“What is this, Matt?”

There were a lot of things going on at once in the warehouse. Most of them were mundane things, the standard kind of stuff an army would cart along with them. There were big crates. There were bushels of various kinds of food. There was shelving. It was a completely normal supply depot in almost every aspect they could see from the door, the sole exception being a reddish glow deeper in the building.

Matt assumed Lucy’s question was rhetorical, but he wasn’t in a position to answer back in any case. As he kept quiet, she continued on.

“It’s weird demon shit, right? You build a warehouse without windows. You have a perfectly serviceable sun, but you don’t even do glass with bars to keep people out, just a solid rock building. And then it’s dark inside, so you put in a light. But can the light be a normal color? Noooo. It’s red. Because no matter where we go, we can’t escape red.”

Matt and Lucy worked their way through the surprisingly labyrinthine arrangement of crates and shelves carefully and quietly. Each layer they passed meant the glow got a little brighter. Matt considered just hopping to the top of everything and traveling straight through, but then considered that he probably didn’t want to be that high off the ground if something went wrong.

“And of course it’s going to end up being just some weird demon nightlight because they can’t help but be all edgy and spiky about everything. I bet that’s just going to be how all their warehouses are…” Lucy suddenly stopped talking as they turned a final corner of boxes and the larger open space in the center of the building was revealed. “Oh, hell. I guess that makes the ‘push all the stuff randomly to the edges of the warehouse’ sorting method make more sense.”

In the center of the room was a giant levitating heart. Kind of. It was shaped like a heart, not in the Valentine's Day way, but instead in the more demon-appropriate ripped-directly-from-some-torso way. The various veins and arteries connected to it looked like they were severed by being torn away from its host instead of cut. The aorta was big enough that a toddler could probably crawl through it.

And, of course, it was on fire. Or made out of fire, maybe. Matt couldn’t tell, and he couldn’t ask Lucy if she could see something more.

“I know what you are thinking, Matt, and it doesn’t even matter. The details of whatever this is, Matthew, are not important.”

He glanced at her with his best “Come on, Lucy” expression, indicating that the details probably were important, and she should share them.

“I don’t know, Matt. I didn’t get any pop-ups. But look at it. It’s a giant floating demon heart. What kind of good thing could it possibly be for? Do you think it’s a giant floating fire shaped like a human organ that, like, spends the weekends working with disadvantaged kids?”

She had a point. They were here to make a big splash, and so far they hadn’t seen anything from the demons but pretty classic bad-guy stuff. He had overheard more than one conversation on the street about the prices of human meat going up. Outside of the pissing-match architecture on every house, they had failed to see anything fun, beautiful, or redeeming about demon culture to counter-balance their evil.

This also wasn’t exactly wiping out a whole town, either. It was just destroying some kind of big, clearly cursed object. He wasn’t quite on board with demon genocide yet, but nothing particularly bothered him about wrecking their war effort.

He shrugged.

“Good, same page. Now get to shoveling,” Lucy ordered.

The demons didn’t seem very nice, but they were fairly practical in some ways. There was a five-foot safety fence set up in a perimeter around the heart, apparently to keep people from tripping into it. It wouldn’t stop Matt, in any case. He slung his shovel through the straps of his pack to keep it secure, grabbed the top of the fence, and vaulted over.

He was still sailing through the air towards the heart when things suddenly got much, much harder in a very literal sense. Matt made contact with some kind of invisible wall, cracked his nose pretty good against it, and fell to the ground. The force field reacted to his face-first impact by suddenly becoming somewhat visible at the point of contact. It flashed a blue light that rapidly rippled through the entire shape of the barrier, revealing that the whole heart was covered from all angles as if it was encased in a snow globe.

“Shit.” Matt spoke before he thought about it, although it didn’t seem to matter. Before he had said it, a large figure was apparently alerted by the impact itself and was already moving out of the shadows towards them.

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When Matt encountered rat-like creatures on Gaia, he called them rats. The system and Barry also did, although he sometimes doubted that they were actually rats. He had always figured it was a translation thing, that the system automatically sensed what animal he’d associate with whatever he was looking at and assigned it that name. The crab-man he had killed the day before was reddish, crustacean, and had claws, so he considered it to be a crab.

But there were always differences, too. A Gaian rat might have teeth that were more curved, or paws that didn’t quite fit. The bats might have heads that were a different shape. Some animals that would normally have fur would have feathers. It was like the universe had tried to make something that was recognizably a bear, but also checked a whole different set of optional boxes on the way.

