Kyra stood atop the high-rise office building and gazed out over the city of Teelameer, where the world's first dungeon break was due to happen soon. Down below, millions of people went about their day in what may be the last moments of security they would ever know.

  Victor stepped up beside her and huddled in his jacket. "It's so windy up here."

  She turned her head. "Weren't you a paratrooper?"

  "And you'd think that C-rank frost resistance would also help. Maybe I just have a natural weakness."

  "Your frost resistance wouldn't have improved so fast if you had a weakness."

  "You don't know how many ice baths I've been taking," he replied. "Or had. They stopped doing anything for me some time ago."

  "You can suck it through ice baths but not a little wind?"

  "Who says I didn't whine in the bath?"

  She turned back to watching the endless motion of the city streets. Teelameer was the pride of the Nivian Republic, a proud and populous country on the eastern edge of Concordia before the cold, desolate steppes. You'd be proud too if you survived centuries of Litten invasions.

  Spread out across the city were her other disciples along with all of Victor's team. According to Benny, the first major breakout commonly occurred in Teelameer. It just happened to be where a large concentration of portals first appeared in the world.

  She supposed that magic obeyed its own sort of physics, and portals in particular had been rather consistent so far. But even they were affected by changes in the past, and lately few of Benny's portals had appeared where they were supposed to.

  This was why they'd already spent a week here in waiting. It was no longer possible for Benny to pinpoint the precise date of the breakout.

  "No problems with your team's body cams?" she asked.

  "They know their job," he replied. "Don't worry, we'll get plenty of highlights of golden boy."

  "Just be careful not to show him up too much," she said.

  Victor had lived up to his promise and achieved A-rank. But it was Tristis, who had only managed to reach B-rank, that needed to be the hero of the day. She wanted to give him every last boost possible to cement his leadership at the future hunters association.

  "Maybe it'll be a C-rank dungeon that breaks," Victor said. "Then the rest of us may not even have to step in."

  "If only I'm ever that lucky," she replied.

  "If it is C-rank," he continued, "maybe you can sit it out."

  Her disciple was concerned that she'd be identified, and it would spoil her long-term plans. But she'd taken precautions against that by changing her status to show a fake name, and she'd picked out clothing to hide her figure, and had every inch of skin covered down to her nose. Even her hair had been dyed and trimmed to match Lori's today.

  "That depends," she said, "on how well you can keep the monsters contained."

  Her disciples understood that their priority was to prevent casualties. This meant hunting down any monsters that may rampage through the city.

  The first breakout was unavoidable. It was always bound to happen somewhere, and that somewhere was almost certainly going to be a big city. In many ways it was convenient for her, but in some ways it was not, as she had a fondness for the Nivians. But any efforts to divert it would only make it unpredictable, and widespread destruction was certain if she wasn't there to stop it.

  The wind carried to them the faint whooping of a distant alarm. Kyra looked out toward a tall building halfway across the city. With her keen eyes, she could see through the glare of the polished windows to find a commotion in the upper floors. The movements of the office workers seemed more frantic than from just a fire.

  Victor noticed the change in her demeanor. "Did you find something?"

  "Just confirming . . ." she murmured.

  That was when she spotted it. An unnaturally large figure tearing through one of the offices.

  She pointed out the building and reported what she saw.

  Victor was immediately on his comms barking orders. He stepped out to the edge of the roof and was about to jump when he turned to her. "Will I see you again afterward?"

  "Don't count on it," she replied.

  Victor crouched and then launched himself into the air by his powerful legs. He did this with such precision that he landed smoothly on another tall rooftop several blocks over, and from there immediately sprang up into another jump, taking him quickly toward the action.

  Far below, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles were also converging. The wailing sirens echoed all across the city. Kyra hoped for the sake of the first responders that Victor's team got there faster.

  She couldn't see the street outside the office building from here, as the low-rises in the area were tall enough to block her view. Abruptly a police car in the vicinity made an appearance, flung up from the ground. It sailed over the rooftops until it crashed violently into the HVAC systems atop one of the buildings.

