“Still nothing?”

Kaveh’s face fell, the only outward sign of his growing sense of panic, as he got the confirmation. No sign of Mandla.

Where the fuck are you dude?

Mandla hadn’t come back from his mission to the south. He and Nicola had gone down after him, to see if Nikki could sniff out the spearman’s whereabouts. After hours of fruitless searching, Nicola had shrugged and bluntly told him Nikki was a hyena, not a hunting dog.

They did find signs that a large number of people had moved through there, but neither of them were trackers and someone had purposefully obfuscated many of the tracks. They’d returned to the burrow in the dead of night, empty-handed.

Once they entered, things got worse. The two found Jabu and the rest of the Gigglers with sabres drawn, arrayed against Andrew and his swordsmen, in a situation clearly about to descend into violence.

Kaveh immediately intervened.

“Whoa whoa what the fuck is going on?”

Jabulani answered him in a bitter tone.

“Karl decided that the invasion meant we had to start rationing food. He’s taken control of the food tunnels and his lackeys are rounding people up to swear [Fealty]. For their own safety, of course.”

Andrew shot back with no less venom.

“You’re mad we pulled the trigger before you did. Don’t play dumb, we all know you were waiting to do the exact same thing when Nicola returned.”

Kaveh’s head spun. This was not his realm of expertise. Nicola decided to make things even more complicated by manifesting her bow, measurably raising the tension in the air. Everyone looked at her.

“If this is what we’re doing now, then surely you know to fuck off since I’m back, yes? I’ll deal with Karl. Jabu, where’s Maxwell?”

“Jacob and the spearmen barricaded themselves in with nearly half of the Supports and Classless, including Maxwell, to avoid Karl’s goons.”

Nicola scrunched her face in frustration.

“Of course, his ghost would haunt me. Okay, I’ll go to the food tunnels, you knock on their door. Tell them Mandla’s dead.”

She raised her bow and the swordsmen flinched. But she glanced at Kaveh, lowered her arm and ran off deeper into the burrow.

The two groups stared at each other for a second before both running off in Maxwell’s direction. Kaveh was left standing alone.

What the fuck just happened?

----------------------------------------

Darkness.

Then, all of a sudden, blaring light as the blindfold was pulled off his head.

Mandla blinked away tears as his eyes adjusted to the harsh morning sun.

Shit, was I out the whole night? I must have been a lot more damaged than I thought.

He was on what seemed to be the rooftop of a building, with vines growing all over the sides. It smelled dank, and not in the good way.

This is the swamp.

He tried to stand up, but looking down, saw that he was restrained on a metal chair bolted to the ground.

He looked up. The man in the red coat was standing there, silently watching him get his bearings.

Mandla sighed.

He brought me here for a reason. Let’s play dumb.

“Okay, you got me. I’m not gonna suck your dick or do any weird shit to live, so just get it over with.”

The man stared at him, contemplative.

“She did mention that you were talkative. But that’s beside the point. I’m Jason, the leader of my Faction and initiator of this here invasion.”

“Hello Jason, I’m Thicc Daddy.”

Jason just stared silently. Mandla gave an awkward cough.

“Tough crowd. Fine, I’m Mandla.”

Jason nodded.

“Mandla. You really hurt my daughter yesterday.”

“Please, she looks tougher than the both of us combined and she’s at Third Rung. She’ll be fine.”

“True. But not all wounds are physical. That was her first fight against another Third Rung and it really messed with her confidence.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo. Taking an explosion to the face messed with mine. Are you a Fourth Rung, by the way? That little gun of yours is way overpowered.”

“I’ll be asking the questions, Mandla.”

The spearman raised an eyebrow.

He’s looking for the bunker or the burrow, maybe both.

“So this is an interrogation?”

Jason gave a small smile.

“That’s a question. But no, not yet. Interrogation has… nasty implications. And we’d like to avoid those, right?”

Mandla’s mouth went dry.

His hands were tied to the chair just like every other part of his body but he tried pulling his arms up nonetheless. It was futile anyway. Even though they were the only two on the roof, nothing Mandla could do was faster than shooting.

