Mooney was moving among the dissipating piles of ash with a clipboard in one hand and a pair of long-handled barbecue tongs in the other. He didn't look like a man who'd just survived his first interaction with an interdimensional hit squad. He was actually looking pretty at home. Like someone who'd spent his childhood stripping lead off church roofs in the nineties and now knew exactly how much bleach it took to remove DNA from a Ford Transit.

"I have to say, Undershaft, there's something very obliging about the marks turning to dust when you're finished with them," Mooney said. He used the tongs to pick up a severed snake head by the snout, inspecting it critically before dropping it into a heavy-duty black bin bag. "Saves a fortune on lime. And you don't have to wait for a dark night to find a canal."

I winced as I watched him tie off the bag with a knot that was a little too professional. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Mooney wasn't just an old mate. He was a man whose C.V. was mostly redacted and whose contacts list was eighty per cent people currently serving time at His Majesty's Pleasure.

"The number of scrapes I could've avoided if London's finest evaporated on impact," he mused, marking something off on his clipboard with a stubby pencil. "Would have saved me from a couple of stretches years in Pentonville, that's for sure."

As he worked away, I felt a weird mix of relief and unease. On the one hand, I was glad he wasn't currently huddled in a ball, weeping about everything he'd just seen. On the other hand, the fact that his primary reaction to the violent murder of a bunch alien hitmen by a bunch of pensioners was to appreciate the efficiency of the body disposal was a stark reminder that Mooney was, legally speaking, a wrong 'un.

I turned to the sound of a frustrated shout behind me. Kenny stood near the pavilion steps, kicking a piece of high-tech wrist weaponry that sparked fitfully in the damp grass.

"This is all rubbish," Kenny said. "Look at it! Proprietary connectors. Bio-locked firmware. You can't even strip it for copper without a dongle."

"I guess that's just the modern way, Ken," I said, checking my own armour for new holes. "Evil overlords love their ecosystem lock-ins."

"It's lazy is what it is. Back in the day, a demon lord looked to throw down, he'd bring good, honest steel. You could melt that down. Make a toaster. This?" He kicked the device again which whined and died. "Wouldn't even trust it as a paperweight."

Iris was winding her silver wool back into a ball, her needles clicking a soft rhythm. She didn't look at the carnage. "You know, strictly speaking, that really shouldn't have happened," she said.

"Which part? The snakes, the void sword, or Mooney's terrifying nonchalance about alien disposal techniques?"

"I'm talking about them being able to track you here," she said. "This field isn't just warded, Elijah. It's dimensionally inert. Margaret collapsed the local probability waves around the boundary lines herself. As far as the wider multiverse is concerned, this cricket pitch is a null-value equation. It doesn't exist."

She stabbed a needle into the wool ball. "To punch a hole from wherever these things are from to here requires overcoming an infinite amount of dimensional shear. They couldn't just aim a portal. They'd need a resonant frequency to lock onto. A fixed point of heavy entanglement that screams 'I am here' loud enough to drown out the background static of two separate realities."

"Basically what Iris is saying," Roderick chimed in, throwing a treat to Max, "Is that these bad boys shouldn't have been able to find you here. Not unless you're beaming out some sort of 'come and have a go if you think you're hard enough' signal."

"Ah," I said. "Well, I might have an explanation for that."

I concentrated and my System overlay came to life. I scrolled past the combat logs, past the snarky comments about my dodge rating, and found the title I'd earned in the Dungeon back in Bayteran.

[Title: Defiant]

Marked as an anomaly who defies celestial symmetry.

+5% resistance to magical and political coercion

+5% Influence with unaffiliated/rebel factions

Hostile Celestials prioritise you as destabilising

Reputation gain with Order-aligned entities reduced

System Advisory: This Title cannot be removed, bartered, or concealed.

"Not all chains are visible. Not all rebellions are loud."

I shared the text with the room. Or the field. You know what I mean.

