He woke in the Underdark with Onetooth dead at his feet and DEATHS: 4 already on the overlay.

  He stood there.

  The rage came up and he breathed it down and stood in the phosphorescent dark and thought about the ranger in the ceiling of the records room and the bolt through his neck and the fact that he had now died four separate ways without meaningfully inconveniencing a single member of the party that was doing it.

  He thought about that for a while.

  Then he thought about something else.

  Loops three and four had been instructive in the way that getting hit in the same place twice was instructive. Painful and clarifying and ultimately just information.

  Loop three he'd gone in straight. Fixed the crack, paid the armory, let Revenue out, and then walked directly into the second level corridor where the party was clustered and said, loud enough for all of them to hear: "New management. Leave now."

  The fighter had looked at him with the settled patience of someone who had already finished their assessment of him before he opened his mouth.

  "New keeper," she said.

  "Yeah."

  She drew her sword.

  Forty seconds. He breathed fire once, caught the cleric by accident, thought for a moment that was something, and then she moved through the smoke and hit him twice with the flat economy of someone who had stopped testing and started finishing. He went down. The overlay ran out.

  DEATHS: 3.

  Learned: she had categorized him completely in the first ten seconds. Everything after that was just confirming the category. Fighting her straight in an open corridor was a way to die that taught him nothing new.

  Loop four he'd been smarter about it. Let them spread. Tracked the overlay until the fighter was alone on sublevel three in the low-ceilinged fungal corridor where she couldn't use her full swing. Terrain advantage. Something he hadn't had before.

  She adjusted in four seconds.

  He held almost two minutes, which felt like progress right up until it didn't. Got fire off twice. The second one caught her sword arm and she made a sound that wasn't quite pain and kept moving and he thought: there, that's the edge — and then she got inside his reach and that was that.

  She stood over him.

  Looked down at him for a moment with an expression he couldn't read. "You keep coming back," she said. Not an accusation. Just something she'd noticed.

  He didn't answer.

  "Get up," she said.

  He got up.

  She hit him once more, clean and final. He went down and stayed down.

  DEATHS: 4.

  Learned: she finished jobs. Not personal. She'd done this before and would do it again and none of it meant anything beyond the contract. Also she'd noticed he kept coming back, which was not information he wanted her to have, but there was nothing to do about it now.

  Also: he'd forgotten about the ranger in the ceiling again. Same ceiling. Same bolt. Same direction.

  He'd stood in the Underdark with the rage hot in his throat and nowhere to put it and thought: I am going to have to stop trying to fight my way through this.

  Most of this party was here for money.

  He had a dungeon full of things that could become money.

  He just needed to know where everything was.

  "The administrative records," he said. "Onetooth's filing system. There's more in this building than what's in the official treasury."

  "Almost certainly," the core said. "He was paranoid about consolidation."

  "And one person knows where everything is."

  A pause. "Wormwick," the core said. "Junior administrator. Second year. He's been running Onetooth's records since he arrived."

  "Tell me about him."

  "Male drow. His supervisor is Maldred."

  Brutus thought about what that meant. A male drow working under a female drow in a dungeon in the Underdark's outer edges. Eight months of that specific hierarchy pressing down on every interaction, every task, every morning he walked into that records room.

  "How's he holding up," Brutus said.

  "He files everything correctly," the core said. "On time. In triplicate."

  Brutus walked.

  The eastern fork appeared ahead.

  "Rock formation on the right," the core said.

  He took the correct path without breaking stride.

  Armory. Eight weeks. Brigandine. Moving.

  Crack sealed. Grelwick wet and furious and muttering about load-bearing stresses while Brutus stood in the sublevel corridor and watched every inch of mortar go up. Two hours. Worth it.

  Revenue out. Full circuit. Coal eyes. Professional.

  Then he went to find Wormwick.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The records room was at the end of the administrative corridor, which always smelled faintly of ink and something under the ink that might have been anxiety if anxiety had a smell, and Brutus was beginning to think it did.

  He knocked.

  Nothing.

  He opened the door.

  The room was narrow and overlit by a torch that had burned low, shelves running floor to ceiling on both sides under the weight of a filing system that looked like chaos and probably wasn't. A desk in the center. A half-eaten meal pushed to the corner of it that had been there long enough to stop being food and start being furniture.

  Wormwick was at the desk.

  Not on the floor, not in the corner — at the desk, working, surrounded by ledgers, moving with the focused velocity of someone using administrative tasks to outrun something that was still catching up. He looked up fast when the door opened, the reflex of someone who had learned to read entrances, and did a rapid automatic calculation and settled into careful neutrality when he finished it.

  He was tall for a drow working a desk job, which meant the administrative chair was slightly wrong for him and had probably always been slightly wrong. White hair pulled back without Maldred's architectural precision — practical, not ceremonial. His eyes were sharp and currently running several calculations at once, the specific attention of someone who had learned that surprises in this dungeon were usually bad ones.

  "You're the new keeper," he said.

  "Yeah." Brutus looked around the room. Pulled a chair from the wall. Turned it. Sat down.

  Wormwick watched this with the expression of someone whose predictions had just failed in a direction they hadn't prepared for.

  "I need to find gold," Brutus said. "There's an adventuring party in the dungeon. Most of them are here for money. I want to pay them more than the job is worth and send them home before anything gets broken." He looked at Wormwick steadily. "Onetooth kept things in places that don't appear in the official inventory. I need to find them."

  Wormwick was quiet for a moment. "What makes you think I'd know about that."

  "Because you've been filing his records for two years," Brutus said. "And you're still here. Which means he trusted you enough to keep you around and not enough to tell you anything. Which means you found things yourself and kept quiet about them."

