A real friend will help you hide the bodies.

  Jonesy showed up in twelve minutes. He poked his head in through the broken door, careful not to touch anything, hands buried deep in the pockets of his jacket. "Jesus, man, turn on some lights. You're like a supervillain sitting here in the dark."

  Brom stood, the couch creaking in what might have been relief, and walked over to hit the switch for the living room light. For a moment, he just stared at the other man, then gestured for him to come in. "Have a seat, Sarge. I've got a problem, and I need to figure out what my next steps are. I thought you might be able to help me with that."

  "I'm assuming it has to deal with whoever kicked in your front door? You should probably get a Deputy out here, file a report. This is their jurisdiction."

  Brom watched Jonesy make his way into the living room and claim one of the armchairs, sinking into it. He didn't move for a bit, just staring at the door, eyes flicking to the night beyond. It was sound advice, he should get the Sheriff's office involved. Not just for the matter of his property damage, but because the cult was going to be an issue for everyone. But not just yet. Right now, he needed to channel his anger into an actionable plan. The first step in that was returning to the couch and sitting down. Showing Jonesy Avery the messages that TJ had left and letting the other process things.

  Johannes Avery was a ten-year veteran of Cold Bay PD. He had instincts. He had insight that Brom desperately needed at the moment. "I'm going to owe you a beer for this, Sarge."

  "You're going to owe me several beers for this. I don't wake up at 3am for just anyone." Jonesy cracked a smile that swiftly faded. "Priorities are going to diverge on this one, Brom. While everyone is going to want the same thing, what the Authorities are going to choose to do is going to be very different. At the end of the day, as much as we want a happy outcome for everyone, they'll pick stopping the cult over saving your nephew. Hostage negotiation isn't what it used to be..." His voice turned bitter on that last part.

  Brom got it. The world the System had made was cold and cruel. If the task issued didn't involve saving his nephew, or made it a bonus objective, then unconnected forces wouldn't see it as a failure if TJ got hurt. As long as the overall mission was completed. His fists tightened. "I've never wanted to hurt a person so badly in my life, Sarge. I feel so violent right now, it should scare me. But it doesn't. And the fact it doesn't... that's what scares me."

  It clearly worried Jonesy Avery, too. The Sergeant knew exactly the kind of destructive violence that lay latent in Brom. Or he had. "Alright. Here's my advice. Right now, we don't know how dangerous the cult is. However, this is a kidnapping with a minor involved, so report it. Get everyone onboard. Because you'll get three things out of that. You'll get manpower, you'll get a location, and you'll get information on the other kid. Alex."

  Brom blinked suddenly and then pulled up his interface, scrolling. He found what he was looking for at the very bottom of a section of the 'Team' menu. A small tab called 'Recently Grouped With' that showed the last fifty people he'd been in teams with. There were forty-eight names on that list, and down there, at the bottom as the oldest entries, were the three teenagers who'd gone with TJ and himself into the Event Dungeon. He pulled it up on his interface and stared at the information logged.

  [Name: Alex Ruddle]

  [Basic Info: Male 18]

  [Class: Healer (Epic) Lv.6]

  Jonesy whistled. "Now that's a damn shame, we're short on Healers that are Rare grade or better. The Census isn't complete yet, but the bulk of our Healers seem to be clustered at Uncommon. He'd have been a real resource."

  "So he's better than you are?" Brom's voice was cold, still staring at the picture accompanying the small packet of data. He wondered, for a moment, how the quiet kid he'd seen eating food at that table had made the choices that brought him here. Of all of them in the dungeon that day, Alex had been both the most deeply horrified and least expressive of his horror. Every moment he'd spent at that meal, he'd been deeply uncomfortable. TJ had described him as 'broken', talking about how he'd started skipping class, and when he did show up, he was a hollowed-out shell of a person. Short words and hard edges.

  "Oh, fuck no. I'm not just better than he is, I'm better than everyone except you. Check my stats for yourself." He practically flashed them under Brom's nose.

