17,271 years later.

Junior Huntsman Grace Pendleton squinted and stared up through the window of the Humvee. A hundred-foot-long, stony-skinned cuttlefish seemed to be swimming through the sky half a mile away, three or four Quonset hut-like structures growing out of its flattened back. “…Okay.”

The messenger sitting in the passenger seat up front followed Pendleton’s gaze upward. “Yeah, those things. Whole bunch of monsters like that started showing up in these parts a few weeks ago. Scavvers figure that they emerged from somewhere to the northeast, that’s where you find the most of them.”

Senior Huntsman Simon Messier, sitting in the back seat across from Pendleton, watched as she signed what the messenger up front was saying for his sake. When she finished, he signed in turn, ‘Are they dangerous?’

“Are they dangerous?” repeated Pendleton.

“Most of them, no, they don’t give us any trouble. Far as we can tell, at least.” The messenger shifted nervously in his seat. “A friend of mine who works at the relay station says that people’ve been reporting stuff like it all over the country, far back as August. Used to be pretty okay between us, but command said there isn’t room in this town for the two of us. Anything like that on your end, back in Eugene?”

“If there is,” mumbled Pendleton, signing for both her words and the messenger’s, “I don’t have the clearance to know. Can’t speak for Simon, of course.”

‘SH Cane, please,’ signed Messier, taking a break from inspecting the stripped shotgun in his lap. ‘We’re at work.’

‘We’re commuting,’ signed Pendleton, half of her attention still transfixed by the flying invertebrate. “Doesn’t count… Hey, Kim, what time are we looking at?”

The driver peered through the scratch-covered windshield, out at the snowplow that slowly cleared a path for the Humvee through the two-foot-deep snow, then checked the map spread out across the dashboard and the compass holding the map in place. “…I give us ten minutes.”

“Finally.” Pendleton flexed the numb toes encased within her combat boots. After a full day of driving and with Servant outposts becoming less and less common the further north the escort went, the trip was beginning to take a bit of a psychological toll on Pendleton. There was a non-zero chance that she had hallucinated the flying cuttlefish and entailing explanation. Or she was just being melodramatic. It was hard to tell.

Messier reassembled his shotgun, the third time he had done so in the past six hours. Pendleton understood the nervousness. Two days was plenty of time for a pack of Primoi to find a way to break out a third-rate Servant holding cell. It would be a small miracle by itself if they were even still around to meet their executioners.

“Sorry about the long drive,” said the messenger, clearly reading the same information into Messier’s gesture. “Nobody here has any real training when it comes to actually dealing with those things, and finding actual Bug-eyes has been getting harder and harder, thanks to you-know-who. We got lucky when we found out that there were still any left in the state.”

“Weren’t the recruitment drives supposed to stop something like this from happening?” asked Pendleton. “We’ve been doubling up all over the country, they can’t all still be going to the cadres.”

‘The Burning One isn’t exactly interested in being a manageable strain on resources,’ replied Messier. ‘Keeping us two stationed was probably just to keep a manpower quota fulfilled.’

“Right…” Pendleton felt the car’s interior become a sort of grim that she had grown very accustomed to over the course of the last four years.

The driver pointed to something outside the car. Out of the snowy gloom emerged a sign reading ‘ENJOY SALEM’, underneath which was a painted wooden board featuring the silhouette of a tree-filled urban skyline. The board had been partially covered by a rough-cut metal rectangle, which had had ‘THIS AREA IS ACTIVELY INHABITED BY THE SERVANTS OF RECKONING. REPORT YOUR PRESENCE AT 555 LIBERTY STR. UNDECLARED INTRUDERS WILL BE DETAINED’ stenciled onto it with white spray paint.

“Welcome to Salem,” muttered the driver, as the Humvee passed by the sign. “Edge of the world.”

At the bare minimum, navigation became easier once one could tell where the roads were supposed to be, even if the roads themselves couldn’t be seen for all the snow.

The messenger was dropped off at the local communal housing, but before the driver could ferry the two Huntsmen towards the security compound, Messier opened the door and stepped out. 'We need to do a tour. It’s a new policy thing, helps with recruitment efforts.'

“Won’t be two minutes,” confirmed Pendleton, following Messier out of the car. “Hell, just keep this thing running.”

“If I do that,” replied the driver, “that’s your next three months of rations.”

“Okay then, maybe don’t.” Pendleton hurried to Messier’s side.

