“What did you just say?” Eik whispered, his brain unable to consolidate the urgent tone with the words.
“I think I’ve hit E-rank,” Heath repeated with a face split in two by the widest of grins.
“You scared the living crap out of us!” Sonja admonished, with uncharacteristic fierceness.
Sorry, sorry…” he mumbled apologetically, but only managing to hold the expression of shame for a moment before the grin forced itself back. “But Sonja, I’m going to be E-rank!”
“And you deserve to be, Heathy,” she said with a soft smile. “But I’m going to be right behind you, you know.”
“You’d better!”
“So what happens now?” Eik asked as he returned the hectona fang to his belt. “Do you just go, like, pop, and you’re E-rank?”
“No, there’s a bit more of a process to it than that, and I think it would be best to wait until we’re out of this jungle. It’ll occupy your mind for a while, so if you do it now, and we get ambushed, then we’ll be a man down and have to protect you,” Sonja said.
Eik and Heath nodded while the kids stared at them one by one in disbelief.
“You didn’t know that?” Gillimi asked. “How could you not?”
“Yeah, everybody knows th—” Taf chimed in only for his eyes to widen as he was struck by realization. “No way, wait! Are you from a new world?”
The Earth team exchanged glances but nodded.
“That’s so cool! What was it like when your world was inducted into the Unified Mass?”
“Uuh, deadly…” Eik said, unable to think of anything better. “Horrifying? Traumatizing?”
As he continued, the kids’ excitement dwindled considerably. “Sorry for asking, I guess,” Taf muttered awkwardly.
“No, that’s okay. We’re worlds apart, literally, so curiosity is no great offense. For these past nine years, I’ve tried not to think about it too much, but by my estimation we probably lost somewhere in the vicinity of ninety percent of our planet’s population, all killed within the first year or so.”
The children paled at that, their postures shrinking a little.
“With monsters constantly swarming out of the fractures to slaughter us, there was little we could do as mostly powerless unawakened and low rankers. I hid in a hole we dug in the ground in the forest with my brother, his girlfriend, and her mother,” Eik continued, finding a strange kind of relief in talking about it out loud.
The fact that he, for the first time, could tell it to somebody who hadn’t experienced something similar or worse also gave a release of tension from his mind that he hadn’t known was there.
“We lived down there for, what, eight months, or something like that. Barely ever leaving that cold, dark, and damp hole in the ground.” he said, eyes wandering between his companions. “When my sister-in-law awakened halfway through, she began to venture out with more courage, but she got hurt a lot. Soon after, my brother awakened as well and they would go foraging for food while her mom and I just waited there for them to return, hidden away and useless," he swallowed hard.
"Sometimes they would lose their sense of direction in the unfamiliar terrain or be forced to run away from monsters. We would sit for days on end, too afraid to talk for fear of attracting monsters, and never knowing whether my brother and sister were dead or just late…”
As he spoke, his eyes gradually lost focus as his thoughts returned to those days of pain. Eventually his words drifted into silence. Only the sound of Heath’s voice jolted him out of the stupor.
“Our story isn’t much different from yours, actually,” Heath said, gesturing to Sonja, whose face had become a stone mask. “We started out in a big group. The city was a frenzy with mangled corpses littering the street like garbage. We fled into the wilderness like so many others, but no matter where we went, the monsters always kept coming, endlessly, never letting us rest. Every day our numbers would shrink as people were dragged off screaming." His gaze was somewhere far away.
"It was maddening. People we had built relationships with died, one after the other, right in front of our eyes. Sonja’s best friend was—…” Heath hesitated and took a moment to reconsider his words, eyeing his sister whose face remained devoid of any visible emotion.
“Anyway,” he continued with a sigh. “Stragglers kept joining up with us so the group never disappeared completely, and then when a few of us began to awaken to our powers we established a small settlement. I think it was about two years before we made contact with and moved to Forest.”
“That’s…” the girl with the red skin named Gillimi said. “That sounds like a horrible nightmare.”
Eik chuckled half-heartedly. “That not a bad way to describe it. I think a lot of us were just waiting for the moment where we woke up in the real world, with no monsters, no super powers, and no dead friends and family.”
“The adults always say that being able to experience the arrival of the Unified Mass is the greatest of privileges, and that anybody lucky enough to be alive at that time gets to experience a new age of discovery that will shape their world until the end of time,” Taf said.
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“Well…” Heath began, glancing at the others. “I guess that’s true. Except the things we get to discover is either terrifying and life-threatening, or,” he said and gestured to the kids. “startling, world-upheaving, and existentially challenging. But privilege and luck are not exactly words that come to mind, I’ll admit.”
The children told them of their upbringings as well, all of them from families with close ties to the Nidafjeld Alliance. Most people lived on the fringes of the Alliance with affiliated home worlds but no personal ties—much like how one used to be able to live in a country allied with other countries without ever feeling that in the day to day.
Although they came from Alliance families, of which there were countless, they could in no way be referred to as particularly important within the overall structure of the hierarchy. The children stressed this.
If they had been important, the Alliance would have sent the best of the best within the appropriate power rank, instead of a team of relatively newly awakened strangers from a new world, which, they agreed, was likely part of a political strategy to solidify a sense of trust and mutual benefit between the two parties. More prominent families would have been able to demand better treatment.
