“What did you find out? Did you learn of his Affinity? The room was a mess.”

“He was tougher than I thought… Before you ask, I don’t know, it definitely wasn’t any of the standard ones.”

“What happened?”

“I'm still not sure. He was drowning well enough, then the door exploded. It didn’t sound like an explosion though.”

“Didn’t ‘sound’ like an explosion?”

“Ugh, I don’t know, there wasn’t a boom.”

“Hold. Drowning? You tried to kill him?”

“Relax, if that had killed him, then he wouldn’t be useful to you anyways.”

“So he has some sort of combination, like yours.”

“Perhaps. Should I try again?”

“No, leave him. I want to see what he finds on his own.”

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

The grape plants stretched out as far as I could see, which wasn’t far. The tangles looked… perverse, painful almost, in their wildly overgrown state. Though that seemed silly, they were just plants, even overgrown as they were.

“Want to go out there?”

Maybe some animal killing would fix my mood a bit. Maybe that was a bit dark, but maybe I was also still trapped in the fucking apocalypse, okay? Give me a break.

Right, Vivi was still here. I was much preferring the solo apocalypse so far… Well, to be honest, both solo and group apocalypsii kind of sucked. Vivi looked uncertain.

Still, she followed me to the edge of the grape trees or whatever they’re called, their thick and gnarled branches were covered in primordial thorns, easily sharp enough to tear through flesh. A tight cordon of dead leaves crunched underfoot as I passed the invisible barrier and the air thickened and the sheer mass of the greenery loomed. They were much bigger than they appeared from the patio. The vines themselves seemed to want to reach out toward me and pull me deeper within the twisted brambles.

Okay, maybe I was exaggerating a bit, but it did look ominous as shit. I ignored the feeling that something was watching me, I only worried myself about animals that were close enough for me to listen to.

“You have gone out there, haven’t you?”

Her brow furrowed, “Of course I have.”

“Well then, let’s go.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

She sighed and threw her arms to her side, “Okay, but not right here, the thorns’ll tear us apart.”

I nodded and followed her, she brought a knife out of… somewhere. Where had she been hiding that thing? It was large enough to be a war crime in England.

She looked at a thinner part and I followed her into the tight space. She fit comfortably enough but I had to avoid being scratched too badly by the ill-positioned thorns.

We entered a… space outside of time. Well, no. Again an exaggeration, but not that much of one. The grape whatevers’ loomed over our heads and I instantly felt like taking a bath as we hit the trapped humidity from the almost completely covered canopy. Sticky. I was definitely taking a bath after this.

A brief debate had me settling on my baseball bat and I traded its storage loop occupancy with my shotgun. Magic sword seemed like overkill, at least for now.

Our feet softly moved through the dead foliage that brought a faint crackle to accompany us down the even, gnarled rows of overgrown grape trees.

I kept an eye on Vivi, I wanted to see what abilities she had but step after step there was nothing. No voices, no animals. Our feet kept pace as we crossed tree after tree waiting for an attack that never came.

“I don’t think there’s anything here.”

I tsked as I took a look around, “Guess not, kind of lame.”

“We should head back.”

I gave her a shameless grin a bit fueled by days of drink, “Scared?”

She huffed and we continued to wander out, away from the winery.

“Heads up, get ready. I got a feeling.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“Bad one. Obviously.” I mean, what were the odds that it’d be a good feeling in this creepy fucking wine-jungle.

She raised her knife into a backwards grip and held her free hand in a ready position behind it. Backwards grip looks cool, but ya know, it seems overall impractical if you want to stab things as far away from your body as possible, which was always the ideal.

Indistinct chittering picked up. That was bad, too much chatter to make out individual words. That, or enraged non-words. I would prefer the second more than the first but either weren’t great.

“I hear it, what is it?”

I stepped closer to her and looked up.

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“Fuck. Rats.”

I swung and ripped one out of the sky as the rat’s broken body spiraled off into the distance and crunched into a tree somewhere out of my sightline.

Just in case she missed the line drive I just cracked, “Above.”

She sliced a leaping one and stepped to the side as it dropped dead to the ground. I grabbed Vivi’s arm and pulled her back out of the way of a fresh series of leaping attackers coming from behind her.

“We need to head back.” I was getting a bad feeling and the susurrus was only growing louder. When too many animals talked at once, I sort of lost the ability to understand them. I’d never been this outnumbered before. If too many people talk at a restaurant it's hard to hear them, now imagine that times a hundred and you are approaching what my ears were picking up

I wasn’t that good at animal-speak yet either, I knew it instinctively, but it felt like the difference between speaking to someone in another language when they were talking clearly and deliberately compared to overhearing a group of native speakers talking between themselves. The more there were, the more it just jumbled into animal squeaks. It was a different league of comprehension I hadn’t yet been able to cross.

Our steps beat a pace back toward the winery as we continued to strike leaping rats out of the sky, or canopy, or whatever. The pace of attacks was growing faster but my bat was up to the challenge. Damn, I just wanted to see what was going on out here, I wasn’t looking for a rat swarm.

Her hand flashed out almost faster than I could track as she plucked a rat out of the air. It thrashed and fought but she held it firm by the scruff and put her face right next to it. What the fuck, I wouldn’t ever be putting my face next to an animal like that, but she did as she whispered something to it. I didn’t catch what she said as the drone of overlapping rat chatter made my hearing an almost completely irrelevant sense for me to focus on.

She released the rat and it stood and sniffed then ran in different directions and repeated the maneuver. It looked back and Vivi then started thrashing until it died.

