“This is burnt hoaraboar!” Stella shouted as she slammed her hands onto Commander Hawthorn’s messy desk.

“Sit back down or I will detain you,” the Commander spoke in a firm voice.

Gritting her teeth, Stella decided against another outburst and dropped back into her chair, her arms folded in petty defiance. The chair had uneven legs and wobbled underneath her, further adding to her frustration. From beside her, Ortho scratched a laugh with his throat, which threw Stella right back over the edge.

She thrust a finger at Ortho. “He’s not my client anymore!”

“That’s not what your paperwork says,” Hawthorn said.

“I dumped him a month ago, after he beat up one of his party members on a crawl and nearly got the team wiped! I filed the paperwork to have him unregistered as my client the following day.”

Hawthorn’s jaw worked—it was hard to tell how upset he was when half his face never moved. Then he grabbed a document off the top of a pile on his desk, that rose over his head, and showed it to Stella.

“You handed in the form,” Hawthorn said. “I have a printout of it here. But you didn’t fill out one of the fields.” He pointed to a large box that was circled in red ink. “You failed to provide a reason for the termination of contract, so the termination was rejected.”

Stella’s jaw dropped. “But—but I was told that’s optional!”

“Yes, optional,” Hawthorn said, “but DARA has a lot of leeway in deciding whether to accept the form or not. If you make a single mistake on your documents, then your fate is in their hands.”

Ortho whistled. “Sister, it looks like those paper pushers have it out for you.”

“Me?” Stella screeched. “I bet they did this to protect other fences from you!”

“And they used you as their precious sacrifice.” Ortho scoffed. “I swear, the people of this city are trash, and you’re the worst of them.”

Stella clutched her head, crushing the cat ears on her headband. “And I swear, if you open your mouth one more time, I’m going to make your head thump far more than mine does right now.”

“Enough,” Hawthorn said. His voice was low, but it cut through the shouting like a blade. “I’ll only say this once. If you two keep arguing, I will silence you both, by force if necessary.”

Stella and Ortho sneered at each other, then faced opposite sides of the room with a huff.

Groaning, Hawthorn stood and shuffled over to a filing cabinet, being careful not to knock down the stacks of files that engulfed the room. His office was tiny, so the walk only took a few shuffled steps. Rather than open the filing cabinet, he shuffled through the files that had been stacked on top. Then he took one folder from the middle without disturbing the pile, shuffled back to his desk, and slapped his quarry onto the table.

He opened the folder and read from some of the documents. “Property damage. Drunk and disorderly. Assault. More property damage. More assault.” With each charge, Hawthorn dropped another piece of paper onto his messy desk. “That was all before tonight.”

Stella eyed Ortho sideways, who shrugged. “I regret nothing,” he said.

Hawthorn held up another piece of paper. It had been hastily scrawled on, with ink smearing out over the provided boxes. “The owners of the Slap Pit, the club that you tore up, Ortho, have demanded a settlement of twelve thousand, three-hundred and ninety kin.”

Stella glared at Ortho. “How do you break twelve thousand kin worth of stuff in a single fight?”

Ortho shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a talented guy.”

“Half of that was for a Mr. Steerwater’s jacket,” Hawthorn explained.

“What was it made out of?” Ortho said. “Grupp testicles?”

“Grupp wool.” Hawthorn shuffled through the documents. “I’ve assured both him and the club owner that all those costs will be paid.”

“Oh, no wonder it costs so much, brother,” Ortho said sarcastically. “You’ve added the gullible tax on top. That’s how you turn a regular pitchfork into Eftyxia, the Spear of Enmaneth.”

Hawthorn slapped the folder closed. “I don’t think you realise exactly how much trouble you’re in, Mr. Nubah Kilebhi. If the Logos Hoshing Association gets involved, you’ll be paying a lot more than seven thousand kin for a jacket. The only reason you’re paying so little is because I just happened to be arresting you tonight, which prevented further damage, and because I pledged my badges.”

Flashing under the flickering, overhead lightbulb were three badges pinned to Hawthorn’s darker-than-night jacket. The bottommost was an S-class dungeoneer badge, showing a symbol like an S with a small bottom and two horizontal lines placed within the curves. The one above was the guard badge: a blue-and-green checkered shield depicting a tower with crenelated head. The topmost badge was unfamiliar to Stella. It was similar to the guard badge in shape and colour, but it instead depicted six black knives fanned out to protect an upside-down triangle in the middle. Stella concluded through deduction that it denoted Hawthorn’s rank as Commander of the Organised Crimes Division.

Hawthorn leaned forward and stared hard at both of them. “In other words, if you don’t pay, then I must, by law, or else my badges will be stripped from me. And I promise you, you won’t like that.”

Ortho shrugged. “Well, you’d better get hunting.”

“And that’s ignoring the thirty-two thousand you still owe the Cartel.”

Stella cupped a hand over her mouth to stifle laughter. “Oh, poor little, stupid Ortho. Whatever will the world do without him once the Cartel chops him up into fine pieces for not paying his debts?”

“Says the stupid fence who worked for ‘Stupid Ortho,’” he responded.

“It was one crawl and that’s all it’ll ever be!” Stella shouted.

“Hey, no need to be so prickly. I know you were upset when I left you for another fence.”

“Left? I kicked you to the curb! And besides, how was I your last fence if you went and found another?”

