Things started to fall apart when the magical beasts came. Zeke and Jace had been out hunting, and when they came back, they made reports of flying lions. Jace would’ve done it just to fuck with us, but I don’t think Zeke would. We don’t even know if Zeke has a sense of humor.

A few days later, Leah and Lee brought back a rabbit head with stag horns. The head was the same size as mine. Said the little bugger was tougher to fight than he looked. Lee, like Zeke, is humor-impaired, so we’re pretty sure it’s not a hoax. Angela said she saw some sort of eagle with a wingspan over fifty feet. Ray saw some sort of fish-person in the river.

Flynn, our combat coordinator, suggested we pair up hunting groups. He wants us to go out in fours, rather than in pairs. Yulia and I get together with Chaim and Gemma, and it only takes us an hour before we find a problem. In a wet part of the forest, we run into a nine headed dino-lizard, about forty feet long and twenty feet tall. It looks like a small apatasaurus, but with nine necks and heads instead of one. And those heads are not vegetarian. Twenty feet tall includes its evil sea anemone front end and seven foot necks.

Chaim yells out “Hydra.”

By the looks on everyone else’s faces, that didn’t do any more for anyone else than for me.

Chaim yells again: “Gemma, stay back. It might be poisonous. Snake, can you piss it off? It’s not very fast. Yulia, can you cut off a head?”

I saserface a wide-beam stunner at it, and it notices, screaming at me and chasing. Yulia dodges, jumps in, and cuts off one of the left-side necks. The neck is about a foot and a half across, but that doesn’t stop the beautiful and talented Miss Sharpness.

“Back off, Yulia, and don't touch the blood. Wipe it off on the ground,” directs Chaim. He’s the best strategist of the four of us, so Yulia gets twenty yards back, while I play dodgehead with my sticks. Yulia cleans her swords by sticking them into the ground, down to their hilts, then pulling them back out, like some incredibly hot Queen Arthur.

It bites at me with three heads, but like almost everything, it's too slow. I dodge, and whack each one with a good strike. No effect, but as one of the heads retracts, it drops a slobber, and I can hear the grass underneath sizzle.

“Seems like acid spit,” I say.

“Oh shit!” says Gemma. I sprint backwards first, and look second. We’re now facing a ten-headed hydra. The neck stump regrew two additional necks, with just as many teeth on the end as the other eight.

Chaim coordinates more, “Gemma, you’re on spit defense. It might spit, and it can’t get on anyone. That shit is what got Hercules.

“Okay. You’re bait again, Snake. Yulia, We’re going to have to coordinate. Chop a neck, and get the hell out of there. I’m going to play Iolaus with my laser.”

“Huh?”

It doesn’t spit. I set up some sound walls, and maneuver them into place. I yell, “Now,” and slam it into the sound wall with home fire alarm volume. It’s a lot harder, because the damn thing has ten heads. Regardless, my control is good enough, and hits them all with a short disorientation, which gives Yulia time to jump in and drop chop off another neck. Chaim has set up his laser, and takes only half a second after Yulia is clear to laser burn the neck stump.

Ten more seconds of dodging, and there’s no new heads. Great. We’re back to where we started, but know how to fight this thing.

We run the drill again, and it works a second time. On the third drill, it shakes its heads when I sound-slam it, but Gemma was waiting with a breath, and saves Yulia by breathing out gale-force winds to toss the acidic drops back at the lizard.

Heads four through six fall and are cauterized quickly. It tries to fake being stunned when it only has four heads left, but Yulia isn't fooled, even if I was. She cuts heads seven and eight together, one with each hand. My god she’s sexy. Chaim manages to cauterize both, and then it takes only ten seconds to finish the creature off. When all the heads are gone, it crashes to the ground, dead, and we pick up forty yellows off the thing.

It’s blood is supposed to be even more toxic than its saliva. Chaim warns us to be extra careful, and Yulia again cleans her swords by stabbing the dirt.

Leaving it where it fell, partly because we can't do anything else, we head back to town to report. When we get there, our report is swallowed by bigger issues. Mary was killed by a flock of "Manticores." They’re apparently lion beasts with spiked tails they can throw spikes from, and wings. Al is in shock. He was defense, supposed to protect everyone, but against four manticores, the four of them couldn’t actually handle all of them. Mary was great at manipulating bone, but not fast enough to handle something that throws spikes at her from thirty yards away. When Al was distracted by the other three, it thew a spike into her left eye. She was dead before anyone noticed.

Al, Beef, and Angela took down the Manticores before they started crying, but Mary’s dead. And she was Yulia’s best friend. The four who greeted me in the first place were the four who founded the town, and they’d known one another since the tutorial ended. Yulia bursts into tears, the first time I’ve seen her lose composure since we met.

“Snake, I need some time.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Play sad songs, and let me cry.”

I go to my kit and start playing Chopin’s funeral march on the Marimba. Then the rest of the funeral songs I know. See You Again. I will Remember You. Tears in Heaven. Heaven Was Needing a Hero. Arlington. I play for 48 hours.

2 days in, I hear Yulia talking to Nick and Alika while I play.