Chapter 9

Jack plunged through the brush, frantically trying to catch sight of the hunting team. For nearly ten minutes he blindly plunged forward. He heard them before he saw them, despite Jack rushing and crashing through branches, bushes and leaves, they seemed to be making even more noise than he was. He heard their voices in the distance just over a sharp rise. He hurried upwards but just as he got to the top of the slope, something heavy landed on his back with a screeching yowl.

Jack dropped to his stomach as he felt something heavy hit his back, he ran a charge of lightning through his body and whatever was attacking let out a pained howl and got off him. He quickly scrambled to his knees and spun around whilst drawing his sword and slashing with it at the same time. His sword cut through the face of some sort of large primate creature with a mouth full of fangs, its black fur had faintly luminescent ultraviolet streaks along its arms, legs and face.

It snarled menacingly at Jack but he didn’t have time to mess around, he poured a significant amount of lighting into his sword and lunged forward. The monkey was caught in mid snarl with its grotesque fanged maw wide open, the sword went straight in tip first and Jack upped the voltage. The monkey twitched and spasmed, smoke poured out of its mouth for a moment before Jack withdrew his sword and turned around to keep going. The whole thing had taken less than a minute.

He quickly jogged up the rise and crested it, he just about saw Stacey’s team at the bottom through the trees but quickly lost sight again. He could still hear them however.

“Huh? What was that? Is there something behind us?” one of the hunters could be heard saying.

“Whatever it was, it's not our problem. Keep moving,” another replied.

Jack stopped for a moment, taking a few deep breaths to recover, resting his hands on his knees. He shook his head in judgement however, at the hunters down below, it was like they didn’t even know where they were. No wonder they’d been having a terrible time of it, if they couldn’t be stealthy in a place like this then maybe they really should go home. But he certainly wasn’t going to allow them to sacrifice Stacey like this. His fists clenched as he heard a bark of laughter down below, he stood up straight and slid down the hill.

A few minutes later he started hearing loud sounds from up ahead, shouting and screaming, the clash of steel, loud noises usually associated with elemental techniques and monstrous roaring. He quickly ran through the trees and brush and a minute later he frantically crashed through into a scene he hadn’t been expecting.

Stacey was standing in the middle of a small clearing, she was the only one standing up, everything and everyone else looked to be either dead or dying. The clearing was littered with monster corpses, the same type of monster that had ambushed Jack earlier in fact. Laying amongst the monsters were the bodies of Stacey’s former teammates.

Stacey just seemed to be standing there, she then raised her hand in front of her and from out of the body of one the hunters at the edge of the clearing her giant sabre came flying towards her, she deftly caught it before looking downwards, resting her sword over her shoulder. At her feet, the other female hunter was still alive.

“Please! Please Stace! Don’t kill me! I never…I never wanted to do it! The others…they made me! Please!” she begged tearfully with her bloody hands raised as if to shield her.

Stacey looked down at her with an icy stare. For a second it looked like she was going to finish her off but Stacey’s face relaxed and her icy stare turned to one of pity, she lowered her sword to the side.

The woman at her feet saw Stacey lowering her guard and was quick to take advantage, she quickly grabbed a small knife hidden in her belt and made to stab Stacey with it.

However she didn’t quite manage it as a massive sword swung downward and bisected her skull. Stacey snorted in contempt before jerking her sword free with a crunch.

Jack meanwhile, had simply been watching in shock, he shook himself and took a step forward, his foot crunched a branch and Stacey whirled around.

“What the- Jack!?” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Uh, hey Stacey.” He gave her an awkward grin.

“What are you doing here?” she asked in confusion, looking him up and down having taken note of his bedraggled appearance.

“I'm er…here to save you?” he told her with uncertainty as he looked around at all the carnage and then back at Stacey who was clearly the cause of much of it.

“Thanks?” She sounded just as confused as he was.

“Er yeah, I saw you back at the outpost and wanted to talk to you so I followed you to the canteen. But then I overheard your team talking about getting rid of you and getting out of the Dire Woods and collecting the insurance money and so I followed and got ambushed and now I’m….well…here…I guess,” he blurted out in a rush before trailing off, now not really knowing what to say.