  The monsters had already escaped out onto the streets.

  Something wasn't right. A troll shouldn't have been able to do that. They were certainly strong enough to flip a car. But to kick it five stories into the air?

  She stepped off the rooftop, using levitation to soften her landing, and then broke out into a sprint. Passers-by stared after her as she overtook bikes and cars. All the people here were completely unaware of the terrible danger emerging a few blocks away.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  As she closed in on ground zero, a surge of panicked civilians was coming the other way. They swarmed over all the roads, bringing traffic to a stand-still. Confused drivers and passengers left their cars and some of them joined the wave rather than wait and witness the source of the panic. An ambulance tried to inch its way against the tide.

  Moving against the crowd slowed her down considerably, and levitating above them wouldn't have helped even if she were so inclined, as levitation wasn't flight, and her aerial propulsion was limited.

  When at last she reached the long stretch of road that led to the office building, she found that the damage was worse than she'd anticipated.

  The street was flooded with water from a broken hydrant and a fire truck that had been bent like a girder. Whatever struck the fire truck had pushed it a considerable distance, catching on the way two police cars, among other vehicles, until it had amassed into a pile-up that stretched across the entire road.

  Aside from the water, the street was devoid of movement. Anyone who could escape had escaped. But it was plainly evident that many hadn't, and not even the torrent from the hydrant could dilute away all the blood.

  To get past the roadblock, she had to hop up onto the fire truck. What she saw on the other side made her reassess her decision to allow the breakout in Teelameer.

  How many people were now smeared across a hundred yards of road? Could she really not have come up with a plan to move this event somewhere less populated and easier to control?

  There was no sign of the monster that did this, so she hopped down and headed toward the office building that was ground zero. Gunfire in the distance told her that somewhere out there, the battle raged on.

  The traffic lights were out, and now that she looked for it, the office buildings were blacked out too. Power must have been cut to the area—probably as a result of damage caused by the fighting.

  She caught sight of a pitched battle down from one of the intersections. A group of Victor's hunters were engaging a pack of trolls in front of a police barricade. None of the police officers were in sight.

  At the front of the ground-zero building, she looked down the road where earlier the police car had been flung onto a roof. Cars were randomly flipped and the buildings looked like someone had dragged a wrecking ball across them. There had been another attempt at a barricade, but not much remained of it. And much farther down, there was another battle.

  She spotted both Tristis and Victor, along with another handful of Victor's men and women. They were up against a pack of trolls, large brutes that could take a beating and dish it out. But among them was pack leader, a giant of a beast that loomed above its own large brethren.

  The extra height didn't give a true accounting of the difference in strength. While the regular trolls and could lift and throw a car, the pack leader wielded one in each hand, batting at any hunter unlucky enough to stumble close.

  For a B-rank monster to emerge this soon, it couldn't be the dungeon boss. Which meant that they weren't dealing with a C-rank dungeon but a B-rank one.

  But they were lucky in a way that it was a dungeon of trolls. Compared to other monsters of the same rank, trolls were weak on the offense and strong on the defense. If you were going to have monsters loose in your streets, you could do a lot worse.

  But it also meant that even an A-ranker like Victor was going to have trouble putting them down. In terms of survivability, you could regard a troll as being one rank higher thanks to its tough natural armor and accelerated ability to regenerate. Watching the battle now, Victor was landing some solid hits, but the wounds on the pack leader closed up almost instantly.

  What they needed was strong fire magic—the troll's greatest weakness. The hunters were shrouding the creatures in flames, but they lacked the necessary intensity. Her two male disciples had always been weak in that line of magic. They were going to need help from Lori, and she hadn't seen the girl anywhere around.

  She turned away from the battle and proceeded toward the office building, stepping over the mess of glass and rubble that littered the forecourt. She couldn't risk overshadowing her disciples out in the streets, but she could ensure that more monsters didn't escape through the portal.