Ortho rolled his eyes. “That’s what they all say.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!” Stella stabbed his bare chest with the nail of her finger. “The moment we get out of here, well, I won’t tell you what I’ll do in front of a guard.”

Ortho raised his hands. They were manacled together, the black cuffs linked by a solid rod that had an even darker aftocore fixed in its centre. He leaned in. “Try it. I don’t need enma to take on a drunk farmer—”

Two swords appeared from nowhere. Their points thrust close Stella and Ortho’s necks and they immediately went silent. They hadn’t seen the swords appear, but the source was clear as day. A thread was wrapped around each of the blades’ handles that traced back to Hawthorn. His hands hadn’t moved—he was controlling them purely with enma.

“Settle down,” Hawthorn spoke calmly.

Ortho and Stella scowled at each other before settling back into their seats, careful not to let the swords poke them. Without a shift in expression, Commander Hawthorn drew his swords back using the faint enma threads connected vaguely to his chest. It was hard to tell where exactly they originated from his body since the dark threads disappeared before they reached him. Without so much as moving his hands, Hawthorn’s swords broke into rectangular chunks that were sucked into a ring on his middle finger.

“I need one of those rings,” Ortho commented.

Stella crossed her arms and mumbled, “When you pay off your debts, you might be able to afford an inventory.”

“And it should be paid soon,” Hawthorn said. “Because—”

Stella stood up, knocking her chair back into a stack of folders. “Well, looks like it’s all settled, then,” she said, stretching. “I think I might as well head out, then. So much paperwork to do for my grupp-for-brains party.”

“Because I’ve passed the debt onto you, Stella,” Hawthorn finished.

“Boy, I wonder what Wip is up to?” Stella said, pointedly ignoring Hawthorn. “I bet that idiot has gotten into another fight with Mr. Emery. What a character!”

Ortho, however, was beside himself with laughter. “Brother, I love this city sometimes. All those regulations are just… ha!”

Hawthorn eyed Ortho. “And I’ve filled out a special ordinance to have Ortho assigned to Stella.”

Ortho’s laughter came to a sudden halt. “Say that again?”

“It’s called a fixed crawl contract,” Hawthorn said. “You’ll need to complete crawls at Stella’s discretion until the debt is paid off.”

Ortho and Stella both lunged at the desk and slammed their hands down. “That’s burnt hoaraboar!” they screamed in unison.

“I am not working with him,” Stella cried. She poked a finger at Ortho.

“You can’t make me work for this grupp,” Ortho responded, pointing both hands at Stella. “I don’t have a tribe, got it? No family, no parties, no fences, just me and my shield.”

“Oh, I’m the grupp?” Stella growled. “Who tried to start a fight with the Ravelin guards because they wanted to scan your helmet?”

“Who set me up with a bunch of thieves that kept stealing all the loot, huh?”

“I distribute the loot afterwards, you grupp-for-brains!”

“Crazy cat lady!”

“Son of a grupp!”

Hawthorn’s swords appeared again at their throats. He waited patiently for the two of them to settle back into their seats.

Seconds ticked by in silence. Hawthorn finally put the swords away then cleared his throat. “Percy, take Ortho back to his cell,” he shouted.

A guard opened the door, walked in, and lifted Ortho up with a hand under his armpit.

“What, hey!” Ortho shouted. “Did I say you could touch me?”

He lashed out wildly, kicking Hawthorn’s desk and causing one of the towers of files to tip and land on the ground. Stella had to slap his legs away to avoid taking a bare foot to the face.

None of his struggling really mattered. The guard, Percy, had dull enma wrapped around his body in what Stella recognised as a strengthening meld. With his enma sealed by the cuffs, Ortho was completely helpless and his protests amounted to a child’s tantrum. Percy dragged him out of the room bodily with just one arm. Ortho did, however, manage to knock over every stack of files on his way out.

Headache or not, one thing hadn’t slipped by Stella. The guard was using a meld, and a complex one at that. Most dungeoneers knew few melds; most didn’t come from upbringings that taught them melds, and the knowledge was kept as secret as the bribes a Councillor received: everyone knew about them but nobody could, or would, give details.

Learning to meld properly took a lifetime of effort. Picking up aftos was just easier, more accessible, and they were generally stronger besides. This was especially the case for dungeoneers who, more often than not, only got into the business of risking their lives for money because it was the only profession in Logos that offered upward mobility to the world’s less fortunate. Furthermore, aftos were so much better constructed these days than hundreds of years back that there really wasn’t a reason to learn melding outside of tradition or to get an edge over other dungeoneers.

Therefore, what defined a dungeoneer these days was not their ability to meld, but their capacity for binding and using aftos. Even Stella could manage up to a single level three afto, but that was useless for dungeon crawling. Guards were about at that same level. If they could use higher level aftos or just use a bunch of lower level aftos at once, they wouldn’t bother being guards. Nobody wanted to risk their lives for that crap pay.

There were only three cases where melding was considered useful these days: to supplement afto usage such as how Hawthorn was doing with his swords, as a lambaster who hid behind their team to meld something big, or for forging enmatech—aftos and circuits alike. In every other case, enma was just fuel for aftos.

In other words, there existed an anomaly in Commander Hawthorn’s ranks, and Stella doubted he’d be the only one. This man had surrounded himself with some strong people.

When the door slammed shut and Ortho’s screaming faded into the distance, Hawthorn finally expressed an emotion that wasn’t brooding: he sighed.