A trio of travelers walked among the yellow flagstone. For days, they had followed a trail of leads left by a childish nobleman who had a typical upper-class spat with his parents, and decided to become an adventurer.

  Usually these kinds of events resulted within days in a returning noble complaining about hard adventuring life, or a letter from the closest tavern demanding money for the substantial bill accumulated by said noble.

  This time, however, the nobleman went from his home manor to the first village, then the next, and at last found himself in a shady tavern beside a sweaty elf— before vanishing into a dungeon.

  Chief Inspector Tanner was leading the investigation. He was chosen by three unfortunate facts— at least he thought so.

  He was close by, he had an apprentice to evaluate, and the nobleman was in a mind-bogglingly high stratum of class that his parents demanded the best. And, like always, nobles get what they want.

  He was a gentleman of later years, softly greying dark-brown hair, hazel eyes, stiff straight back and tanned skin, beaten by the sun during long travels. He was equipped with a scuffed steel breastplate atop dark chainmail, and a light satchel with necessary travel rations and tools.

  As a classical Swordsman, he opted to carry his old two-handed longsword and collection of daggers with him, but he didn't expect to use any of his weapons in such low-rank dungeon.

  He had his current apprentice, Miller, for pest control duties.

  Unlike him, she didn't carry any weapons. Her skills and class gave her the ability to create her own arms and armor in an instant.

  She had a satchel similar to Tanner’s, and an equipment belt with a multitude of different sized pockets and pouches filled with different adventuring gear ranging from basic potions to chalk and compass.

  If Tanner were a decade or two younger, he would have enjoyed Miller's company beyond her sharp wit and analytical approach to their missions. As a young woman in her mid-twenties with sharp facial features, glimmering green eyes, mischievous smile, and golden hair, she was everything Tanner appreciated in a woman.

  Sharp and purposeful. Durable and deadly. Like a fine sword.

  “Tanner.” Tanner heard a whisper, a sound like wind traveling over an asylum, infused with madness.

  His second traveling companion, Tobias.

  “The second circle awaits,” Tobias said before blowing strongly at Tanner's direction. He continued until his lungs were empty, and ended up in a hacking coughing fit.

  The coughing elf was ivory-pale like he had never seen the sun. His dirty grey robes and dark circles around his eyes made people jumpy around him, especially when he appeared from a dark alley mumbling about the secrets of the universe— and food.

  Miller stopped cataloging the collection of splotches and pieces of remains on the floor, looking up from her small wax tablet, already half-filled.

  “Tobias? You sense something?”

  “I believe he was making a personal observation. Not an investigative one,” Tanner answered on Tobias' behalf. “Anything interesting there?”

  “Someone bled a lot... and the body was left here... stampeded afterwards,” Miller said while gesturing with her hands around the scene.

  “Anything else?” Tanner asked. They had seen at least a dozen similar sites, days old ratkin corpses crushed under heel of a small marching army.

  , Tanner thought.

  “Yes... sir. These dents over here—” Miller said and pointed at the floor covered in dried blood and mushed remains.

  The spearhead had left markings highlighted by drying blood.

  “—same general practice. Group of fighters in the front, and a spearman making kill checks. Bigger supply group following— a rearguard.”

  Miller glanced at her tablet, making sure she didn't forget to add anything important. She hadn't, but there was the last thing that happened to this corpse after being flattened.

  “And something fed here. Around... two days ago?” Miller continued.

  She pointed at a distorted pool of blood and a handful of vague pawprints leading away from the spoil. Towards the corridor they had yet to travel.

  Tanner nodded his head while Miller spoke. She had an impression he wasn't really listening. He probably already knew all of this, but wanted to check if she had noticed every detail.

  He looked like a bar patron listening to his favorite bard, head bobbing with the beat.

  “And?”

  “And... they all... went that way?”

  Miller pointed at the brightly lit corridor in front of them.

  “Yes... and?”

  In Tanner's experience, the young always found meaning from the smallest details, and failed to see the bigger picture. The simplest, and most obvious clues.

