Forest at my back, sloping plains in front of me, there weren’t a lot of places where other squads might be hiding to get the jump on those who fought the shardhide. My anima tank drained by the second as I poured the energy into my grenade. The palm of my hand sizzled as the power coalesced there.

Lockjaw and Marilyn kept the shardhide at bay the best they could, but it was becoming abundantly clear that unless I helped them soon, they’d both fall to it.

Marilyn’s body reformed every time the shardhide took a swipe at her, but she came back a little frailer each time. Her body reconstituted itself over time, but it was hard for her to get close enough to attack the monster without getting smashed. It didn’t look like she had much in the way of offensive abilities.

Lockjaw was still poisoned and looked to be fading fast. He stumbled back on three-toed feet as the shardhide snapped its jaws around his arm. The monster shook its head, and Lockjaw went flying away from the battle. He pushed himself up from the ground with one arm, but the other stayed cradled against his chest. Marilyn ran over to him with the shardhide in tow.

It would kill both of them if I didn’t intervene. My grenade wasn’t as powerful as it could have been, but if I didn’t give Lockjaw and Marilyn the time to regroup, I might be facing off against this thing by myself.

I stepped out of the cover of the forest and yelled a challenge.

“Hey, you ugly bastard, come over here!” I activated my armour as the Rancid Shardhide swung its attention towards me.

It lowered its head and ran at me with jaws wide open. Its body didn’t move in a back and forth motion like a lizard. Seth had spent many hours explaining the difference between a lizard’s hips and a bird’s hips, and how they operated differently in dinosaurs. This monster was from another planet in the Alarendei Empire, but it very much looked like a dinosaur barrelling toward me.

Marilyn smothered Lockjaw’s arm in some sparkling green slime, making his scaly skin knot back together and heal itself. So, Marilyn was a healer too. That was good to know.

I’d never been a really sporty guy until I had kids. I still wasn’t, but I knew how to lob a ball to my son when we played catch, and the shardhide’s open mouth was a nice, big target. I drew my arm back, threw the grenade, then started counting down from seven.

It sailed right into the shardhide’s jaws, which instinctively snapped shut at the detection of the foreign object landing inside. It didn’t stop running towards me, though. A second before the monster reached me, its side blew out, heaving it to the left.

A gout of green gas exploded from the side of the shardhide as the force of the explosion rolled it over. The beast tried to get back onto its feet, but one of its front legs was just gone. The shardhide issued forth one final death rattle as it died.

A notification went out on the global channel.

Hatchet [EDGE Force] has slain the Rancid Shardhide in the Verdant Hills!

250 points have been added to their squad’s total. [EDGE Force] are the current #1 squad on the leaderboard!

You have received a Violet Prize Box! Open it to reveal your rewards.

I left my armour up as both Marilyn and Lockjaw headed my way. I’d helped them out in their time of need, but did I trust them? Not yet.

Lockjaw’s tooth-filled grin made it hard to tell how he was feeling. Marilyn had taken on a more human appearance now. Her translucent green body formed into a flowing dress as she walked, and her skin shimmered from green to pink.

“That’s some ability you’ve got there,” I said to Marilyn, but Lockjaw was the first to speak.

“Thanks for the assist, Hatchet. I’m not concerned about you getting the points over us. We both got Gold Prize Boxes, so we didn’t end up empty-handed,” Lockjaw said, then turned his head towards Marilyn. “Are you okay?”

Marilyn shrugged. “It’ll take a while to completely reconstitute what I’ve lost. I’ll need some food to fully recover.”

“Does it need to be cooked?” I asked.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“No, I can use raw food,” Marilyn replied with a hint of scepticism in her voice.

“Here, have this,” I said, then handed a couple of pieces of bladeface meat over to Marilyn.

Her eyes went wide. “Thank you!”

She took the meat without question, then slipped it straight through the surface of her dress and into her body, where the flesh began to visibly break down.

“That’s interesting. No need to chew, huh?” I asked.

“Technically, I don’t actually have teeth anymore,” Marilyn said and she prodded her teeth, which bent inwards like gummi lollies. “My body breaks down any biological matter I put inside it. Some things take longer than others, but it all eventually gets absorbed.”

Lockjaw laughed, suddenly and triumphantly. “Oh yes, this will do nicely!”

He turned away from us, then blew out a stream of toxic green gas, just like the gas the shardhide had exploded with only moments before.

“You can get abilities from the prize boxes! I just got Rancid Breath!” Lockjaw said. “Breaths out rancid gas, which poisons all enemies in a three-metre cone… Metres? Show me the measurements in Imperial, you cowards!”

