A few members of the studio crew notice it before anyone else does - the way the edge of the portal in the camera feeds changes from red to green.

One of them changes the active video on the broadcast to the portal, with a bit of time delay so the audience can see it change in realtime. Another interrupts the hosts to tell them the news.

It's a tense couple minutes, waiting for the last of the espers to evacuate. But they all make it out, and the tens of millions of people watching, collectively, can breathe a sigh of relief - Infested Wasteland, the scourge of Toronto, Barcelona, Taipei, and Lyon, has been erased.

They all make it out - except one. Pinion is waiting in the rescue tents outside the portal, ready to guide Starfist as soon as he emerges. He never does.

One of the DRT agents comes up to her. "Ma'am. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this. But Starfist... one of the worms in there got him. It was quick. He had gotten his core worm, but one of the smaller worms came up out of nowhere and." He looks at her, trying to gauge how much gory detail to go into.

"What happened??"

"It bit into him. Through the middle. If the jaws didn't crush him instantly he would have bled out in under a minute. I don't think he suffered much."

Pinion's legs give out underneath her, and she sinks to the ground.

"I'm so sorry for your loss, ma'am. He was a great guy and the world's going to be worse off without him." When she doesn't respond except to let out a keening sob, he slowly backs away to let one of the support workers quietly drape a blanket over her shoulders.

"What? What is it? Hyung you're killing me."

"They did it! They cleared Arrakis!"

"Holy shit! That's awesome!"

Woo-young slumps into Tae-hwan's arms in their hotel room, and expands his commscreen so they can both watch the video of the portal together. "God I'm so mad at this stupid dungeon."

"Yeah. ...'you hard counter it'. You said."

"Well you would've! If it hadn't done the, the, the portal bullshit!"

"Ugh. Stupid dungeon. I could've been such a hero."

"Could've been. Tae-hwan, do you want me to look up just how many lives you saved?"

"...uh..."

"I'm gonna. You and Flywheel. You're being ridiculous."

"You don't have to."

"I'm gonna," he repeats, and does.

Get fucked, asshole.

It's hard for her to celebrate, when the damage to the city was so enormous - rebuilding will be a grueling yearslong task. But this was far from the worst-case outcome, in terms of places Arrakis could have surprised them with this kind of capacity, and the overall response speaks very well of the systems that had to handle it.

Causal Web spares a few moments to feel both relief and a bit of quiet pride in her own contributions. (It's important, not to let these things go by without responding to them emotionally.)

Then she gets back to work. It's the first week of what could be a very long confluence; a lot of people want her help, and some of them actually need it.

Leah wasn't really following the coverage very closely; the live feeds aren't fun or pleasant to watch and there are better ways to stay informed.

Such as, for instance, a coworker sprinting through the office, announcing the news to everyone she sees, and creating a mass invite to an impromptu celebration at her house. Leah accepts the invite; it's not every day that a named dungeon gets killed, after all.

There are articles, on the website, about the dungeon. There's a page with all the collected statistics; someone else is already busy editing is into was. There's an article on the best practices for being in the area when it shows up, too. With great pleasure, Leah moves it to the archive.

She's snuggling with Theo when the news come in. Several cameras caught the moment when the portal's edges turned green and she brings up the video and they can watch the strike team evacuate.

"They did it! Get wrecked, asshole. " She was in there for several hours the day after the Incident getting people out. She already complained about how much it sucked.

Squeeze. "It reminds me of this... 'Smallpox, was a disease.' Infested Wasteland, was a dungeon..."

"Yeah, it's great. Did you hear they might upgrade it to S-rank, because of the secondary portal bullshit. It'll be post mortem now."

"That doesn't really seem like a... Useful measure. But if it makes people feel better. I did sensor sweeps in five C-and-B dungeons today, so... I guess it's really about celebrating, and I'm more focused and aware of all the little ankle biters and not the big name. ...Good riddance, though."

hugsqueeze "The little ones will also kill people if left to their own devices so...they're just less showy about it. And the confluence is still just starting."

He rattles off a dungeon ID, "was, a dungeon. Down in oakville. With crocodiles."

He adjusts the snuggle.

"If it's gonna be like this all month, I should splurge on stuff that might make me slightly more relaxed and happy. Like a soda fountain. Just like ones that fast food joints have. Why not? I think it'll fit in nicely in that space between the fridge and the pantry."

It's been a long few days (but it was worth it, it would have been worth it even if it ended up just being damage control in the end). 

She's pleased about her small contribution, even if it was in the background and hardly anyone will notice.

...even just the lives saved would have been worth it, of course, especially with Arrakis breaking containment like this, that's why she does this, but the thought is nonetheless there, that those broken bones were totally worth it (and dramatically shorter on recovery time than normal, she needs to send Aumento another thank-you when she has downtime) when Arrakis is fucking dead, this is the last city it will ever ever terrorize.

(Of course the ideal is not to get broken bones at all, she's much less useful that way and it's miserable, but any time she's in a disaster zone it's a risk, and the risks were piling up that first day in Toronto, with all the damaged buildings.)

It's a confluence, so there's always going to be more dungeon breaks, but just for now, she can celebrate a little.

Kennedy Park, age twenty-nine, is working as a teller at the Queen West branch of the Toronto-Dominion Bank when Arrakis hits, which means she isn't in her fourth-floor apartment when it collapses.

Her husband Calvin works from home as a graphic designer; he isn't so lucky. 

His death doesn't make the news, apart from a three-second shot showing a collage of several dozen victims that plays as a newscaster reads out the casualty figures.

Kennedy had never particularly worried about her husband dying. He was thirty-one and healthy. He'd been taken by a dungeon, once, when they were still dating, but she didn't even hear about it until he'd already been rescued. One of them dying had seemed like the sort of thing they could plan for when they were older.

The days since Arrakis breached have been one long string of learning just how much more there is to do than she'd expected. Her brother works night shifts at the hospital and says she can crash at his place as long as she's out of bed by the time she gets home from work, which means she doesn't have to worry about emergency housing and only has to worry about calling Calvin's parents, and arguing with Calvin's parents about whether he should be buried in Ottawa where he was born or Toronto like he actually wanted, and figuring out whether the fact that his dead body was fished out of the collapsed rubble of their apartment building means his death has already been registered, and trying to remember which of the more-than-a-dozen critical documents she needs had a copy that wasn't in their apartment, and calling funeral homes (closed) and their church (closed) and his life insurance company (not closed, but wants her to wait on hold for forty-five minutes) and his employer and every other institution that needs to know he's dead from his credit card company to ServiceOntario, and making a list of every subscription he had so she can cancel those too, and responding to more than a dozen texts from friends who've heard that Arrakis hit Toronto and want to know if she's okay—

And when she stops for the day, not because she's done but because no one is picking up the phone this late, she still has to cook dinner. It shouldn't be a big deal, really, she cooks on weekends, but somehow that's the final straw that makes her start crying.

Her phone's news algorithm helpfully informs her that Arrakis has been destroyed, and probably she should be happy about it, but mostly she just feels angry — angry that they were too late for Calvin, angry that even though apparently it was possible to kill Arrakis once they tried no one bothered to actually do it until this appearance, angry at herself for not just being happy that the dungeon is dead.