Max's leg bounced underneath the table, as he glanced around the metallic interrogation room, mentally counting how many cameras were in there.

It wasn't his first time in a metal matchbox like this, and it wasn't even his second.

But it was the first time he'd been here for blowing a conspiracy wide open.

And despite what Aiden said, Max knew the hero's association was involved somehow. There was just simply no way they didn't know about this. He'd reported it directly to the hero's headquarters and met with the singular person he could stand there, the Human Resources Assistant manager. As far as employees went, Phil wasn't the highest up in the chain but he was high up enough that his word should have carried weight when he put in a high-priority alert for dungeon activity investigation.

But nothing.

Max had then gone to the press, to try to get the story leaked. Going to the press went against everything he believed but he'd had one of his delvers talk to a reporter on his behalf, a young woman who was desperate for a big break. The problem with the press was that they were owned by the very same sponsors who owned the heroes, and so they wouldn't let anything that wasn't in their best interest leak. Max wasn't even surprised when no article came out about it. But it did confirm that something was going on here and at the very least, the hero association was aware of it. And there was no point in continuing to try to leak the news via reporters. Every reporter worth listening to had been bought off, and even the underground ones only wanted to do an investigation if they got paid. And Max had a moral standing against paying bottom feeders, especially when there was no guarantee that he'd get anything out of it.

Every other thing he'd tried was useless. Mundane Law Enforcement. Useless. King's Knights. Double Useless. Mercenary Guild, Dungeon Union…so damn useless that he considered never paying another guild or union fee again for the rest of his life.

All they did was make him fill out paperwork and then wait for a response from the…you guessed it…hero's association. He thought the mundane powers were supposed to act as a check and balance against the capes, but they cowed to the big H assholes just as much as the rest of the world did.

Which was what led Max to this point.

He'd had no choice really. And no amount of guilt tripping from Luke, or frantic texting from Flaviana–his extended fling–telling him that he'd made a stupid choice, was going to change his mind.

Still, the metal seats and the silver power-suppressing cuffs around his wrists were uncomfortable and chaffed.

He sure hoped he wouldn't be sentenced to them for the rest of eternity.

He sighed and rolled his shoulders, trying to get the crick out of them that had been bothering him all day. He didn't know what it was. Maybe he'd slept wrong? Or maybe it was because he'd been under constant tension for the past week, trying to crack this case. Either way, his shoulder had stiffened into a permanently coiled state and now nothing he did could get it to ease.

Ha, I sure do miss that Sirena. She knew how to give a good massage. I shouldn't have broken up with her but she said she didn't see a future with us and so what the hell was I wasting my time for? She didn't want to date a [Mercenary]. I wonder if she would be down for hooking up with a [Villain] though?

"Jeez, how long do they plan on keeping me here waiting?" It felt like it had been hours already even though in actuality, it had probably only been minutes.

The truth was that Max was really bad at waiting. He hated sitting still, hated being bored. He hated being in one room for too long and hated not having anything to stimulate him so he didn't have to fixate on every damn random thing that flitted across his mind.

It was why he enjoyed dungeons. Every day was a new thing. New environment. New stages. New creatures to slay and or befriend. New treasure to be had.

No time to sit around and mope. You had to think fast and act even faster or you would be killed before you could take a breath.

It was always exciting. The job seemed to fit him to a tee, and he couldn't believe there was a time he wasn't a delver, a time that he'd even thought about doing something else. Being a [Hero] of all things. What a disaster that would have been.

Yeah, so glad that didn't work out. I would have been a terrible [Hero].

Dungeon delving was perfect for him. Without dungeons, he would be bored and listless like he'd been all spring before dungeon season arose again.

Maybe his boredom was part of the reason he'd gone to such great lengths to reveal this conspiracy.

Even staying in Hovelton just a few months out of the year was so dull that he needed some kind of excitement, and he'd found it in the case of unstable dungeons.

He hadn't been too bothered by the first one, thinking it would be great exercise to get rid of it. But eventually, they started happening too often, so much so that he was somewhat terrified that it indicated a shift in his world. That something was changing, and his universe was breaking in some way that it couldn't be put together again.

Max liked change. But not that much change.

What most people didn't know was that the rise in occurrence of UD's had been happening for longer than a year and it was directly correlated with the decrease in the occurrence of stable dungeons. No one else had made the link. He didn't think anyone else was as obsessed with dungeons as he was, so much so that they had made maps and kept track of how many of them spawned every single year. Max wanted to defeat at least a thousand dungeons before he died and he crossed out each one he beat. And thanks to his maps, he could see the small changes that hadn't happened in the years before. If the trend continued, pretty soon, there wouldn't be any stable dungeons left to conquer.