“You came all the way out here dressed like that to save me?” She looked genuinely touched. Jack looked down at himself and saw that his t-shirt and jeans were ripped and bloody, his trainers were also covered in mud.

“Um yeah, I couldn’t not, you know…..” he grinned. She smiled back.

“What was that about insurance money? And them getting out of the Dire Woods?” she asked.

“Well, from what I overheard, I think they regretted coming to the Woods, thought it was too dangerous or something and just wanted to get out. They said that if you got killed then their team would be classed as understrength and they’d be allowed out. And there was something about collecting the insurance money on you as well, I don’t know what that means, life insurance maybe?” He shrugged after he explained.

Stacey’s eyes widened in fury for a moment and she looked like she wanted to attack the dead female hunter at her feet again.

“Those bastards! Fucking bastards! I knew I shouldn’t have had anything to do with them. Lazy, conniving, useless assholes!” she kicked the dead body at her feet, sending it rolling away from her.

“Then why did you?” he asked her.

“Huh?”

“Why join them? What happened to your old team?” he asked again.

Stacey sighed after a moment. “Why do you think?” She gave him a hard look. “After you ditched me, to go off into the Dire Woods with Meredith Shriverston, what was I supposed to make of that? Huh? You’re not the only ambitious one Jack, I have aspirations as a hunter too! Going on an expedition into one the world's greatest magical anomalies, on a team with the Meredith Shriverston of all people, how could I not want that! When I heard that you and her were recruiting for a team, I was so excited, but then you told me no! I mean…what the fuck!? I thought we were friends!” she ranted, getting more agitated.

Jack grimaced, this wasn’t going amazingly well, but he couldn’t blame her. When they’d first had this discussion back at the North Yorkshire branch, he hadn’t really explained himself very well, or at all really.

“Well I….” he started before sighing, trying to find the right words. He started again. “A while back before leaving, director Welts asked me to not invite Rachael and Zack, he didn’t want his kids in that kind of…well in this kind of danger.” He gestured all around him, at the dark, creepy forest around them, with unrecognisable alien flora and fauna everywhere, maniacal monstrous chatter echoed far off and in the distance some sort of animal or monster screamed in pain and fear. “Everyone kept warning me about how bad it was in here and the death toll. I've seen more hunters die here in a few weeks than I ever did out in the real world. I just……didn’t really want to bring one of the few friends I have to this place only to watch them die,” he explained to her.

“So, you were protecting me?’ She looked at him sceptically as she stood, surrounded by the carnage she’d wrought.

“Um, yeah,” he admitted, feeling rather silly now.

She sighed tiredly again before grinning. “You’re an idiot,” she told him good naturedly.

“Hey, I never claimed to be anything else.” He grinned back. “So how did you fall in with these guys anyway?” he asked her.

“Well, I’d always wanted to go into the Dire Woods myself, and after you left me behind I was desperate. At first I tried to get my old team to go on more and tougher hunts so we could rank up and go to the Woods, but that wasn’t working,” she explained.

“Oh? Why not?”

“They didn’t want to go for starters,” she said with a wry grin.

“Ah, yeah I can see how that might be an obstacle,” he chuckled.

“Mm, we’re all D rankers and it's difficult to progress from there, but D ranked jobs give good money anyway, so it's easy to get complacent. Anyway, I actually managed to get back up to the point where I could take a rank up hunt again, but then someone approached me. He said he was going to the Dire Woods outpost and his team needed another member, his name was Adam, a B ranker, he’s around here somewhere.” She carelessly waved her hand to the various corpses lying around. “Something struck me as off about them as soon as I met them, but they were going to take me to where I wanted to go so I thought I’d bear with it,” she said with a grimace.

“Yeah, you didn’t look too happy whenever I saw you around the outpost,” Jack remarked.

“Oh god they were such a shitty team, just a bunch of whiners and wimps and lazy fucks, they barely trained or cultivated, even Adam, I don’t know how he made B rank. All they wanted to do was drink and laze around, they took a few hunts out in the Woods and got scared, so after that all they wanted to do were simple harvesting jobs or being loot mules, god it was humiliating. And did I mention they were arseholes?”

“Yes, you might’ve already mentioned something along those lines.” He nodded, smirking in amusement.