When the two Huntsmen were five feet from the doors to the converted apartment complex, the messenger that had brought the two of them to the city opened the door for the two of them and nodded them inside. “C’mon, I got everyone together for you.”

Pendleton and Messier entered the complex’s lobby to the sound of thunderous applause. Several emaciated Servants shone battery-powered lamps at the two Huntsmen like spotlights, while other bundled-up, half-skeletal figures swarmed forward and enthusiastically tried to receive a handshake.

Someone at the back whistled. “How many of them Primoi have y’all killed so far?”

“Yeah, we, uh…” Pendleton broke into a grin and pulled her windbreaker’s hood from her head. “Thanks for asking. I’m Huntsman Moonshot, and this is my partner, Cane. It really is such a great duty that I’ve been given. From the bottom of my heart, it finally feels like I get to make a difference after all these years, and the Servants need brave people like me, and you, and all of us, to step up to the plate and do the best we can to turn this all around. We Huntsmen might not be much individually, but when we Servants work as a team, we get to show those monsters how tough humanity really is!”

The dozen-ish Servants broke into another round of whooping and cheering. Someone firmly patted Pendleton in the back before fading to the rear of the crowd.

“But for now…” Pendleton nodded back towards the grey, intimidating-looking car outside the building. “We’ve got to deal with a bit of an infestation that you’ve all kindly rounded up for us. You’re all doing so well out here, seriously. When we finally kill the Burning One and bring back everyone that we’ve lost, none of you are gonna be the one who washes the dishes again. That’s a Bug-eyed guarantee.”

The complex broke into the kind of laughter that one might present to a business associate that had been invited over for dinner.

“That’ll be us, then.” Pendleton waved and turned around. “Keep up the fine work, everyone. Vengeance scattered!”

Half a dozen ‘Vengeance scattered’s followed the two Huntsmen out of the complex.

‘You remembered to say ‘great opportunity’ this time, right?’ signed Messier, once he had closed the door behind him and turned to place himself in Pendleton’s field of view.

Pendleton blinked and looked back at Messier. ‘You’re still hung up on that?’

‘I just want to make sure. If you say ‘great duty’ again instead of ‘great opportunity’ in front of one of our superiors, they might start actually doing something to pressure you into saying it right.’

Pendleton rolled her eyes and opened up the Humvee’s rear door. ‘I still got the point across, didn’t I?’

‘Doesn’t stop whoever wrote that from being a stickler,’ signed Messier. ‘There’s no point in bringing something down on yourself, just train yourself out of saying it.’

The driver dropped the Huntsmen off at the ‘security compound’ and drove away with a curt “Vengeance scattered”.

Pendleton slung her shotgun over her shoulder and pulled her gas mask over her face, tucking her blonde ponytail under one of the straps. She sized up the converted police station before getting Messier’s attention with a short wave. ‘Doesn’t look like much,’ she signed with her gloved hands.

Messier’s face was unreadable behind his mask. He turned away and began trudging through the snow towards the boarded-up door, which appeared to have insulation foam taped to the cracks. The snow gave little indication that the police station was used any more frequently than the buildings around it.

Pendleton readjusted her mask, which she still hadn’t figured out how to fix so that it didn’t squish her nose. ‘So, any last-minute tips from my venerable mentor?’

‘Don’t touch the mask,’ signed Messier.

‘Come on, this is what you signed up for!’ Pendleton nudged Messier playfully. ‘You want me to just rely on orientation? That was just a bunch of theatrics! “Bulletproof, fireproof and can think faster than a supercomputer” isn’t especially useful for what our job actually is these days, and I figure it doesn’t even apply to any except the Burning One.’

‘Sorry I don’t know more than you,’ signed Messier, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I don’t know anyone who knows more than me either.’

Pendleton decided to look away from Messier again.

Messier cracked the door open, letting a small pile of slushy snow tumble into the darkened front room. All of the furniture had been pushed to one corner to make room for a hand crank-powered space heater, behind which huddled a single bundled-up person with a damp paperback novel in one hand.

The guard looked up at the Huntsmen entering the building. “O–Oh! The Huntsmen! I thought you weren’t due for another day!”

Messier read Pendleton’s signing, looked at the guard, and shrugged.

“Alright, well…” The guard picked up a historic-looking hunting rifle and shakily stood up. “They’re round back, in the old holding cells. And, yeah, they haven’t made any attempts to escape just yet.”

Messier unslung his shotgun and followed the guard towards a door at the back.

