“What do you think it says?” Michael asked as Sonja handed him the note. Apparently the particular translation ability they were influenced by did not extend to the written word…

“I think I can make a guess,” Eik said with concern, looking around the mossy clearing. “Look,” he added and traced a path along the ground with a finger.

Scattered bloodstains ran roughly from the initial direction the Alliance team had moved, a particularly dense concentration around the bloody slip of paper, continuing away and into the trees in the opposite direction. At closer inspection, a decidedly non-human set of footprints was mixed into the bunch, overlapping the bloodstains with three long, clawed toes setting it clearly apart from the rest.

“Someone was being hunted, and they made it back here, at the very least.”

“I think we may have to find whoever wrote this note before anything else,” Sonja said. “If they’re alive, they’re our best hope.”

The trek through the vegetation was slow.

None of them were skilled enough trackers to follow traces like broken twigs or faint prints in an environment that wasn’t even their home planet, so they were forced to search for the minuscule bloodstains with every step they took. Whenever they lost the trace, they would have to backtrack and rediscover the stains to maintain the correct course. Worst of all was the thought that somewhere in the vicinity lurked a monster that had already seriously wounded or killed at least one of the people they were looking for.

“Do you also feel like we’re being watched?” Heath asked nobody in particular, never turning away from his position as vanguard. They maintained a strict formation, unwilling to let anything take them by surprise.

“Not really, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something was,” Eik said, constantly scanning their surroundings from his place in the middle of the formation.

They walked for another tense few minutes before Sonja held up a fist to stop, pointing a few meter in front of where they had stopped.

“That’s… a lot of blood,” Michael noted, swallowing hard at the scene as he knelt for a closer inspection. There were not signs of arterial gushing, but a moss-covered tree had been practically drenched in contact stains. “Maybe they leaned against the trunk here to rest for a bit. Are they really still alive, having lost this much blood?”

“I hope so,” Eik said with a frown, kneeling next to Michael. “I don’t want to stumble upon a dead kid in this cursed jungle.” He smacked a mosquito the size of grasshopper when it tried to land on his neck.

“Kid? Are we looking for children out here, Eik?” Heath asked, face painted with genuine horror.

Eik sighed. “Yeah, I don’t think I ever told you guys, did I? I was essentially forced to have a duel with an F-ranker from the Nidafjeld Alliance when I was there. People usually awaken around age twelve or thirteen, so all of them were children,” he said, his face growing paler despite the persistent heat and humidity. “I almost killed the kid. He was dying on the floor because of something I did…”

“Much stronger people put you in that position,” Sonja interjected matter-of-factly. “I’m all for personal responsibility, but there really wasn’t anything you could have done to oppose Atla in that situation. She’s probably an A-ranker. We all saw how she absolutely decimated that vulgar Boulder Fist Gary.”

Eik gave her a grateful look. “Thank you for saying that.” What he didn’t say, however, was how thrilling it had been in the moment. Despite the genuine remorse he felt for hurting the blonde boy, the exhilaration of a struggle against a dangerous foe was not something he could just forget so easily, he found.

From then out, the trail of blood became easier to follow. It was obvious that whoever had bled like this must have been going through healing medicine like a pre-schooler going through candy on Halloween to survive for this long. But even with strong medicine, it would be a matter of time. A wound that severe didn’t just heal itself.

Albeit subtly at first, the terrain began to change ever so slightly, the trees—which until now could have been called overly healthy with leaves blotting out the sun completely in some places—starting to show signs of decay with entire branches utterly stripped. The moss cover also thinned to scattered patches, some of which were either discolored or withering.

“Why did Atla even send us here?” Michael asked Eik. “I mean, if we’re actually looking for kids, then wouldn’t the parents be involved in the first place?”

Eik shrugged. “My guess would be that the parents might be too powerful to enter a world this new—that, or completely untrained. I don’t know.”

“Surely there must be teams of E-rank or F-rank both stronger and more experienced than us,” Heath added.

“If I had to guess,” Eik said. “and to be clear, I am guessing. The Nidafjeld Alliance probably wants to give us a chance to feel useful. If we feel like we’re being set up as a charity case without providing anything in return, then the foundation of our relationship would be one-sided and fragile. We need to feel worthy or we won’t trust them to stay loyal to us. The Alliance is essentially forcing mutual benefit from the beginning.”

“Politics,” Sonja said tiredly.

“Yep, politics.”

“So they’re potentially trading the lives of their children in order to reinforce a new alliance with us?” Heath said. “That’s barbaric.”

“I mean, they’re an multiversal super organization, so what can you really expect? Think about how much a country on old Earth would sacrifice for traction on the global playing field, and then multiply that by a factor of a thousand,” Sonja said, the corners of her lips tightening. “The mental disconnect between different branches of the Nidafjeld Alliance must be enormous. Like different worlds in every sense of the word.”

Heath didn’t answer, but the frown on his face exposed his thoughts on the matter.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The decay of the land only continued to worsen as they made it further into this new territory. Something wasn’t right in this place. Natural terrain didn’t just change on a whim like that. Or rather, it shouldn’t on Earth.

