Zed’s feet hit the ground with a thud he felt go through his body.

With Jason’s orb of light illuminating everything, he noted they were in a cavernous place. The walls were of brown dirt with ridges and a rough topography.

“What kind of monster are we looking for exactly?” Zed asked, looking around. “Because I swear this is quite the artistic place. Is it intelligent?”

“We’re looking for a monster called a ground rat,” Jason answered. “And it’s not intelligent.”

“A ground rat,” Zed said. “Doesn’t really convey the level of threat. You say a ground rat and I picture a simple rat. Anyway, this place is quite wide.”

“That’s because they eat dirt and crops mostly,” Ash answered, taking the lead for some reason.

“Then why are we hunting them?” Zed asked. “They sound peaceful enough.”

“She said mostly,” Oliver said as they walked. “Which means it’s their favorite meal, doesn’t mean they won’t take a bite out of a human if they get the chance.”

“And all monsters are unnatural abominations that shouldn’t exist,” Chris said. “They all must die.”

“You know,” Zed told her. “If I keep commenting every time you say something that sounds like that, I’ll start to sound like a broken record. I mean, can’t you be a little more…”

His words trailed off at the look on her face and he faced the path ahead of them.

“Never mind,” he said.

The hole wasn’t just cavernous, it was also long. Zed and the team walked its confines seeing with Jason’s floating ball of light, though Zed didn’t need it. While the place was dark, in his eyes it was like walking around under the light of a full moon.

There were blood stains everywhere they looked. Claw marks as deep as a finger span and as long as Zed’s forearm riddled the walls. There were residues of broken rocks on the ground from fallen stalactites of rock and earth and they looked up to find the ceiling of the hole riddled with them, some of them broken.

Judging by the blood stains on some of the stalactites, it was safe to assume they’d been used as weapons in some way. Even the ones that rose from the ground were broken, shattered under the weight of something bloody. There were holes in the walls as well, like scorch marks, small and large. Some were as big as Zed’s head and others as small as his fist.

They touched none of them but everyone’s expression dimmed with each passing mark. Zed took it as a bad sign.

They walked deeper in and the ground inclined upwards as they did. Every place they looked was the same. Broken earth and blood stains, but no bodies.

It was a considerable while before they saw the bodies.

They were heralded by a putrid stink that poisoned the air and tortured everyone’s nostrils. Chris covered her nose with her forearm and the others protected theirs in one way or the other. Jason was the only one who watched, unfazed.

Whatever had happened here had been a massacre, and the victors had piled their defeat into a mountain of corpses. Giant rats were stacked atop each other to form two mounds, each one no less than twelve feet high. The blood on them was dry and caked, and the hair on their bodies were rigid and stiff.

“Is it just me,” Zed said. “Or does the air in here feel… wrong.”

“What you’re sensing is ambient mana,” Jason said, walking up to the corpses. “It’s similar to aura but different. Think of aura as the human and animal versions of ambient mana.”

“That would make ambient mana the aura of the world,” Zed guessed.

“Correct,” Jason said. He was squatting at the base of one of the mounds now, studying it like an archeologist would study an interesting boulder.

The ambient mana felt odd.

Aura was similar to it and Zed had learned every aura was different like every individual was different, but they all held similarities just the way humans held similarities. For instance, Beta rank aura felt like a rough towel being rubbed along his skin. From what he knew so far, the stronger the category was the harder the towel was rubbed.

Ash’s aura felt like he was scrubbing at a particularly hard stain on his skin. While it was mildly uncomfortable, it wasn’t something he couldn’t tolerate. It was like walking around with one too many layers of body cream.

Rukh rank aura was different in that it felt like someone had replaced the towel with an unnecessarily rough sponge. It made being in its presence annoying. And while he could tolerate Chris’ aura, Oliver’s aura was annoying to be in the presence of when it was let loose. It was like carrying a weight on his back. Jason’s aura, however, weighed down on Zed like a physical thing when it was released.

Ambient mana was different, however. It felt just as Zed remembered it from when he was learning aura sense. It was like the touch of cobweb against the skin but without the mental discomfort of having the byproduct of a spider touching him. Here it was wrong, as if someone had taken a pile of cobwebs, dipped them in glue then dipped them in hot sand, and cast it about like a fishing net.

“Why does it feel like that?” Zed asked.

“Because the VHF were here,” Chris spat, walking up to squat beside Jason. “And they taint everything they touch.”

“How bad is it?” Ash asked from where she stood.

“A platoon,” Chris answered, touching the skin of one of the rats where a burn mark as large as her hand was. “Maybe two or four of them.”

“Four platoons?”

“Soldiers,” Chris corrected.

