Eik, Heath, Sonja, and Michael circled the small plaza cautiously. They had not encountered any more monster since the two many-eyes bastards, and that was putting them on edge. With all the action tonight, it felt almost wrong for there to be nothing dangerous roaming the streets. Was it truly over?

“Why are the monsters not attacking each other anyway?” Michael asked suddenly. “They only go for us, even when they’re completely different types from one another.”

“They usually do act aggressively towards other species, as far as I know,” Sonja answered. “There must be something special about them this time.”

“We should head back for now,” Eik interjected. “The intel from the scouts grows less and less reliable with time. We might run into something far worse if we hang around here for too long.”

They didn’t rush on the way back, That’s how one gets oneself killed. Eik was beginning to notice his injury again. It wasn’t too bad yet, but he could tell that the effects of the pain relief were fading, albeit slowly.

“Michael, can you work on my ribs and arm for a bit?” he asked, glancing back and noticing that the healer had stopped a few paces back. “Michael?” he repeated, only for the young man to hold up a flat palm for silence.

Eik snuck back to Michael’s side, Sonja and Heath joining soon after. “What’s going on?” Eik whispered.

Michael didn’t say anything for a long moment, his eyes closed as he tried to focus on his ears. Finally he spoke, voice barely audible. “We’ve have been hearing bird song regularly since a while ago. But now… Now I don’t hear anything.”

They all stopped moving in order to listen. Sonja was the first to notice something.

“I think I hear… a rumble?”

“I don’t hear any—“ Heath began, but cut himself off as his senses picked up something as well.

It took a few more seconds of tense silence before Eik’s ears registered something. Vibrations. Deep and ominous. It rapidly grew, sounds of destruction drawing closer by the second. Before any of them could react, the house four doors down from their position was pulverized as a massive shape barreled through it like a freight train, taking walls, roof, and furniture with it.

“There are Awakened fighting that thing!” Sonja shouted, her voice drowned out by the clamor of the high-ranked battle. Eik hadn’t noticed the Awakened. He had only noticed a single thing of importance. The monster had a vile tail spike.

This was the thing that had put Olivia in a coma.

Eik set off in pursuit of the battle, as monster and Awakened kept moving erratically as they fought, each side taking turns to act and react, the powerful exchanges continuously bringing them up into the air only to crash back into the ground like missiles.

“Eik! Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Heath called, Eik barely able to hear the man’s voice despite being only a few meters apart.

“I need the corpse of that monster!” Eik screamed over the noise. “It’s the only way to synthesize a reversal agent for the comatose Awakened.” Michael shouted something back, but Eik couldn’t make out the words and he didn’t have time to go back to listen.

Even as he ran, chasing that sphere of destructive chaos, he found himself wondering what the hell he was doing.

He could not help.

He could not survive.

But he didn’t know what else to do. The thought of running away to watch felt somehow unbearable. He’d been made to promise his brother that he’d protect Olivia and her mother as his only living family. At the time Eik had snorted in morbid amusement. Olivia had already been high D-rank back then, and he, an unawakened 20-year old was supposed to protect her, from what, exactly? All the memories of the scary monsters she had annihilated with a single flaming punch?

Eik had taken that promise as a joke, but his brother had meant it. Now Eik intended to keep it.

For one moment the monster disappeared from sight, vanishing despite its considerable size. In the next, it impacted the earth with an earsplitting boom, close enough to throw Eik off his feet. He landed painfully on his bad arm, doing his best to protect his vitals as he rolled. Coming to rest against a tree, Eik could hardly keep his eyes open as he watched the cursed, quadrupedal beast roll over and get to its feet.

As it shook debris out of its mane, an Awakened who looked like Andrew Brooks, the C-ranker who had led the efforts in Mission Central, showered it with a flurry of punches that released white, flashing shock waves to batter the monster back into the ground. That damned tail came up out of nowhere, broad side striking Andrew dead on and sending him ripping into the darkness.

Immediately after, the spear woman Cecilia and another Awakened appeared out of the blue, both launching killing blows at the beast. But before they could hit, it leapt backwards, towards Eik, its paws sliding through the ruins of a house as it came to a stop.

Eik screamed as broken bricks and wood fragments pelted him like snow in a blizzard. The four meter tall monster glanced back momentarily, attention drawn by his voice, but leapt away, disappearing a second later.

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“N-No…” Eik muttered, seeing his chance to save Olivia melt away. “No, no, no! It wasn’t supposed to—“ Frustration and stress overcame him. Rage welled up like a geyser, permeating his body.

“Hey, F’er, what are you doing here?” Cecilia asked as she came in for a landing.

“I’m going to kill that fucking thing!” Eik snarled, fingers clawing into the grass as he fought through the pain to get to his feet. “I’m gonna kill it!”

***

Eik spent the next two days in bed. Mis lay across his chest as he stared up into the ceiling, brooding over recent events. He had finally Awakened and gained super powers, but seldom had he felt as useless as he did right now.

He squeezed the duvet until his knuckles turned white and ground his teeth as he fumed, hating his own weakness. Struck by a jolt of determination, he sat up, the cat rolling away with a yelp of dissatisfaction. She strolled away as if he had committed the most sinful of atrocities.

“Don’t even start on that, girl,” he called after her. “I’m the guy with the food. You should keep that in mind.”