Max knew that it didn't necessarily mean the end of the world. Correlation wasn't causation and all that. But if it was…

If the world broke, if suddenly all the stable dungeons were somehow becoming unstable, unusable, and unable to be explored…

If Max was rendered redundant…

He didn't know what he would do.

Luke would be happy.

Luke didn't like his dungeon delving in the first place and thought Max should have gone into regular law enforcement. Or become a gun maker. Max liked guns. But the thought of doing the same thing every day made him sick. He could manage it for short breaks, like during a spring here or there, but eventually, the boredom would eat him alive.

Being a [Villain] would arguably be worse though. He'd seen it with Aiden. The man had been a brilliant professor and a [Hero], a really powerful one. More powerful than most people could even conceptualize. People had wanted to kiss his ass everywhere he went and even though he'd stayed relatively humble considering his status, Max had slightly hated being around him sometimes just due to how brightly he glowed.

And now…

He was so frighteningly weak and regular. Breakable. A man who might have been able to shift mountains and even reality to his will, who could stop an army and take down entire high-level dungeons on his own.

Now, he got back pain from cleaning gutters, dislocated his shoulder from a simple spar, and tired out after a few hours of strenuous activity. He couldn't do anything without extreme difficulty.

It was a torturous punishment and Max didn't think he could go through that, certainly not with as much grace as Aiden had.

Max knew getting the [V] tag was likely a possibility today. Apart from his significant rap sheet, what he'd revealed online was something that the [Heroes] wanted to keep hidden. He'd thrown egg at their faces. And they were going to want to make him pay for it.

Fortunately, he had one last card to play.

"Okay seriously, how long do I have to wait here?" Waiting this long should be cruel or unusual punishment. He turned toward the reflective glass. "Hello? What the hell are you guys waiting for? Get in here and interrogate me, or torture me, or lobotomize me for all I care. Just do something, please."

The door opened as though hearing his prayer and relief rushed through his body like a breeze, allowing an exhale. He thought it could be one of three people opening the door. His brother finally came to bail him out with whatever connections he still had in law enforcement. It could be Flavi attempting to break him out, even though he'd ardently texted her not to do such a thing. Or it could be the third person, the one he'd spent his one mandatory phone call on before they'd cut off his access to telecommunications.

As the figure cleared the doorway, Max felt a smile spread across his cheek.

"Ah," he said. "You my friend are a sight for sore eyes."

The man standing in front of the doorway did not look in any way happy to be seeing Max. His hair was slicked back with more gel than Luke usually used, his suit was the epitome of crispness and his shoes shined to perfection. Loretta's oil polish probably.

But he wasn't smiling.

Then again Silas Creevy had probably never smiled a day in his life.

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His shoes made no sound on the floor as he drifted over, and pulled the chair back, sliding his significant weight into it.

The two men stared at each other for several seconds, Max with glee and Silas with the indignation of a canary that had been caught.

"I have to admit," Max said. "A part of me didn't think you would take the bait."

"Talk." Silas' voice, like the man himself, was severe and uncompromising, and quite intimidating considering how angry he looked.

But Max let the silence linger, glancing toward the glass instead. He then shot Silas a raised eyebrow.

"The room has been cleared," Silas said. "The cameras disabled. Now talk."

"Ah. You people sure are efficient and powerful. I wonder what it would be like to wield that much power. I bet your bread is always sliced perfectly right and your toilet gives zero splash. You probably use three-ply toilet paper too."

Silas' jaw tightened. His power bristled in the room. It was likely dangerous to anger such a powerful man, but Max was having so much fun he couldn't help himself.

"So, do you want me to start with the threat or my list of demands? I'm not sure which one to go with first. Believe it or not, it's my first time blackmailing someone."

"The threat was already obvious in your message."

"But the message only said 'the hen is in the henhouse'. That could mean anything." Max wasn't even sure what it meant. Only that he'd passed that message along to Silas' secretary and now the man was here.

Max pursed his lips. "Although you're probably also referring to the code attached to the message that I gave Helen. And the saying plus code is a password that only you and one other person knows."

Silas' frustration grew. Max smiled more. Good. That was for making him wait in this damned room for what felt like days.