Abruptly, Heath slammed the edge of his tower shield into the earth with a dull thump, the soil erupting up and peppering his plated boots with a faint metallic sound. The rest of them peeked around the barrier and immediately saw what had gotten their tank of a front liner to react so cautiously.

About thirty meters ahead lay a huge body, unmoving, dry, faded eyes staring back at them. The decay of the vegetation had allowed them to notice the corpse much earlier than they would just a few kilometers back. A massive gash along the creature’s side informed them that something had killed it. It could well have been the person they were looking for, but to be safe, they approached with caution.

“Is that the monster we’ve followed from the clearing?” Michael asked. The three long digits on its feet told them that it was likely.

“It’s been dead for at least a couple of days by my estimation,” Sonja said. “But I’m not sure if a corpse would decompose in the same way here as it would at home, so I could be wrong.”

When they got close enough to the corpse to poke it, Heath did, eliciting a gasp from Michael.

“What?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Do you just poke anything you see no matter what world you’re in?” the healer hissed, clutching his own shield protectively. “What if the damn thing explodes or emits poisonous gas or something like that?”

“It didn’t. Look, nothing happened,” Heath said, poking it five more times for good measure, to Michael’s displeasure.

The thing had two long, slender legs equipped with wicked claws that resembled those of an ostrich. It was tentacled, each of the four appendages ending in single, razor-sharp claws. The thin but muscled torso elongated seamlessly into an extensive neck bearing a reptilian head.

Eik strained his eyes to look above the trees. “Are those crows?” he said, directing the attention to the sky. A flock of something circled an area ahead.

“I doubt it,” Sonja said, taking a few steps towards the swarm. “But it might be something that serves the same function in the ecosystem.”

Heath hacked completely through the absurdly long neck, just to be on the safe side, before they left the corpse behind and trudged on, formation tight. At the pace they moved, it took a couple of minutes to get close enough to catch a glimpse of someone slumped against the trunk of a tree, arms and legs splayed to the side. One of the carrion feeders was perched on the boy’s knee, waiting patiently for its meal to breathe his last.

The monster was neither crow nor vulture, but not far from it. Two pairs of fleshy, membranous wings were tucked against a slim body, a long tail swishing from side to side. Spines ran down the small creature’s back from the skull to the tip of its tail. Unlike its features, its size was more or less that of a common crow. Sonja put an arrow through its stomach, the monster never getting the chance to utter a sound before it died.

A chaotic cacophony erupted above the trees as its kin scattered in all directions.

“I really hope that doesn’t alert something worse to our presence,” Heath muttered.

“Then we’ll just have to deal with it,” Sonja said stoically.

The four of them jogged up to the boy who showed no signs of registering their approach. His eyes were closed and remained so even as Michael began to work on him. A long wound ran from the bottom of his ribs to his groin, making his extended escape all the more impressive. His entire pant leg was soaked in dry blood from top to bottom.

“Is he dead?” Heath asked, his back to the boy as he kept an eye on the forest. He would need to react quickly if something came for them.

“I’m honestly not sure,” Michael admitted, the green glow from his hand pulsating soothingly. “His skin feels cool to the touch, but not to the degree that I would expect from a corpse. But like Sonja said earlier, I’m just not sure whether anything I know about medicine applies right now.”

Eik nodded. “I can’t find a pulse, but it could just be weak. Or his circulatory system could have a completely different pattern from ours, or the arteries could all run too deep for the pulse to be felt through the skin, or they could have something that circulates blood in a continuous stream instead of rhythmic pumps,” he blabbered, frustration evident in his tone. “The only thing I know for certain is that they do have blood, because I’ve seen it. Or this kid could be a different type of humanlike alien for all I know,” he continued, throwing his hands up in frustration.

“He’s breathing,” Sonja interjected with an ear to the boy’s mouth.

“Oh,” Eik said, his rant coming to a halt. “Good, then.”

They fed the kid some of the medicine they had gotten from Atla before departing. It melted on his tongue like butter and flowed down his throat. Some of the color returned to the boy’s face within a minute. Soon after, his eyelids began to flutter ever so slightly. Eik patted him gently on the cheek, eliciting a pout and a forceful exhalation.

“Hey,” Eik said gently. “Hey, can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying?” Before they left, all four of them had gotten the translation magic cast on them. The detailed explanation given by an eccentrically enthusiastic man as he affected them one by one had involved something with the brain, the ears, and the way they exchanged information. Eik hadn’t understood too much of it, but it worked.

“Can you speak? Do you know where you are?” he continued, adding a bit more force.

“Do you know where you are?” Heath asked.

“Do you know how to shut up?” Eik retorted cleverly.

“—rn?” the boy mumbled, so quietly that it was almost impossible to hear.

“What? Say that again.”

“Kirn?” The voice could still only barely be heard.

Eik looked up at the others. “What’s a kirn?”

“It’s a name. One of them was named Kirn, I believe,” Sonja said.

“Kirn? Kirn, can you hear me?” Eik asked.

“That’s not Kirn. Kirn’s a girl,” Sonja clarified, unable to completely conceal a snicker.

He glared at her through narrowed eyes. “Say that from the beginning then…” he grumbled. “You get him to talk the—”

“Something’s coming. Get ready!” Heath’s voice hissed as he stepped left to cover them better. “And it’s approaching fast!”