I couldn’t believe it when I heard it for the first time, but now it was starting to make sense. Could you blame me for being skeptical? Who would believe that they were kidnapped for no apparent reason and then sent to a planet who knows how far away from Earth? I guess it’s true that truth is often stranger than fiction.

I was sitting in a circle with twenty-two other people. We decided to do a quick head count so that we could keep track of people in the event of an emergency. I thought it was stupid, as this was already an emergency, but I kept my mouth shut.

Amaya was next to me, and the other two from our holding cell also decided to stick close to me. The congregation of people had gathered around to listen to the Altum man’s, no, Scalisth’s instructions on how to proceed.

Koreth, the Altum emissary I had met before, couldn’t be more different from Scalisth. While Koreth was kind and patient, Scalisth constantly berated us for our uselessness as he glared at us through his milky white orbs.

His white skin reflected the harsh sunlight from above, making him glow with vitality. He was standing in the middle of our collection of survivors, mocking us more than advising us on the plan moving forward.

“Do any of you have any idea what plants are safe to eat here, let alone touch?” Scalisth yelled out to a man who was twirling a thin plant stalk between his fingers. The man dropped the plant and stared at the Altum in fear.

“And you,” he said as he turned to a woman in the crowd, “Stop looking at the floor! Keep your eyes focused and search your surroundings.”

The alien scoffed contemptuously. “It’s like you are all trying to die.”

In between his verbal abuse, I could pick out some semblance of a plan, although it was only bit and pieces. The long and short of it was that we were on the Altum home world, referred to by humanity as Altus, or greater in Latin. As we learned before, we were kidnapped and transported to this planet because we were half Altum.

As it turns out, there was a traditional coming-of-age ceremony for Altum youth that was of great importance to their people. Something about fulfilling their bloodlines to achieve their potential. This ritual must be completed on sacred grounds that are assigned to you at birth by your birth parents.

We were going to travel as a group to this sight, whereafter we will be set free to do as we wish. Scalisth even alluded to someone sending us back home, if that was what we wanted.

Aside from that, the Altum gave hardly any actionable information. It all boiled down to following his orders and doing nothing without him knowing. Everyone listening to Scalisth was skittish at best and paralyzed in panic and fear at worst. Still, some of us managed to speak up and ask some clarifying questions, I being one of them.

“S-Scalisth, I have a question,” I asked with hesitation. He didn’t have pupils, but I could still tell his attention had shifted towards me at the mention of his name.

“You will refer to me as Master or Master Scalisth, Suni-Kes,” he shot back at me. “I will let your disrespect pass just this once, and I expect no one here to make the same mistake.” His frown lightened slightly.

“You may ask your question.”

I nodded in response and added quickly, “Shouldn’t we make tools and traps to hunt wild animals? I doubt there are enough edible plants here to sustain all of us.” I noticed a few people nodding in agreement, all of us starting to feel pain of hunger eating away at our stomachs.

Surprisingly, Scalisth took a second to ponder my question. A contemplative hum emerged from his throat as he looked around into the forest, seemingly visualizing the animals within it.

“Impossible,” he said finally. “A full-blooded warrior would likely have the strength to hunt in these woods, but you half-breeds are far too weak to do the same.”

He thought for another moment before adding, “That leads me to another point adjacent to the previous one: You are all weak. So weak that it sickens me to know you and I share a common heritage. You should try and account for your weakness by equipping yourselves with weapons.”

He looked toward me again. “Not to hunt, but for protection. Try to run before you hide and hide before you fight. Self-defense should be a last resort option.”

He gestured to the people gathered around and said, “Your strength is in your numbers. Many of the predators here are solitary, so stay in groups to avoid giving them an easy kill. Should you be forced into combat, make noise, and draw attention to it so that I may be made aware of the conflict and come to your aid.”

That was some scary shit. A group of twenty adult humans had no chance of killing anything here, let alone defending ourselves against predators? What kind of place had we landed in.

We were informed of how we would be travelling in groups of five that stayed together while the entire convoy moved through the woods. We would rest in intervals and camp during the night. We would also apparently resume travelling at night, as the day/night cycle on Altus was almost twice as slow as it was on Earth.

Scalisth finished speaking but left us with one final message.

“I have been tasked with escorting you all safely, and I have sworn on my title to protect you from harm until we arrive at our destination. With that in mind, I implore you to try and survive through your own actions, not through my intervention. Things will go a lot better for all of us if I am free to protect the group as a whole rather than dealing with individual conflicts.”

He punctuated his statement with a wave of his hand. A faint aura of blue energy created a trail from his palm to a location a dozen meters behind us in the tree line.