It’s fine. I’m fine. He’s just trying to scare me.

Jason continued.

“Now, I’ve been a soldier probably for longer than you’ve been alive. You know what the first rule of warfare is?”

Mandla shrugged.

Jason tutted.

“Logistics, logistics, logistics. Without a good handle on your logistics, any sort of military action is doomed from the start. I thought I had that. My supplies were calculated exactly.”

But then The Hunger hit.

“But then The Hunger hit. I’ve been put in a very awkward position here, far from my main settlements. I think you can help me with that.”

“Yeah sure, the N4 highway goes east towards Mozambique, you’ll probably find food over there.”

Jason stared, silent once more. Mandla stared back, unyielding.

The man continued.

“We had information from a reliable source that there was a bunker buried somewhere around this community.”

“Like a nuclear bunker? Woah.”

Jason gave him a dry look.

“We found that bunker, but it was half-flooded and missing two things I have great need of right now.”

Two?

“The food that didn’t get waterlogged, and the map of the other bunkers.”

Mandla didn’t visibly react but his mind was reeling. There was a map? Kaveh wouldn’t have hidden that but Karl…

That wily motherfucker.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“So there we are, wondering what the hell we’re going to do, when an Ascendant comes snooping around.”

“A devastatingly handsome Ascendant.”

“The Ascent makes us all beautiful, kid, don’t feel special. This thoroughly average Ascendant gets himself captured, leading to several natural inquiries. How, for example, is it that he looks so well-fed?”

The subtext was clear. You had to have had food to get past the Hunger. Where is it?

Mandla shrugged.

“Maybe he was really fat before the apocalypse.”

Jason chuckled.

“You just don’t stop, huh? Look kid, your options are limited. You seem sharp enough to understand that your survival is contingent on your usefulness to me. And I dislike killing kids. So help me out. Be useful.”

I’m the only one of us he’s seen. He can’t kill me until he knows where the burrow is. Or they capture someone else.

Having the threat to his life outlined so clearly allowed Mandla a clarity of purpose. Every bit of mental energy would have to be focused on his new goal.

Escape. Or die.

Piece of cake.

----------------------------------------

Kaveh ran down the tunnel, following Nicola’s path towards the storage rooms. Mandla had been gone for mere hours and already things were falling apart.

He’d managed to break up several fights before anyone was seriously injured, but just the fact that people were drawing steel on each other felt like a gut-punch to the assassin.

Has this been simmering under my nose all this time?

Especially after their victory over the elephant, Kaveh thought their group had never been tighter. As he made his way into the food storage area, he heard the sounds of combat, betraying the lie he’d so hopefully believed in.

I’ve been an idiot. A blind one.

Rounding a corner, he saw Nicola and Karl locked in deadly combat. One of the storage rooms was filling with smoke as a fire was breaking out within, while sparks flew as Karl relentlessly cut arrows out of the air, others thudding into his shield, chasing down Nicola who was using her enhanced physique to its fullest, acrobatically bounding off walls, shooting from mid-air and staying just ahead of Karl’s vicious swipes. The walls around them were scored, pocked and burned from missed and deflected strikes, and anyone who’d been with them had long since disappeared for their own safety.

No!

Kaveh manifested his [Scimitar], running into the fray and flicking the curved sword out of its scabbard. The tunnel lurched about him as he entered his high-speed perspective, and the brawling duo’s frantic motions slowed down to a snail’s crawl. Karl’s face was frozen in a savage snarl, while Nicola’s was locked in focused determination.

The assassin ran between them, following the ghostly silhouettes of his skill, edging around the ethereal bear-claw effect in front of Karl’s [Sverð], and placed his palm in the middle of the large man’s chest, shoving it backwards. Still moving at blurring speed, he ducked underneath the barrage of arrows from Nicola’s [Volley] and grabbed her foot. His sword re-entered its scabbard. Time lurched once more.

“Oooof!”

“Ahh, fuck!”

Both Karl and Nicola exclaimed as the former shot backwards, crashing into the tunnel wall, and the latter’s momentum was violently arrested mid-air, breaking her ankle. Kaveh let her drop, dismissing his [Scimitar].

