Day 36.
Su Ming was in a solo dungeon run.
This was normal. Su Ming did solo runs regularly, partly for the experience and partly because he found them meditative — just him and his army, no variables, clean.
What was not normal was the relay notification Su Xuan received at 9:47 AM:
Gate sealed externally. Someone is using a Barrier Stone on the dungeon entrance. I can't get out.
Su Xuan was already standing before he finished reading.
Barrier Stones were illegal under District Monitoring Bureau regulations. They were also available, through certain channels, to guilds with enough money and enough certainty that they wouldn't get caught. They sealed a dungeon gate from the outside, trapping anyone inside while preventing rescue.
The monsters didn't stop regenerating while the seal held.
He was moving before the second message came: Iron Vanguard. I saw the insignia before the seal went up.
Su Xuan called Serrath.
The Death Knight materialized from his shadow, black plate and white flames, already oriented toward the door.
"Gate 14, south zone," Su Xuan said. "Now."
Serrath did not reply with words. It simply moved.
Su Xuan moved with it.
He arrived at Gate 14 in seven minutes, which was faster than the transit and involved taking routes through the industrial district that were technically not pedestrian paths.
Four Iron Vanguard members stood at the gate entrance with the relaxed posture of people who had done this before and expected it to take as long as it took. The gate behind them was sealed — a faint grey shimmer across the entrance, the Barrier Stone's signature.
They saw him coming.
One of them raised a hand. "Hey—"
Su Xuan did not stop walking.
"This area is secured by—"
He kept walking.
"Stop, or we'll—"
[Void Grasp — Activate]
The Barrier Stone's energy was a physical thing, once you knew how to read it — a field, dense and deliberate, anchored to three points around the gate frame. Su Xuan felt the anchor points with his Void Grasp extended into the space and pulled.
The seal shattered.
It didn't just disperse. It came apart, the energy unwinding from all three points simultaneously and dissipating in the specific way of things that have been built on artificial foundations and encounter something that operates below the level of their construction. The grey shimmer cracked, fractured, and was gone.
The four Iron Vanguard members stared.
Su Xuan stopped walking. He was ten meters from the gate. He looked at the four guild members with an expression that contained no anger — no heat, no emotion that required managing. Just clarity. The specific clarity of a person who has already decided what is going to happen next and is giving you one more second to understand that you cannot change it.
"Leave," he said.
One of them — braver or less perceptive than the others — said: "You can't just—"
"Serrath," Su Xuan said.
The Death Knight stepped out of his shadow.
Three of the four Iron Vanguard members were already moving backward. The fourth, the brave one, looked at Serrath — at the A-rank undead that had never been defeated in any dungeon Su Xuan had entered since obtaining it, at the black plate and the white-hot flames and the absolute, unliving stillness of something that had pledged itself to something it considered genuinely, metaphysically above everything else in this district — and made a decision.
He turned and walked away very quickly.
The other three were already gone.
Su Xuan walked to the gate and went in.
He found Su Ming in the fourth chamber, surrounded by his undead army in a formation that said: I have been managing this situation for twenty minutes and I am fine but I was getting tired of it.
Su Ming looked at him.
"You broke the seal," he said.
"Yes."
"Took you a while."
"Seven minutes."
"Eight. I counted." Su Ming dismissed the defensive formation. His summons relaxed, if undead could relax. "Zhao Wei's escalating."
"He did escalate," Su Xuan said. "Past tense. This is done."
"He'll try something else."
"Yes." Su Xuan looked around the chamber. "How are you?"
"Fine," Su Ming said. Then, with slightly less performance: "I was fine. But I'll admit the first two minutes after the seal went up were—" He stopped. "It's fine."
"I know." Su Xuan looked at him. "I know you were fine. That's not why I'm here."
Su Ming was quiet.
"I'm here," Su Xuan said, "because someone tried to hurt you. That's sufficient reason."
A pause.
Su Ming looked at him with that unguarded expression again — the one he wore when he wasn't building anything with his face. "I'll say this once," he said, "and then we're going to finish the dungeon and I'm going to pretend I didn't say it."
"All right."
"I'm glad you're here. In this timeline. Wherever you came from." His voice was even. "I don't know everything about what's happening — about you, about what your class actually does, about why you sometimes say things that sound like you know what's going to happen before it does." He met Su Xuan's eyes. "I don't know. But I'm glad."
Su Xuan was quiet for a moment.
"Finish the dungeon," he said. "Then we deal with Zhao Wei."
"Deal with him how?"
"Permanently," Su Xuan said. "But quietly."
Su Ming considered this. "Define quietly."
"He loses the ability to cause problems. He keeps his health and his freedom." A pause. "I'm thorough, not cruel."
"Good distinction," Su Ming said, and turned toward the next chamber.