  Miller narrowed her eyes at his teacher. She knew he was playing his little games, and Miller tried to figure out which one. He enjoyed the old asking game, mostly at the sites with absolutely no evidence just to see what the Illuminator apprentices came up with. Usually something with the dragon cults. Or any cult really.

  Miller rose up from the floor, gently brushing the dust off from her knees. She clasped her hands behind her back and walked backwards next to Tanner.

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  She turned her head around trying to see what the older man saw, searching for the clue. Yellow flagstone, dust, blood, little pieces of the body, roughly hewn walls—

  She pointed at the upper left wall. “ Scorch marks from lightning. Von Straus is— was a Lightning Mage, wasn't he?”

  “Very good,” Tanner gave her a pleased smile. “Wizard, actually. Knowing the classes and skills of our inquiry is crucial. Know your enemy before they know you.”

  Miller nodded, Tanner approached the pieces left behind and knelt down to inspect them himself. He was rather pleased with his little teaching moment. Miller hadn't missed anything crucial, and she would have checked the roof before they left.

  “The man wonders about ballistics. The thunder roars inside. Erupting pain and death of already dead.”

  Both Tanner and Miller, turned to look at Tobias. He stared at the ceiling, but his eyes were fixed on something much further, beyond the rock and soil above them.

  Miller approached him gingerly and lowered her hand on his shoulder.

  , Tanner thought. .

  “Tobias? What do you see?”

  “There is a Mirror on the moon. It reflects everything here.”

  Miller gave Tanner a side-eyed stare, a question. Tanner shrugged.

  “I meant, what can you see... here? In the dungeon?”

  “Oh... the mage was casting a spell— maybe Thunder Lance— and lost control due to an arrow on his... neck?... chest?... Throat! He got hit on his throat, and the spell came out from his back and arched around,” Tobias explained and swung his hand on short arch, following the scorch.

  Tanner looked at his friend in silence. These moments of clarity were rare, and for a moment he could see the old spark in Tobias' dark eyes.

  Tobias walked briskly next to Tanner and picked up something from the ground. A small piece of fine blue silk. A small sliver of it was still under enchantment and resisted staining.

  Tobias continued with a professional tone— an investigator's voice. “Von Strauss was wearing silken robes, yes? Probably something like this... very fine, very expensive...”

  He continued to rattle out the details about the silk, its origin and possible other enchantments. Tanner knew the signs. The old Tobi was going away soon.

  While giving a small lecture on the trade routes in Boiling Sea to the western continents, his left hand's fingers started to curl on themselves, making a clawed fist.

  Eyes bulging, he looked around and saw— everything.

  “err0r.#142128.g//class.necromancer.main_attr_minrequirementnotmetSOLUTION:setuser.SEVENTH_SEVENattr_focus=FFatr_essence=FFerr0r.#CDC142128.h//user.SEVENTH_SEVEN invalid SYSTEM.classes, soul=falseSOLUTION:soul=true,” Tobias' voice shrieked, sounding like a bagful of cats fighting a blackboard.

  The sound stopped abruptly with a loud click of his jaw snapping shut. Tobias breathed heavily between his teeth, arching his back slowly backwards. His jaw slackened and he was able to whisper the last words, “All system errors amended, report tickets created, thank you and have a nice day.”

  He stood silently, looking frail and lost.

  Miller had been assigned to Tanner and had traveled with him and Tobias for over a year now, but she had never seen, or heard, Tobias acting this way.

  She took a careful step forward, opening her mouth to speak— but stopped at Tanner's command. He was frantically searching his bag for something.

  Tobias was on his knees, scratching symbols and markings on the dried blood, muttering to himself. He clawed the stone, but left no other marks than faint lines of red.

  Tanner marched next to Tobias, kneeling in blood, and talked to him with a calm voice, “Tobias, wait. No... take this— yes, the quill and the ink. Parchment here, see? Use it. It's better,”

  He had once seen Tobias scratching markings on wooden floorboards. There were splinters and blood everywhere. Tanner had carried writing implements everywhere after that.

  Parchment was placed over the bloody flagstone, and Tobias was feverishly drawing circles inside circles, connecting them with precise lines and scribbling arcane symbols on them.

