"Sands. Can you hear me? The hole just finished closing," Koren said into the communicator. Scout stood in front of her, waiting anxiously for a response.
"Yeah, I can hear you." Koren and Scout both let out sighs of relief.
"While I'm glad that the communicators still work, I'd be interested to hear what you plan to do now," Professor Kohaku said.
"Well, I guess we could try to lure it out again so it opens another portal," Koren said somewhat tentatively. She and Scout eyed the slime all over Scout and the dirt that covered them both. Lying down out here in the rough certainly wouldn't be the most pleasant option.
"No, you should go back to the motel, shower, sleep in a real bed. Somebody should get to," Sands said. "Besides, we should see if anybody else is still alive in here before the portal opens up again so we can get them all out."
"A shower sounds great to me!" Koren said. She looked to Scout, who held her gaze for a second before nodding.
Sands walked slowly and caught her breath as she finally let herself relax a little. There was no more need to run now that the portal was closed, but she did want to get to Professor Kohaku in case the Stranger found her. Sands was pretty confident in her own abilities, but not while carrying somebody in her arms.
"We're still trapped in here, aren't we?" Will asked weakly. The way the magical communicators worked, he was only able to hear Sands's side of the conversation, so he wasn't entirely sure what was going on.
"For now, but don't worry, we'll get out. Professor Kohaku's here; she'll find a way to reopen the portal to the normal world, or the monster will go hunting again, and we'll follow it out."
"But what if it hunts us?" Sands felt a shudder run through the boy. She pulled him to herself more tightly (being careful not to squeeze too hard with her enhanced strength), and he snuggled into her arms, obviously craving warmth and human contact after nearly a week in this cold, dark, dreary place.
"I promise it's not going to get you," Sands said resolutely. The Bystander Effect would prevent her from explaining that she had a magic weapon and super-strength enough to bench press 400 lbs, so she'd just have to convince him he was safe through the strength of her conviction. "I'm taking you to the Head of Security at my school. This monster is nothing to her. She was standing right by the portal when my sister and our classmate chased it back through, and she sent it packing, no problem. And if it comes after me, I've got a mace and I've been training to fight monsters just like it. I'll kick its ass. You're safe now, I promise." With that, she gave a little reassuring squeeze.
Apparently, her little speech had worked. She could feel as Will relaxed and practically melted into her arms. A minute later, his breathing evened out, and she could tell he had fallen asleep. She was thankful for her inherited strength; even though Will was a small child emaciated by lack of food, he was also in middle school, and well past the age a petite girl like Sands could normally carry someone a significant distance.
Sands kept an eye out for the Stranger as best she could in this poorly-lit, creepy realm, but fortunately, she reached Professor Kohaku without incident.
"Miss Mason. I'm glad to see you and the boy are safe," Professor Kohaku said, looking up from where she was examining some spell work she had scratched into the ground.
"Yeah, me too." Sands distastefully eyed the ground, which was covered in slime and tentacle-like vines. "Will's sleeping, but I don't want to put him down on that. Please tell me you brought blankets."
"When I heard this would be a rescue mission, I quickly packed a number of essentials—food, water, medical supplies—and, yes, blankets." Kohaku clenched her fist. There was a brief flash of white light and a flare of heat. When Sands finished blinking the white spots from her eyes, she could see that a circle six feet across had been sanitized. The slime was gone, and the tentacle-vines that had passed through the area had shriveled up and died. Meanwhile, Kohaku reached into the extradimensional storage space in her backpack and pulled out a blanket. "I've activated the spell on this blanket. It will work the same way as the temperature control from the shield over Crossroads. Will will be comfortable." Kohaku placed the blanket on the ground. Sands carefully got down to her knees and removed Will's arms from around her neck. As she gently placed him on the ground, he started to wake up. He started to squirm and clutch at her arms.