“Yeah, so anyway, here we are. I don’t really know what to do from here, the whole team’s dead. I guess we need to report this,” she said with concern.

“Let's try and tell Cheryl first,” Jack said.

“Huh? Why?”

“Cus she likes us and will be more willing to listen to us, besides I don’t think the commander is overly fond of me,” he informed her.

“You mean he doesn’t fall over himself to give you the royal treatment because you're the only lightning cultivator in the guild?” she asked with a smirk.

“That's precisely it.” He nodded with a smirk and she laughed lightly.

They began walking back to the outpost. Stacey turned to Jack as they walked.

“So if you were protecting me, then what about Nate? I thought you two had a whole bromance thing going on,” she teased.

“Nate…Nate is kind of a lunatic, could you really see me stopping him from coming to a place like this?” he asked. Off in the distance, something that sounded like a banshee on steroids trying to pass a kidney stone howled. “He would’ve followed us. Also, I thought you were saner than Nate.” Nearby, a small rodent-like animal the size of a cat got grabbed by some vines and dragged beneath a tree, its squeals of pain were quickly cut off with a crunch.

“I suppose you're right. But, now it looks like I’m out. Even if I’m cleared of any wrongdoing I can’t stay in the Dire Woods without a full team,” she said glumly.

“Ah don’t worry about any of that, you can join my team.” He waved off her concerns nonchalantly.

She looked at him in surprise and tripped as they continued walking back to base.

*********************************************

“Dead? All of them?” Cheryl looked back and forth between Stacey and Jack sceptically, they both shuffled their feet and tried to avoid looking guilty. They were currently in the outpost commanders office along with the commander himself, they had just given Cheryl and the commander the abridged version of events out in the Woods. Cheryl was leaning against his desk while the commander sat behind it, looking at them sternly.

“Well that sucks,” Cheryl said blandly with a small shrug.

“Sucks!? Is that all you can say! An entire team just got killed! Some of them by one of their own teammates!” the commander burst out indignantly.

“Which team were you on Stacey?” Cheryl asked, ignoring the commander.

“Oh er, team Meteor,” Stacey answered nervously. Some hunters liked grandiose names for their teams.

“Meteor…Meteor….” the commander muttered to himself as he quickly swiped through a touchpad, looking for the details of the hunting team in question. “Ah, Meteor, found them……Let's see here, oh, you were on that team huh? Lowest job completion rate, lowest revenue earned, several complaints lodged against them by the surveyor corps and a fair number of black marks against most of their members, I was actually thinking of putting them on probation. Well damn, regardless of the team, this is a mess, there needs to be an investigation,” the commander growled in frustration, scratching the burn scars on his neck.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“You mentioned something about insurance Jack? Insurance they had on Stacey?” Cheryl spoke up again, as if to guide the conversation, as she was wont to do.

“Oh, yeah. They said they would collect the insurance on Stacey afterwards, not quite sure what they meant precisely. It's not life insurance is it?” Jack suggested.

The commander frowned before swiping through his touchpad again until he found what he was looking for, he turned it around and showed it to Stacey.

“Is this your signature, Fairchild?” He showed her a scanned image of a document with a slightly messy signature at the bottom that said her name. Stacey leant down to look at it.

“No, that's definitely not my signature and I never signed anything like that, what is it?” she asked in confusion.

“It's just what Errant says, it's a life insurance document. Obviously the hunters guild offers life insurance to its hunters for a large sum to be paid out to their chosen beneficiaries in case of the hunters death. But most don’t bother because it's ridiculously expensive,” The commander sent a glare to Cheryl.

“Don’t look at me, that's my sister's department.” Cheryl shrugged.

“Anyway, this particular document was apparently signed by you, yesterday in fact,” he informed them.

If that didn’t confirm it, then nothing would, Jack thought. They’d clearly planned this, though their execution left much to be desired.

“I did not sign that!” Stacey vehemently insisted.

“I vouch for Stacey, if she says she didn’t then she didn’t. Obviously team ‘meteor’ had this all planned out. You can investigate this all you like James but Stacey’s actions were justified and she’s still a hunter of the guild if she still wants to be, it's decided,” Cheryl stated firmly. Cheryl was one of the guild executives and a founder of the UK hunters guild so a mere outpost commander like James Harren couldn’t really do much to gainsay her. He settled for an unimpressed snort before turning to Stacey.