The rest of them walked up to the pile, despite the smell, and Zed touched one of the burn marks on a corpse above him. It didn’t feel like something burned. Instead, it felt as if something had melted it and now it had cooled and congealed.

“Mana burn,” Jason explained, standing beside him.

“How does something get mana burn?” Zed asked. “Is that what happens when you blast things with your ball of light or some kind of sickness from using too much mana?”

“No,” Jason answered. “Mana burn comes from being hit with a concentrated amount of mana, usually from a mana stone. If it’s strong enough, it’ll burn.”

“And how do you do that?”

“With a rune blaster.”

“Like your rune gun?”

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“Yes,” Jason nodded. “Rune blasters can be powered by a mage’s mana but people mostly use mana stones gotten from monster cores. With one, the blaster draws mana from the stone and shoots it out like a laser beam.”

“Like stormtroopers?”

“Yes,” Jason said. “Like stormtroopers.”

“So we had our monsters taken out by stormtroopers,” Zed said with a thoughtful sound. “I don’t know if I should be bummed or excited.”

“I would advise you not think of them as stormtroopers.”

“Yeah,” Chris said, still staring at whatever had her attention where she was squatted. “They’re more like star troopers from that one starship troopers movie. They don’t miss. And they’re also mages, so there’s that too.”

Her voice was baleful, and while Zed was surprised to find she actually knew some movies, the tone of her voice staved off the urge to make a remark on it.

“So it’s confirmed,” Ash said with a touch of worry. “The VHF have finally extended their reach this far out.”

“We knew it was going to happen eventually,” Oliver said.

“Yes, but this is too soon,” Chris hissed. “How did they even get wind of a mana surge having occurred here.”

“How did you guys know a mana surge was here?” Zed asked. “Maybe they found out the same way?”

“A few weeks ago we felt one break,” Chris answered.

Zed raised a confused brow. “Break?”

“Yes. That’s how mana surges work,” Jason said. “According to Heimdall and Ivar, during the first awakening, there were about eight mana surges around the world. They erupted from the ground in random places, spilling ambient mana everywhere. When they were done, they crystalized into massive monoliths that the governments of the countries they’d sprouted in studied.”

“Now, there are two types of mana surges,” Ash interrupted, taking over from Jason. “The first kind, the less potent, are the monoliths. They emit massive levels of ambient mana, and when they are done with whatever task of shooting ambient mana they were doing, they just solidify. The second type, vastly more potent than anything you can find, are the crystalized ones. People like to think of them as the cores of the mana surge. They’re at the heart of the monoliths. When the monolith runs out of mana to give out, and is weak, it breaks apart to leave only the crystal inside. And that crystal is as large as a boulder.”

“You guys know quite a lot about it,” Zed mused. “But that doesn’t answer how you guys know there’s one nearby.”

“That part’s easy,” she said. “When the monolith shatters, it lets out a massive wave of ambient mana, mages from miles away feel it like a massive shock wave when it happens.”

“And one happened over a month ago,” Chris said. “And we need to get to it before the VHF platoon does.”

“We’ve been trying,” Oliver said. “And I don’t really get what the big deal is. We were going to sell it to them in the end, anyway.”

“Yes,” Chris said. “But that’s after getting everything we could out of it. Whatever is left—if there is any—is what we intend on selling.”

“Wait,” Zed protested. “If the monolith breaks after a long time, what of the crystal? How do you know it hasn’t broken?”

“Those ones give off a different kind of effect when they break,” Jason said.

“Effect,” Zed said, skeptical, “like what?”

Jason remained silent and it was Chris that answered.

“Like a magnet,” she said. “But this time, instead of metals, you get monsters of every rank and category for miles.”

“So it will be best to get to the crystal before it breaks?”

“Yes.”

Zed had a feeling they were too late on that one. But considering how far away the town was from the forest he’d woken up in, it should be fine.

Unless, people go exploring for no reason, he thought, still not inclined to comment on anything. There was always a hunger around the topic of the surge and he wanted nothing to do with having anything related to that hunger directed at him.

“Just putting it out there,” Zed said. “But why exactly don’t we want the VHF to find it?”

“Because a mana surge core is concentrated raw mana. It’s not like a mana stone or a monolith that you can just break down and cart away or process. It’s more complicated. I’ve seen it kill someone from simply being touched by it. And it erodes almost everything so it’s almost impossible to move. If the VHF find it, they’ll set up a whole lab around it just to break it down to something they can finally cart away.”

“But I thought you said its difficult to—”

“They have a way, Bloodbath,” Chris said, infuriated. “I don’t know what it is, but they have a way. And Heimdall says he knows a guy who has a way, too. The plan was to safely break down the parts that keep it immovable, then sell the part that can be moved to the VHF if we don’t find a use for it.”