Sands could see the panic in his eyes, so she tried to reassure him. "It's alright, Will, you're safe. I'm just gonna lay you down here with Professor Kohaku." He calmed down a little, and she turned to the professor and asked, "Can you get him some food and water? I gave him a little before, but we didn't have much time."
"Of course." Kohaku pulled a granola bar and a bottle of water from her pack and gave them to the still-half-asleep Will, who downed them before going back to sleep. "I'll keep an eye on him while I continue to work on reopening the portal. You should go check for more survivors. You still have the distress beacon I gave you, right?"
"Yeah, I've got it." Sands got to her feet, pulled her flashlight and mace from their pouches on her belt, and headed out into the darkness.
Koren shifted uneasily in bed, trying to relax enough that she could get some sleep. She could hear the water running as Scout washed off the dirt and slime from crawling through the portal, but that wasn't why she couldn't fall asleep. No, she was just too agitated up from fighting the Stranger, from hunting the monster through the dark forest and being hunted in return.
She tried to remind herself that they were probably safe. Most of the Stranger's reported activity had been outside, specifically in the forest several miles from where they were staying. The chances that it would go outside its usual hunting range and into the second floor of a building just to go after them were incredibly slim, especially since last they had seen it, it had been injured and retreating to its layer to heal. It had still been very dangerous, of course, and if Koren was being honest with herself, likely strong enough to kill both her and Scout if it had really wanted to. That said, they had hurt it, and it had seemed to prioritize retreating to its layer over finishing them off when it was injured, so there was no reason to think it would come after them now.
None of that reasoning got rid of the fear Koren felt. It was so damn annoying, too! Koren had thought that she would finally be able to grow up and be less afraid of the night now that she actually knew what monsters might be after her and was training to fight them, but if it was ever going to happen, it certainly hadn't happened yet. She had made sure to choose the bed closer to the window because she knew that hiding away from her ridiculous fears never helped them go away.
Scritch.
Heart pounding from the sudden rush of adrenaline, Koren threw the sheet out of her way, leapt to her feet, grabbed one of her Hunga Munga from the nightstand, and threw open the curtains. She found a window sealed tightly shut. On the other side, a tree branch moved gently with the wind, scratching against the glass. Koren just stood there and stared for a second, listening to the blood pounding in her ear. Then, she exclaimed, "Fuck it!" She wrenched open the window, pivoted on her heel, went back to the nightstand to grab her other axe, and returned to the window. Reaching out the window, she held her left-hand axe so the large curved blade was pointing at the back of the tree branch. Then, she pushed the button that would freeze the axe in midair. She swung at the branch with her other axe. Caught between her swinging axe and a sharp immovable object, the tree branch only lasted a couple of swings before Koren had cut all the way through it. It fell to the ground with a thunk.
Koren retrieved her floating weapon. Then, she turned around and saw that Scout had finished showering and entered the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. "What are you looking at?" She demanded aggressively. Scout gave her a look that clearly conveyed how dumb a question that was when Koren was clearly doing something weird. "The tree was bothering me, so I cut it, alright? You have a problem with that?" Scout just looked at her silently for a long moment before turning away to finish drying off and change into her sleepwear.
Shrugging off her classmate's judgment, Koren set down at the small table in the corner of the motel room, pulled a magical rag from her pack, and started cleaning her blades. Heretic weapons were tough enough that she didn't need to sharpen them, but her axes were still dirty from the tree sap. As the rag went over the blade, the sap disappeared entirely. She finished cleaning the blades and returned the rag to her pack. Then she stood up, walked over to the window to shut it, and returned her Hunga Munga to her nightstand.
By that point, Scout was finished changing. She walked over to the window and began using a field engraver to draw a spell on the windowsill. Koren walked over to examine the spell, but she didn't recognize it. "What spell are you using?" Koren asked.
Scout didn't respond for a while as she concentrated on drawing the spell properly. When she was finished, she looked up at Koren and said, "Intruders."