“Fairchild, you’ll either need to find a team in the Dire Woods willing to take you or you’ll have to go back to the branch headquarters. No lone hunters here I’m afraid,” he told her.

“That's okay sir, she’s joining my team, team Meredith,” Jack told him. The commander nodded before noting it down in his touchpad.

“Very good, we’ve marked the location of the….conflict, not that we’ll be able to do anything. You’re both free to go,” he told them.

With audible sighs of relief the two of them turned around and quickly left the commanders of office and the main administration building.

The next day…..

Team Meredith, now including Stacey, were sitting around a large table in the canteen. The building was lively with other hunting teams and guild personnel eating, drinking and talking.

After almost a month of trying, the outpost engineers had finally managed to get a satellite signal from directly through the Dire Woods entryway. Before, someone had actually needed to step through and outside the rift in space back into the Yorkshire Dales in order to send and receive any sort of satellite signal. But after some work the engineers had managed to set something up. Now everyone had the internet and satellite television back.

In a mini celebration of the fact, most of the base had crowded into the canteen and surrounded the various television screens that had been set up around the interior. They now had access to information from the outside world.

One of the engineers was behind the bar, finagling with some sort of device that would finalise the connection. When he was finally done he stood up and pressed something on a handheld device, he nodded to the bartender who clicked his remote, the television sets all switched on at once to a small cheer from the gathered crowd.

The bartender flicked through the channels until he got to the news channel.

The first story, surprisingly enough, detailed the the discovered fate of the Titanic II, the supposedly unsinkable, unkillable mega ship that crossed the Atlantic ocean and was supposed to reopen direct trade between Europe and the American continents.

It was found adrift just off the coast of Mexico, it did not respond to radio calls, nor did it look like anybody was aboard on deck. When investigators from Mexico and the US boarded the ship and entered the interior, contact was promptly lost. After several days another team was sent, contact was also lost with the team but one of them managed a garbled radio transmission. Not much was gleaned from it except for several words; all dead, monsters, dungeon, help us.

Another team of investigators, this time completely made up of top ranked hunters from the US. They boarded the ship and managed to confirm that the ship had indeed become a dungeon, they reported the presence of many different types of monster and a vastly changed interior. The hunting team attempted to fight their way down to the bowels of the ship but in the end were forced to withdraw, however they did manage to come away with a fair amount of valuable dungeon spawned loot.

After the hunters exited the dungeon, they stuck around for a while to help other hunter teams investigate the exterior of the ship, but then a strange thick mist manifested from out of nowhere and converged on the ship. Apparently that's when things got a little hairy, swarms of monsters came screaming out of the mists and began attacking every human in sight. Everyone that wasn’t dead was forced to abandon the deck of the ship, either by getting back to their own boats or jumping into the sea.

After a short while the impenetrable mists dispersed, but of the ship, there was no sign. However a couple of weeks later it showed up once more but this time off the coast of Portugal, near Lisbon, nobody knew how it had got there but there it was anyway. A highly ranked team of Portuguese monster slayers attempted a dungeon delve but were beaten back like the previous team. Just like last time, a short while after the hunters exited the dungeon, a thick mist covered the ship and when it dispersed the ship was nowhere in sight. The Portuguese hunters had made certain to promptly debark the ship after getting out of the dungeon.

Now the rest of the world was waiting to see where the now so called ‘ghostship’ would reappear next.

Jack heard a funny noise to his left, he turned his head to see Nate actually wiping a bit of drool from his mouth as he stared raptly at the tv screen.

Another story detailed the search for the spider-like titan that had attacked Paris a couple of months back, it had been found having crossed the border into Germany and was now occupying the Black forest. Not only that, but it had also somehow spawned hordes of smaller but still alarmingly large spider-like monsters which were in the process of overrunning the region.

The Black forest of Germany was already a densely forested mountainous region, so in this day and age it wasn’t a place for the faint of heart and many villages had already been abandoned or overwhelmed by monster attacks. But the swarms of tank sized spiders made the region completely inhospitable, the only area that humans held sway was a large fortress the Germans had set up which was occupied by their soldiers and hunters.