What was coming towards him now was a rhino. It didn’t have the big nose horn, sure, and Matt was aware the horn was why they were even called rhinos, but it didn’t matter. It was heavyset. It had elephant-ish feet. Its neck was like a tree trunk, and with big, bony orbs protruding out of its forehead, it still looked like it could ram. It wasn’t a rhino, but it was.

Its voice suddenly boomed out. “Insect! What are you doing here? Snuck in, eh?”

Matt had forgotten about his disguise. Things still weren’t good, but they apparently weren’t as immediately bad as they would have been if he had been in human form. “Uh, yeah. Sorry. Curious.”

“Curiosity is no excuse, insect. This is a guarded military storage building. You knew you were not supposed to breach it. The usual penalty for that, fly, is death.”

Matt looked like an insect, but much more like a cricket than a fly. He could sense this mistake was intentional, a kind of insult he should wince at. He pretended to wince before commencing with begging.

“Please, not that. I just want to see. You understand. Just to see.”

“Ha! To see, he says. Do you know how much is stolen from these warehouses if we don’t guard them? But this here is a little too big to steal, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I… did not expect this.”

He really hadn’t. Whatever this was, it was weird, and he really did want to destroy it at this point. He was about to sucker-punch the Rhino with a shovel strike when Lucy suddenly cut in.

“Don’t do it, Matt. I just scanned this guy, and he’s the first person I’ve seen who actually has their rank listed within their description. He’s something called a battlelord. Try to find another way besides fighting. This seems too risky.”

The rhino, who could not hear Lucy, laughed at Matt’s words.

“Didn’t expect it? I bet not. Well, the bad news for you is that killing you is the easiest thing. Keeps rumors from spreading, you see. Keeps me out of trouble. No reason to keep you alive at all. Unless…”

Matt had been getting a sense for a bit that the rhino was angling for something. Otherwise, why hadn’t he just attacked the moment he showed up? Hoping that it was just money the rhino was after, Matt reached into his pack.

“I can pay.” Matt had killed a bunch of people to get this money, and hoped it was a lot. As he opened the pouch, the rhino wrinkled its nose.

“Did you rob a battlefield to get this? It stinks of blood. Not just one kind, either.” It put its huge hand out and grabbed the bag before hefting it upwards, as if testing its weight. “Not much, for this kind of thing. But it’s better than splitting it with the others.”

The rhino’s eyes lighted on Matt’s shovel for a moment. “Ah, you dug. I wondered how you got past the guards. Do you think you can get out the same way, without getting caught?”

Matt nodded. “I’ll try.”

“Really your business if you do or don’t. If you get caught, the guards will just skewer you. No skin off my back. But you better close up the tunnel on the outside when you’re done. If you don’t, I’ll have to explain it, and I will find you if you cause me that kind of trouble.” With that, the Rhino began walking back towards the dark. Lucy let out a huge sigh of relief.

“That was close, Matt. Very close. Do you think we could dig out of this place? It’s a stone floor, but…”

Lucy was interrupted, as in the center of the room, the heart beat, once. Somehow Matt knew it had, even though it made no noise. As he turned back to look at it, he saw a rapidly expanding halo of energy, tinged in the same dull red that the light gave off. Before he could do anything to dodge it, the wave of energy passed through him. He had the slightest twinge of pain, something that he suspected might have actually shown up on his HP bar as a single point of damage had he been looking at it.

It wouldn’t have been a big deal at all, had it not also dropped his disguise. By the time he had eyes on the rhino, it was already roaring in rage.

Please let it be slow. Please let it be slow.

It wasn’t. The battlelord title apparently wasn’t just for show, and Matt knew from experience that not everything big was slow, especially where system shenanigans were in play. This thing was apparently high-leveled enough to have done away with any awkward, un-agile aspects of its biological starting point.

It was faster than Matt, at least at baseline. He used Spring Fighter to weave out of the way of the first big punch as he simultaneously tried to dislodge his shovel from behind his shoulder blades. The rhino’s footwork was good enough that missing a punch out of its charge didn’t disturb its balance, and it followed up with two more quick hits. The first Matt was able to dodge. The second sent him flying backwards through a shelf and almost into the rock wall. With a Matt-sized hole in the shelf in front of him, he jumped, kicked off the wall, and sailed over the now collapsing shelf.

The rhino was waiting. If there was one thing that Matt knew about fighting from Earth, it was that jumping attacks were usually a pretty bad idea. The person on the ground got to push off the ground, which meant they could get their weight AND strength into play. The punch the rhino had hit him with might have been light, but with time for a windup, the rhino was readying a world-ending haymaker.

If things didn’t change, Matt was about to learn how to fly.