"If you don't mind, David," Argyle shot the man a questioning look to which David acquiesced with a wave of his hand. Argyle rose from his seat, straightening his suit as he did. "These machines are known as mana accumulators, and while these machines are not of our particular design, there are enough similarities that I am certain the original design originated with us," Argyle announced to the room. "Many members of the Unseen prefer a much more mana rich environment for their day to day lives. These machines originally facilitated this by drawing in mana from a wider area and concentrating it around the accumulator's main body."

  David could see at a glance that not everyone in the room was happy about Argyle's interjection. Several of the Unseen's representatives looked rather irritated with him. It made sense that the Unseen were famously reclusive when it came to their secrets. Clearly, Argyle felt there was a need to reveal this particular connection. Isabella was harder to read; she seemed rather nonplussed, unlike the others.

  "These have been modified significantly from the original design, however," Argyle went on, walking up the side of the table to stand in front of the screen. He gestured at several of the images depicting the mana accumulators, pointing out the strange tubes and pinions that stretched out from the bottom of the device. "These, for instance, the original design was just the tower; these seem almost like some sort of modification to direct the flow of mana one way or another, push or pull."

  He tapped the screen, drawing the augmented images apart with a gesture. Under the surface, his hands left ghostly trails of afterimages, a trick of the room's lighting. "The most obvious change is this network of peripheral emission-points. I will hazard a guess that the Vish either wished for a broader collection radius or required them to control the output more precisely. In terms of magical engineering, that introduces instability. It's a brute force method, and not one we would ever have employed."

  Another Unseen at the far end—a hulking slab of a man with a face like a glacier, David had forgotten his name—shifted in his seat, lips twitching with the start of protest. But Argyle simply continued. “I do not mean to disparage; the Vish are resourceful when it matters. But the choice of materials here, and the complete lack of any dampening mechanism, suggests a willingness to accept risk. Catastrophic risk.” He stopped, glancing out over the room.

  Isabella’s gaze had fixed, unblinking, on the contraption displayed. David could tell she recognized it—he suspected she saw more than just the object, perhaps pictured the entire web of consequences that radiated from its existence. She had a way of making something as banal as staring at a slide feel like reading someone’s biography in the lines of a fingerprint.

  "The Vish have always been ambitious and willing to cross lines the rest of us would not," Isabella stated flatly, "this seems to be a continuation of that behaviour. The question remains, what do they want?"

  David raked the assembly with a practiced, administrative version of a predator's gaze. His own take? The Vish didn't have a goal, not in any sense that the rest of the magical world would find logical. "If these accumulators can escalate a dungeon to Breach, perhaps the Vish are looking for quantity over quality—enough to overwhelm our collective resources,"

  “As ever, you are direct, David,” Isabella murmured, her lips barely moving. “Yet it rings true. The Vish operate on spite as often as on profit.” She offered a rare, slight incline of her head toward Argyle—a show of respect, or at least acknowledgment, that even centuries of old blood feuds could not fully suppress. “I’m more concerned by the possibility that they hope to trigger something… unprecedented.”

  A sharp intake of breath signalled David's realization, "Our two groups have kept the secrets of magic and the system for lifetimes, we are the entrenched powers. The only group that benefits from upending the order of things is the Vish. A large enough breach is the one thing we wouldn't be able to cover up, too much exposure, too much damage."

  “In point of fact, I believe the Vish are less interested in exposure than they are in destabilization. They cannot create power; they can only steal or fracture it.” Argyle’s voice cut through the growing tension of the room, “Chronic chaos means chronic opportunity. No one at this table needs a primer on why that is anathema to both the Banner and to the Unseen.”

  David read the room as the implications settled: an old argument, suddenly sharpened to a knife's edge. Even among the Banner, the debate between secrecy and action had never been resolved, only papered over by decades of compromise and mutual dependence. The knights and the serpents butted heads constantly while the doves tried to play peacemaker between the two factions. All the while, his own faction, the abstainers, paid little attention to the internal squabbling, instead looking to external issues. The current crisis was stretching the seams between them thin enough to see the blood beneath.

  A representative from the Abstainers—a young man named Liu whose Asiatic features fit him quite well, despite the suit he wore that looked ill-tailored in the current company—cleared his throat. "If the Vish intend to create a Breach, what then? Escalation is foolish; they would simply rush their plans forward. We are on the defensive."

  The woman called Lady Canter, a member of the Knight faction, spoke before David could reply. “If they want a fight, we should give them one.” Her voice had the clipped certainty of a career military officer. Her nails, painted a shade of blue to match her suit, dug into the wood of the conference table as she leaned forward. “You cannot negotiate with rabid animals. We have the people, the numbers, and the will. Waiting will only see us bled dry while we scramble to solve problem after problem.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Across the table, a thin-lipped man with a head of perfectly oiled curls—Foster, if David recalled correctly, a senior strategist among the Banner's elite, and a member of the Serpent faction, gave a sound that was almost a laugh. "And what would you have us do, Lady Canter?" he said, voice sliding between contempt and boredom. "Send a strike force after every Vish den in Canada? Farther afield, even? That would be assuming we could even find enough of them to matter, let alone all of them."