  The front entrance had been completely torn about by the creatures forcing their way out through an opening designed for puny humans. She entered the dusty foyer, where it was dark and eerily quiet, as the lights and alarms had been cut off with the power. There was no sign of life on this level.

  She gazed up at the double-high ceiling and found a large hole where the trolls had punched their way down. Standing in the mess of broken concrete and rebar beneath the hole, she lowered into a crouch and then propelled herself up. She may not have a special jump ability like Victor, but sheer strength of limb worked just as well.

  Kyra found herself in what had once been an open-plan office. Everything had been smashed to bits. She could smell blood but didn't stay to search out the source as there were no survivors—her ears told her that much.

  She found the next hole in the ceiling and jumped up. Another office, but this one had cubicles, leaving behind a thicker layer of debris underfoot. But that wasn't the only difference. Beneath the hole to the next floor was a large heaping of compacted rubble. When she made her way over and looked up, she found out why.

  She could see clear through several stories up. Something had punched through five layers of concrete flooring.

  A normal troll couldn't do that. Maybe if it was flung . . .

  The building shook. The crash came from above. She listened carefully to the thunderous steps approaching and then a grotesque face appeared at the top of the hole. Its lips curled up into a grin at the sight of her before hopping down.

  She stepped away and the creature knuckled awkwardly forward, having to hunch over to fit beneath the ceiling panels.

  A troll pack leader.

  Behind it four more trolls dropped down from the hole. These were only of the regular variety.

  If she wanted, she was fast enough to dart past them. But her disciples down in the street were barely holding their own. There would be nothing to keep this second pack from rampaging through the city.

  She had to take care of the problem here and now.

  With the trolls still clustered together, Kyra pushed a stream of fire from her hands toward the pack leader. The flames coursed around the creature's bulk and consumed the rest of its pack.

  The sprinklers overhead popped off, but the water boiled away before it could reach the floor, and soon everything disappeared into a thick fog.

  The lesser trolls perished immediately, but the pack leader lurched into a frantic charge. Its head tore through the ceiling panels and pulled away the metal grid, sending a rain of plaster down around them.

  Thick arms flailed at her, each bringing to bear the strength to bend a fire truck. But through the steam and smoke and ceiling plaster, it was blind and she was faster, and when it lowered its head for a better look, she was there and ready to grab on.

  In such close proximity, she could concentrate her fire better, and the monster died quickly.

  But now she had a new problem. A fire had taken hold on this floor, spreading fast across all the shredded furniture and plastics. The sprinklers were slowing it down for now, but she had to hurry.

  She chased the smoke up through the holes. Fire and smoke no longer bothered her as it once did. Natural fire didn't hold a candle to A-rank magic.

  There was a strong draught pulling everything up, and she only had to follow it to find the way forward.

  She was approaching the upper levels when she found herself on a floor completely different from all the others.

  There was no ceiling in the usual place—or none that remained, anyway. All around her was a mess of fallen rubble, many layers deep. It was a mix of everything—concrete and plaster and particleboard and plastics. And it was all on fire.

  She hopped up to where the ceiling should have been and settled on a length of exposed steel. Thick, oppressive smoke filled the entire space, but with her hunter senses, she got enough of a sense of her surroundings. It seemed that the upper floors had fallen away, probably all the way to the roof.

  There was someone else here, and that person floated down toward her.

  "Master!" It was Lori.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  "I've been trying to close the portal. But that thing keeps getting in my way."

  The thing was swinging from beam to beam high overhead, regarding them cautiously.

  "Are you trying to get yourself killed?" she scolded her disciple. "You're only C-rank."

  "I'm not trying to fight it," Lori said. "I can fly, and it can't hurt me if it can't catch me."

  "Were you the one who set this place on fire?"

  "I set the troll on fire," Lori said indignantly. ". . . And then it landed on the rubble."

  There was a groan of metal overhead. The troll was done assessing them and must have decided that it could take them both on, as it had dropped down a layer toward them.

  "Get out of here and help the others," she commanded. "I'll take care of this."