"It's an intruder alert? Just for this window, or what?" Scout shook her head and gestured around the entire room before heading to the door to enter the motel room and beginning to write more spell work. "So what, you put the spell on the entrances and it catches intruders anywhere in the room?" Scout nodded. "That's handy."
By the time Scout had finished inscribing the spell and imbuing it with enough power to last while they slept, Koren had returned to her bed. Scout put the field engraver away and went to her own bed. It wasn't too long before Koren was fast asleep. She was understandably tired, and now that she felt safe enough, it was no wonder she fell asleep easily. But at least Koren had gotten a few hours of sleep while they were waiting for the Stranger to attack. Scout had been awake the whole time, and even with her enhanced stamina, she was completely exhausted, but she just couldn't seem to let herself sleep. She wasn't afraid—she was worried.
Normally when one of the twins had trouble sleeping, they would just climb into the other's bed, but that was the whole problem—Sands wasn't there. Instead, she was away in that messed-up alternate realm. Scout had known Risa Kohaku for her whole life, and she trusted her to keep her sister safe to the best of her considerable abilities, but she knew that even in what should have been safe circumstances, unexpected dangerous stronger than even what an adult Heretic could handle could pop up seemingly out of nowhere. She couldn't help but wonder if she had made the right decision by staying out here. Would she really be more help on the outside?
In the end, it didn't matter. The decision was already made, and Scout was exhausted enough that she eventually fell asleep.
For the first hour of her search, Sands had been constantly on-edge, waiting for the Stranger to jump out at her, but now she was just bored. Sure, this place was really disgusting, and the spookiness never stopped disturbing her a little, but mostly it was just empty of life. Well, okay, there were still plants and the vine things were everywhere. Sands had determinedly stayed away from a few of the tentacle-vines that were moving around a little or pulsing more than she was comfortable with, but other than those and the creepy spore-things floating in the air, nothing was moving. She could sometimes here echoes of what people were saying in the normal world, although she had yet to determine a concrete pattern for where she heard them and where she heard nothing. Besides that and the quiet squelch of her footsteps, there was no sound.
Sands had grown up in a school next to a jungle, so there were always people around and jungle noises in the background. When she ventured into the jungle with her father, it was almost deafeningly loud, and even when her family left Crossroads, they rarely went somewhere quiet or empty, so the forest out in the normal world had already been oddly silent, but at least there the sounds of crickets and birds broke up the monotonous quiet of the night. Here there was none of that. She couldn't even pass the time by talking to Professor Kohaku, since she didn't want to disturb her attempt to develop a magical way to reopen the portal to the normal world.
Finally, as Sands started to approach this place's weird reflection of the town library, she noticed that the low pulsing sound a number of the creepy vines were making was getting louder. This whole place smelled bad—a dank, musty scent that reminded her of the worst smells of the jungle by her home combined with the rotting zombies she had fought. The smell only got worse as she approached the library. She cautiously opened the door and made her way inside. The floors, ceiling, and walls of the library were even thicker with mucous and slimy tentacles than the insides of the other buildings Sands had checked. When she rounded a corner, she found a row of bodies on the floor. Choking down the nausea at the sight and smell of the dead bodies by reminding herself she had a job to do, she contacted Professor Kohaku over the communicator and told her that she had found them. Counting the number of bodies, she was able to confirm that it matched the number of disappearances.
The bodies looked and smelled disgusting. They were all covered in slime, and the oldest-looking ones had begun to rot. Several of these had slimy tendrils living in them, wriggling around. Even the body that looked least dead had a tendril going down its throat. Sands crouched down and checked its neck for a heartbeat, but found nothing. There was of course the possibility that the person could be resuscitated, but that was well beyond Sands's extremely limited medical knowledge. She'd have to return to Will and Kohaku so she could guard the boy while the professor came and figured out if there was anything she could do for these people.
