Gavyn got the kind of call no one wanted in the middle of the night. An alarm spell lanced through his head, dispelling sleep and embedding standardized job details as an insistent thought.

  Action Level: THREAT

  Type: ROT

  Cause: BEING, CORRUPTION

  Infrastructure collapse is imminent.

  The location was given to him as a memory of how to get there. Blips of someone else's vision showed him the cleanup site and the surrounding area. Gavyn rolled out of bed with a half-growl, half-groan. His wife stirred but didn’t wake. She had long ago become accustomed to the demands of his work.

  He was dressed and out the door, gear strapped to his waist and back, in under five minutes. Though he was a big man, his movements were quiet. Not only because his wife was still sleeping, but also because one never knew what might hear all the noise a person makes just being alive on the job. Of course, magical bio-dampening was standard for industry workers, but that didn’t mean employers were willing to provide anything useful. So Gavyn had learned how to move quietly and had even acquired a few anti-noise spells himself.

  Leading up to the site, police with their opaque face plates and helmets directed the evacuation of residents, workers, and resident workers. A perimeter already defined the danger zone plus safety buffer, clear field projector crystals dotting the pavement and glittering in the streetlights,. It was a two-way authorization filter. Everyone was allowed out. Authorized personnel were allowed in, meaning that Gavyn needed no physical credentials or personal interaction to get past. He waved to the faceless peacekeepers anyway. Chances were, he knew a few of those uniformed individuals.

  He was the first to arrive, but the two other members of his crack team weren't far behind. A young, wiry man with dull light-brown hair still messy from sleep who looked seven kinds of disoriented. A stooped, bony goblin in a cheap robe who nervously twisted his hands around his straight stick of a staff. Gavyn snorted.

  “What’s your name, kid?” he asked, staring evenly at what he decided was his trainee.

  “Wiverlala, uh, sir,” he replied.

  Gavyn snorted again. What parent named their child Wiverlala? Nod at the long-respected and highly capable wyvern race and then undermine your tribute with the frivolity of “lala”. The owner of the name standing in front of him had probably already heard all the jokes there were to tell, so Gavyn didn’t voice his thoughts.

  “Well, Wiverlala, my name is Gavyn.” Gavyn pointed a thumb at his own chest. “That’s Murguk.” He switched to his first finger and pointed it at the goblin. “Is this your first emergency rotation?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m all trained up, though,” he rushed to say earnestly. “I already did some jobs over in the Holdover district. I swear I’ll be helpful. I just… What are we cleaning up? Exactly?” His pitch rose slightly on the last word.

  Of course, he was trained up. He wouldn’t be there if he hadn’t been. It was about what Gavyn had expected. It wasn’t ideal. Something about the memory showing the cleanup site nagged at the back of his mind. It looked like common dark rot, but he had a feeling this would be an uncommon cleanup, for which he would have liked to have more experienced teammates. It couldn’t be helped.

  “Alright,” said Gavyn. “This is your run-of-the-mill grid rot. Unfortunately, all the bad things people think and do produce trace amounts of corruption that seep into the environment. In dense populations, like our fair city, that seepage can’t dissipate fast enough. It builds up and corrupts infrastructure. Then we come in and clean it up. Make sense?”

  The kid nodded.

  “Good. Our job is to push it back far enough to prevent the building from coming down and contain the core. A regular team will come behind us and remove it. Murguk is here to beef up the wards in the areas we clean so it won’t spread again after we leave. You,” Gavyn pointed at Wiverlala, “are here to do what I say. I am here to keep you out of trouble. Am I clear?”

  The kid nodded again, vigorously. The sleepiness had left his eyes, and he was listening intently. Some of the consternation that had built in his stance eased when he realized he wouldn’t be expected to know anything.

  “Let’s go then.”

  Gavyn turned and made his way to the back door of an office building. Rather than going in, he stepped to the side of it. This part did require physical credentials, unlike the barrier he’d crossed to get there. He held his cuff up to the stone wall and spoke a short spell. The wall disappeared in the shape of a narrow doorway. He stepped into a metal box with a hole in the back. It was pretty big, as holes went, but not big enough to stand up in. The stone wall closed, and an absolute darkness enveloped them.

  Wiverlala immediately activated the standard-issue mini wizard light. Gavyn snatched it from the air and deactivated it.

  “You can hold dark vision, right?” Gavyn asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Use it. Light will prevent us from seeing the more diffuse corruption. Anything we miss can turn into another core with time.”

  He could have warned the kid ahead of time, but he would remember the lesson better if he felt bad for making a mistake first. Wiverlala obviously hadn’t absorbed any of the grid-rot training.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Gavyn crawled into the hole, expecting the rest of the team to follow. These tubes were made to contain and route exactly this kind of corruption. They were not made to be traversed by anything living. Of course, it was made poorly. Though even as shoddy as this system was, it shouldn’t have been overwhelmed to this extent, unless those who worked here seriously hated their jobs.

  “Here’s the edge. You see that radiation coming off it?” Gavyn asked.

  It shouldn’t have spread out this far. They should have been called before it got this bad. Gavyn braced for a long night.

  “Um… No, sir. I-I can’t see anything.”

  “Keep looking.”

  Gavyn turned on his side and motioned for Wiverlala to come up next to him. Wiverlala obliged, pulling himself forward on his elbows and frogging his knees out. Good Halon. Why couldn’t the city at least find a mage capable of hovering them through the tubes? Gavyn pointed so the kid knew where to look.

