~~~Stanley~~~

Stanley tried to ignore the knot of surly emotions lurking behind him, but Eve was too close for that, especially without his soul shield.

Fortunately, he didn't have to ignore her tantrums to keep making progress on his soul repair. Though, for once, he was glad meditation blocked his senses. That way, he didn't have to listen to the occasional screaming tirades...

Not for the first time, Stanley considered if Nate might have orchestrated that entire event to get Eve out of his base. Or was he giving the man too much credit? There had been times not long ago when he wouldn't have put it past Nate to have some grand and complex scheme designed to maneuver everything into place... but not anymore.

He'd seen Nate worried and afraid... in his soul. Stanley didn't think there was a way to fake that—or, at least, he was pretty sure Nate didn't know how. Plus, it just made no sense for Nate to go to all that trouble and still end up so weak.

It was truly disappointing how weak he still was. Which only made everyone else seem like a joke in comparison.

Of course, that was changing. Slowly. Hopefully. All the skill shards he kept dumping into this place had to be making some kind of difference... right?

Stanley was never sure how much time passed while he worked; he just went until his soul told him to stop. He'd gotten far better at repairing his soul—faster too—but he could only seal a certain amount of the wound back together before the strain got too high and threatened to undo his efforts.

Violently.

That was a lesson he'd learned the hard way a couple days ago. Luckily, Lee's patch held, and he'd only lost a couple of days' progress, but it had still hurt like a motherfucker...

Now he always stopped before reaching that point.

Like now.

He didn't tell Eve he was leaving. She'd figure it out. He did, however, collect Caffeine before leaving the purified zone.

They could find each other easily enough, but he didn't want Caffeine roaming alone out there. It was one thing to let him wander inside the zone, and another thing entirely to have him running across the wastelands.

Stanley picked a new direction, north and slightly further east than the last trip, then headed out in as straight a line as he could manage. Not exactly a grid search, but his best attempt at one, and he'd started by clearing the north first. The smaller area, at least when starting from Nate's.

He would attack each lair on his path, both to collect cores and also to check how strong the nearest ones were. He kept notes on that last part.

The weaklings needed somewhere to start out their hunting careers, especially if they weren't hunting with Zeke. Not that anyone was...

Nate was somehow the more paranoid one now. Two days of only training for Zeke and his new team, with not one actual monster or lair.

Stanley didn't want to get involved with training or dishing out pain again, and he didn't have to. Not yet. Nate wasn't coddling them anymore. Their souls crying out in anguish all morning were evidence enough of that.

That meant Stanley was more than willing to leave it to Nate. For now.

A positive sign waited for him at the first lair beyond the clean zone, where he found a three-man team already hunting the monsters within.

Of course, Caffeine immediately dashed inside to say hello.

Stanley followed, with much less enthusiasm, and found them fighting... worms. Earthworms. Ones that looked far too similar to a certain giant specimen. A dead specimen.

They weren't identical. The worms burrowed from the tunnel sides and had small tentacles around tiny mouths full of teeth, but that was where the similarities ended. Obviously, these were way smaller. Plus, they weren't hiding their souls or pretending to be trees.

The humans fought with clubs, but mostly they relied on one man who was burning the worms with fire.

He wasn't very precise in his targeting, liberally spraying fire throughout the tunnels, including over his companions.

Stanley pushed the fire away from Caffeine and, by extension, everyone else. He also killed every worm in reach while halting his flight in front of the pyromaniac. "Stop it. Now."

Pyro stopped, pulling all the fire back to drape his body while still lighting up the tunnel.

"Hi, Caff!" one of the previously flame-covered men exclaimed and bent to pet the pug. Caffeine returned his enthusiasm a thousandfold, then went to greet the other, neither of whom looked at all burned.

"You guys have fire resistance or something?"

The first man stood with a smile for the happy pug and nodded. "Hiya, Stanley. I don't think we've been introduced all formal yet, but we've seen you around, and the little guy, of course. I'm Axle, and you guessed it. Me and Diesel served together at the same fire station and came out of it with some extra resistance."

"Not so much fighting fire anymore as fighting alongside it now," Diesel said.

"Good thing, too, since Kyle here can't aim for shit!"

"Hey!" Pyro, and presumably Kyle, protested. "I can totally aim the..."