Iris read it and her needles stopped clicking. "Hostile Celestials prioritise you," she read. "Elijah, my dear, that is a metaphysical 'Kick Me' sign glued to your soul."

"I thought it sounded pretty heroic at the time."

"It sounds problematic," Roderick said. The old man had sheathed the Null-Edge and it seemed to have turned into a walking stick. He limped over, leaning heavily on it. He looked at the stats floating in the air between us.

"We're going to need to deal with that signal," Roderick said. "Sure, these snake-boys were chumps. Level 12 or not, they were rank-and-file. Contractors. But, as far as I understand these things, the Maker'd not exactly going to have a limited budget. Eventually, he'll stop sending the temp agency. He'll send some proper professionals."

He paused, looking me up and down. "You know. Someone like you. In your previous life."

I froze. "What do you mean by that, mate?"

Roderick tapped the side of his nose. "Margaret was a talker, lad. Especially after a sherry."

"She talked about me?"

"Hey, don't worry about it. She was very proud. Said you were a 'Solutions Consultant for people with kinetic problems'. Said you cleaned up messes that weren't supposed to exist. She also said you were very expensive and very quiet."

I felt the blood drain from my face. My Aunt. The woman who read me Pilgrim's Progress and made sure I ate my vegetables. She'd obviously known an awful lot more about my life than I'd hoped. She had known exactly what Griff was turning me into. And she hadn't been horrified. She'd been proud.

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"Just for clarity, can we all understand that I wasn't a hitman," I said. The defence was automatic. "I was more… a man who hit things."

"Semantics," Roderick snorted.

"I mean, sure. Sometimes those things were people. But it wasn't like I was, you know, a proper bad guy."

"All I'm saying," Roderick continued, "is that you should know how this sort of thing works better than anyone. You know the escalation ladder. If the first team fails, then the second team is going to be handier. So you either need to lose that Title…"

"That description is pretty unloseable, I'm afraid," Irise tutted.

"Fair enough. In which case, Elijah, you need to take levelling up more seriously."

"I'm open to suggestions. It's hardly like I'm avoiding gaining experience, is it?"

Mooney had finished his sweep and a pile of debris sat near the middle of cricket pitch. The pile contained wrist-blades, bandoliers of shadow-infused ammo, and fragments of the Leader's armour that hadn't been voided by Roderick.

I walked over and picked up a wrist-rig.

[Item: Flechette Launcher (Pursuivant Pattern)]

Class Restriction: Bio-locked (Reptilian/Construct)

Status: Incompatible

Note: You do not have the wrists for this.

"Yeah, as Kenny said, this is all junk," I said, tossing it back onto the pile. "High-level junk, but I can't equip it. My Class restricts me to looted gear, but this stuff is bio-locked. It's useless in helping me level."

"Is it?" Iris asked.

She picked up a shard of armour. "While I bow to your more… direct experience, Margaret always told us that the System runs on Essence," she said. "On concepts. She was very clear that form was just the packaging. I think she would tell you that if you can't use the form, then you need to take the function."

"I don't understand."

"I think what Iris is suggesting is you break this stuff down for parts." Roderick said.

"Strictly speaking, I'm saying he should cannibalise it," Iris corrected. "Margaret was particularly good at stripping the magic out of the metal. And you're a Warden too, right? So you should be able to anchor the power to this place and discard the casing."

Then my System pinged. It seemed like it agreed with Iris.

[System Quest Unlocked]

Title: The Art of Deconstruction

Classification: Skill Acquisition / Survival Mandate

Context: You are holding the detritus of your enemies. In its current form, it is useless weight. But everything contains power if you know how to break it. You face threats on two fronts: Griff in London, and the Maker in the stars. To survive, you must learn to cannibalise the resources of one war to fight the other.

Objective: Successfully dismantle 5 items of [Pursuivant-Class] tech to unlock the [Salvage] Skill tree.

Reward:

[Skill: Salvage (Lvl 1)]

[Material: Void-Dust] (Crafting Component)

+500 Experience

Failure Condition: Inability to learn. Inventory overflow. Death by hoarding.