I grinned. “I guess even the aliens know that the Metric system is superior.”

“Don’t you start,” Lockjaw said.

“Wow, I got a Shardhide Tooth Charm, which makes me immune to poison!” Marilyn said excitedly.

Immunity to poison would be awesome. Was poison a debuff with a defined end timer on it? Or did you just keep getting hurt until you had some kind of antidote? Lockjaw’s poison debuff had disappeared, so it must have run out by itself.

I figured I better open my own prize box to figure out what I’d received. I got a couple of healing potions and a mana potion, and a notification appeared saying I’d unlocked a new skill.

New Skill: Rancid Claws

Rank 1

Cost 50 mana

Duration: 10 seconds

Coat your claws in rancid poison, giving you a chance to poison enemies you slash with your claws. Enemies with lower constitution scores will take greater poison damage over time.

Ah, so poison definitely did have a defined duration. But the constitution score of the target contributed to how much damage I would do to it.

“I got a skill too,” I said, but I was confused about the mana cost.

I didn’t use mana – I used anima. But when I opened my interface, I totally had a mana bar which sat full at 110 mana. It didn’t match the total anima I had stored in my tank, which showed 80/500 anima. My anima tank still had the same capacity after levelling it up in Romania, but this interface didn’t list a rank next to the tank.

Was mana what the Alarendei Empire called anima? Regardless, Rancid Claws was a brand new contest power I could use at any time without sacrificing my anima power slot from the techniques I’d learned by harvesting enemies. I could just activate this new ability whenever I wanted to, as long as I had enough mana.

There was one more item in the box called a High-Value Flask of Experience. It was tradeable, and when used, would give the user an infusion of experience. I could convert straight anima into experience whenever I needed it, but I could give this to any of my squadmates to help them level up.

“What is your squad up to now?” Lockjaw asked.

“Some big monster is blocking the bridge between this southern part of the plateau and the northern desert,” I said. “Two of our group are stuck on that side, and three are over here. We’re going to try a two-pronged attack to clear the blockade.”

Lockjaw nodded. “Sounds like a plan. We need to head north too. This river cuts across the whole plateau. Anyone who doesn’t survive the night will come back on the other side of the river, back in the Temple of Awakening. Whatever happens, we’re going to need to clear the bridge.”

“Your squadmate Grendel – is he on this side of the river?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s over in the forest that way,” Lockjaw said and pointed in the direction of where Kaiser and Spook were last.

I quickly opened my chat to send off a warning.

Hatchet: Kaiser, watch your back. Grendel’s apparently in your vicinity.

Kaiser: I know. He’s found our scent. I don’t know how long we’re going to be able to evade him.

“Are you squad leader, Lockjaw?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, Franklin Gaunt is our squad leader. Why?”

“Because we want to work together with whoever we can here. Your squad is powerful, and so is ours. Adding our strength together only gives us all a better chance of triumphing. But Grendel is trying to hunt down my squadmate Kaiser right now. You need to put a stop to it, or message Frank and tell him to intervene.”

Lockjaw lifted a clawed hand and scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t really think that’s my place.”

“Grendel thinks Kaiser is responsible for the torture he suffered at the hands of a biotech research firm called Mnemtech,” I explained.

Then I thought back to the fact that weird cyborg Robert Forge Jr. was here on the plateau too. He was the son of the guy in charge of Mnemtech. Was he friend or foe? I’d need to figure that out later. He seemed to recognise me somehow when he stared me down back in the temple.

So far, I had no idea where anyone from Forge’s squad or the Edgebreaker squad were.

“Stay with me here, this is going to sound nuts, but Kaiser and Grendel are actually the same entity brought through into our dimension from an oil painting of a dead cult leader,” I said, then waited for their inevitable dubious reactions.

“Weirder than having your DNA spliced with a Carcharadontosaurus?” Lockjaw asked.

“Or weirder than having your body’s cells become jelly?” Marilyn asked.

I scratched the back of my neck as I tried to find the right words. “I guess not. I mean, on my first mission, I could pull characters out of my imagination. We’re all weirdos here, by the sounds of it. Anyway, I’m trying to say that your squadmate wants to kill my squadmate, and I really don’t want that to happen.”

“I’m sending Franklin a message now,” Lockjaw said. “He’ll sort it out. He knows a thing or two about anger management.”

“If he doesn’t sort it out, I feel like I need to go give my buddy some back-up,” I said.

Lockjaw and Marilyn shared a look, then nodded in agreement. “We’ll come with you.”

Hatchet: Hang tight, buddy. We’re coming for you. Just hold on.