As Sands stood up and turned to hurry away from the corpses before she actually did puke, she saw a gross tendril slithering on the floor right in front of her. She started in shock before bringing her mace down onto the tendril with considerably more force than was necessary to smash it. Her mace passed through the tendril and the slime it was crawling through with a squelch and crashed through the floor with a crunch before Sands caught herself and pulled it back up, leaving a hole in the floor. Unlike most times a Heretic killed a Stranger, Sands's aura didn't flare up, and she didn't feel the pleasure that accompanied the absorption of a new power. She had to assume it was just too weak.
Sands realized suddenly that a low rumbling sound she'd heard since entering the library had gone quiet. After a second of silence, there was an ominous growl. Shining her flashlight that direction, Sands could see the Stranger rising to its feet. There was no sign of the injuries Scout and Koren had inflicted on it earlier in the night.
Sands knew that whether or not she could defeat the Stranger, she needed to relocate the fight in case the most intact-looking person on the floor could be saved, so she turned and bolted for the door. She passed through the doorway and then stopped, turned back, and used her construction mace to raise a steel wall on the Stranger's side of the doorway. It was charging at her, so she had to sacrifice strength for speed, making a thin wall that would cover the entire doorway. The Stranger crashed into it with a loud clang and a screech of tearing metal as it left dents in the shape of its head and upper body, and its clawed right arm tore straight through the metal. Sands swung her mace at the arm, but the Stranger pulled it back through the wall before she made contact. Her wall definitely wouldn't stand up to a second attempt to break through it, so Sands turned and sprinted out of the library. As she did, she activated her emergency beacon.
There was a loud screech of metal followed by pounding footsteps as the Stranger pursued her. She could hear that it had nearly caught her in the entrance way, so rather than take the time to open the front door, she swung her mace with all of her enhanced strength and smashed it open and jumped over the half-dozen steps down from the door. In front of her, she could see that Professor Kohaku had teleported to the front of the library in response to her signal. The dampness of this strange world was starting to rise up from the ground in a way Sands recognized, so as she landed from her jump, she tucked herself into a roll, leaving a clear shot for the spear of ice Kohaku launched at the Stranger with a gesture. The creature let out a cry of pain. When Sands stood and turned to look back inside, she saw that the Stranger had been knocked back across the entrance way of the library, although the ice spear had cracked into several pieces rather than penetrate its tough hide.
"You should return to Will in case there are more Strangers in here than just the one large one and those little tentacles," Kohaku said. "But first, where are the victims?" Sands described how to get to the room with all the bodies before heading off.
Sands didn't have to wait long after reaching Will's sleeping body (which was protected by a magic circle Kohaku had inscribed in the ground) before the Professor returned with bad news. "None of the other victims survived."
Sands stayed quiet for a moment to respect the dead. Then, she asked, "What about the Stranger?"
"It's still out there somewhere. It fled, and I prioritized checking on the victims. I could possibly hunt it down, but I am the Head of Security, not the Hunter or Investigation Tracks. Besides, this is a class assignment, so while I will not allow it to harm anybody else, I will allow you and the others to handle it. But first, I need to find a way to get back to the normal world so we can get Will to safety and your classmates can get here to assist you."
"We should go back for the bodies. Nobody deserves to have those things crawling in their body after they die, and their families will need closure. That's much easier with a body," Sands said quietly.
"I have already taken care of it," Professor Kohaku said, patting her backpack (and the extradimensional storage space within). "Now that there is nothing you need to do immediately, you should probably try to get some more sleep." Sands somewhat reluctantly had to agree. Kohaku handed her another blanket. She laid it down next to Will on the relatively clean ground around him, lay down on top of it, wrapped it around her, and tried to get comfortable enough to fall asleep. It was hard—this place was the embodiment of creepy darkness that it's hard to sleep in, and she didn't have her sister there to support her through her fear and discomfort like she was used to—but the combination of her exhaustion and her repeated reminders to herself that Professor Kohaku was right there to keep them safe eventually allowed her to fall asleep.