A bent and mangled animal corpse floated in the air above our group, leaving a trail of crimson blood on the ground below it. The spectators all scrambled to get out of the way, but some were unlucky enough to have viscera land on them.

The corpse, which looked like some kind of giant headless bird, fell to the ground with a wet thud.

Scalisth spoke up again, saying, “Your first task will be to scavenge and distribute food from this corpse. This is the only free meal you will receive on this planet, and I expect you to receive it with grace.” Everyone looked dumbstruck at the pale white body of the bird, and then back at the man looming over it.

“I have business to attend to elsewhere. I will return in five Earth hours, whereupon I expect a camp to have been made.” He paused for a moment before adding, “Good luck.”

Scalisth walked away as the body began to ooze blood. We all sat there dumbfounded as we all began to truly realize the gravity of the situation.

///

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Wherever there is chaos, there will always be order. While everyone had collapsed from fear or exhaustion, one man stood out in our group due to his unwillingness to give up. For the most part, Quentin Trebeck was exactly what we needed in this stressful situation. He was a member of the Urona Law Enforcement Agency and had quickly taken charge of the situation.

I had thought everyone in the group had abandoned hope in their exhaustion, but it seems like Quentin was just pretending to be tired and defeated to lie low and avoid Scalisth’s attention. Because of his background and training, the man was in excellent physical condition, so he was a beacon of strength and structure to the people in need of such things.

“You three, you will all position yourselves there, there, and there.” Quentin punctuated the words by pointing in three separate directions. “You will be on perimeter duty and will watch the forests for potential danger. Yell out if you see anything unusual.”

“Which is everything,” added a tall man with blonde hair.

Quentin nodded, “Yes, many things will be strange and foreign, but I trust that you three have the insight to distinguish between unknown and harmful. I’ve seen how you three sit and watch everything that has happened so far, so I think you’ll be just fine.”

The group of three, which included Amaya, split up and moved to their assigned positions. Quentin didn’t waste any time and went around organizing more people to scout the perimeter of our clearing, gather supplies, or to go to work on dressing down the bird corpse.

This entire time, he had practically ignored me, which was hard to do considering how tall I was. Finally, the impromptu leader of our scrap of humanity approached me directly.

“Hey, what’s your name?” That caught me off guard as he really hadn’t bothered to ask anyone else for their names, probably for the sake of efficiency.

“It’s Carlos,” I said softly.

“Well, it’s nice to meet your Carlos, I’m Quentin.”

“I know,” I responded quickly, “I heard your introduction to the group.” He chuckled softly, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Ah, that’s right, I almost forgot I did that. Putting that aside, I’d like to ask you a few questions.” At this, I became immediately on guard. Something about his demeanor set me off, and I had no reasons to trust him. Quentin, seeing my reaction, raised his hands up in a show of peace.

“Woah there, it’s not anything bad. I was just wondering if I could pick your brain about a few things that have been bothering me about this whole situation.” I relaxed slightly, but still kept my shoulders square with his in case he tried anything.

“What’s been bothering you? Is it the kidnapping? Maybe the part where we’re stranded in the woods with an alien supremacist? Or wait, hear me out, maybe it’s the part where we’re a billion kilometers away from Earth with no way back?”

My voice had raised to a fever pitch, and I was practically yelling at the man in front of me. I looked at him with anger and fear in my eyes, as the weight of the entire situation began to squeeze me from the inside. Quentin just stood there, searching my eyes for something.

I looked back into his and saw myself reflected in them. I could see in his eyes that he was just like me, scared and alone. I realized I was breathing heavily from anger and took a second to slow my breathing.

“Sorry,” I added quietly with my head low.

“Don’t worry about it, Carlos, this place is stressful, I get that. What we can’t afford to do is to lash out at each other. We’re all we have here, so it’d be good if we could stick together to get through this.” He smiled, this time a lot more genuinely than before. His expression reminded me of my boss, Mary, and how different she looked when she truly smiled.

I smiled back at him, “I agree. You had a question?”

“Yes, I do.” Quentin’s face became solemn. “What do you remember from arriving here? Like, do you remember being moved or did you just wake up here or what?”

It was a bit out of the blue, but it was a reasonable question. I thought for a moment before I answered.

“I think I was asleep for the actual transportation between worlds… Damn that’s so weird to say. I don’t remember much, but I remember that when we moved I felt weightless, like I was floating in an ocean.”

“I’ve never been to the ocean, but I have been in a public swimming pool. They’re about the same experience, I presume?” Quentin joked, but I only let out a puff of air from my nose.