  [Name: Johannes Avery]

  [Basic Info: Male 35]

  [Class: Healer (Heroic) Lv.6]

  "...huh. No wonder you were always so effective." It made so much more sense now why Jonesy had been so calm and collected. Why his team had locked in around him, respecting his calls and trusting him. Brom had never gotten hurt enough to need the full weight of what the Sergeant could bring to bear, but now he knew.

  "Oh, you don't know the half of it. Time and place, though. I'm already typing a brief to the Captain and getting you set up with an Amber Alert. You have the personal details of any Deputies?" Jonesy looked up from his interface, multi-tasking at a rate that Brom could only admire.

  "No. The Captain and the Sheriff had pretty different approaches. Captain Quint had me lock in with you guys so that you could put together a clear guide and each help steer your fellows through. Sheriff Colby had me with new guys every time till the whole department had rotated through. That's where the bulk of people on my group list came from." He had ten Guards, four teenagers, and all twenty of the Northwest County Sheriff Deputies. The other twelve had been various randoms, some from the Mayor's office and others from his school tour.

  "Put a pin in it anyway. Captain says to head to the Station, and he'll handle getting folks together." Jonesy snapped his interface closed and stood with a groan. "You need to grab anything? Or, uh, feed your cats."

  Brom paused, looking around the dark inside of the house. "Do I have to leave my door kicked in, Sarge?"

  "No. Crimes like this get auto-logged. Even if you use the Housing Interface to restore the damage, we still have access to the records of it. You'd think with Cold Bay being a safe zone, crime would be down, but the younger teens have figured out they're practically invulnerable. We've started having issues."

  Brom was only half listening. From the moment he'd registered his 'home' with System, he'd been getting a prompt to repair it. Stubbornly, he'd been ignoring the button. He'd been doing so well on his own before the world had changed, restoring this house with his own two hands. He'd been maybe two weeks from having everything in place to make an attempt at repairing the roof, even if it was the absolute worst season for it. He'd wanted, no closer to needed, to do this himself. But after tonight, fuck it. He was going to take what this fucking System owed him.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  It drained a nominal cost of gold out of the tally listed in his inventory window to fix everything. Not just the kicked-in front door or the stud splintered by TJ's arrow. The broken picture frames. The water spots on the kitchen ceiling. The sagging porch and its squeaky boards. Lastly, of course, the roof. He could hear it, the pops and groans around him, as though the old house were getting some kind of spa treatment. A deep tissue massage for drywall and insulation. Brom largely ignored it, going into the kitchen and setting out fresh food and water.

  A sharp sting went through him as he picked up Sabbath's bowl, holding it in his hands for a moment before he tucked it away on the shelf. What stage of Grief was Anger again? He seemed to be stuck on it.

  Turning for the door, he shoved his hands in his pockets and pulled out what he'd forgotten was in there. Sabbath's collar and the medallion. Without hesitation, he looped the medallion next to the tag, then cinched the collar tight around his wrist. The Grip didn't seem to mind the company, tendrils of iron creeping out to anchor the old leather in place. It was awkward, chunky, but hell, he had the whistle to summon an eldritch abomination around the other wrist. He was just picking up all sorts of questionable accessories at this point!

  Jonesy raised an eyebrow when Brom finally joined him on the refurbished porch. "Everyone's ready and waiting for us."

  "Yeah, thanks, Sarge. For showing up." Brom didn't have a lot of people he could just call at 3am. Most of the people who still considered him a friend weren't in Cold Bay. He didn't even know if they were still alive at this point. So for him, Johannes Avery was his first, last, and only friend in the world right now.

  Not that Johannes knew that. He just rolled his eyes, clapping Brom on one solid shoulder. "Less talk, more action. The first forty-eight hours are critical in any investigation, and we're already starting what, twelve or so hours down? C'mon Brom, let's get the ball rolling on getting you some justice."