The heavy conversations had thrown them all into a gloom, so when the fracture that would take them home finally crackled into existence, they had sat in silence for a few hours. Tears once again streamed down the children’s cheeks as they rushed for the portal without a moment of hesitation. The Earth team stepped through as well and this time the number of faces waiting for them had almost doubled since the day before.
Gillimi and Taf were already well into their recounting of the events of their expedition, and many faces among the listeners were growing tearful and disbelieving as the reality of the results of the rescue mission became clear. One woman with black hair fainted when she heard of her son’s fate.
Gillimi was stuck in a perpetual hug, her red-skinned father’s tight embrace almost crushing her. Taf, on the other hand, was passed around between his mother, father, sisters, and grandparents, showered in hugs and kisses, displaying the classic embarrassment of a teenager but unable to hide his relief at being back in their arms.
Sensing a good chance to quietly leave, Eik and his friends snuck off and headed for his suite. Five minutes later, Atla joined them and thanked them for their efforts.
Eik asked her about the bag of holding that he'd taken from the elf's corpse. Sonja's assumption had been more or less correct. It was apparently common for bags of holding to be calibrated to the owner, so to anyone else trying to access the bag's contents it would behave as any other ordinary sack. Eik still kept it, but his excitement had been severely quenched.
Next, Atla had some questions to follow up Taf and Gillimi’s explanations about their experiences in the temple.
“This cult,” she began. “what can you tell me about them?”
Sonja pursed her lips. “They ate two of the children, but as far as we can tell, they also ate their own people. The leader was not the same species as the followers, and he knew of the Nidafjeld Alliance. From the way he spoke, it seemed like he might have come from somewhere else, specifically to do something in that town.”
Atla hmm’d and tapped her fingers on the thick wooden table as she digested that.
Michael spoke up as well. “And they had the same symbol everywhere inside the temple. It was kind of creepy.”
“What kind of symbol?”
“A sun contained within the crescent of a half moon,” Eik finished.
Atla was silent for a moment before she closed her eyes slowly, her jaw clenched tight in frustration. She slumped back into a chair and exhaled resignedly. “I can’t believe those deranged mongrels have managed to infest this new world as well…”
“This new world as well, you say?” Sonja asked with a frown. “Who are they and why were they there?”
Atla gave them a look as if she was considering whether or not to elaborate. In the end she started speaking. “Yes, this is certainly not the first we’ve seen of them. They are an absolute scourge on the Unified Mass, and you can count yourselves lucky that they didn’t infiltrate your Earth as well.” Atla was becoming visibly agitated and she took a couple of deep, controlling breaths before she continued.
“They call themselves The Moon Shall Swallow. Stupid name, right? We’re not really sure what their exact goal is, but judging by their behavior, it’s nothing good.”
“And what were they doing there?” Heath asked.
“Recruiting new blood, I would assume. They like to do that as much as they can. Most civilizations prefer to gain power through negotiation, shows of force, and direct political or military confrontations. You’ve seen that yourselves with the monsters invading your world. The Moon Shall Swallow prefers a softer approach, infiltrating new worlds under the guise of aid and security. Because they go about it so quietly, it’s very difficult to catch them in the act.”
That sounded an awful lot like the exact thing the Nidafjeld Alliance had done on Earth. Except for the fact that Atla had punched one of their strongest fighters into the next week, of course.
“What about the cannibalism, then?” Michael asked.
“That is, unfortunately, also not the first we’ve encountered that particular strategy of theirs. They essentially work stealthily to sow friction and discord within the population they infiltrate, and one of the advanced steps is to encourage cannibalism as a way to erode the minds and mental boundaries of the cultists. A way to make them more malleable, you could say. Quite effective too.”
Michael looked like he wanted to throw up again.
“So what do we do about them?” Heath asked.
“You don’t do anything,” Atla said firmly. “You’ve already helped us immensely by taking care of the key figure, for which we’ll be sure to express our gratitude. But enough of that,” she continued and looked at Heath. “I hear you’ve reached something of a milestone.”
Heath’s excitement radiated out of him like the brightest of suns. He sat down on the soft couch, squeezing his wide, armored rear into a space between a mountain of throw pillows. He closed his eyes and within moments, his grin was replaced by a slack jaw as he slumped into the couch, looking almost lifeless. Sonja made to leap to his side, but was stopped by Atla.
“Don’t worry. His mind is being shielded from the radical changes occurring within his body. He’s just fine despite the drooling,” she assured them. “In fact, if you—”
“—on!” The sound was faint at first. In fact, if Atla hadn’t stopped talking, Eik would have assumed it to have been a trick of his exhausted mind.
“—urdered my son!” The voice was getting closer fast. And it wasn’t happy.
“I want to see the bastards who murdered my son!” a woman’s wrathful, sorrowful cry rang out from the hallway outside. “They killed my son and you just let them walk away?”
Other voices seemed to be trying to reason with her to no avail. A stentorian explosion shook the whole room after which everything was silent for a moment. Eik’s eyes flitted to Atla, and to his dismay, she looked genuinely concerned for the first time since he’d met her.
He never got the chance to ask her what was going on. With a thunderous crack, the door to his new suite shattered.