As the three walked down the dark, abandoned hallways of the stripped-bare police station, Pendleton prepared her shotgun as well. She rehearsed the tactics that Messier had given to her at the start of the apprenticeship, mumbling the tips behind her gas mask. “‘Thinking gives them time to power up and kill you, trust your gut and close in before they know what hit them…”

The guard came to a heavy door on the far side of the building, producing a key ring from an interior pocket of his outermost sweater while keeping one hand on the barrel of his rifle. “Don’t worry, they’re in there. I’ve checked in and heard them talking every ten minutes since we got them in here. Been hard at work.”

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While the final door was unlocked, Pendleton took a deep breath, gripped her shotgun, and prepared for her first face-to-face meeting with the newly revealed horrors of the world.

The door swung open.

“Alright then, I’m just gonna start combing the ballroom and seeing if anyone here knows anything about where they might be keeping the ruby.”

“Cool, that’ll be, uh, manipulation plus persuasion, diffic–”

“And, actually, I’m not trying to just coax out the information normally, I’m just trying to figure out who might know anything at all, then from there, I’ll just use Entrancement to make them tell me. Can’t be too big of a favor for some hot stranger to ask, right?”

“Oh, okay. Manipulation plus insight, then, but just difficulty two, I’d say. It would’ve been three, but I’ll make it easier for you.”

“Awesome.” Horan rolled eight ten-sided dice on the concrete floor, then paused from looking at the results to glance past the bars of the holding cell at the three Servants in the doorway. “Oh, hey, we’ve got visitors.” He raised his voice slightly. “Mark, we’ve got visitors!”

In the far corner of the cell, a hunched figure in a khaki hoodie withdrew a rusty-edged swiss army knife from a crack in the brickwork, where it had been in the process of being vainly used to file away the mortar. Mark dropped the knife to the floor and glanced over his shoulder at the visitors with disdain. After a moment, he picked the knife back up and went back to desperately trying to saw mortar with a stabbing implement.

“A–!” The guard stomped petulantly. “Stop that!”

“No.” Mark continued to pointlessly dull the already-ineffective blade of his knife.

“Sorry about our friend,” said Horan. “Someone with invisibility would be really useful in our game right now, which is something his character just so happens to have, but he’s apparently decided to prioritize trying to do a prison escape over helping me with a heist.”

He leaned back in his cross-legged position, supported himself with his palms, looked up at the three Servants, and blew a stray strand of hair back into place. “So, we’ve met DeShawn–” He nodded at the baffled guard– “but who’re you two new guys supposed to be? I mean, the masks and guns offer a pretty obvious answer, but it’s still proper to ask.”

Quet, sitting across from Horan, looked down at the notebook in her hands. “Want to join in? I’ve got spare character sheets, and the edition we’re using is pretty new-player-friendly. You can use my dice if you don’t have any.” She beamed sunnily. “New players are always welcome at our table!”

“She keeps sheets, custom dice and rules for nine different game systems on hand,” grumbled Mark, still working at the unyielding wall, “but no spare clothes.”

“Past-me knew what her priorities were at the time,” said Quet, “and wilderness survival wasn’t one of them. Blame the Bug-eyes.”

Pendleton got over her insurmountable confusion and ripped her gas mask off of her face. “You didn’t search them?!”

“I–I did!” protested the guard. “I checked their pockets and everything! Jacket and pants! The knife guy had a… metal… rolling pin! In his waistband!”

“He has a knife!”

“Blunt,” noted Mark.

“I’ve got pencils,” added Quet, unzipping a pocket in her skirt that the Huntsmen could have sworn hadn’t been there before and producing a worn-down stump of a pencil. She twiddled it between her thumb and forefinger for emphasis. “Not much else, though. Trying to break out has taken quite some time.”

“It would take a lot less time if more than one person actually did something,” growled Mark.

“You can put the rust-stick away, dude,” said Horan. “Jig’s up. The fuzz is here.”

“Come back with a warrant,” mumbled Mark, otherwise undisturbed in his work.

Messier audibly sighed through his mask and stared at the floor. Nobody would be keeping him caught up this time around.

Pendleton elbowed the guard. “My partner and I came all this way due to the reports of detained Primoi. These are just random, poorly dressed people!”

“I was arrested under false pretenses,” mumbled Mark.

“Would you get away from the wall for five seconds?!” snapped Pendleton.