"How about I start with the story instead?" Max said. "Of how I discovered what you were up to. Because it wasn't easy I gotta tell you that. I had to bug phones from lower-ranked association employees. Had to pay a hacker literally ten thousand credits for it to be undetectable by your security systems. And then I went through transcripts, had to call in a bunch of favors…do you want to know the hardest part though? Not the staking out, or the bankrupting myself trying to figure this shit out. It wasn't even the one time I spent nearly an entire day in a barely open freezer waiting for something to move." He could still feel the cold in his bones. "No, that wasn't the worst part. The worst was when I had to wear this monkey suit and go to that stupid party thrown by Azure, and listen to Anthony Royal drone on and on about how [Heroes] today aren't like what they used to be. How y'all have it so hard thanks to the new rules Vacek has put in place."

The air was silent as though Silas were poised to cut off Max's airways at any moment. And he could probably do it. Get rid of him.

Except that Max had put in contingencies in case anything was to happen to him today and he'd let Silas' secretary Helen know that too. They were not great contingencies because they were kind of last minute but Silas didn't know that. And it was likely killing him that he couldn't harm Max without repercussions.

Maybe I should do this blackmail thing more often. I haven't had this much fun in a while.

"You know Anthony Royal right?" Max inquired, his leg bobbing even more. "He was that hero that was embroiled in that embezzlement scandal. The one that you had to investigate yourself. Except you didn't actually investigate him because you already knew about it. Because you had been using Royal to give you access to the man who controls the disaster reporting database, that way you could do some collusion yourself. You used that to somehow hide nearly all the reports we made, leaving some but getting rid of others. So it wouldn't look like so many dungeons were appearing in Hovelton."

"But that wasn't enough. News of the unstable dungeons was already leaking and spreading to the [Hero] association, so you conspired with Azure, a man with wealth and power over damn near every reporter in the city, to keep everything quiet."

Max tapped his fingers on the table. "Azure knew about the dungeons this whole time but was concerned about how it would affect his reelection campaign. He was also concerned about the fact that the dungeon appearance was apparently affecting Mr. Lochlan's crops which Azure used in his cereal business. So he conspired with old Mr. Lochlan to keep it quiet. It wasn't too hard since Lochlan was worried that people wouldn't buy his crops if they thought it was infected with unstable dungeon juice or whatever. There's no such thing, but we all know how dumb and discriminatory people can be."

Silas didn't respond to that, and Max one-handedly cracked his knuckles, one by one.

"So once I figured that out, the next question I had was why you, Silas Creevy, a paragon of virtue and head of the hero anti-corruption unit, would do any of that? What would you have to gain from this? You've never taken a bribe in your life. And you've never needed to seeing as how a [Hero] of your caliber can probably afford anything he wants. Maybe after you retired, the money wasn't flowing in as easily." Max tutted. "Still, you wouldn't do this for the money. At least I don't think you did because there are less messy ways to get money. You did it because the opportunity that had presented itself to you was a blessing in disguise. Unstable dungeons in a largely remote but not completely remote part of the district. You could exploit that to encourage some type of large-scale catastrophe. A catastrophe like a level four dungeon opening up and no one attending it, releasing a monster that wipes out thousands of people. That was what you wanted. And Hovelton, along with a few other places, was the perfect stage to carry that out." Max cocked his head, consideringly. "Hovelton is not politically important to Orinia, but it's close enough to Arcadia for visibility's sake. A disaster in Hovelton would definitely make the news but it wouldn't be devastating for the economy or the military. A [Hero] could show up right on time and save the place, but if they didn't people would die or get hurt."

Max's mind worked as he spoke, putting the pieces together based on Silas' facial expression. "If Hovelton collapsed, it would be a political blow for Azure, but he could recover from it by blaming us delvers for improper mining practices." One of the untrue superstitions was that mining too much, or improperly, created unstable dungeons. "Or you could blame a certain [Villain] who lived in Hovelton for the disaster. He would have been the perfect scapegoat, wouldn't he? Especially considering his previous crime, which you would have found a way to make public. Even though Sparrowfoot is powerless now, once they knew what he'd done, the masses would have figured that there was some way for him to bypass his bonds and they would have crucified him before he even got the chance to defend himself.

"And that was all a small but necessary sacrifice to make for your main goal. To show the world how important [Heroes] are. When news broke of the disaster, reporters would ask, 'Well why didn't the [Hero] association arrive on time and save those people?' and you would say something along the lines of 'because we don't have enough personnel or funding or whatever. We're overworked and underpaid. We have a lot of responsibility on our shoulders that no one appreciates. We have too much 'paperwork'.' Oh we all know how much you [Heroes] hate 'paperwork'." Max knew 'paperwork' was a code word for some kind of punishment that Dominic Vacek implemented on unlawful and destructive [Heroes]. He didn't know exactly what it entailed but he knew they all hated and feared it.

