Okay. Katrin could kick some serious ass. His ass, specifically. Along with any other ass he’d seen since arriving in this strange world. Even without the blades she carried.

Honestly, he’d somewhat seen it coming, what with the way the others treated her. The other elf, apparently a friend, seemed to be friendly enough with her. Were they siblings? They looked enough alike—but then, he’d never seen anyone else like them, except maybe for those people who’d come out of, and gone back into, the freakin’ air.

He wondered what else she could do. There’d been a lot of fuss—and, he suspected, swearing—about her tattoos earlier, and the other elf had been on hand for healing while that was going on. They’d also started bleeding, which made him suspect they were more than just decoration.

Could tattoos make magic happen in this world?

So far, his weren’t showing any magical abilities, though he had caught the others staring at them from time to time.

And his HUD wasn’t magically connecting to anything, either.

[Searching… Searching… Searching… Error: Connection not found.]

Despite Katrin’s clear skill advantage, the human, Nalis, seemed nominally in charge. The two others looked to her for security guidance, but though she bickered—no, ‘bicker’ wasn’t the right word. That had been a full-on argument earlier—with him, she also, interestingly, deferred to him.

Nalis was a prince, according to Donal’s depiction of a stick-figure royal family drawn in the dirt. He wasn’t quite sure about Donal and Katrin. By the drawing of them next to a couple of trees, he assumed they were forest-dwelling elves—and, he finally understood the world for ‘forest’ Donal had been trying to teach him all afternoon—but Donal’s first attempt to explain what Katrin was had grown rather complex, involving a lot of stick people and a lot of circles.

In the end, he’d brushed out his attempts in frustration and replaced them with a drawing of an elven royal family, denoted by their pointy ears and their varyingly-sized crowns and his lines indicative of a family tree. Then, he’d drawn an angry elven soldier defending them against an equally angry wolf. Then, he’d circled the human prince from his earlier stick family—not the one with the small crown, he noticed, but th second one—and drew a line connecting him with the angry guard.

So, if he read things correctly, Katrin was some form of royal guard who, for some reason, was protecting a different set of royalty.

Seemed off the prince didn’t have his own guard, though. Even if he were doing emissary work, he should have his own security detail.

He wished he knew more about it. Much more than stick-figures and gestures over the fading light of an afternoon could tell him.

And, God, did he ever regret not taking Spanish in school. With a name like Matteo, he really should have, and he knew enough that he could recognize the prince trying to speak it with him.

But no. Although his grandmother’s Mexican roots had provided his given name, it was his father’s side that provided the familial default language.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Greek, not Spanish.

And even then, he was rusty. Trying to speak it was like trying to flex an old hinge. Words were slow to come back to him, but they kept coming. Randomly, throughout the two days he’d been here.

And they didn’t matter at all, because nobody else understood them.

No English, either—which just further clinched the fact that, wherever he was, it was definitely not the United States.

If only his HUD could connect.

God, just one little connection, and he’d be downloading the world’s dictionaries so fast—Hell, another week and he’d have had them and a working translator. It was a default installation.

Instead, all he got was—

[Searching… Searching… Searching… Error: Connection not found.]

—that.

Oh well. When life gave you lemons, you had to work with them. At least his time in the military had prepared him for that. No one gave out half-working lemons quite like they did.

And, well, this new install did have some pretty nice programming. The targeting system was smooth as he’d ever felt—like a snap running through his nerves when he lined it up right—and the thing had a massive upgrade in memory. It also did have the translator app, even if its dictionaries were completely empty. He was just building it from the ground up.

Hell, Donal probably thought he was a remarkable genius when it came to language recall, given the eidetic memory it was providing.

Thank you, NCU-North Tactical.

They still couldn’t have very advanced conversations—complex verbs and abstract ideas were… fairly complicated, no matter how good they got at inter-racial charades, and—

Three holy fucks, what was that?

[Explosion Detected. 3.26 miles South-South-East. Calibrating…]

[Explosion Detected. 3.26 miles South-South-East. Calibrating…]

[Error: Calibration.]

[Error: Calibration.]

[Error: Connection.]

[Error: Connection.]

[Searching… Searching… Searching… Error: Connection not found.]

He dismissed the scroll of notifications, but kept the vague map direction the HUD impressed into the corner of his vision—a small window, easily retrievable. It showed the forest directly around them, mapping as he moved, and only vague emptiness around the HUD’s estimated location of the explosions.

He frowned. Then, he noticed the other two men were not looking around, they were looking to Katrin.

He looked, too.

She was standing stone-still, focused on something he couldn’t see—the middle distance, as if concentrating on something in her mind.

Silence filled their campsite. It was eerily silent, prickling along his nerves. As if the whole forest were listening, too. Or—was he insane for thinking it?—waiting for Katrin.

No, not insane. This whole scenario was insane.

He was so far out of his depth, any weird thought was suddenly a lot more credible. Hell, the more outlandish, the better, probably.

Fuck. He hoped it wasn’t more demons. They could take them, he thought, between the four of them—but not if those demons were also throwing explosives around.

The thought made him want to douse the campfire and go find a tree to climb. He always did better higher up, where he could have more control on anyone—or anything—heading his way.

Katrin was speaking now, her voice low. Her eyes kept searching the middle distance, clearly focusing on something else.

…did she have a HUD, too?

[Searching… Searching… Searching… Error: Connection not found.]

…No. If she had, they would have connected by now.

Abruptly, the prince got out of bed and started putting his swordbelt on.

Matteo stiffened.

Were they going to head out and investigate?

Not if Katrin had anything to say about it, apparently.

He made to stand up, but Donal put a staying hand on his arm. The other two were arguing. Katrin was no longer looking into the distance. In fact, by the look on her face, she was ready to smack her charge back into his bedroll.

Then, one after the other, they left.

He and Donal looked at each other. Then, the elf got up and began packing up camp, gesturing for Matteo to help.