I couldn't help the small smirk that tugged at my lips as I watched Kostick interact with Kels and his team. It was obvious he was being a little more bombastic than the man would usually be as he made a show of dragging the trio off to continue his interrogation. It was a bit odd the way he swapped between the extreme focus and oddity. It almost made one wonder which one was the man, and which one was the show. The stillness of his aura revealed that truth, to me at least, still waters ran deep. The hike back to the vehicles was a simple matter, and this time we weren't in a rush. It was even simpler for Kostick, who I would swear never actually touched the ground once over the course of the entire hike.

  We arrived back where we had left the vehicles previously to find they were still there, untouched. Small blessings, though I doubted normal car thieves or anything similar posed much threat to Banner vehicles. That didn't mean that Vish couldn't have done something on their own way to or from the dungeon entrance.

  Kostick swept both vehicles with a series of small wand-like devices, both magical and technological as far as I could tell, as well as utilizing a pair of his hex-tile barriers to check the vehicles at various points before declaring they were free of issues. There seemed to be a multitude of uses for his small barriers beyond the obvious defensive applications I had already seen. It didn't take long after declaring both vehicles safe for use for Kostick to herd the group of them into one of the vehicles we had arrived in originally. The man was single-minded in his pursuit of discovering every little detail that had occurred on the dungeon run. Though I imagined he was also attempting to distract his friends for the moment, to keep them engaged.

  Meanwhile, I chose rather happily to ride in the second vehicle with the mana accumulators. There simply wasn't enough room for all of us plus the three pieces of machinery in a single vehicle. It wasn't that I had no desire to sit through Kostick's interrogation extravaganza. Nope, not that at all. It was like watching a traffic accident, fine from the outside, less so when you were directly involved.

  The ride was blissfully quiet compared to what I was sure would be going on in the other Banner vehicle. It was after all just me and a few inert devices. It was interesting to me that they did, in fact, remain completely inert. I would have thought that moving them would expose them to enough ambient mana to get at least a small response out of them. I had thought it might be similar to the idea of a pinwheel in a still room, one that was suddenly being waved around. That turned out to be incorrect; they were just hunks of lifeless metal while we bumped and jostled down the roads towards our destination.

  The motorcade passed through the chain link fence surrounding the Yellowknife facility without issue. It seemed odd that we weren't required to stop at any of the checkpoints. I could sense the people manning them, but all the vehicles in the motorcade passed through without so much as a pause. It seemed like terrible OpSec to me; then again, perhaps the Banner had measures in place that didn't require a stop and search or stop and verify protocol. The Banner's entry procedures weren't something I was at all interested in. Once the vehicle ground to a stop, I climbed out of the rear door, with my bag in one hand and the accumulator in the other. It would have been a tricky thing to do before the System. Then again, I would likely have struggled to lift the accumulator at all Pre-System, let alone carry it one-handed the way I was currently.

  I glanced over and saw that Kostick had climbed out of the other vehicle alongside Kels and the rest. He seemed not happy, but satisfied. Which was good because I doubted any answers I could give the man would improve his temperament at all. Crunching footfalls in the light snow that covered the ground and an approaching aura drew my attention to the person headed directly towards me. A heavy coat, scarf, thick wool cap, and other layers covered the person nearly from head to toe. If it weren't for the exposed face peeking out, I might have mistaken them for a walking lump of fabric and frostbite. Whoever she was, she looked young, and her aura didn't have any of the signs of being a Ranker, and there was more than a small tremble of nervousness running through it.

  She came up to me at a light jog and held out a tablet for me to take. That would make her an aide of some sort? A gofer, maybe? Aide probably sounded better to most people. I chose not to say anything at all, I dropped my bag to the ground to accept the tablet with my now free hand. The moment the tablet left the aide's hand, she scurried away like a mouse under the gaze of a cat. It didn't escape me that she cut a path directly towards where Kostick was talking with Kels and the others.

  Really need to find out about that reputation I seem to be picking up.

  Looking at the tablet, I found that it was already on a call, and displayed on the screen was the face of David Giffle. Technically, my boss. On paper, at least. If nothing else, I assumed it was him who signed off on my cheques.

  "David," I greeted the man, tilting the tablet to get the glare of the morning sun off the screen. All the magic and tech the banner had, and they still couldn't make a decent anti-glare screen.

  "Aiden," He responded in kind, and then fell silent. I smirked at the screen. This was a game we had played many times by now. The sole objective being to find out who would crack first. It wasn't very often that David won these little games we played. In the end, he always had more plates in the air than I did at any given point in time, and far more cats to be herded about. On the other hand, I for the most part just needed to make sure Sean didn't do anything stupid. At least not fatally stupid. Painfully stupid was sometimes funny to watch. Thankfully, though, both of those occurrences were becoming fewer and farther between these days.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  In the end, as per usual, it was David who broke about two minutes in.