System Advisory: Waste not, want not.

I wasn't sure I was ever going to get used to Quests just popping into my head like that. But I had to admit that was pretty handy. I shared my quest with the group who didn't seem to think its sudden appearance was anything out of the ordinary.

"Right," I said, eyeing the heap of alien hardware. "Okay. Salvage. I can do salvage. That's just reverse engineering with less maths and more violence, right?"

I picked up a wrist-rig and examined it some more. Up close, it was actually pretty nasty, with the metal fused with something that felt uncomfortably like cartilage. It was still warm to the touch.

I stared at it for a few minutes, but no button prompt appeared. There was no "Press X to Dismantle" to help me out. It appeared I'd have to figure out how to break it.

"Anyone got any tips?" I asked. "Or is this another one of those 'figure it out or die' learning curves?"

"Just find the seam," Kenny said. He was currently kneeling in the mud, holstering his shotgun so he could properly fuss Max. The Labrador was currently investigating a severed snake tail with the cautious optimism of a gourmet critic.

"Leave it, Max," Kenny said, scratching the dog behind the ears. "That's not for eating. That's pure cholesterol and you don't know where it's been."

Max sneezed, looked at the snake tail with profound judgment, and then sat down, thumping his tail against Kenny's leg.

"He was good during the fight," Iris noted, winding her wool. "Guarded the biscuits."

"He was asleep under the table," Roderick said. "We're spoiling him. He's getting lazy."

"Tactical reserve," Kenny corrected. "Who's a good tactical reserve, Max? You are. Yes, you are. You are!"

I looked at them. "Sorry to interrupt guys, but I'm holding a piece of assassination technology sent by a literal deity to terminate my existence, and you're cooing at the overweight dog."

"Max has seniority," Roderick said, lighting a cigarette. "And he's not overweight. He'd big boned. Now stop stalling and break the toy."

I sighed in exasperation and ran my thumb over the casing. It was seamless, but I knew that everything had a stress point. Everything had a flaw. It struck me that I might be overthinking this. I smashed the wrist-rig against the floor.

It cracked in a puff of violet smoke.

[System Notification: Brute Force Detected.]

[Efficiency: 12%]

[Salvage Failed.]

[Item Destroyed.]

"Yeah, Margaret always said subtlety, wasn't your key skill lad," Roderick said, exhaling a plume of smoke. "Try to remember you're not trying to kill it. You're trying to dissect it. Treat it like a lock, not a brick."

"Locks usually have keyholes," I said. "This doesn't."

"But you should be able to sense its flow," Iris said. "Everything in the System has a flow. Margaret used to say that if you could find the current, you could interrupt it."

"Well, wasn't Aunt M just full of good advice," I said.

I took a breath and picked up another piece, a bandolier node. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the hum of it against my palm. I needed to think of it as not just machinery. It was mana trapped in a cage.

I focused on that hum and twisted it. I applied pressure to the flow of energy inside, the same way I applied pressure to a grapple in [Closed Circle]. Find the joint. Apply torque. Wait for the give.

Snap.

The casing popped open and a small, glowing crystal fell into my hand, cool and heavy.

[System Notification: Essence Extracted.]

[Item: Condensed Shadow (Common)]

[Progress: 1/5]

"Better," Iris said.

"See?" Kenny said to the dog. "The new boy is learning. Maybe we'll keep him."

I picked up the next piece. My hands moved with a new rhythm. Find the stress. Apply the pressure. Harvest the result.

I sat there, surrounded by pensioners and snake parts, popping high-tech alien weaponry apart with my bare hands. I was going to turn their assassins into spare parts. I was going to build a war chest out of their garbage.

Mooney walked past, dragging a heavy bin bag that clinked wetly.

"Hurry up with that, Undershaft," he said, not looking back. "I've got to get these in the incinerator before the council bin-men come. They charge extra for occult biologicals."

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