Nearly quivering with fury, he tried to make sense of it all.

“Guys, what the fuck are you doing? Do you realise we’ve been invaded? Do you even care? Mandla’s alone out there and you two are what? Fucking squabbling?!”

Nicola, nursing her healing ankle, bitterly spat a response.

“Mandla’s dead, Kav. He obviously encountered a lar-”

She quietened into a stunned silence as golden flakes swirled around Kaveh’s palm, coalescing into his wicked [Khanjar] blade. The long dagger glittered in the growing light of the fire as he gripped it, white-knuckled. Kaveh took a tone he never had with her before.

“Don’t.”

Karl raggedly drew in a few wheezing breaths, winded from the impact, before coughing out a response as well.

“She’s right, Kaveh. He’s either dead or as good as dead if he got himself captured. We need a Hegemon and a plan of action, not some naïve hope.”

“You shut up! Both of you just fucking shut up! You don’t even know for sure, but him being dead would be real convenient to your plans, wouldn’t it? You guys are fucking unbelievable!”

Nicola tried to interject into his furious rant.

“Kavvy, we have to face th-”

All she accomplished was turning his incandescent rage on her.

“What the fuck did I say? You two fucking- fucking hyenas are picking over Mandla’s body before he’s even dead while we could be out there finding him! Bringing him back! I’m fucking disgusted at both of you, and I swear right the fuck now, neither of you are getting my [Fealty]! Neither! I’m going to go find my fucking friend.”

With that, he dematerialised his [Khanjar] and strode out of the room, smoke following him as he stepped with purpose.

I’ll just do it myself.

----------------------------------------

Mandla tested his restraints once more. Completely immobile.

The invaders evidently had experience in imprisoning Ascendants, as they had made absolute sure he couldn’t escape. After his conversation with Jason, he’d been brought down to this room to “think on how he could contribute” and they’d neutralised his abilities quite effectively.

He was suspended in the middle of the room, hanging from his arms via chains attached to opposite ends of the ceiling. Said chains had been driven through his forearms with spikes, and his body had long since healed around them, locking them in place and sending a dull, throbbing pain up his arms with every movement. His hands, the conduits through which he summoned his weapons, had been cut off and the stumps were covered in a ball of concrete to prevent them healing back, courtesy of a [Sapper] with the [Soften] skill. His legs were bound together and tethered to the floor by another short chain, stretched taut. The blindfold had been placed back on his head, preventing him from gathering more information about the room. All he could hear was the chirping of various mutated insects outside. All he could smell was the damp room.

He was well and truly helpless.

Okay, this might not be a piece of cake.

Mandla heard the door open ahead. A single heavy footfall, the creak of wood, another footfall, another creak and the blindfold was being ripped off his head once again.

It was the woman, Jason’s daughter. She hobbled on a pair of wooden crutches, as the stump where her leg used to be sprouted regenerated flesh ever so slowly.

I did that, didn’t I?

She had come to visit him for some reason. Mandla would take full advantage of this opportunity.

Jason had inadvertently told him that she was easily emotionally perturbed. He’d have to remember that.

She looked unsure of what to say.

“Umm, I don’t know how to do this. Are you okay? No, of course not, what am I saying, ugh. What I mean is… ahem I’m Victoria.”

He just stared at her, wordless.

She flushed, red tinting her cheeks.

“You’re- you’re Mandla, right? Mandla Nkosi?”

She knows my name? How?

His eyes narrowed, staying silent.

She looked down towards the ground before visibly taking a large breath, gathering her courage.

“I- uh… I used to follow someone on Instagram. Before the… you know. A friend of yours? Kaveh Sattari?”

Mandla’s face froze in confusion before the absurdity of the situation made him burst out laughing from its sheer unexpectedness. Kaveh was hot, and his looks and genuine personality meant been popular on social media from the moment he hit puberty, something in the millions of followers. There were leagues of people, mostly women, thirsting over him to the point he had dedicated fan pages. Mandla had never been one for the social media game so he never really kept track or even had accounts for himself but being around the hazel-eyed Persian meant passively absorbing some of that attention, to the point that a lot of people knew him as “Kaveh’s friend”. It rankled sometimes, especially when girls would talk to him just to get access to Kaveh. But this?