  Brom liked the sound of that, following Jonesy into the fast-travel that dropped them both outside the station that housed Cold Bay's City Guard. People gave the two of them a wide berth when they entered, more so than usual. It probably had something to do with the fact that Brom looked ready to reduce anyone who got in his way to red mist. Not his expression, that was a flat neutral thing, almost too neutral. It was the aura around him, a barometric drop strong enough to be felt in the hinges of jaws and deep in inner ears.

  The whole building breathed a collective sigh of relief when the door to Conference Room #1 clicked shut behind him, making him effectively the collective problem of the men inside the room. Men that Brom mostly recognized from his recent trips through the world of Cold Bay's law enforcement elite.

  Roy Quint was there, sitting at the head of the table like a King gathering his council. Bruce Colby was off to his right, looking tired and sad, as if a little perpetual raincloud would spawn in above his head at any minute. Melinda Walker, the Deputy Mayor and the last of Cold Bay's three Moderators, was seated to his left. She had a compact open and was busy applying concealer to the dark circles under her eyes. It still surprised Brom that Sven Amundson, Cold Bay's current Mayor, was just an NPC. As Melinda had grimly explained to him when he'd first met and asked her, the Mayor was 'replaceable'.

  A few other faces were scattered around the table. People Brom vaguely recognized and should have been able to name, but was too numb at the moment to bother. He steered himself toward an empty chair and barely managed to stop himself from flopping into it at the last second. His heavy gaze swept the room once, twice, taking in the people who were shuffling papers and settling in.

  "Ladies, Gentlemen, I'm just going to say this now. The last thing my nephew told me was that the cult behind the Event Dungeon was back. It was in the high school, meaning that it's currently using high school kids to do whatever it's planning. Tonight, those people broke into my home. They kidnapped my nephew. They killed one of my cats." He glanced at his wrist and then back up to the now silent room. "Most of you should know by now that I'm usually a pretty easy-going guy. But this shit? I'm not just going to fucking sit by and let this shit happen."

  For a long moment, there was silence in the room, settling heavy and thick. Then Captain Roy sighed. "I think I speak for everyone here when I say we'd like to pursue a few options before we agree to let you take part. This is your case and the emotional involvement, we're representatives of the law. We're not going to sign off on what is effectively at least one murder."

  "...is it murder if they're cultists, though? Like, genuinely trying to understand here, but have they crossed into NPC territory?" That was from one of the Deputies, Glass, if the name plate above his head was correct. "We had something like that happen with the sirens before the issue on Aria Beach cleared up, where folks would get captivated by them, and they'd get classified as hostiles in the combat logs. Wouldn't this be the same thing?"

  Sheriff Bruce cleared his throat. "It depends on the individual. For the youngsters, the System can't connect. It can't make them NPCs unless they're already dead. Then it can animate them back."

  "Wait, wait, wait, I might be fighting some weird teen cult zombies?" Brom didn't like the sound of that.

  "That's just it. At the moment, we don't know anything about the cult's structure. We don't know if it's actually the CHYC or if it's just a bunch of kids in robes causing trouble. As satisfying as it would be to just find a location and let you off the chain to solve the problem, Brom, that might not actually solve the problem. We need information, location, and a plan. Can you hold yourself together enough to help be part of that? Or in true Barbarian fashion, are you just going to be rage incarnate and ignore everything but what you can put a fist into?"

  Brom met those sad, tired eyes. The intelligence behind them, almost human but not quite. He clenched his jaw, the muscle aching from the tension, and then relaxed and let out a breath. "I fucking hate it, but you're right. I shouldn't be making any decisions right now, so I'll wait. I'll listen. But if you find out where TJ is and you fiddle-fuck around... I'm not just going to sit here with my thumb up my ass at that point. I'll go get him."

  It wasn't like anyone in this room could stop him. There'd be consequences, but Brom had plenty of life experience dealing with those.

  Melinda cleared her throat. "...alright. I think that's a very acceptable condition to secure your cooperation, Mr. Jones. Now, Gentlemen, let's get down to business and get some actual facts on our problem."