Interlude - Ernest

  Ernest hated few things, but high among those was his name. It either made people think he was truly honest, living up to the name, or they joked that he had a name better suited to an octogenarian.

  In any case, it was a weird thing to be focused on when he should, instead, be focused on the absolute heap of trouble he found himself in at the moment.

  When Seraph had arrived in the industrial sector at some ungodly hour of the morning, it was to find that the reports they had were wildly understating the situation.

  It wasn't a two-portal breach, but three. E, D and C-ranked. Captain Varrock had immediately put in the call for additional troops, but what they had on hand was more than enough.

  Then she'd looked at him in a way that made him stand a little taller. He looked up to the woman. It was hard not to. She was a C-ranker and had been one for a while. For as long as he'd been with the organization, in fact. If anyone in Seraph slipped up to B-rank in the next decade it was going to be Lyra Varrock. Her words carried weight.

  She stared, then gave him his marching orders.

  He wasn't going to take part in the subjugation of the C-ranked Slime portal. That was... a shame, actually. Not only would its completion give him a noticeable boost in power--especially so soon after hitting Rank C himself--but it would look good on his reports. He'd barely had the opportunity to work with the other C-rankers in Seraph yet, not as a C-ranker himself.

  Instead, however, he was to lead a D-rank team to subdue another portal. That was... fantastic, actually. If anything, that would look even better on the final report. He had been a Seraph D-ranker just two months ago, so he knew the drill well, but he had never been the one in charge of anything.

  He took it as the honour that it was, told her that he would do his best, then set off and followed everything by the book. If that meant that they were a little slow, then so be it.

  He started to regret that when he and his team entered the facility the portal was in and discovered bodies. Not humans, but kobolds. One of the D-rankers on his team, one he had worked with just recently, was a very distractible spark mage. They were able to confirm that some of the dead had been electrocutted to death. The rest had been shot, in the head, mostly through the eye, and by a larger than average calibre weapon from across the room.

  Seraph should have been the first on the scene. There had been nothing on any of the more discreet channels that any of the delving companies used to let each other know that they'd staked a claim. The only thing was that a small R&D arm of some other corp had paid Seraph a premium for them not to touch one of the breaching portals, the E-ranker, because they wanted to test something.

  Since that portal was noted as being of low value, Seraph gladly took the money and offered assistance in a few other ways. Ernest had seen that kind of thing before, and in this case, it seemed pretty harmless.

  They entered the portal. Maybe he should have moved in faster, but the book was written in blood, and... well, he wanted to do good. He owed Seraph a great deal, and his goal was to be like those he admired, something that wouldn't happen if it jumped in half-cocked and didn't follow the rules that had been written in careless blood.

  They went in slowly, taking their time to clear each room of the portal, even if they found was the same, over and over. Dead kobolds, killed via precise gunshot wounds, or electrocution, and the lingering scent of something that made his eyes and throat sting. They found three sets of prints in one dusty corner. One of them took pictures with their augs, but all that told them was that there were three humans in here, possibly women.

  The only other hint was a few discarded shell casings. The shells were .454 Casull, a bizarre choice. But strong enough to take out kobolds with ease... as well as just about everyone on his team, and himself as well. He might be a C-ranker, and he might be able to throw up a shield that could tank that kind of round, but not forever, and not instantly.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He had the group slow down, even as he kept an eye on the clock. They were, if anything, ahead of schedule.

  That didn't matter, not as much as the incoming meeting. Running into a hostile group of delvers was dangerous, no matter the circumstances. Though whether or not they were hostile was up for debate.

  They discovered snacks. Cans of energy drinks and discarded wrappers. So this was definitely planned.

  Had their intel leaked? A mole? Something less sinister? He made sure to keep conversation going, to alert the group ahead. This wouldn't be that bad. Seraph had gatherers here already. They'd talk to the diver team, tell them that they'd send in Seraph teams to gather the raw materials of the portal, then negotiate things from there.

  That would mostly be out of his hands, but any reasonable corp would see a way to both come out of this as winners.

  Then he felt it. The air shifting, the magic twisting. It was wrong. In an instant, he went from sensing the higher-than average ambient magical energy of the inside of a portal to being aware that that same energy was fleeing, and sucking everything out with it.

  He gripped onto his magic, holding it in.

  "Portal exit!" a member of his group shouted. There was genuine fear there.

  "Hang on," he warned. "Keep your cores close." The instruction barely made sense, but he hardly had time to go over the step-by-step guide for what to do to minimize the pain of a force portal exit.

  And then it happened. In a blink, Ernest and his team were back in the real world, back on Earth. It felt like all of the magic was sucked out of his core, then some, most, was shoved back in.

  He heard one of his men projectile vomiting on the ground next to him, then gagged at the scent. Another simply fainted. He felt like he'd been scrunched up into a little ball, like a loose sock, and forced through a lonely spin cycle in a washing machine.

  Ernest slowly became cognizant that a lot of people were shouting.

  There were three figures in the room that hadn't been there before, and he instantly became aware of two things.

  First, these were the delvers that had cleared the portal before he and his team could make it to the end. They were standing right where the portal had been and seemed unbothered by it. So, probably no magical backlash from the sudden exit.

  Second, they were not in the uniform of any corp he knew. If anything, it was very much the opposite. None of the corporations in Fortress ENE dressed their members like that. They looked evil. Three comic book villains.

  The analytical part of his mind noted that they were shoving off far too much flesh. Why? That was an OSHA violation if he ever saw one. Did that one have ears on her hat? What possible reason could there be for that?

  He noticed the clean-up crews scrambling for weapons, but he raised his hand and tried to stay steady on his feet. "H-hold!" he called out.

  One of the women looked at him, then snorted. "Get a look at this one. He's green."

  "Not now," another replied, her mask making her voice deeply sinister. She was the tallest of the trio, by the gun at her hip, she was the one who'd been shooting kobolds within the portal. "Seraph, I take it? We're done here. Are we going to have problems?"

  "You... didn't file to take on this portal," he said.

  "It was mid-breach," she replied.

  That was... not wrong. Technically, since it was in that state, it was an obligation to at least try to subdue the monsters coming from within. The legal precedent on that was iffy at best, but it was widely considered one of the reasons why rankers were given better treatment overall. If a breach happened, they were the front line to stop it.

  "We're heading out," the woman said.

  "Who are you?" he asked.

  "You don't need to concern yourself with that," she replied. "Come on... Buzzkill and... Nightshade, we need to go. There's more work to be done."

  He watched them casually step out of the room. Without him ordering the others to do anything, there was no one willing to step up and keep them, not that Seraph had the right to, technically.

  And... and this was going to be a mess of paperwork to fill out, wasn't it?

  ***