  Canter flicked her gaze at Foster, a look so flat and withering it might have left a lesser man desiccated. “You think containment will work? You’re deluding yourself. The only thing they understand is force. We root them out. Erase their infrastructure.” She made a slicing gesture with her hand. “We lose otherwise.”

  Foster’s tongue flicked over his teeth. “Ah, so that’s the plan? Kick in doors until the Vish run out of people or find somewhere else to play?” He turned to David, including him in the crossfire. “You know as well as I-”

  "Enough," Isabella's voice cut through the brewing argument like a razor blade, more poignant was the spiral of frost that crawled across the table. "Something must be done; that much is clear. Arguing here solves nothing." She cast her gaze around the room. "I propose that we join forces to handle this issue. The Unseen will move into the north, we will assist with the dungeons that lie in more isolated areas and begin looking for Vish strongholds. This should allow your Banner more recourse," then cut a sharp look at Lady Canter, "to carefully, move forward on assessing and eliminating this problem before it grows.”

  David observed the interplay of offers and challenges, reading the fine web of rivalry, resentment, and necessity glimmering in the air. Lady Canter looked ready to leap across the table, her knuckles whitening. Foster, for all his oily calm, pressed his shoulders rigid against the chair. Even Liu, the Abstainer, seemed unsettled, chewing his lower lip in a way that suggested he'd just realized the implications of what had been put on the table. The Unseen's proposal was more than just a gesture—it was the first time in living memory that they'd offered to take swords to the front lines rather than maneuver quietly from the periphery. The unseen had made contributions to be certain; they frequently dealt with dungeons that appeared in the far-flung corners of the world, where it would be inconvenient to say the least for the Banner to reach them.

  The room, for all its modern appointments, receded from David's mind. He saw instead the image of the north—his own mental map, built from field reports and skull-stupid casualty lists. All those dead, chewed up by monsters that were deadlier than their best predictions. Even now, the gears of his mind worked the logistics: how many teams could be mustered and flown north, what would it take to augment them, who among the Unseen could be trusted not to sabotage the effort for their own ends. He reined himself in.

  "This is unprecedented," David said, tightly enough that the warmth of his voice evaporated. "I will need to coordinate with the Banner's directorate. But we welcome the Unseen's offer of support and will make immediate arrangements to integrate our operations in the north. The Vish have presented themselves as a clear and present threat—one that warrants a proportionate, unified response." He let the words hang; his mind was spinning with the sea of meetings and paperwork he had just had dumped in his lap. The meetings with the international council alone would be a nightmare, let alone the internal meetings.

  "We all have preparations to make. I suggest we get to it."

  ——-

  Elsewhere, far across the ocean, another meeting was taking place. One that was far more clandestine than the almost boardroom-style meeting that the Banner and the Unseen had arranged for themselves. Such was the nature of a criminal organization, particularly one that occupied the cracks in both the mundane and magical worlds, growing through them like a cancerous weed. The membership of the Vish stretched across the globe and came from all walks of life, the criminals, the ghettos, the boardrooms and ballrooms. They were smugglers and thieves, dealers and kingpins, robbers and murderers whose business crept into all facets of life. All they had in common was lust for money and power, and a willingness to do whatever was necessary to get it, or get more of it. At a base level, this was true, but there was one other uniting factor: Fear. Every member of the Vish carried a deep, singular fear, one that wore the face of a man.

  “They know,” A feminine voice carried through the darkened room, “or at least they think they know.“

  “That could be a problem,” a male voice growled in return, “What of the captain and his failure to recover the accumulators?”

  "He has been suitably chastised; there is little sense in throwing away a perfectly good tool." The woman's voice responded.

  "Irrelevant, all that matters is that we stick to the plan. None of us want to face His displeasure, do we?" a third voice posited, a shiver washed over the room at the less than subtle reminder of who held the leash of the Vish. No one wanted to face that man's ire; the survivors of it were few and far between, and never whole.

  "Cease your prattle," ground out a voice that sent shivers down the spines of all present, and sent skin crawling with a primal fear that wasn't easy to subdue. The man in question had arrived. "Nothing has changed; if anything, this only accelerates our timelines." The tall, rail-thin man drooped into a seat at the table with a casualness that was only seen in people who knew at a bone deep level that they could kill everyone present without even bloodying their clothes.

  "Let the Unseen and the Banner worry about what we will do next; we continue as we have with the accumulators and our other plans." He turned his attention to the woman, "Tell me, Essa, how are we progressing there? It is your area of influence after all,"

  "Progress is, as it ever is, steady." Essa answered, voice steady only through sheer will, "We have had setbacks, but nothing unexpected." She broke out in cold sweat as she felt the full attention of the man fall on her like a physical weight. It felt as if his gaze would bore through her all the way to her soul. Then it was gone as his gaze shifted away from her.

  “Barlow, our people?”

  "Sorted for the moment, we're moving in more and more of them with each passing day. Refugees, migrants, whatever works. Failing that, we use the portals." The sharp-dressed man adjusted his glasses with a finger, pushing them back up into place. "There haven't been any issues worth consideration, not since the Sturm incident some time ago."

  “Good, very good,” Valter grinned wolfishly at his subordinates, “Now, we plan our next move.”