“Yeah, I’ve got a problem with you!” the bowl cut yelled, getting into Eik’s face just as he was getting to his feet. “You’re a damn traitor, is my problem with you!”

Eik narrowed his eyes in confusion, the accusation taking him completely by surprise. “I’m a traitor? Since when?”

“Since you became all buddy buddy with that bitch with the pink hair.”

Eik couldn’t help but laugh. “Is that what all this dumb whispering that everybody’s doing has been about?”

“You went over to their side!”

“No, I was picked up and thrown over to their side, smart guy.”

Mushroom head sneered and pushed Eik in the chest. “You could just have come back if you hated it so much.”

“I couldn’t come back because I didn’t have a clue where the hell I even was!” Eik shouted, all sense of amusement gone. “Do any of you even know how terrifyingly powerful these people are? Huh? Do you?” he asked, eyes flitting from person to person.

The hostility hadn’t dissipated from Mr. Bowl cut and his four boogers, but they also didn’t have anything to say in return.

“You!” Eik snapped, whipping a finger at one of bowl cut’s stupid friends. “Who’s the strongest person you’ve ever seen—that is, who’s the strongest in Forest?”

The guy looked exceptionally and deliciously uncomfortable by being pulled to the forefront of a conflict of which he had enjoyed being a blank faced, secondary instigator. “I… Well, I guess Travis Lockwood?” he mumbled, glances of uncertainty flickering between mushroom head and the three other followers.

When mushroom head sent him a glare of incredulity, as if to ask how he could say something so moronic, he hurried to change his answer. “Or actually, I think maybe Boulder Fist Gary is stronger than Travis Lockwood actually.”

“Perfect! And do you happen to remember what Atla, or the bitch with the pink hair, as you so cleverly called her, did to Boulder Fist Gary when he annoyed her?” he asked without giving them any time to answer. “That’s right, she folded him up like aluminum foil with a single punch. And I met people there who were as strong as her.” That produced a lot of widened eyes and whispered conversations among the crowd. Even Mr. Bowl cut’s friends appeared to be doubting their own claims.

“That’s a load of bull!” Mushroom head hissed, fury crackling behind his eyes. “You and all the other traitors just want to hand our society over to some backwards aliens with hidden agendas and no desire to actually coop—”

“If you could all just get your stuff in order in relative silence, that would be immensely appreciated,” Travis’ aide from earlier shouted from the same supply shed roof, clapping loudly for attention. “Would you perhaps be so kind as to save the schoolyard squabbles for after we have dealt with one of the biggest threats in our city’s history?”

Eik stepped back and Heath nodded and followed suit. Mushroom head held his glare for a few more seconds before he also turned on his heel and went to the opposite side of the courtyard, cursing them out all the way.

“What a dumb ass,” Heath grumbled. Sonja didn’t say anything but looked miffed.

“Isn’t it better to just not engage with people like them? They feed on aggressive responses like that and only come back for more,” Michael said, watching as the blonde man walked away.

Eik glowered at his feet, knuckles white around the handle of his new knife. “Mushroom head over there is obviously in bed with Boulder Fist Gary, his dumb son Rock Fist Bart, and their faction. If he was spurred on by them, then I could have died at the teeth of a monster and he would still have tried to spin it into an insult aimed at them. If they are so eager to come after me, then I’d rather start swinging than wait until they resort to more vicious methods.”

“I don’t know, man…” Michael said. “I think you’ll just make it worse.”

Eik looked at the young healer and shrugged, the corner of his lip turned up slightly. “You know what? You’re probably right. I might have overreacted back there, but I’ve just been a bit stressed recently, and I already had a big mouth before all this. What I said will probably anger them, but I think I’ve become pretty important as of late, even if I’d prefer to be a little less sought after,” he said.

He checked his medicine belt over again since he had been rudely interrupted before. He kept talking.

“Even if I as an individual am still the weakest of the weak in those higher circles, I’m the one Atla talks to, and Atla is the one the Nidafjeld Alliance talks to. Once the leadership talks to her a bit more, they’ll realize what I’m coming to realize.”

“Which is?” Sonja asked.

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“That, without the Nidafjeld Alliance, or at least some kind of powerful support, Forest, humanity and Earth are probably going to be annihilated before long.”

All three of his friends swallowed hard as their faces grew pale. “Why?” Michael asked.

Eik motioned them closer with a finger, as if to reveal a closely guarded secret. “You know what rank Travis Lockwood, Boulder Fist Gary, and Olivia Valkiri are, right?”

They nodded. “B-rank,” Heath confirmed.

“What do you think the Nidafjeld Alliance would protect us from? Hint: it’s not A-rankers.”

Michael looked ready to puke, all three of them growing even paler than they had already been. “To my knowledge, there are at least two more ranks above A-rank. Atla called them S-rank and X-rank. If there’s anything after those, I’m not sure, but all I know is the S-rank and X-rank are unimaginably powerful. A couple of A-ranker could probably annihilate the entirety of the population of Forest.”