“And if the VHF find it and set up the town?” he asked.

“Then they’ll take over all the towns near it by default,” Chris finished.

“Wait. You said you’ve seen a mana surge before. Saw someone die from touching it.”

“Yes. And if you ask any questions about that, I’ll rip your arms off and shove them down your throat. My past is mine and yours is yours. Got it?”

Zed nodded vehemently. “Got it.”

Zed made a show of looking around as they lulled back into a somber silence as the others dwelled on the implications of the VHF’s presence. He knew nothing about the governmental group and couldn’t appreciate the weight of their worry. Also, they’d once said the VHF had kept companies that still produced soft drinks which meant they’d somehow ensured the stabilization of some form of civilization. If that was true, wasn’t their presence more of a blessing than a curse?

He could slightly understand the reluctance to give up power, but as natural as it was, it didn’t make it good. He could still remember the tyrant from his memories. The man had made a dictator of himself, refusing to relinquish power to his people or the governments around them. He’d ruled by himself, and when his people didn’t like the way he ruled, he ruled with an iron fist. Whatever experience the others had had with the VHF was beginning to seem personal, the microcosm of some macrocosm. They were like the people who owed the banks loans they couldn’t pay back and got angry at them simply because the interests grew and the bank demanded they continue to pay. It wasn’t the bank’s fault they owed, and they knew there’d be penalties if they missed a payment. It was…

Bank analogies, again, Zed thought. I’m beginning to think one of those memories belonged to a banker. My money’s on the dad.

Still, the analogy wasn’t wrong. This war on VHF was beginning to worry him. He’d just met these people, and while Oliver had been nice to him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to fight a war for them, especially if it was against people who could do the things mages could do while shooting mana lasers from guns. He didn’t want to have that fight, not if it was a fight they could simply step away from.

The thought continued to plague him even as they made their way out of hole through an alternate route. They continued deeper into the cavern, passed the mountain of corpses and followed the ground’s elevation. Eventually they found themselves coming out of the entrance of a hole in the side of a hill where they were met with another litter of corpses and the residue of violence.

“Did you know the monsters were going to be this much?” Zed asked, staring at the chaos.

“No,” Chris said. “Abed hinted at nothing this dangerous. Remind me to give him a piece of my mind the next time we see him, will you, Jason.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Jason said, his voice ominous as they walked down the hill. “I’ll be giving him a piece of mine first.”

The walk back was filled with the silence of Zed. The others had conversations, most of them dark and foreboding, but conversations nonetheless, while Zed thought. He fought against the idea of fighting against men with laser guns and magic at their beck and call with nothing but a tomahawk and the ability to heal quickly. His experience with the Moscovian Sloth already told him the outcome of such a fight, and as cowardly as it felt, there was a part of him that knew he wouldn’t fight; a part of him that saw no tactical value in fighting for people he’d just met, even if they were the first he had met since waking up.

It was a logical mind, a tactical mind, and it made him feel bad.

He went through the motions of what they needed to do mechanically. He walked when they walked and sat when they sat. He ate when there was something to eat and cracked jokes he didn’t remember with laughs that came from nowhere and smiles that didn’t reach his eyes.

The journey back to their car was quiet and took two days of which he spent on autopilot while his mind thought thoughts he wished they didn’t think. In the end, loyalty was the only reason his mind could come up with for him to fight alongside them.

Sadly, it wasn’t enough.

Later on, Zed was seated in the back of their pickup truck as Jason drove them back to the town when Oliver asked him a question.

“What’s wrong?” Oliver asked. “You’ve been acting strange since we got out of the ground rats’ nest.”

“What do you mean strange?” Chris asked from the front seat. “He’s always acting strange.”

“Yes. But this time it’s different, he’s almost thoughtful.”

Chris thought about it before turning in her seat to look at Zed.

“That’s true,” she said. “His jokes haven’t been as boring or annoying as usual. What’s up, Bloodbath? You good?”

Zed had somehow garnered everyone’s attention. Even Jason watched him through the rearview mirror.

“I’m good,” he answered. “Just got something on my mind.”

“And what’s so important that it’s got you acting almost like a civilized human being?” Chris asked.

“Starship troopers.”

“What?” everyone asked.

“Starship troopers,” Zed repeated. “I know I know the movie. But by the life of me I can’t remember watching it, and believe me, I’ve tried.”

Chris turned back in her seat with a sigh and a groan.

“I can’t believe I wasted thirty seconds of my life for that,” she said. “And it’s all your fault, Oliver.”

“What did I do?” Oliver asked, baffled.

“Don’t care. All I know is that now you owe me lunch.”