No answer. Typical.

He stretched and felt around his ribs and arm, concluding that he was more or less good to go. While out of commission, he’d been practicing with the Profound Toxin and it had hit level 4 shortly after the monster wave ended.

The Hectona fang really was a great tool for injecting his toxin. The biggest problem was how unwieldy the damn thing was. Half the time, he lost his grip on it as he plunged it in, delaying the delivery of Profound Toxin by seconds. The bony surface was too smooth, and the lack of a proper handle was annoying. But weapons were expensive, and custom orders even more so, and it was doubtful that a weapon specialized for envenomation was purchasable from any random smith’s shelf.

For now, he’d have to make do with what he had.

Eik stirred some milk into his tea, staring off into space. Sonja had registered their team of four people with the help of C-ranker Andrew Brooks, getting the process over and done with quickly. Eik had gotten them into the man’s good graces by making hundreds of much needed healing spheres for the Awakened during the monster wave.

Sipping the tea, he immediately recognized the acidic tones that quickly faded as he swallowed. Mirewort, and a potent one at that. Unlike the purposefully jumbled and unspecified drawers of potential ingredients for the antitoxin, all he had in his house was just a box of different bags of materials. He put it on the small kitchen counter and riffled through the contents until he found what he was looking for.

By now, he would normally be feeling light-headed, with a spine made of ice, and pain in the arms and legs moving from mild to intense.

But none of that was the case.

Instead he felt a tingle down his sides and in the fingers and toes. Nothing more. [Resistance: Toxin] had utterly trivialized his exercises with antitoxins… Even if he kept doing it, the main purpose of the original exercise had been to practice the art of keeping a cool head during a panicked situation, specifically in matters of life and death.

It had never been a question of whether he had been capable of creating the antidotes in the first place, but whether he could do it under pressure. Simply pretending to be weighed down by an imaginary death sentence wasn’t really sufficient. Suffice it to say, it was no big loss. Working with toxins every day carried the risk of accidental poisonings so he had always felt obligated to keep his skills sharp. But now there really wasn’t a reason to do it anymore.

Chewing on a whole reaper’s root, he pulled pulled on his boots and locked the door, although the gigantic hole in his wall still gaped with nothing but a sheet of canvas for cover. If somebody wanted to go after his stuff, there wasn’t much he could do about it, but looting was a tendency that had largely disappeared after the first few years of the new world.

People had more or less realized that survival was easier if you could trust your neighbor. He would like to rebuild Eik’s Excellent Elixirs one of these days, when he could afford to. Until then, he had a date with three eager adventurers.

***

Heath, Sonja, and Michael were already waiting when Eik made it to Mission Central, reviewing their equipment and consulting with the staff at the counter. Considering the crowd in the building, it would seem that that second wave had made a good number of people change their minds about taking up monster hunting as an occupation.

“Eik!” Heath raised a hand in greeting. “How are you?”

“Well, you know,” he said, patting his arm indicatively.

Heath laughed heartily. “Good to hear! Then we’re good to go today.”

“Did Sonja get anymore info on the assignment?”

“Kind of,” Michael answered, putting down a drink he’d been nursing. “It’s still super uncertain what the monster population looks like after the wave so we’re basically only allowed to go just outside city limits.”

Sonja joined them, holding up a slip of paper. “We’re heading west. Apparently a forest appeared there, so they’re sending us to check it out.”

“Wait, wait,” Eik said, holding up a hand. “Did you say a forest appeared?”

“It seems to be an expansion of the forest already there, to be clear, but yes.”

Eik threw up his hands. “Well, okay, I guess. By the way, were you able to find some leathers for me, Heath?”

The big man nodded and pulled a bundle out of a bag by his chair.

“Thanks a lot,” Eik said. “What do I owe you?”

Eik paid his new colleague and put on the protective gear, stretching to check the fit and nodding in satisfaction when Andrew Brooks strolled up.

“Your medicines really saved us back then, you know. A good number of people made it back for treatment because your healing spheres kept them stable.”

Eik shook the man’s hand. “That’s a relief.”

The C-ranker grinned. “And so, I’m preparing a reward for you.”

Eik’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “No, that’s okay. I didn’t do it for—”

“I hate debts, so you’re welcome to think of it as me selfishly satisfying that,” the muscled man interrupted with a wave of his hand. “Your contribution to this matter does not exceed accepting my gift.”

Eik snorted. “Yeah, okay. I’ll gladly accept, then.”

Andrew sucked his teeth. “About that… It’s gonna take a little bit to prepare, but I’ll find you later, alright?”

“Yeah, sure,” Eik said as the C-ranker disappeared into a backroom with a wave.

“What was that about?” Heath asked.

“I’m not really sure,” he answered as they fastened their weapons and checked their gear one last time before heading outside.

As they made their way out of Forest proper, the overhaul of the world became frighteningly apparent. It had been difficult to tell among the many buildings. What had been the western plains just a week ago were now wide swaths of green forest, stretching as far as the eye could see.

On the horizon a titanic mountain reached for the skies, its peak disappearing into the clouds. Eik wondered if even Everest of old earth could have rivaled its size. As he spun on his feet, several more mountains of that caliber could be seen as faint colossi in the distance.

The world was changing again.

And Eik had no idea why.