Even in the apocalypse, I can’t escape Kaveh’s fangirls. Man, he’s really wasted on Nicola.

She looked hurt that Mandla had just laughed in her face, and got angrily indignant.

“Listen you little shit, I convinced my dad that you would be more useful to us alive than dead, so I expect a little gratitude! All I want is some confirmation. You look a lot like Kaveh’s friend but I can’t be sure. I just need to know if he’s alive.”

I’m getting the unpleasant feeling she’s one of the obsessive ones. On second thought, this might be the best possible outcome.

“We can trade information.”

She frowned, scrunching up her delicate face.

“I’m not gonna tell you our biggest weaknesses, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, nothing like that. I just want to know what terrible things you guys have planned for me. Then I can tell you about… Kavvy.”

Ugh, I hate Nicola. Her names fucking suck.

For her part, Victoria flushed deeper, clearly excited at his mention of that name. Predictably, Nicola had been a big part of Kaveh’s online life and many more people called him by that shitty nickname thanks to her.

She opened her mouth to respond, then shut it, almost afraid to speak before finally talking.

“You should just swear [Fealty] to my dad and lead him to your cache. He’s been put in stressful situation here. We have like fifty people and a few days’ worth of food in hostile territory. Normally we can hunt to supplement our stores but the only thing around here are tough-as-shit crocodiles, while the savannah is somehow empty of all game and… let’s just say I’ve seen what my dad will do when his people are on the line.”

“He’ll write me a sternly-worded letter?”

“He’ll break you, Mandla. I’ve seen it before. Everyone breaks eventually and you’ll be no different. Please spare yourself. It really… really isn’t pretty. And you’ll give us what we need eventually either way.”

“Torture doesn’t work.”

“Only if you don’t have the ability to confirm the info quickly, or you have the wrong person. I’m asking you now, please don’t make him do this. You seem capable enough that you’d be an asset to our Faction and… and I don’t want to ruin my chances with Kavvy.”

The beautiful daughter of the evil warlord wants to bone my friend instead of me. Awesome. This adventure sucks.

Mandla didn’t want to tell her that just being one of his abductors had likely put her permanently on Kaveh’s shitlist, because she might think something crazy like her only chance was to make sure Mandla never got the chance to tell him.

I’m gonna have to play this carefully. She looks sincere.

If she wasn’t just trying to fuck with his mind, Mandla was in for a horrible experience, maybe even worse than his Second Trial. Still, this was an opening.

The question was, could he last long enough to do anything with it?

----------------------------------------

Kaveh strode down the tunnels, making his way to one of the communal spaces. The smell of smoke grew in the air as part of their food stores continued to burn, spurring growing activity around him, with people streaming past carrying water in wooden buckets.

The communal spaces, designed to be places to retreat to if the burrow was ever attacked, were accessible from many tunnels but sealed with heavy doors at each entrance. Jacob, Maxwell and others had taken advantage of this and were holing up, waiting out the chaos outside.

Kaveh found Jabu and Andrew loudly arguing in front of one of these huge doors. Striding into view, the assassin summoned his [Scimitar], his face brooking no argument. Seeing this, the two opted to run instead of confronting him.

He stepped up to the door.

“Jacob? Maxwell? You guys in there?”

Muffled noise from within.

“Kaveh? Is that really you? It’s been crazy down here, we’re hearing all sorts of things and people are patrolling the tunnels with weapons. Jacob, Monty and I were able to rally people to hole up in here but we’re blind to new developments outside. What’s really going on?”

“It’s… complicated, let’s say that. Do you have food?”

“Yeah, these places were designed to be defended. We have a cache along with some water, but we’ll have to come out eventually.”

“That’s fine. Stay in there, don’t let anyone in. I’ll be back with Mandla.”

And with that, Kaveh left the tunnel, left the burrow, and, veiling his face with his scarf, disappeared off into the night.