"Jeez, Kyle. We're just joshing! You gotta thicken up that skin if you want to get anywhere with the ladies." Axle winked at Stanley from where Kyle couldn't see.

Kyle did not try to pet Caffeine, and the pug paid him noticeably less attention than the other two in return. That, along with the weaselly soul, made Stanley automatically distrust the man. It didn’t help that he reminded Stanley of a certain fire slinger from back with Samantha...

Though he started smiling after hearing what he said next.

"Eve keeps ghosting me, and all the advice you gave me never worked. Now she just threatens to shoot me if I try to talk to her!"

Both men grinned, and Diesel said, "You're just saying it wrong! You need more confidence! Chicks dig confidence."

Stanley had a fun moment imagining this guy trying to hit on Eve with likely terrible pickup lines, courtesy of these two, whose souls felt very amused at the mention of Eve threatening Kyle. So he was more than willing to help when Axle asked for it.

"So... since you're already here, Stan the man... Maybe you wanna speed things up..." He ran a thumb over his throat.

"Sure." The underground lair wasn't deep, and it was easy enough to drag out the remaining worms from their hiding spots. He even went so far as to bring the mass of writhing flesh back up the tunnels before turning them into a gooey mess of dead things.

Lair Destroyed: [Grub Pit]

"Don't take too long. I... saw another underground lair collapse shortly after the queen..." Stanley stopped talking. Instead, he just dragged them and the dead worms back to the surface. "Never mind. You can dig the cores out up here. Coming, Caff?"

Caffeine was the best, because he didn't hesitate to jump into Stanley's lap. It was a nice reaffirmation after an unpleasant memory.

"Thanks for the..." Axle's voice vanished into the distance as Stanley flew away toward the next lair. A lair full of spiders the size of basketballs...

He only killed a handful after confirming that their webs were flammable, then left the rest for the fire brigade. They would probably have no trouble, and he expected they would head this way next.

He tried a newer tactic in the following lairs. Namely, he went after skill shards.

Most lair queens wanted to survive. Well, presumably all of them did, but some monsters were just too stupid to live. The slightly more intelligent ones would usually surrender if given enough motivation.

So rather than dig his way down to the queen and confront her in person, Stanley preferred to gather as large a mob as he could near the surface, then kill them all at once.

Any queen that wasn't a total idiot would notice what had happened, and most of those would surrender then and there. That way, he got a pile of cores and one guaranteed skill shard. It was a good system.

What he did with the stupid ones depended on how annoying they were. If she kept feeding her army into the grinder that was Stanley, he would let her live. If she got stingy but also refused to surrender, he would put in the extra effort to kill her.

Maybe, in time, he could get the lairs trained? Like that beetle one where the queen just offered up a skill the moment he entered. It would make collecting skills much faster...

His lair spree sadly ended when he spotted the one thing worse than stingy queens.

Humans. A lot of them, too.

Stanley put up his shield before approaching, since his soul tended not to work as a very good icebreaker. He even tamped down his soul sight after a cursory inspection of the souls ahead. There were no obvious invaders, and given that he hadn't found any since they attacked him, he was guessing they could all hide their souls anyway.

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Caffeine was the backup for that. Not one he'd proved yet, but Stanley expected Caffeine wouldn't take kindly to any lurking undead...

They had a nice setup. Similar to Nate's base. Though with far fewer people. And no Zeke. That last one was a very glaring lack.

"Hi. I'm here to rescue you, so... take me to your leader?" He kept Caffeine in his lap while the nervous wall sentry ran away, shouting for someone named Felix.

This wasn't like some of the other groups he'd found. They didn't seem quite as in need of a rescue... Something Felix seemed in agreement with when he stormed outside while looking like he'd just woken up. "Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you!"

"We don't need some dandy-man coming in..."

Stanley sighed and looked down at his still all-white suit. Walter was definitely holding a grudge.

"So fuck off before I kill you and take your..."

Stop

The guy was pathetic. Weaker than Nate. Which meant he had a lot of nerve to be threatening people. Still...

Stanley resisted the urge to do something violent to the unmoving man. He hadn't forgotten about his potentially over-reactive temper just yet, and Caffeine hadn't even growled at the guy. He was probably just a blowhard who liked to talk big.

"...core!" the man finished yelling when Stanley let go of him. He hadn't even noticed the stop... but the surrounding people were all looking on in confusion.