  “Aiden,” his face pinched in a way that told me I wasn’t going to like what he had to say much. “I need you to come back.”

  Ah, there it is. That’s the reason for the look. I thought to myself while I stared back at David via the tablet. He knew quite well that this was going to be unpleasant. I had been waiting for ages to get up here and get to work, to start levelling and advancing again, and he wanted me to come back after a single dungeon. I could feel the irritation brewing in my belly, the frustration, on the verge of becoming anger.

  “No.”

  “Aiden-”

  "I said no, David," I ground out through clenched teeth. My fingers flexed, clenching the tablet. I had to force myself to take a breath and remind myself to be gentle with the tablet. Pieces of tech like this were much more breakable to me these days than they had ever been before.

  "I have already received several preliminary reports. You need to take time to rest after everything that happened in that dungeon, and afterwards," David's expression went from stony and clenched to chagrined, "and preferably go see your family before my strike commander decides he's going to rebel instead of just threatening it."

  "Ah, Uncle Wolf is causing problems then." That made much more sense. As a strike commander, I assumed he would have access to the reports that were coming out from this operation. I would wager that the Banner at large considered me an asset to David and Uncle Wolf, hence they would be getting the first round of reports. "It doesn't matter. I have no intention of coming back just because he got a little nervous. I've grown more in a day here than I have in weeks back there." I finished, jaw clenched and face set.

  For a moment, David appeared pensive, contemplative. I couldn't sense the man's aura through the tablet; it was nothing like that, but I had dealt with David long enough to know what it looked like when he was thinking. I could practically see the gears turning inside his mind as he twisted the situation back and forth, looking for any way he could get what he wanted. In the end, the problem was that he didn't have any authority to make me do anything or order me around like a Banner Ranker. Though that wasn't to say there was nothing that he could do.

  What he could do was make an incredible nuisance of himself. In theory, he couldn't stop me from staying in the north and continuing to clear out dungeons or chase down the Vish. What he could do was make either of those objectives far more difficult and time-consuming for me. Far more aggravating as well. He could simply have me delisted so that I wouldn't be asked to clear dungeons or be paid for clearing them. There was that, and that would certainly hurt my wallet, but money wasn't much of an issue right now, and hadn't been for a while. Not offering me dungeons wouldn't stop me entirely, but it would slow me down, possibly quite a bit.

  It wasn't quite the tool against me that it was against other recalcitrant Rankers. Others whose advancement would completely stall out without access to dungeons they could find. Between [All-Seeing Eye] and [Auric Manipulation], I could find the dungeon entrances myself without any issue. The problem was that I would have to spend the time searching for them. Searching thousands of miles of ground on a regular basis just wasn't feasible in reality if I wanted to clear dungeons at any sort of reasonable rate.

  My train of thought was interrupted by David reaching the end of his own.

  "I also need you to escort the machine that I've been seeing in my reports back here to us." He finally spoke up, "We cannot risk the Vish reclaiming it while it is in transit, and you are the only one nearby, not otherwise engaged, we can be reasonably certain could repel such an attack." I grunted in response; that was a point in David's favour. A point I couldn't refute easily.

  A heavy sigh escaped me. I knew David was right, and neither of us wanted the Vish to have the chance to take back the accumulator. That would be infuriating. To have spent all that effort and lives on acquiring it, even if it hadn't been the main goal, only to lose it? Let it fall right back into the hands of the organization that had put it there in the first place. The people we had just taken it from.

  "Fine," I grumbled after a moment of thought. "Fine, get the damn jet ready."

  "Already is." was the only forthcoming answer from David before the call ended, leaving behind nothing but a blank screen.

  I looked up to find the aide jogging back over to me. She accepted the tablet when I held it out. “I guess I’m going home?” I said it almost as a question.

  "Yes, sir." The young woman answered, "If you'll give me your bag, I'll get it squared away, and we can get you underway."

  I handed my duffel over to the aide and followed her as she led the way towards where I could see the jet within a small hangar. I let out another sigh. Why did David have to be so reasonable and so right? It was annoying. All I wanted to do was stay in the north and go on an absolute tear, crush dungeon after dungeon. The drive to keep growing stronger had never left, never dulled; the present circumstances and my desire to crush the Vish only exacerbated it. My desire to keep gathering power was driven by the thing that dogged my every step and haunted my nights, when the silence crept in like the edge of madness closing in. A half forgotten phantom, a memory. A barely formed memory of something hungry. Hungry in a way that made me break out in a cold sweat, and made my skin crawl.

  There was something out there. Something very old, and very hungry. Something I was absolutely certain, down to the marrow of my bones, that I couldn't face as I was,

  Fortunately, multidimensional horrors from beyond reality weren't on my current bingo card. The thought that something that fundamental might change one day, if I continued to survive and grow stronger, was cause for no small amount of concern. It was however, a concern for another day and not the current one.