Brunhilde’s look of disgust and shock was worse than anything we had experienced beneath Titan City. She shook with revulsion, hand covering her mouth. It looked as though she was on the precipice of voiding the contents of her stomach, her face tinged with hints of pea green stored within her cheeks.

“Where did you find him?” she managed, having taken the time to swallow and force her breakfast to settle within her stomach. The risk had passed… for the moment. “Where was he all this time? What took you so long to find Gunter?”

She stared at the mangled spike feeder corpse, hand lingering tenderly on the most human-like part of it, the face. With its eyes closed, one could pretend Gunter was almost human, as long as they only looked from the neck up and ignored the mottled gray skin. He painted a serene image, hateful beady eyes and sharp teeth buried under their closed parts. I could almost see the man speaking to us on the road instead of this misbegotten form, back when we were optimistic about delving through unexplored ruins.

Alain looked to Javier for permission, waiting for that implicit nod of approval to divulge what we had learned. Where we were wasn’t explicitly secret information, but only Javier was aware of what was on a need-to-know basis, and this seemingly dodged those parameters. That, or Brunhilde was so deep that she would implicitly be fine to be told anything we struggled through. It was a question for Javier for when the world was less hectic, if that would ever be true again.

“We found him… it… whatever you’ll want to call this corpse before you in the ruins of Old Titan City, amassed with the rest of the spike feeders there. That signal you pointed us to seemingly brought him along as well. He was already in this shape upon our arrival, no amount of his humanity left to speak with.”

We couldn’t answer the others questions. We didn’t know, nor could we speak as to the consequences of Gunter’s pursuit of knowledge. We had acted in the face of safety, meaning fleeing that dangerous site. His desire to learn had overridden his desire to live an assured life, and this was the price he somehow paid. Speaking that aloud to Brunhilde would no doubt wound her, and our job wasn’t to twist the knife in deeper. Perhaps Amalarys would reinforce that point at a later time, but for now we could only remain objective and true in our discourse.

“So who can have the corpse?” she managed after a brief silence, staring at her old friend. Her face was locked in the direction of her friend, haggard and unyielding in spite of the evil resting before her.

“We presumed you would want to study it. That’s why we brought it up instead of leaving it down below in the ruins,” Alain replied, avoiding looking in Brunhilde’s direction. The chance of meeting her gaze would have meant he was drawn into her pull, her method of being. He couldn’t afford to be feeling those emotions, even if she had all but guaranteed there was no chance of a glance. That would destabilize the conversation even further.

“Gunter would have wanted to know what happened to him,” she replied. “It’s my duty, along with my compatriots, to understand the process.”

She swallowed deeply, turning back towards us, body resolute. She was filled with conviction, a goal already determined before the words left her mouth. “We’re studying him until he no longer resembles himself, his body sacrificed for the good of everyone. If this is the price he paid for knowledge, we’re going to wring him dry until he’s gone far beyond the sum he traded for. I won’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”

A pregnant pause filled the morgue. What happened next was entirely up to her, the body given into her care. It was a matter of waiting to ensure nothing else was required from us.

“Now get out.”

Her words were venom, flung carelessly with no thought as to who they would hit so long as they were heeded. As long as her purpose was achieved the means didn’t matter.

Understandably, she wanted to be alone with her former companion. We filtered out of the morgue, leaving behind any stray thoughts about Gunter. He was now only Brunhilde’s problem. We no longer had a claim over him, having finally ended our watch for his missing body.

We started heading up to Amalarys’s office, having been given permission to fulfill that obligation with Brunhilde before debriefing on the success of our mission in the city below, our return the night before a brief window of respite. If Amalarys wanted one thing, it was her researchers happy. They were the last bastion for our hopes in securing the future of Titan City.

“Well? What happened down there?” she asked, studying her nails with seeming abject boredom.

The room seemed more chaotic than usual for her, paperwork flooding over every nook and cranny. Any surface that had the potential to be clear was cluttered, every answer creating two more problems.

“It was as infested as Brunhilde’s research suggested,” Javier started. “Cluttered with an endless amount of spike feeders. Person-rank ones primarily, in aggregate numbers still a threat, perhaps even more than one would see in a Culling Night. The borders of the city were barely populated, making our descent into the city nearly seamless. That didn’t make it much easier as we went into the heart of the city. We had to mow down spike feeder after spike feeder without making a meaningful dent. They kept coming no matter how many we killed, and I’d estimate we killed somewhere around two hundred of them by the end of our excursion.”

“So how did you stop the signal then? I presume you didn’t kill all of the monsters, or you would have gotten back much later than now. You better have a good excuse.” She crossed her arms, sternly gazing at Javier, our leader cowering ever so slightly under the weight of her authority. It was only noticeable if one was used to his body posture and by this time I could confidently say I recognized when he looked uncomfortable.

“That some were left alive wasn’t for lack of trying. We took a tactical retreat from the horde after fighting nearly non-stop for at least fifteen minutes, if not longer. Even if they were person-rank spike feeders, it was a more proactive effort than Culling Night, energy having to be actively exerted to dodge the threats. Perry here suggested we break off from the action, and we managed to stumble onto the signal which Perry deactivated.”

