Will had expected the return journey to get more pleasant once they passed Trimbryhall, but it was the opposite. There was a persistent hooting and howling at night—sometimes close, sometimes far away—and once when he used Detect Life, he sensed a distinctly non-human presence at the edge of his awareness.

It was only a matter of time before they had a run-in. It was an unreasonably pretty day, sunny and warm, on the road the wound past Greensby, that the stink of rotting flesh was carried up on the breeze. Soon they could make out distant screams. Human ones.

Their options were to call a halt and try to wait out the danger, or get it over with and walk into whatever jack-in-the-box surprise Nifala had in store for them.

Will chose the second. At least that way, they could try to flip the script and get the drop on the mystery threat. His qualified guess was grinners. They had heard them on the way up, too, and still hadn’t encountered any. He figured they were due a run-in.

The chimps went up into the trees, armed with bows and arrows tipped with a crude poison Will whipped up from parts of the peeking troll and the nettlegeist. Nix and Bee took the lead as the party’s heavy-hitters, while Mongrel, Will, and Oatmeal made up the back line. Having expended all his pistol ammo, Will was down to just his skills, if it came to that.

Loony’s job was to stay with Zero and keep her calm. She’d only get herself killed if she fought now.

They left the road and stalked through the forest. After some time, the screams stopped. Will pinged Detect Life once, got nothing. They kept on. Number Five reported to Mongrel that they had hostiles up ahead. Will pinged again, and this time he got a hit. Six signatures, crouched on the path ahead.

They snuck over, stacked up. The chimps got into position in the treetops, found solid firing lines.

Sure enough, they were grinners. Feasting on fresh corpses. They were like big, ugly, hunchbacked dogs, bodies covered in a sparse coat of black fur that showed the pink skin underneath. Their back limbs were that of canines, but their forelimbs ended in disturbingly human hands. True to the name, their elongated faces were stretched in ear-to-ear rictus grins, their mouths filled with large, blocky teeth.

They were distracted by their meal, consisting of four dead adventurers. A few of the monsters, forced to share, screamed and snapped at each other to gain access to the best bits.

Mongrel gave a sharp whistle. The boys opened fire, raining arrows down on the grinners that buried themselves into their backs. It did not seem to do much damage, but it did confuse them, the creatures whipping around to find the cause of their sudden pains, still unaware that it came from above.

The poison would only take serious effect after a few minutes. Probably too long to be relevant. But it couldn’t hurt to use it, anyway.

Mongrel shot his rifle, missed. The crack alerted the monsters. Four of them went for the main group. The other two had discovered the treeborne chimps and began climbing trunks to reach them, moving with frightening speed.

Oatmeal, in a rare show of bravery, stepped up to the treeline and unloaded his shotgun at the beasts. He was rewarded with a disastrous misfire, the gun coming apart with a bang and whistling of metal shrapnel. He staggered back and clutched at his left hand, which ran with blood.

True to form, Bee shouldered the Explorer aside and leapt forward, first into close combat. She fell upon a grinner, burying her axe in its shoulder, and the two of them tumbled away as they bore into each other full-force, rolling out of sight towards the road.

Nix stayed put, didn’t want to pull too far ahead and leave the others undefended. Good thinking. Mongrel took a second shot, actually hit one this time, but it kept coming.

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Then the grinners were on top of them. Nix shot out bladed tendrils and skewered two of them mid-air, rolled them up in a tangle of limbs and began taking them apart, pulling and cutting.

The last one went for Oatmeal. Will headed it off and hit it with an amped Spark at close range, using a Construct cylinder to mitigate the blowback. The thing flew away, landed smoking on its back, and quickly crawled up again. Tenacious little fuckers.

Will’s cylinder had held up, only showing hairline cracks, so he sent another Spark down the same tube. It shattered and cut up his arm some, but the grinner got the worst of it. Half its face was blown off, reduced to a blackened ruin with the bones showing through. Its eyeball popped from the heat.

But it refused to die. Again it staggered up, a fiery hatred showing in its remaining eye. Will was running low on AP. He drew his sword. Not his first choice, but what could you do?

The thing was at least slowed by all the accumulated damage. Will lunged for it. He had to keep up the pressure, deny it a chance to recover. His blade bit into its neck, but the flesh was tough, like dried-out leather, and it only sank in a few centimeters. The grinner twisted and nearly pulled the sword out of his hands, but he managed to hold on to it.

It lunged at him. He jumped back. Its great jaws snapped shut with a sharp click, caught a scrap of clothing, tore it free. He slashed, it weaved. Then it giggled. The unmistakably human sound sent an electric shiver through him.

What’s so fucking funny?

He only had time to feel a twinge of fear before he sensed Bee coming up the rise. She was there in moments, axe retrieved, and brought it down on the creature’s back. The first blow crunched through spine, sent up a squelch of dark blood.

She kept chopping until it stopped moving. It was nearly in half by then, its entire midsection a soupy mess of blood and bone and guts and pulped flesh.

One grinner came falling out of the trees, riddled full of arrows, and twitched spastically on the ground. Pumped so full of poison that it was essentially done, Will figured. The last one came leaping, hoping to catch them unawares. Nix snatched it out of the air and sliced it up.

And that was that. The few monsters that were still wriggling were dispatched in swift fashion. No one was too badly hurt. Bee was banged up, had a chunk taken out of her right forearm, but she’d be fine. Oatmeal was whining like an abandoned puppy over his cut-up hand, hoping for attention. Will fished out a couple shards of metal, bandaged him up, and told him to stop being dramatic.

No one else was hurt. Nix had shed a tentacle, but that was nothing for her. It just slithered back to her and melted into her flesh, and she was like new again. Loony looked a little green in the face. She got it together when she saw that Will was watching.

Aside from the disaster with the shotgun, it could not have gone much better. While the others picked through the adventurers’ corpses, Will scrounged the woods and roadside for low-level reagents—herbs, flowers, and mosses—to whip up a small batch of healing potions. He distributed them to Oatmeal and Bee. He then got to work butchering the grinners. It would take a minute, so they set up camp early for the day, and the chimps stayed in the treetops to keep watch in case more trouble came their way.

The grinners did not yield anything too exciting. He took their teeth, livers, and fingers. Class 3 reagents, probably. He had gotten spoiled, that he saw that as inferior.

When Oatmeal got done whining about his hand, he started up about the shotgun, lamenting that he’d lost out on his only good weapon. Mongrel gave him shit about breaking it. In truth, it probably wasn’t the kid’s fault. Just equipment failure due to inferior craftsmanship, most likely. Mongrel knew that too. Not that he was going to let go of a good hazing opportunity on account of that.

Oatmeal took it personally. The young Explorer sulked for ages, wrapped up in his cloak. Finally Mongrel got tired of seeing him like that, or maybe grew a conscience, and gave his rifle over as reconciliation, said he was better off with it. Oatmeal lit up like a kid on Christmas, and kept it tucked in the crook of his arm for the rest of the night, doing a fair—albeit unintentional—parody of the missionary they had met.

It was a funny little troop of na’er-do-wells he had put together. Misfits, the lot of them, but then there was no such thing as normal or well-adjusted on Nifala. Half of them were still raw, but there was potential. Certainly the best line-up he’d ever had. There had been no need for a big group, before. Will and Mongrel had kept things simple, small-scale, minimal risk.

He had to admit, this approach excited him more. Maybe Bee was rubbing off on him. With their bond, he wasn’t sure if there was a risk of her personality bleeding over into his.

They went to sleep, and Will did his best to ignore the wet sounds of Mongrel and his demon tongue-fighting each other. It was becoming a problem.