He told them most of what Atla had told him about the fate of defenseless new worlds, reiterating the apparent importance of strong supporters to help them safely through the coming era of multiversal conflict.

He told them about the possibility of being invaded by S-ranker or even X-rankers the moment Earth became saturated enough with dimensional matter to sustain the existence of beings of such surreal might.

He told them that some older and stronger civilizations in the Unified Mass would seek to claim Earth as their own in order to fulfill their quests for expansion, resources, or dominion, caring little about the fates of the original inhabitants.

He told them much of what he had been keeping inside. It had been fraying his nerves to carry it, and although he knew that he was cruelly putting it on their shoulders now as well, it was a tremendous relief to finally share the burden with someone he felt he could trust with it.

It was clear that his friends were rattled by the revelation, and understandably so. He had basically given them the precise recipe for the potential horrific death and destruction of themselves and their loved ones. To say it was a lot to take in would be the understatement of the century.

“I’m sorry to dump all that on you guys,” Eik sighed, sitting down on a barrel as he rechecked his laces. “You didn’t deserve that.”

Surprisingly, Michael was the first to regain his bearings. “All of that will eventually become common knowledge anyway, right?”

“Yeah, I’d guess so.”

“Then being aware of it early, despite how uncomfortable and very, very, very frightening it might be, it’s to our own advantage.”

Eik chuckled. “Thanks for seeing it that way. I certainly didn’t when Atla first told me.”

Eik spent the remaining minutes trying to comfort his friends before Travis Lockwood called for the raid to commence, ordering all teams to set off. The Great Raid was the biggest expedition ever undertaken by troops of Forest.

The march across the western plains was a disjointed, sloppy affair, none of the teams walking in anything resembling a proper formation. It was painfully obvious that this was not an operation borne of careful planning and thorough training, but simply a necessary call to arms.

Eik and company were situated somewhere in the back half of the procession, but even from that far back, the shrill clamor of battle echoed across the plains, demonstrating in no uncertain terms what they could expect inside the forest.

The sheer number of Awakened moving through the trees at once would have been an awesome defense on its own, but with the addition of high-rankers practically plowing their way to the lake, demolishing anything dumb enough to attack, they were unstoppable as they moved.

Being part of a raid of such size, Eik couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride. They were marching for Forest, to fight and to protect.

With all the noise they were making, surely the monster in the lake would be expecting them. According to reports, the number of roaming monster and Awakened beasts has risen far above what they had originally been when they team first discovered the lake and the Awakened bison, but a procession like theirs would also be riling up the forest fauna.

“Hey traitors,” a woman yelled as her group passed them. “Don’t run crying to your new masters when things get saucy, you hear! Can’t have you tanking your images even more than you already have, eh, traitors?”

They gave her the stink eye but heeded Michael’s advice to not engage. Judging only by facial expressions, only a few snickering people seemed to share that perception of treachery, yet nobody stepped in to back up Eik’s team as they were harassed.

As they made it into the western forest proper, they had to step over mangled corpses and pools of blood, mostly from monster and Awakened animals, but also from people.

“Tighten up, guys,” Sonja called as she drew her bow and nocked an arrow on the string. One of her skills, [Bat’s Ears], allowed her sensitive hearing to help her locate unseen enemies before they could ambush them. “We’ve got incoming.”

The vegetation was as dense as they remembered, only the path cut by the vanguard offering any sort of visibility. Any monsters intercepting them along the procession would be difficult to spot before they were on top of them, however.

Eik fished around in his medicine belt and popped a small, doughy sphere into his mouth before he drew Viper Fang from its sheath.

The potent mixture of poisons had a bitter taste and as it entered his system, Noxious Invigoration kicked in, pumping up his physical capabilities to make up for a bit of the strength he had lost out on when he chose the path of [Profound Toxin] over a regular E-rank.

“Straight ahead!” Sonja directed as Heath got into position to receive the attack. “No! It’s coming from ab—”

A blur of motion descended downward at an angle, moving faster than any monster Eik had fought, with the exception of the lanky D-rank monster from the fight where he had teamed up with Heath and Michael for the first time, as well as the gigantic spike-tailed bastard that had sent Olivia into a coma.

The shape went right for Michael in the back, but Heath grunted and straight armed his massive shield as he swung it up above his head to intercept the flying creature in its path. With a deafening gong of solid matter impacting a metal surface, the monster was crushed against the shield, exploding like a water balloon and turning into a slab of ground meat. Eik, who was standing just behind Heath, was bathed in warm blood.

“Ack! Gah!” he spat, mouth, nose, and eyelids sticky with the red fluid. “Nice catch, Heathy, but couldn’t you have exploded it over that way instead of right into your good buddy’s face?”

“Sorry!” the red-cheeked tank called over his shoulder, immediately returning to a stance of readiness. “Can you fight?”

“I can’t see yet. Give me ten seconds and I’ll be good.”

“Gotcha!” Heath called and engaged an Awakened boar while a white-haired monkey approached, swinging deftly from branch to branch.

The Great Raid had been kicked off with chaos.