"Then," Max continued. "You would trot out a Firebringer or one of your other high-charisma heroes to talk on camera and convince the world that it needed to give you more freedom. People would demand that [Heroes] got more respect and less oversight. Funding for hero programs would go up. People would revere heroes again. They would long for the old days when non-heroes like me weren't allowed to mine dungeons unless they had proper [Hero] supervision. And just like, a New World Order would begin. Or maybe should I say the 'Old World Order'? Because we all know you aren't just satisfied with being our saviors. You assholes want to be our Gods too." The silence essentially crackled with tension as Max delivered his final line. "Tell me, how close am I to the truth?"

Pretty damn close judging from how Silas looked like he wanted to incinerate him.

Max felt like giving himself a giant high-five.

And the best part was that Max didn't even have to figure all that out himself. Royal had spilled most of it when Max had gotten him alone and drunk at a party, and slipped him a mild truth potion he'd prepared for the event. Max wasn't sure the truth potion had even been needed. Royal had been so pissed and discontent at being cut off from the deal that he'd just felt like opening his heart up to Max.

And Max had felt like a used emotional prostitute after the event but at least he'd had his answer. And it was worth it to see the putrid look on Silas Creevy's face.

"Now that we've gotten that out of the way," Max said, "I have a list of demands…"

Hours later, Silas Creevy walked out of the jailhouse descending the stairs. His muscles ached from holding back the force of his powers and it had taken everything for him not to lacerate Max in that room.

Now he finally understood why so many people, [Heroes] and [Villains] and rival [Delvers] alike, wanted that man dead.

That one-eyed bastard was irritating as hell.

As he descended the stairs, Silas saw Azure in the distance.

He was smoking. It was disgusting habit that the man had never quite managed to kick even though he'd hidden it from the press during his [Hero] days.

Azure always mocked his wife for having a nervous temperament, but he didn't seem to realize that he had one too. His gaze moved shiftily, his hand shook around his cigarette, and he didn't have his usual political smile.

"So," he said anxiously as Silas approached him. "What did he know?"

"Some of it," he said. "Not everything."

That didn't comfort Azure. He heaved a sigh. "We're playing a dangerous game here."

"You knew the risks before you joined us."

"Yes." His nerves showed clearly on his face. "To make matters worse, Vacek is back."

Silas nodded. He already knew Vacek would be returning soon. Despite how hard they'd tried to cover the dungeon incident, the [Hero] association was too big and there were too many 'noble' souls for him to keep it hidden forever. It was bound to come out.

He'd just hoped the president of the association never found out their true intention.

"The news of the dungeon brought him back from his trip to Planet Fae," Azure said. "We'll have to lay low for a while, and put up our fall man. Also bury the thing we GLITCH."

Silas nodded. "Yes. But you understand that might still not insulate you. When you started this, you said you were willing to die for the cause."

A hard look entered Azure's eyes. "I was. And I still am."

Luther didn't like people in his house.

He lived in a penthouse, on the top floor of a pristine Capital City loft, with high ceilings, large windows to allow light, and a contemporary design with sleek furniture and minimalistic accents.

It was beautiful, featuring light brown oak and golden hardware.

But the dour presence of the man standing in the middle of his plush centerpiece rug seemed to darken the whole room.

And it was even worse when he turned around and pinned Luther with his grey-eyed gaze.

Luther tensed up.

"Sir?" he greeted because the bastard liked formality more than breathing even though he'd come to Luther's house with no invitation.

"Luther. You were supposed to stay in Hovelton to observe the dungeon situation."

"Yes."

"And?"

"And what?

"What did you find?"

Luther didn't want to admit that he hadn't actually stayed in Hovelton and had instead stayed in Arcadia and monitored the situation through the reports received at the Hero's Center there. So he swallowed, tried not to show visible fear, and said, "Nothing unusual. There are some UD dungeon issues but it was largely resolved within a few minutes."

"Lies." The man's voice was quiet but cracked like thunder. "Little Luther, you should know better than to lie to me."

Oh, how Luther loathed that name.

The man looked away and stared at the window. "They found an unstable dungeon underground. It was unearthed by Max, the dungeon delver, and it's causing a stir because there was an eldritch creature that emerged from it." His jaw clenched slightly before he continued. "I also heard that Aiden Sparrowfoot's daughter pre-awakened and she was involved in an incident with GLITCH where she got hurt. Because of us."

"That was Lucy Frank's call."

Luther swallowed because Dominic Vacek turned to pin him with an accusing gaze again.

"Now, do you want to explain to me, Luther, what exactly you found in Hovelton?"

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