“What… the fuck was that?” Seriously.

“The rats are all around us-”

She took off back to the winery. Son of a bitch! I took off after her, she was fast but I had been getting buffed up through life-or-death bullshit since day 1 of the apocalypse. Well, practically.

I swung a horizontal strike aimed upward and sent a rat flying as I grabbed another that had landed on my shoulder before squeezing the life out of it. The squishiness dribbled over my fingers as I intimately felt the little bones break. Gross.

I slid to a stop and grabbed Vivi’s arm. She whirled and stabbed into my arm, well, where my arm would have been if I wasn’t wearing a shield. As it was, it skittered off the face. To be fair, I probably shouldn’t have used the hand I just squeezed a rat to death with. There’d be time for regret later.

She whirled with a wild look in her eyes, “What are you doing? I’m not dying out here!”

“Shut up, neither am I.”

Her knife’s point edged closer to me and I narrowed my eyes, “They’re already ahead of us-” I could hear a ton of chatter in that direction. “We have to fight.”

A wild look entered her eyes as mine narrowed. Never trust a timid person just because they’re timid. Unpredictable, unreliable. They could be just fine, but you wouldn’t know until you’re in a situation where that’s tested and because they’re shy it’s hard to get a read on them before you find yourself in a situation like that. Same with people who talked too big.

“Hey!-” I swatted another series of rat paratroopers. “Get your shit together, we fight and when we get a moment, we run.”

Her wild eyes locked on mine and I saw something.

“Get that fucking knife out of my face.” I was not going to die by rat and I was not going to die by panicked chick. Neither of those situations were about to happen and, thankfully, before I had to make that choice, she calmed down.

“Okay, what do we do then?”

I ignored the accusatory tone, “Which direction’s the winery?”

She pointed, damn I would have totally called that wrong. Just like the hill I was first trapped on. I really needed to work on my sense of direction.

“They are all around us, probably have a trap just waiting for us. We have to go another way. And don’t run! They want that.”

Shit, that’s right. The animals could understand me. Could they understand everyone or just me because of the skill?

She squinted or did something with her eyes, her dark pupils expanded to fit the entirety of her scelera. They were following some line I couldn’t see and pointed. “Ron’s that way.”

How the hell could she tell? I shrugged off a rat and bashed another with my shield before whipping my bat around and exploding a third that seemed to possess less bodily integrity than its cousins.

She continued to slice and I started to catch hints of what she was doing, at least, ya know, when I wasn’t taking out rats. The congealing rat-blood splatters I was currently sporting made smell as uncomfortable of a sense as hearing.

“Okay, let’s move in that direction.”

I dismissed the final attempt by my brain to get my shotgun out, it’d be a waste of ammo for just rats. I debated on going with a sword but dismissed that one too. Not something I’d admit in polite company, but swatting rats out of the air was just too satisfying. That and it was mostly a stabbing sword and the thought of running around with a rat shishkebab turned my stomach a bit.

Our feet hustled along her nonverbal guiding steps, the rats drop pods were petering out. I didn’t trust it. I mean, these were rats and they’d been attacking as individuals. Most animals still followed base instincts even if they had conscious choice now.

I skidded to a stop.

“It’s coming. Get ready.”

She hesitated and started to move, but then saw I wasn’t moving. She might have also caught the motherfucking carpet of rats approaching from every side. Both hands clasped around her blade and she started mouthing words I couldn’t hear over the horde of rat-battle cries. I wiped my hands off on my mom jeans and… gross. GROSS.

I didn’t see when it started but a foul-looking wave of greasy mist started to emit from around her feet and as it touched the rats, I observed a couple of different effects. Some rats turned on the horde, throwing themselves into a completely new level of homicidal-suicidal fury as they shredded into their own ranks, others stopped and blankly stared even as other rats tore into them, while a third batch just straight up dropped dead or killed themselves in an uncomfortable variety of ways. Everywhere I looked, it was a new way.

I looked down and saw the mist starting to wrap around my feet and pull itself up. I pushed out some Will and a nova of invisible Will forcefully dissipated it away from me. I didn’t even have to do anything as the cornucopia-of-fucked continued to spread through the rats that approached within a dozen feet of Vivi and I.

The reprieve gave me a chance to process a couple of thoughts. First of all, AOE was OP. Secondly, this was some twisted ‘not-magic’. I couldn’t bring myself to look away from a rat that was digging into its own stomach with a furious intensity. It stopped at some point to rip out the throat of a rat that tried to help its self-disembowelment before resuming its personal disembowelment. Fucked. Truly fucked.

A surprising number were involved in really REALLY violent and perverse mating. I mean… Wow, just wow. I didn’t even know that rats were able to mate like that. Or like that. I checked again to make sure that no more of that mist was touching me, some had been sneaking a bit closer so I dissipated it with a tiny burst of Will. I did NOT want whatever that was touching me.

The rat horde petered out and left… a blanket of dead, disemboweled, sex-murdered, self-murdered, rats. My head slowly turned to Vivi who was panting. She didn’t look like she even knew I was still here as she took a deep breath through her nose and the entirety of the mist swept up and into her nose. Her head shot back and she laughed, deep and rich and completely unlike any tone I’d heard from her up to this point.

I took an involuntary step back and her head twisted like a viper toward the sound of a crunching rat body.

The predatory look faded quickly as I stopped hugging my bat and loosely directed it in front of me. This chick was bananas, ba-an-an-insane. I wiped the horrified look off my face as her eyes widened.