Two years after the Millbrook crisis and subsequent reforms, Dust found himself in a position he'd never expected—testifying before the Continental Congress on Governmental Reform, an international body that had been established to address corruption problems affecting trade and diplomacy across multiple kingdoms.
"The fundamental insight from our experience," he told the assembled representatives, "is that systematic corruption cannot be addressed through purely systematic solutions. Effective reform requires both systematic thinking and adaptive implementation that responds to local conditions and changing circumstances."
The Continental Congress had been formed in response to the success of their redesigned methods, which were now being implemented in seventeen different kingdoms throughout the northern continent. But success at this scale had created new challenges that transcended any single kingdom's authority to address.
"Criminal networks adapt faster than governmental systems," explained Elena during her portion of the testimony. "When reform efforts succeed in one location, criminal enterprises relocate to areas where reforms haven't been implemented. This creates a kind of arms race between reform efforts and criminal adaptation that can only be addressed through coordinated international action."
The international dimension of their work had evolved naturally from their kingdom-level success, but it required capabilities and perspectives that were fundamentally different from local or even national reform efforts. International criminal networks operated across boundaries and jurisdictions in ways that made traditional law enforcement inadequate, while legitimate international commerce needed predictable legal frameworks that could protect honest business from criminal competition.
"We're essentially creating international institutions for addressing problems that don't respect national boundaries," Master Blackthorne observed during one of their planning sessions. "That's unprecedented in scope and complexity."
The Continental Congress represented an attempt to formalize the international cooperation that their reform efforts had made necessary. Instead of individual kingdoms trying to address corruption within their borders while criminal networks operated internationally, the Congress would coordinate systematic reforms across participating kingdoms while establishing legal frameworks for addressing cross-border criminal activities.
"It's ambitious to the point of being unrealistic," admitted Lord Commander Blackwood during their private consultation. "But the alternative is accepting that criminal networks will always have strategic advantages over legitimate governance because they can operate across boundaries while governments cannot."
Dust's role in the Continental Congress was advisory rather than operational, which allowed him to maintain some distance from the political complexities that international coordination inevitably created. But it also meant accepting responsibility for recommendations that would affect millions of people across multiple kingdoms.
"The weight of decision-making at this scale is almost incomprehensible," he wrote to Sarah Millwright in one of his increasingly rare personal letters. "I'm helping design systems that will influence economic and political relationships throughout the known world, but I sometimes wonder if I've lost touch with the individual human concerns that originally motivated this work."
Sarah's response, when it arrived several weeks later, was characteristically direct: "You haven't lost touch with human concerns—you've just learned to think about them at a scale that most people can't imagine. The question isn't whether you're still connected to individual needs, but whether the systems you're creating will serve those needs better than what existed before."
The insight in Sarah's letter helped Dust understand something about his evolution as a reformer that he'd been struggling to articulate. His fundamental motivations hadn't changed—he was still driven by the desire to help people improve their circumstances through legitimate means. But his understanding of what that required had expanded to encompass systematic and international dimensions that individual interventions could never address.
"The personal has become political, and the political has become international," Elena observed when he shared Sarah's letter with her. "But the underlying purpose remains the same—creating conditions where people can build better lives without being exploited by those with power over them."
The Continental Congress's first major initiative tested whether their methods could work at international scale. The Port Security Accord established common standards for legitimate maritime commerce while creating coordinated enforcement mechanisms for addressing smuggling and other criminal activities that affected multiple kingdoms.
"It's essentially extending the Westmarch model to cover all major ports throughout the northern continent," Dr. Whitehaven explained to the implementation teams. "Common legal frameworks, coordinated enforcement, and legitimate alternatives to criminal services."
The Accord's implementation required diplomatic negotiations that were more complex than any reform work Dust had previously been involved in. Each participating kingdom had different legal systems, political priorities, and economic interests that had to be accommodated while maintaining the systematic coherence necessary for effective anti-corruption efforts.
"International reform is like conducting an orchestra where every musician is playing a different piece of music," observed Ambassador Helena Stormwind, who served as diplomatic coordinator for the Accord implementation. "The challenge is creating harmony without requiring everyone to abandon their individual parts."
But the most significant development was the emergence of what Elena called "reform resistance networks"—international criminal organizations that had begun coordinating their activities specifically to counter reform efforts across multiple kingdoms.
"They're learning from our methods," Vincent reported after analyzing intelligence about criminal network activities. "Using our own systematic approaches to organize opposition that crosses boundaries and jurisdictions in ways that mirror our reform efforts."
The criminal counter-reform efforts were sophisticated enough to pose genuine threats to the systematic changes they'd been working to establish. Instead of simply opposing individual reform initiatives, criminal networks were targeting the institutional foundations that made systematic reform possible—corrupting Academy graduates, infiltrating reform organizations, and creating false reform efforts that served criminal interests while claiming legitimate authority.
"We're facing organized opposition that understands our methods well enough to turn them against us," Elena told the Continental Congress during an emergency session. "This isn't random criminal resistance—it's systematic criminal strategy designed to undermine systematic reform."
The response required capabilities that went beyond traditional reform work into what could only be described as intelligence warfare between reform networks and criminal networks. Academy training expanded to include counter-intelligence methods, Institute operations developed security protocols that protected against infiltration, and Continental Congress coordination created information-sharing mechanisms that allowed early detection of criminal counter-reform activities.
"We've moved beyond reform into something that resembles conflict between different models of social organization," Master Blackthorne observed during one of their strategic assessments. "Reform networks representing legitimate governance versus criminal networks representing exploitation-based systems."
The conflict dimension of their work created ethical challenges that Dust hadn't anticipated when he'd first begun helping individual people escape exploitation. The methods necessary to protect reform efforts from criminal counter-action sometimes resembled the systematic secrecy and manipulation that they'd originally opposed.
"The danger," he confided to Elena during one of their private conversations, "is that fighting systematic criminal opposition requires us to adopt methods that could corrupt our own purposes. We risk becoming what we're fighting against."
"The alternative is accepting defeat and abandoning the people who depend on reform efforts to create better lives," Elena replied. "But you're right about the danger. We need safeguards that protect our methods from being corrupted by the necessity of defending them."
The safeguards they developed drew on everything they'd learned about maintaining ethical clarity while operating in complex political environments. Regular rotation of personnel to prevent institutional capture, external oversight by organizations with no operational responsibilities, and systematic evaluation of whether their methods were serving their intended purposes or being adapted to serve organizational survival.
"The test," Dust told the Academy instructors who were implementing the new ethical protocols, "is whether our methods continue serving human welfare or begin serving institutional interests that have become disconnected from human purposes."
As the Continental Congress concluded its first year of operations, Dust found himself reflecting on how completely his understanding of reform work had evolved. What had begun as individual acts of compassion had become systematic institutional change that affected international relationships and required capabilities that bordered on intelligence warfare.
But the fundamental question remained unchanged: were their efforts creating conditions where people like Sarah Millwright could build better lives, or were they creating new forms of institutional control that served different masters but maintained similar power relationships?
The answer would determine whether their decade of reform work had succeeded in its original purposes or simply created more sophisticated forms of the exploitation they'd originally set out to eliminate.