“The floating part is similar, but in the ocean, you really get a feeling for how small you are as you feel all of the water below you push you along wherever it flows. That’s kind of what it felt like. After that, I remember feeling like I was falling for a split second but then I hit the ground less than a moment later.”

Quentin nodded along, as he listened to my story. His response led to me asking a question of my own.

“Why are you asking? Was yours any different?” There really was no reason for it to be any different between the two of us.

“No, well, actually yes, it was sort of different. I got the weightlessness feeling and then the falling, but I was awake before we hit the ground.”

That was interesting to hear. “Really?” I added, “What was it like?”

“Well, you say you fell for only a second, while I’d say it was closer to a minute. We didn’t enter Altus close to the ground, we entered it from up in the sky.” My mouth fell open at his words, and he nodded in agreement.

Quentin continued, “Yeah, I know right, it’s weird to say but we really came in from up in the clouds. I’m assuming it’s some failsafe to stop people from entering the world into walls or something similar, but I can’t be sure.”

“It’s not an issue humanity has ever had to deal with before,” I joked at him.

“No kidding. Essentially, that guy, Scalisth was hovering below us and seemed like he was escorting us down to ground safely. Eventually we touched down, and that’s where I think a majority of people woke up.”

“A majority?” I asked. “You think there were other people awake alongside you?” This made him pause for a moment before answering.

“Well, that’s the crazy part of all of this. Do you remember the head count we did earlier? How many people did we total?” He leaned in close as he said all of this, whispering like a teenage girl gossiping to her friends.

“Uhm, I think it was twenty-two, twenty-three if you count the girl who went all crazy and got knocked the fuck out.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought to, and I’m glad you mentioned the girl because she’s important to this. I know it was dark, but you remember that auditorium we were in, right? I don’t know about you, but I counted at least a hundred people in there.”

I cut him off when I realized what he was saying. “I see what you’re getting at. Where did the rest of them go, right?” He nodded and gestured to the woman lying on her side in the middle of the clearing.

“Exactly! When we were coming down here, I was freaked out, so I didn’t think to check, but I think that girl wasn’t part of our group. I think she came here some other way, like with another group of people.”

That made sense. What happened to the other eighty people who were gathered in that cavern underground. Whatever happened in there grabbed all of us, not just those in the front. Shouldn’t there be at least five other groups of people our size scattered throughout the wilderness?

“It does make sense that there would be other people,” I agreed. “But how would they get down? I might be remembering wrong, but Scalisth was the only Altum who was there when we got teleported, and he’s the one who got us to the ground safely.” Quentin thought for a moment as he rubbed the stubble on his chin thoughtfully.

“Yeah, that’s a good point. Maybe there were more of them waiting to catch us when we arrived? Scalisth seemed to know where we are in relation to that one place, so it’s not farfetched to assume he could’ve planned this.”

Our conversation was interrupted when a shrill shriek emerged from the edge of the clearing. I whipped my head to the side and saw it was the side Amaya had gone to.

“Shit,” I thought to myself. It was too early for things to already be going wrong. I looked at Quentin for what to do next, but he was already running to the source of the noise.

Earlier, Quentin had assigned three people to gather wood for a fire, and they had gotten back with a few tree limbs just before we heard the screaming. Quentin shifted his trajectory slightly and grabbed a thick branch before continuing on.

My legs still felt like jelly, but I mustered up the strength to follow him as I entered into a half run. I didn’t have to stop for a stick, as one of the gatherers held one out for me to grab as I ran past.

I yelled as I went by, “Thank you!” and continued forward. My long strides consumed the distance between me and Quentin quickly, and I was right behind him after only a few seconds.

We cleared the brush line that defined the area outside our camp but didn’t slow down as we ran into the dense woods. It wasn’t long before we heard a commotion, and we picked up the pace to meet whatever dangers were present.

We saw the shapes of three people standing over a fourth on the ground. Thankfully, I saw that Amaya was unharmed, but she was definitely shaken by something.

Quentin yelled out to the group, “What’s wrong? What is it!?” He skidded to a half and froze in place. I caught up with him a second later and saw what the commotion was about.

On the ground was the deformed body of what was likely a young woman. Her head was splattered across the ground and her body was contorted into impossible positions. There was a dense pool of blood beneath her, with a spattering of crimson painted onto a tree near what remained of the head.

We all stood there in shock at the gruesome sight. If I had eaten earlier, I would’ve emptied my stomach at the horrifying sight. I looked away, not able to keep looking at the woman’s corpse any longer.

Everyone was silent for a moment before Quentin spoke up. “Who… who the hell is this?”