Hilarious.

"Got it," Stanley said. "You're perfectly fine. You don't need a dandy man to save you because you're a big, strong, manly man, and I can just fuck off. All clear and understood. Bye!"

Stanley flew a few feet away before stopping and looking back over his shoulder. "Did I mention we have someone who can purify and remove the miasma? It makes the food taste a lot..."

"I said fuck off!"

"Um, sir?" said one guard who'd witnessed the man's sudden yet brief onset of unmoving silence. He looked nervous. "Are you..."

"Shut up, Mark."

"You're right!" Stanley exclaimed with false exuberance. "I should ask everyone else, too!"

Felix went a little red in the face, and green light appeared over his clenched fists. "You really want to do this?"

Stanley eyed his fists. "Um, sure? Show me what you got."

Mark scrambled back, afraid, as Felix thrust a hand palm out toward Stanley, and a stream of green bubbles flew from Felix’s palm... like actual little soap bubbles. Only green.

Stanley caught the first one with his hand... and it popped with a surprisingly painful sensation that blew a small hole through his palm. Not bad, though it was obvious why everyone was scrambling away from the man.

His magic bubbles behaved very much like normal bubbles in that they seemed to drift on the wind, and only mostly in the direction the man was aiming.

There were also a lot of them.

Stanley pointed at the man, mostly to clarify that he was responsible and primarily for the other people who were feeling some violent emotions of their own. "Stop."

Felix stopped, frozen, with an expression on his face that looked like maybe he was pooping, and Stanley destroyed all the remaining and still drifting bubbles with a mental swat.

It hurt...

Despite all the hostility, Caffeine still showed no signs of aggression in return. In fact, he wasn't even watching Felix. Caffeine only sat in Stanley's lap while staring up into his face with his big brown eyes...

"I'm fine, Caff," Stanley said, then added. "Good boy!" The curly tail wiggled back and forth rapidly, and Stanley smiled before kissing the pug's head.

He found a lot of worried and somewhat confused people staring back at him when he looked away from Caffeine.

"Hi, Mark," Stanley said while drifting closer to the no longer fleeing man.

No response.

"I didn't kill him."

Gazes jumped back and forth. Mark’s and everyone else in earshot.

"Jesus christ." Stanley let go of Felix, and this time the man noticed something had changed. Probably because Stanley wasn't in the same place and all his bubbles were gone...

His hand, still glowing green, shifted to point back at...

Stanley caught his wrist in a mental grip. "Just stop, Bubble Man. I'm not here to fight any of you. And you're all too weak if I was."

Felix glared at him, but, to his credit, he didn't fire any more bubbles.

"You see," Stanley said. "There's this guy, Nate, who's very adamant about saving humanity. Personally, I'm still on the fence about the issue, but since I'm already here..."

"Fine!" Felix growled. "Mark, go call a meeting. Our savior has arrived!" He smiled then. "Maybe he can take some of the dead-weight off our hands."

Stanley shrugged. He didn't really care who came with him or didn't. "Just hurry it up? I'm only doing this as a favor."

Felix followed him as Stanley did a cursory tour of the place. Mostly, he wanted to see what they had for food, and only for Caffeine.

The pickings were slim to abysmal. "Is your food rotting?"

"Of course it is! We have to eat in the lairs now."

"I told you, we have a cure for..." Stanley found the kids in an inner courtyard and stopped talking. They weren't dying. Not like the people at the church. But they weren't healthy. Not having a good time either...

Caffeine's sorrow as he bounded over and tried to cheer them up was... infuriating! "The kids are coming with me."

Felix opened his mouth, anger spiking again.

Stanley was no longer in the mood to indulge the idiot. "Tell their parents or families. I won't leave them here too..."

Green light blazed up from Felix as he growled, "Like hell, you're taking my son!"

Stop

Stanley took a slow, deep breath when he saw Caffeine looking back his way... along with a scared little boy staring at Felix. He unstopped the man but forced Felix's hands tight to his side while turning him to face the boy.

"I'm saving you, you idiot!" Stanley hissed behind him. "Besides, it's too late now. Caffeine will never let me leave them here..." He felt Felix stop fighting his hold as they watched Caffeine make his way from child to child, with differing reactions from each.

Some pet him happily, and some shied away from the little dog.