Amalarys turned to me, an intense focus living behind her gaze. “How’d you stop the signal? Where’s the emitter? Was there an emitter? You need to explain sufficiently so that Brunhilde and her team can prepare for any other instances of this, doctrine forbid.”

I swallowed, unwilling to admit how I had interacted with whatever it was that had emanated the signal. “I uh, electrically disrupted it. Whatever that object was got destroyed by my action, withering to dust. I wouldn’t have known how to preserve it. It was a strange thing made of a material I don’t know how to describe.”

They stared at me, mouths opening and closing, as though they were unsatisfied with my answer, but words failed to find purchase. Evidently they were willing to let the matter rest. You can’t draw water from a stone, after all. I took confidence that they weren’t suspicious of my efforts, given my unintentionally cultivated aura of ignorance. The virtues of being from a small village it seemed.

“We’ll have to get more clarification on the full scope of electricity at another point. Run some tests with Brunhilde and her team,” Amalarys muttered, unwilling to let my part go without some sort of commentary. “Javier, continue on.”

“From there, we collected Gunter’s corpse for Brunhilde and her team and returned, coming straight back to you. I’d prefer if we could have a break from official business. It’s been a long two days, Amalarys.” Javier looked like he had no strength left, hair matted against his face. Our gauntlet through the ruins had also left me on edge. He didn’t even bring up our observer. Was he even listening then? I wasn’t sure anymore. I knew the others knew, but now I didn’t know if Javier did or if he was purposefully excluding information from Amalarys.

“Fine, we’ll discuss more about this mission later, although I don’t know if you’re entirely off the hook. There’s some other elements I need further clarification on, but this was a fine first effort” she sighed, drooping further into her chair as another guardsman ran into the room.

He panted heavily, lupine attributes visible on his body. I thought I recognized him from the cafeteria; he was always going back for seconds after hastily scarfing down the first helping. He never seemed like the serious sort, but the gaunt look on his face suggested something was awry. I didn’t like the prospect of that. Somehow, I had never caught his name.

“The code black is confirmed, boss. I’ll continue making my rounds,” the guard said. He saluted and ran off, Amalarys rising immediately out of her slump, body rigid with shock. She tightly gripped the arms of her chair, fingers pale, impressions forming under her grasp in the hard wood.

“No, it couldn’t be. I thought we had more time,” she muttered, rifling through the papers on her desk. “Where are my scout reports? This is ahead of schedule.”

She dove about the room, documents flying through the air. Nowhere was safe, our bodies shoved aside to make room for her to dig through pile after pile until she triumphantly grasped a stack of papers and threw them onto her desk.

“No, no, this is months ahead of the projected timeline. Why is my last report from a month ago?,” Amalarys grunted. Her arms cleared the desk, papers flying into the air.

“Guess it doesn’t matter then. Everyone, let’s go assemble in the training grounds. Whatever brief rest you thought you were going to get is now gone, so make the most of this time to recover your strength. The worst has come to pass.”

I stared at Javier’s face, noting Alain, Vera and Mia also trying to draw the information out from his expression. His shocked face spoke more than enough for his lack of words.

“To put it briefly, given Javier seems to have been lacking on your generalized training for the city guard, Titan City is about to come into contact with a city-tier spike feeder. Everyone is going to gather to receive their directions before the arrival of the monster.”

She started bolting out of her office, leaving all of us trailing after her, hoping to keep up with her frantic pace. “Hopefully the others are more aware of a code black. We don’t have the time for this level of information. Need everyone to be present to prepare for impact. A code black means that the projected trajectory is within the next few hours. If you had the time to go to the city walls, you would already be able to see its advancement in the distance. It’s simply that large.”

Amalarys took the stairs two at a time, pace picking up even further, every second not spent directing the city guard was a second gone to waste. There simply wasn’t enough time to mobilize the city in response to the threat, but I could tell that she was prepared to do whatever she could to mitigate the harm.

This… this is what we’d been training for. This was for everything and everyone we cared about. A Culling Night sounded like nothing compared to the prospect of being met with a city-tier rank spike feeder.

I didn’t need to ask, the grim aura in the air all the confirmation I needed. People were going to die. Civilians, guards, parents, children, families. People were going to die, but we had to do everything we could to stop the spike feeder, or it wouldn’t be just some people, but all of them.

We entered the training grounds to the amassed city guard forces, others still trickling in behind us, seemingly having had further to go. They bore their second form attributes as a reflection of their speed to return, the message so important that all measures had to be used to ensure they were present and on time.

I wondered if the guard had gone to all of the outposts throughout the city to deliver the message before getting back to Amalarys to ensure that they would all assemble on her timeline. Perhaps most of the plans were drawn up beforehand, and the only item was ensuring the guards were available to execute them. Time was the enemy here. We needed more, but it was clearly running out.

it began to dawn on me that my will was sitting in my bedside drawer, stored away for moments like these. I hoped it wouldn’t be needed, for any of us.