Dorian shot awake and slipped into a combat stance preparing to fight an opponent that existed nowhere except in his head. It took minutes of deep breathing to calm his racing heart and thoughts.

Dorian's mind had been on the blood drenched fields again. It was always that damned field.

Knowing that thinking about that hellscape would do no good, Dorian focused on something that was thudding around his skull like a living migraine. His discovery the previous night and his need to find a monster core. Once, Dorian had harvested monster cores in the hundreds—he'd also left a lot behind when he couldn't be bothered to get out his hunting knife and cut out the core.

And now here he was almost a decade later trying to find a single one and being unable to. The thought and the absurdity of the situation made him laugh and he moved to prepare for the day. After his morning ablutions and swallowing down the least moldy bread he could find, Dorian slipped on his jacket and moved to do the impossible that was common place once.

Dorian got to the garage and knocked once and entered. He found Jax lounging in a chair with a new bandage on his side and Leo reading something on his PT. Personal Wrist Terminal. Dan, the man he was looking for was absent. Dorian cleared his throat to get the other two's attention.

“How are you guys doing?”

All he got back was non committal grunts in return and an absent minded wave from Leo. It was that kind of morning. Dorian flicked his wrist and projected a screen from the terminal clasped there. He scrolled through the spam messages and promises of strength and resources from the many organizations set up to fleece hunters for the little they made, he found Dans contact and sent him a message asking for where he was.

Knowing he wouldn't get a reply soon, if at all— Dan had a special hatred for technology made by the GDF. Dorian found a seat and begun searching the web for easily purchased monster cores. His preliminary findings were not good. Each core went for thousands of credit each. For a moment Dorian contemplated just leaving the city and going to hunt for a monster core in the wild lands himself. He quickly dismissed the idea, that road led to death.

Monsters wherever they came from weren't really suited for the Earth and the hunters hadn't given them time to acclimatise. Those monsters that survived and now populated the wild land, abandoned fields, forests and cities of humanity were the worst. They had adapted and were very good at staying alive, and even better at killing. And without the system and the advanced weaponry the GDF were developing from monster parts, Dorian was basically defenceless. Not to speak of the rising monster population. The issue of the wild lands was a whole nother powder keg waiting for a spark.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

With buying a core out of the question and hunting in the wild lands an assured death, Dorian was stuck. He contemplated telling the others his discovery but stopped himself. He couldn't be sure he hadn't been hallucinating and telling the others only for it to be false was cruel. Dorian went back to scrolling through the web for hours till he stumbled on a possible answer. A dragon core.

Humans had been drawing and weaving the flying, fire breathing lizard into their stories since time immemorial. To see a figment of their imagination brought to life was awe inspiring, to see it burn down a city with it's breath was not. The breathe the monster had used to burn down the city was not of fire, but of pure weaponized Echo. Mankind's spirit had nearly broken on that day but yet again the hunters had pulled through and felled the monster. And now it's Core was providing energy and powering Kowloon City. A city Dorian had recently robbed.

Further reading on the forum expounded on the possible solution to Dorians problem, the dragon core was housed in the Kowloon City Power Plant and it only hired hunters to run maintenance on the facility. Not by choice but by necessity, only hunters could survive the high Echo emissions. Dorian didn't need to read more to infer where the writer was going. All he needed was to secure employment within the Power Plant and to slowly siphon the excess echo the dragon core generated into a depleted one.

Further reading attested to the veracity of the ploy but all agreed that it was a painfully slow process, taking months to fill a single core. Dorian read even more but couldn't find anything else. That was one way to solve his current problem, but it was contingent on Dorian getting a job at the Power Plant— he didn't like that. Another possible way that Dorian had tried not to consider was the Meat Locker.

The Meat Locker was an underground fighting ring in all major cities that pitted hunters against each other and monsters, most times to the death. Particularly good showcasing were awarded with monster cores and other amenities. Dorian despised the place because he and everyone knew who really ran the fighting rings. It wasn't the hunters that played at being underground bosses but the shadowy figures who took glee in watching mankind's former finest kill each other for mere trinkets. Should all else fail, Dorian put the Meat Locker on the bottom of his list.

A beep on his terminal had Dorian swiping through his screens till he saw his credit balance had climbed from Zero to a solid five thousand. Hoping against hope, Dorian scrolled back to the monster core sales page and found that impossibly, the prices had somehow jumped. He was never close to affording any of them even with his sudden influx of credit but now they were truly beyond him. Sighing in defeat, Dorian begun crafting a resume.

He needed that Power Plant job.