  Tanner tapped his friend's shoulder and watched him work. Whatever happened here was now beyond his understanding.

  Tanner could feel Miller's questioning look drilling into the back of his head.

  “He's making a Patch Note,” he answered to the unasked question.

  “Patch Note?”

  “The System made a change here. Something that literally changed the laws of reality. Oracles can see it. Feel it. He is trying to make a copy of that, to sanctify it.”

  Tanner could hear a sharp inhale and gulp.

  He thought of the sacred halls of Church of the System where the Patch Notes hung in the thousands. He and Tobias had visited there after creation of each Patch Note. Tanner would have to contact the Church to add this one to their collection. Maybe this is the one to crack the secrets of their language.

  The parchment was becoming more ink than parchment. Tobias was scratching the ink away and writing sections over and over again, changing details in a language only he could see.

  “Is he... alright? The sound he made— it wasn't any language. What—“

  “He'll be fine. Tired, but fine.”

  Silence hung loose while the Oracle continued his work of unraveling the secret meanings of the universe.

  Tanner broke the silence, just to break the unease. “We'll need to camp here. He won't continue traveling after this.”

  Miller looked like she wanted to ask more questions, but she knew how Tanner felt about questions about Tobias. “Yes, sir. I'll make perimeter walls. Bread and meat for supper?”

  “Make it soup and vegetables. Boiled soft— almost mush. Tobias won't have enough strength to even swallow properly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Miller walked forward for good 60 feet before stopping and softly humming a spell into life. A warbling wall of multicolored light rose from the flagstone, slowly changing to a color of hewn walls around her. The wall was indistinguishable from other walls, but was slightly see-through from this side.

  She took great pride in her skills and talent for creating hard light sculptures that truly mimicked the feel of real materials. A stone was coarse and earthy. A fire was hot. Only the liquids gave her a hard time—a flaw in her grasp of what liquids actually were and how they behaved.

  After Miller had made two illusionary walls of stone, she prepared a camp-site away from the blood and body parts. The corridor echoed with soft clattering of pans, and soon a fragrant aroma of broth and vegetables floated around a small campfire.

  Calling it a campfire was misleading. The heat came from slowly rotating sculpture of light resembling a living flame, giving heat to the boiling pot.

  When Tobias was finished, the light in the corridor had begun to dim, the spell keeping it lit having lost almost all of its potency. Tanner helped Tobias to rise up and walk, and the trio gathered around the campfire in a darkening dungeon.

  Miller transcribed her findings from wax tablet to parchment between bites from her bowl. The parchment was better for long-term note-taking and was already filled with her findings from the other sites, including sketches of the pawprints she’d found.

  She hadn't made a positive identification of the thing walking, preying in their lead, but it was some kind of six-legged nightbeast. Her best guess was an umbrefel, but this dungeon didn't list it as a possible monster spawn.

  Miller cast a sidelong glance at Tanner. He was waiting for the identification, but it wasn't high priority. They had found the disappeared nobleman Elijah von Strauss dead, and now they had to find his killers. Even if it was a monster born from a dungeon, a mob.

  She bit into the mush forcefully. If she failed to identify the monster before they found it— or when it tries to ambush them— Tanner would make her fight it, and compile a complete report of its taxonomy. Miller hated with a burning passion cutting up corpses, measuring bones, and weighing organs. Maybe they wouldn't meet the monster and all would be good?

  Tanner fed Tobias before eating himself. Slow spoonfulls of mushed carrots and potatoes, with a couple of peas in hiding. The elf didn't say anything, just gripped tightly his creation, the Patch Note.

  His fingers were black and red from ink and blood. He didn't even notice— or care.

  His eyes glimmered in the campfire's light. A deep thought was buried in there somewhere, and he was trying to decode it, translate it to a language understandable for other beings.

  "Tan-n-n-n-ner."

  "Yes, Tobias?"

  "There will be raisins in your cookies. Till the end of the days."

  "Thank you, Tobias."

  “Till the end of your days,” Tobias specified before biting into a mushy carrot.