“I am invoking my right to an attorney and will be invoking my right to remain silent until I have spoken to my attorney.”

Quet leaned to the side to look past Horan and at Mark. “Are you even a U.S. citizen? Bec– Are you American?”

Mark shrugged. “Kind of a moot point by now.”

The guard cleared his throat, which prompted a celebratory fist-raise and faux-encouraging cry of “DeShawn!” from Horan. “Actually, uh, no, when we caught them in the city, they were, like super tall, and their eyes were all… I guess they– Hey, denim guy, stop being all shrunk!”

“I feel like there are better appearance-based nicknames for me,” said Horan.

“You asked for that when you went for a jean jacket and jean jeans in minus-forty weather,” mumbled Quet.

“Blue looks good on me!” Horan sighed and stood up. He clenched his fists for a moment, then looked up at the cell’s concrete ceiling above him. “Actually, I’ll hit my head on that, it’s almost brushing me already. Don’t want a concussion right now, you know.”

“Then just crouch forward when you’re doing it or something!” protested Pendleton.

“No.”

The guard sighed. “Okay, fine, he can’t become tall again. But his eyes were–” He glanced at the leather eyepatch over Horan’s left eye. “His eye was all glowing, a–and it was blue!”

“Still is,” said Horan.

“I mean it was all blue!” The guard waved at Horan as if trying to cast a spell. “C’mon, make it glowy again! I know you can!”

“Actually, the humidity is all weird these days this far north, and if I do that without proper fluid intake in the last hour or so, I’ll get a nosebleed. Super hard to clean. This is why I prefer the warmer climates. Ever been to Egypt?”

The guard pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, yes, he can’t glow again just yet.”

Pendleton attempted to fold her arms before remembering that she was holding a shotgun. “Okay, fine, do you have any other visual indicators that you people locked up a bunch of psychopathic immortal abominations instead of a bunch of innocent people?”

“It’s just those two things,” said Horan.

The guard hung his head. “…Just those two things. But, but, um, I’ve kept them in here without feeding them since Saturday, and they’re still okay, even though they haven’t eaten in days! What do you say about that?”

“…Rations are due on Wednesday,” said Pendleton. “Nobody has eaten in days!”

The guard sighed and nodded.

“We did actually end up finishing a bag of jerky that I found in a gas station,” clarified Quet. “So that helps.”

“Do you even know what Primoi look like?” Demanded Pendleton. “L– You saw them whe– You’ve seen the photos of the Burning One. Everyone has! We all know what Primoi look like. Not like just… regular people! Do these look like the Burning One to you?” She glanced at Messier, who stared at her in response. She looked back at the guard. “Knowingly wasting Servant resources is a pretty serious offense, you know.” She caught Quet’s eye. “You. Pen and paper. Are you Primoi?”

“Yeh,” said Quet.

“And can any of you prove it?”

“Neh.”

“Alright then.” Pendleton spun around on her heel and stepped into the hallway. “I’m going to take this up with the local Custodian, see who knew about this. If you admit to providing a false alarm right now, you won’t also be charged with impeding sanctioned Huntsmen.”

“No, it’s… They’re real!” The guard looked back at the people in the cell with mounting desperation. “C’mon, don’t do this to me! Just do some magic or something!”

Horan casually inspected his fingers. “Oh, bummer, hangnail.”

“I’ll ask the Custodian about a DeShawn,” said Pendleton, striding down the hallway and signing at Messier. Right before fading from view, she turned and pointed at Horan. “And you didn’t admit to faking it, so you’ll likely be found as an accomplice to conspiracy to impede judgment efforts. Unless it somehow turns out that you are actually Primoi, in which case we’ll just kill you.”

“Fine by me,” said Horan. “I’m not with you losers.”

“Also trespassing on Servant territory, then.” Pendleton turned around and headed out. “Could’ve just inducted them and called it a day…”

The guard turned and glared at the prisoners. “You could’ve just gotten my property rights revoked! Do you things have any idea what you do to other people?!”

Horan folded his arms and shrugged. “Probably would’ve seemed a bit more believable if you weren’t so extra in the middle like that. Talking with your hands is a bad habit, you know.”

The guard snarled and gripped the barrel of his rifle for a moment, then sighed and relaxed. “For all I know, you’ve got some kind of… death-curse on you.” He turned around and followed the Huntsmen out. “I just need to back myself up. Lindsey knows I wouldn’t lie, the Huntsmen are just being tricked, yeah. They’re built for lying, after all…”

Once the guard shut the door behind him and his footsteps had receded, Quet nodded calmly. “…I don’t know if you’re going to take this as a compliment or an insult, but I do intend it as a compliment when I say that you’re shockingly good at being an absolute nightmare.”