Those were the worst. Seeing them afraid of a pug was bad enough, but Caffeine's reaction was so much worse when he laid down to make himself as small as possible, even shrinking slightly as he did so. Then he would stare up at them with little whines and tail wags.

One of them still ran away from Caffeine... and into Felix's arms with a cry of, "Daddy!"

Stanley closed his eyes to avoid glaring at the bastard. Why couldn't people just be straightforward? If you're an asshole, then you're an asshole. Don't complicate it by having dimensionality. That just made everything more annoying.

"I want Mommy."

"I know, Junior. She'll be home soon."

Stanley opened his eyes to see Felix watching him with a mix of hostility and... other emotions. "I'm not here to split up families. I can wait until everyone gets back... or I can just go gather them up."

"I... I'm not leaving until she gets back."

"What did I just fu... What did I say?" Stanley sighed. "Which way did she... You know what? You can just come with me, and I'll go grab..."

Felix didn't move. "I don't know."

"You don't... what? No, it doesn't matter. She can't have gone far." Stanley fired up Soul Sight and swept it over the building again before taking to the air. He fixed Felix in his gaze, and the man flinched at whatever he was seeing or feeling.

"Don't fuck with my dog, or I'll..." He glanced at the boy in the man's arms. "Just don't." It wasn't that he worried about Caffeine's safety, but he'd rather not have to murder anyone when he got back...

Stanley stopped in the sky and listened to his Soul Awareness. Going so far as to push it to the limit until the souls bombarded him loud enough that he could pinpoint every nearby lair. Including picking out the ones with humans inside them.

Then he made the rounds.

Most people didn't give him a hard time about heading home. Those that did usually shut up when he killed all the monsters in the lair and threw the cores at them. The really stubborn ones, he just took along with him to the next lair.

Sure, they screamed bloody murder, but that was how he found a new and fun way to deal with annoying people.

Silence

Seeing them scream and yell as the realization that they couldn't make a sound settled in... that was totally priceless. Plenty of that crowd tried to attack him, and Stanley only broke one woman's arm... She just wouldn't stop trying to kill him. It was probably Felix's wife...

He stopped a few times to repeat the soul scans, making sure he'd missed no one before heading back.

Stanley felt much better about his decision when he found Caffeine playing with the children. Once again, the pug had won them all over, and they weren't the least bit worried even when he changed sizes. The parents weren't as blase about it, but Felix was with them and talking them down when Stanley arrived.

"Let them play..." His soul felt rather dour, despite what he was saying.

"Did I get her?" Stanley asked, landing beside the man. "Forgot to ask you her name..."

Felix looked away. "It's fine. You can take the others. I'll stay here. I'll find her if I keep looking. It's only been a few weeks... She's probably holed up in a lair somewhere."

Oh.

"The miasma was probably too strong..." Felix was muttering now. "She had no choice... she had to hide out..."

Stanley left the delusional man there with his son and went looking for the rest of the gathered humanity. They weren't hard to find. "Everyone outside!"

They grumbled and some refused to listen, but they all ended up outside, whether or not they wanted to. It helped that enough of them had either seen or heard about him by now.

Caffeine followed the kids and kept them entertained through the short flight outside. Then Stanley addressed them. "I'm going to carry all of you to a new home. If you don't like heights, then shut your fu... your eyes."

Damn kids.

There was some grumbling, but it cut out after he lifted the entire mass of humanity into the air. Then they only screamed.

"Shut the fu..." Stanley cut off his own yell when he saw Caffeine trying to distract a terrified child from looking down. Instead, he only cursed silently in his mind while dragging up some dirt to create a floor. Of sorts. At least enough of one to hide the receding ground.

That helped reduce the fear.

Individually, the people were weak. Insignificant. Combined, they added up. Not enough to stop him, but enough that he didn't want to move them.

It made the trip take a little longer, but that was fine. Until he saw Nate sprinting his way, well before he reached the green zone...

"Stanley!" Nate exclaimed, his soul full of panic. "I need you to..."

Nate’s shouting voice faded into static because Stanley was already peering past the man, back toward the base, his Soul Sight as strong as he could make it.

Son of a bitch!

Fear rose within him, but the rage drowned it all out. Enough rage that he didn't even bother to drop his passengers. Enough that he snatched Nate up and dragged him along for the ride.

Then he moved toward the undead souls in the distance.