  “Ooooh. It’s kind of purple-ish?” Wiverlala asked.

  “Yes. Watch me. I’m going to break down some of it, then you’re going to do it. When you get comfortable, we’ll both work on it to speed this up.”

  Wiverlala nodded hesitantly. Gavyn pulled the spray wand from his back. A flexible hose attached it to a small tank, which hung off the side of his backpack. He was already sweating, and the hair stood up on his meaty arms. He pointed the nozzle on the end of the wand at the creeping mass and held his thumb over a rune on the bottom of the grip. The magical liquid that misted out wasn’t visible in the dark, even with dark vision, but the radiation signature went out where it landed on the corruption. Needless to say, touching the radiation was bad for your health.

  It wasn’t radiation in the physical sense, where atoms decayed into new elements, giving off deadly energy. It was radiation in that the minute purple tendrils were the spread of the corruption. When no more tentrals were visible, he reached out and physically tapped the spot with a magical mallet. It was heavy, but the magic in the head did the work, breaking up the inert corruption and causing it to evaporate. Gavyn didn’t know where the residue went or how his tools worked. He didn’t have to know in order to use them. Murguk muttered a familiar spell from behind them. A silvery film washed over the spot Gavyn had just cleared and then faded.

  “Simple enough,” Gavyn said, looking toward his trainee, who already had his own wand in hand. At least he’d brought the right gear. “Go ahead.”

  Wiverlala cleared a small spot on his own without issue, and they worked quickly for the next few hours, falling into a rhythm. They followed the main tube, ignoring side shafts for the time being. Cores formed in hidden spaces, but where they could spread the fastest. So this core was almost guaranteed to be in the main tube. If he could find it, he could mark the boundaries of it and get an idea of how much potential extra-tube spread there was. The cleanup details had specified that structural collapse was imminent, meaning that the corruption had broken out of the tubes and infected the building foundations.

  As the corruption grew denser and harder to break up, Gavyn’s unease grew. Ambient noises gained extra echoes and began to sound like whispers. The tendrils wriggled along the walls, getting longer as they went further in, very visible and very alive. He took the lead, not allowing Wiverlala to spray after a while. Gavyn sprayed, Wiverlala swung the mallet, and Murguk panted and wheezed out his spell.

  Finally, Gavyn sprayed, and the purple tendrils didn’t disappear. They had reached the core. He pulled a piece of chalk from the front pocket under his coat. He drew a line around the inside of the tube. A translucent barrier sprang up, and the tendrils recoiled. Gavyn thought he glimpsed a body.

  “Stay behind the barrier,” Gavyn told Wiverlala.

  Murguk wouldn’t have crossed it even if he had been allowed. He had gotten further and further behind as they’d progressed.

  Gavyn stepped through and drew another line on the inside. After the tendrils recoiled, he did it again. He had reached the surface of the core by the fourth line, and there, lying as if on a non-existent floor, was a fresh body. The corruption had not consumed it, despite having eaten through the tube, creating a sphere for itself in the building’s foundation.

  Chills ran from Gavyn’s toes to his scalp. He was sweating and spent. He reached over his shoulder into the backpack, withdrawing a black leather tome. This, too, was standard issue, with printed utility spells for the job. Gavyn thumbed through it almost casually, identifying the marker spell. He spoke it. A pulse radiated from him… and died before reaching the core.

  “Well.” Gavyn said, “shit.”

  He thumbed through the tome again, showing none of his rising alarm in his body language, looking for a spell he’d written in the margins himself. There.

  “Haven’t used this one since the crater of Grand Hollow.” That had been seventy years ago.

  Gavyn spoke the spell with all the authority and knowledge of his decades in the industry, his baritone voice rumbling through the space, seeking every crevice the core had invaded and carved out. This was a counterspell, designed to undermine the core’s anchor to the physical world, rather than simply a marker spell. It, too, fizzled out before reaching any boundaries. Before that, though, Gavyn saw deeper into the core via the magic.

  There wasn’t just one body. There were at least fifty. They had been murdered, with rituals designed to make their corpses as potent as possible for just this purpose.

  A hissing, deep laugh slowly rolled over the group.

  Gavyn turned and looked at Wiverlala, who was rightfully terrified. Gavyn’s eyes burned into Murguk’s.

  “Barrier, wizard. Now,” he growled.

  “Th-that is not r-regulation,” the goblin squeaked.

  He was right. A magic barrier could further weaken a structure compromised by grid rot, but they would not be clearing out the rest of the rot that night.

  “Now! Unless you want to be melted through your weak protections.” Gavyn thundered.

  Murguk obeyed. Gavyn pushed himself back with just his arms, calling on his strength. He placed a hand on the kid’s shoulder.

  “Look at me.”

  The kid tore his eyes away from the dark.

  “Turn around. Get back to the entrance. Do not panic. Do not try to go faster than a walk. You’ll tire out too fast and get caught. Got it?”

  Wiverlala nodded, but his eyes returned to the core, widening even further as a telltale hiss of failure came from Murguk’s barrier. Murguk redoubled his efforts. Gavyn shook Wiverlala, then forcibly turned him around and gave his backside a shove.

  “Go!”

  Gavyn didn’t turn back. He followed the kid, and Murguk kept throwing up barriers as they retreated, knowing that if he stopped, they would be overwhelmed.

  All Gavyn could think as he fled for his life was that all their hard work had been for nothing. He would still have to work in the morning, and the building would still fall.