Horan chuckled nervously and brought a hand to his hair. “Well, a– You know, i–it’s something you learn over time, and, I mean you were good too! And Mark was… naturalistic.”

“The things we do to make Deus get rid of all this…” Mark shrugged and yanked the knife out of the mortar, which resulted in the rusty blade breaking off and remaining lodged between the bricks. “I invoked my rights. I take them seriously.”

Quet blinked slowly. “The world ended, Mark.”

“And yet the law persists, because life isn’t fair.”

–

Nearby to a frozen river and only half a block away from the city’s communal residence was a squat, concrete mound of a building. A masked Pendleton and Messier were ushered inside and given directions by the old city hall’s single guard, who looked like they were supposed to just be starting high school by now.

After a surprisingly harrowing few minutes of navigating their way through the desolate, prison-like hallways, the two Huntsmen found themselves in what was ostensibly the beating heart of Salem: an array of archaic radio equipment was strewn across the walls of a former office space, manned by a trio of Servants who looked no better off than the scavengers in the nearby apartments. One of the radio operators pointed the Huntsmen to a single-person office adjacent to the radio room.

Inside the office, a woman in her fifties played absent-mindedly with a dented Stylophone. When Pendleton knocked on the ajar door, she dropped the stylus and snapped to attention. “O–Oh! The Huntsmen! I’d heard that Kim and Al were back, how did the elimination go?”

Pendleton removed her mask and started signing for Messier. “Miss Custodian. Yeah, about that…” She waited for Messier to enter the room and stand next to her. “We just had some… concerns about the Primoi your city captured. Were you or any of your retainers actually present upon their detainment?”

“Oh, yeah, totally.” The Custodian slid the Stylophone. “One of the scavver teams managed to hold up some trespassers and brought them in once they noticed the glowing eyes. I’ve seen them myself, everyone in the city has. Do–Don’t worry, though, we made sure to only look at the holding cell one at a time.”

Pendleton mentally added ‘Gross breach of protocol from regional administration’ to the list of issues with the town. “Okay, but how were you aware that they were Primoi?”

The custodian blinked slowly. “…Because two of them were seven feet tall and had glowing, solid-color eyes?”

“M-hm, m-hm, okay, and could you please provide a visual description of the three?”

“Sure, uh…” The Custodian narrowed her eyes. “One was, I think Middle-Eastern, he wore far too much denim and had an eyepatch, and the other tall one–”

One of the radio operators poked their head through the door. “Hey, Lindsey, sorry to bother you, but we’re getting something on the priority network.”

“Oh, right then!” The Custodian stood up and hurried around her desk, gesturing for the two Huntsmen to part. “Sorry, this is for me.”

The Custodian, with the two Huntsmen trailing behind her, hurried to a desk with a ham radio set up on top. One of the radio operators pressed a button and slid a microphone towards her, which she took and held close. “Custodian present.”

“This is SDC-USA-49,” replied the radio. “Verification code 8813. Is this SO-USA-31? Verify, over.”

“Verified,” said the Custodian, fear dawning on her face. “S–State purpose for contact, ov–over.”

Messier looked to Pendleton, who nodded solemnly and signed as the radio continued.

“HVT Beta-One has been detected on a confirmed course with your jurisdiction, ETA T-minus three minutes. Interception forces are mobilizing, immediate Class-3 emergency procedures recommended. Over and out.”

The Custodian’s eyes went wide at the mention of Beta-One. Once the transmission cut out, she turned to one of the radio operators who had been listening in behind her back. “Call the scavvers, tell them to head downstairs now. We’re getting out of here as soon as possible.”

On the way down the nearby hall, the Custodian waved an approaching scavver back down the way he came. “It’s the Search-and-Destroys! Back to the apartments! Now!”

Pendleton looked to Messier, who shook his head. She looked back at the Custodian. “SH Cane and I will remain topside to keep eyes on the target, help the cadre out if we can. You stay safe, we’ll handle the target to the best of our ability.”

The Custodian nodded and followed the radio operators out of the room. “Try your best. Vengeance scattered.”

“…Vengeance scattered.” Pendleton pulled her mask back onto her face and followed Messier towards the stairs leading down to ground level.