  Wormwick looked at him.

  Then without a word he reached under the desk and produced a ledger labeled STAFF WELLNESS and set it on the desk between them.

  "Start here," he said.

  They worked for an hour.

  Wormwick knew the system the way you knew something you'd built out of necessity — not just the structure but the logic underneath it, the specific shape of Onetooth's paranoia pressed into every filing decision. The STAFF WELLNESS ledger cross-referenced to a secondary system in the lower shelves. The lower shelves had gaps that corresponded to physical locations in the dungeon. The physical locations corresponded to asset notations buried inside the Q3 inventory discrepancies that Maldred had apparently told Wormwick to stop querying.

  "She said it three times," Wormwick said, turning a page. "The third time she said it in a specific register."

  "What register," Brutus said.

  "The one that means you've been noticed." Flat. Not complaining. Just describing the way you describe weather. "Not a threat. Just. You've been noticed."

  Brutus said nothing. Wormwick turned another page.

  It was genuinely impressive work. The kind of competence that only came from years inside a system so Byzantine that understanding it became its own form of survival. Onetooth's hidden infrastructure emerged slowly — properties in three cities under names that weren't his, investment accounts, a sealed room on sublevel three behind the manticore enclosure that appeared in exactly one maintenance log and nowhere else. A gold reserve labeled emergency liquidity in Onetooth's private notation that Wormwick had located by cross-referencing four documents that had no obvious reason to be related.

  "That's enough to pay the party twice over," Brutus said.

  "Three times," Wormwick said. "Conservatively."

  He turned another page. He'd been loosening incrementally across the hour — not relaxed, Brutus didn't think he did relaxed, but the held careful quality had shifted into something more like focus. The quality of a person doing something they were genuinely good at in front of someone who was paying attention.

  "There are external holdings as well," Wormwick said. He said it the way you said something you'd been deciding whether to say. "Outside the dungeon entirely. Properties. Accounts. He spent decades building it. Nobody was supposed to know."

  He turned the ledger so Brutus could see the page.

  Brutus looked at the numbers. Looked at Wormwick.

  "You found all of this yourself," he said.

  "I file everything," Wormwick said simply. "If you do it long enough you start to see the shape of what's missing."

  They worked a while longer in silence. The half-eaten meal sat forgotten in the corner. The shelves ran floor to ceiling all around them, Onetooth's paranoid careful record of everything he'd ever tried to hide, slowly becoming legible under two years of patient attention that Onetooth had never bothered to notice or acknowledge.

  After a while Wormwick set his pen down.

  He looked at the desk.

  "The crack," he said. "In the treasury wall."

  Brutus waited.

  "The maintenance report. I filed it four months ago. Onetooth told me to bury it so I buried it." His hands were flat on the desk. "The party that's in the dungeon right now — they knew about it before they arrived. They knew about the hellhound's patrol. The Sigil Stone's location. The secondary stash locations on sublevel two." A pause. "They knew because someone told them. Sealed letters. I never met anyone directly. He asked the right questions and I—" He stopped. "He paid what Onetooth owed me. Fourteen months of back wages."

  The records room was quiet.

  "I told myself it was just information," Wormwick said.

  Brutus looked at him. He thought about fourteen months. He thought about you've been noticed said in a specific register that meant stop asking. He thought about a drow sitting in this room filing everything correctly and on time and in triplicate for a kobold who had never once looked closely enough to see what he had.

  "Why tell me," Brutus said.

  Wormwick was quiet for a moment. Then: "Because you sat down." He said it to the desk. "You came in here and you sat down and asked me to help you find something. And then you actually looked at what I found." A pause. "Maldred has been my supervisor for eight months. I don't believe she knows my name. Onetooth used mine when he needed to tell me I'd done something wrong." He looked at the ledger in front of him. "You sat down."

  Brutus said nothing.

  "The man who contacted me," Wormwick said. He turned a page, hands moving again, something to do while he said the rest of it. "I don't know which party member he is. The letters stopped when they arrived. He never described himself." He paused. "But the last letter was signed. Just one letter. Just—"

  From the ceiling above and behind them, in the northeast corner, something shifted. The specific sound of a position adjusted after holding still too long.

  Wormwick's eyes went up.

  His face changed entirely. Not fear. Recognition. The specific recognition of a man who has just understood several things simultaneously and has approximately half a second before it stops mattering.

  He was already standing, already moving, one hand out at nothing—

  "V—" His voice broke across it. "V, NO—"

  The back of Brutus's skull came apart.

  Cold stone. The overlay counting down. The core getting words out fast in the half second that remained—

  Ceiling vent. Northeast corner. He was there the whole time—

  Zero.

  He woke in the Underdark with Onetooth dead at his feet.

  He stood there.

  The rage came hot and immediate and he let it run longer than usual. He'd earned that much. Then he breathed it back down and stood in the cold blue tunnel and thought about an hour in a records room. About a drow cross-referencing four unrelated documents to find something that wasn't supposed to be findable. About you sat down said quietly to a desk like it was the whole explanation, because it was.

  About V, no said to a ceiling.

  "He was there the whole time," Brutus said.

  "Before you arrived," the core said. "Already in position. He heard everything."

  "Wormwick didn't know."

  "No."

  "Where is he now."

  A pause. "Still in the records room."

  Not running. Brutus hadn't expected running.

  "Keep track of him," he said.

  He pocketed the Crown and started walking. He had one letter. The man in the ceiling had a name that started with it and Wormwick had been about to finish saying it and would finish saying it in a future loop when Brutus figured out how to keep him alive long enough to get there.

  DEATHS: 5.

  The eastern fork appeared ahead.

  "Rock formation," the core said.

  He took the correct path and walked faster.