The morning after the second raid, Maria was no longer a victim. She was a prophet. In the grim, hopeless ecosystem of the Hazard Clearance barracks, her dented shield and Elara's clean sword were relics. Orphans who had once pitied her now whispered her name with awe. They believed she had found a path out of the Bureau's slaughterhouse.
But Jack saw the cracks.
When no one was watching, Maria's hands shook as she polished her battered shield, lips moving in a half-coherent prayer. Her eyes glimmered with the manic light of someone staring into an abyss, convincing herself it was a doorway.
She wasn't strong. She was unraveling. And unraveling things spread.
Jack lay back on his cot, slipping into the cool lattice of the dungeon interface. He was no longer just a manipulator of fear he was the engineer of despair. The last two raids had proven the system's viability, but the results were noisy. Too much chance, too much chaos. He needed control.
The schematics bloomed before him. He adjusted the rules with the detached calm of a surgeon. The guaranteed loot chests in the early chambers? Gone. In their place, he embedded a trigger: rewards would now only appear when the group's morale dropped below twenty percent. Hope would not greet them at the start. It would come at the end, a poisoned gift offered only when they were broken enough to take it.
Monsters, too, were repositioned. He spread ambushes over longer stretches of empty corridors, letting silence and dripping shadows grind them down before teeth and claws did the rest. He was not building a dungeon anymore. He was building a god that rewarded suffering.
His work was interrupted by raised voices in the barracks.
A lanky boy one who had watched his best friend die in the sewers finally snapped. "If this culvert is so great, why are half the people who went with you dead? Aaron is gone! Two more last night! That's not survival that's suicide!"
The room froze. Maria's mask shattered into rage. She lunged, grabbing him by the collar, her eyes wild. "They died for a reason! They made a sacrifice! It takes faith! Something a coward like you wouldn't understand!"
Her voice cracked like a whip across the barracks. Some orphans looked away in shame, others in fear.
Jack moved smoothly, placing a hand on her arm. "Maria… stop," he whispered, calm, concerned. His tone suggested restraint, but his positioning reinforced her dominance. To the room, he wasn't defending the skeptic. He was steadying the prophet.
The narrative set itself. Maria was passionate, even dangerous, but she was right. The skeptic was not silenced but he was isolated, branded a coward in the eyes of his peers. A problem deferred, not erased. Jack preferred it that way. A simmering dissent was more useful than none at all.
Faith doesn't need to be rational, Jack thought as Maria pulled away, still trembling. It only needs to be contagious.
Miles away, a very different contagion was spreading.
The Level 2 Auditor, Eva Rostova, leaned over her monitor, scrolling through Sector 7's mana reports. Two spikes. Same hour, two nights in a row. Structured. Not random. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
"Signature is patterned," she dictated into her log. "Suggests unregistered event. Low urgency. Recommend Level 3 file review."
She tagged it Pattern Anomaly and forwarded the report. It would sit in a digital inbox for days, maybe weeks but it wouldn't vanish.
Back in the barracks, Jack's vision pulsed with a sharp new icon.
[External Review Pending: Dungeon activity marked as a structured anomaly.]
A cold knot twisted in his gut. His camouflage in the noise was gone. His dungeon was now a recognized signal, a blip waiting for a name.
That night, Maria gathered her followers, her voice no longer a whisper but a sermon. "Next time, we bring everyone who's willing. Every sword. Every scrap of courage. This is how we live. This is how we grow strong enough to spit in Vale's face!"
The barracks erupted in feverish whispers. Some still trembled with doubt. But most nodded, hungry for another taste of survival, another hit of hope.
Jack lay awake, his mask serene. His interface whispered beautiful numbers.
[Tenant Recruitment Surge: +114%]
Perfect. Faith was the fire. He only needed to decide how many lambs to let it burn.
The violet warning still pulsed faintly at the edge of his vision, joined now by a sharper, yellow flag.
[Notice: Bureau Auditor has flagged dungeon signature. Risk of Exposure: Low, Rising.]
For the first time, Jack wondered how long his god of despair could grow before it was truly noticed.