However, if nothing else, whenever one of the giant spiders was slain, its corpse provided a wealth of valuable material to harvest, process and either sell or use. In fact, the French and German governments had actually gotten into a dispute over the hunting rights of the creatures, even though they were firmly within the German border. The French felt that because the spider titan originated from their country, they should be entitled to whatever it produced, obviously the Germans disagreed.

The final story was more of a local one, it seemed the hunters guild disliked the notion of only having a single lightning cultivator to call upon and for the past few months had been training up several other lightning elements.

The screen showed a group of men and women, all garbed in expensive looking, shiny new armour, wielding weapons that certainly didn’t look like simple machetes or chains scavenged from abandoned construction sites. They were the newly trained lightning elements that the guild was ready to show off to the world. They were down in London, at the main headquarters conducting an interview with the press.

“And how do you feel about finally having the ability to cultivate after all this time?” one reporter asked one of the armour clad new lightning cultivating hunters.

“It feels.…..it feels really great. As lightning elements we were used to getting looked down on, you know? But now we finally have the opportunity to make something of ourselves and we just…we’re really grateful to the guild for giving us this opportunity,” one of the young men answered the reporter, politely and eloquently, someone had clearly been taking his lessons with the PR department seriously.

Nate nudged Jack in the ribs. “Looks like you’ve got competition Jack. Ha!”

Jack smiled and shrugged in response. He wasn’t really bothered, he’d held off divulging the secret of lightning cultivation to the rest of the world because he didn’t want to be held responsible for what happened in case people got hurt over it. Fortunately, somebody else had let that particular cat out of the bag, so Jack at least didn’t hold himself responsible for whatever came afterwards, in fact he understood there was still a nationwide manhunt going on for someone, likely a lightning cultivator, killing people and using them as cultivation material.

In anycase, good for them, the new hunters that is, not the homicidal maniac. That was Jack’s opinion anyway.

“So what are your thoughts on the world's first ever lightning cultivator? Jack Errant, you’re following in his footsteps. He was the one to discover the secret after all and is widely considered to be a rather successful hunter to boot, many also consider him to be a trailblazer, even now he’s apparently in the Dire Woods, one of the most dangerous places in the world. Do you look up to him in any way? Would you seek to emulate him?” the reporter asked.

“Ah ha yes, Jack Errant. Well let's face it, he only discovered the secret to lightning cultivation by accident didn’t he? It wasn’t exactly on purpose or anything. Someone was bound to stumble on it eventually weren’t they?” the newly minted lightning cultivator stated in a somewhat amused, superior tone.

Jack’s eyebrows rose along with a feeling of indignation. He certainly didn’t see any other lightning element come up with anything concrete before him. Nevermind anything charitable he’d thought about these guys previously, screw ‘em.

“Oh? But even so, you must respect his success and achievements as a hunter, you-” the reporter tried to ask a follow up question but was interrupted by the same lightning element.

“I mean, success is a subjective term isn’t it? What's he actually done? Killed a few goblins, slimes and mutated doggies? I’ll admit he broke some new ground for us, but he’s not exactly a powerhouse or a trained professional,” the man arrogantly spoke out.

Jack glared at the tv screen. Who the fuck was this guy? Where was he getting this confidence/arrogance from? It certainly wasn’t from actually going out and successfully hunting monsters, judging by his pristine, unmarked, unscarred face.

Faint, thin blue arcs of electricity began crawling over his body, several of the tv screens nearest him began flickering before Stacey prodded him in the side of the head. He took a deep breath and calmed down, slightly.

“You can rest assured,” the man continued. “We’ve actually studied our element and know what we’re doing,” he said in a smug tone, the handful of lightning elements and journalists chuckled.

“Ooooo!” The crowd of hunters and guild personnel went in amusement at the dig by the new lightning element.

“Whoa! Them's fightin’ words!” Katie laughed.

“I hope they get eaten alive by Fairies,” Jack stated emotionlessly.

“Jack!” Meredith protested. Nate, Stacey and Katie cackled, even Noah let out a deep chuckle.

After that the news finished and most people turned back to doing other things. Team Meredith for instance, had to plan its next expedition.

“Is it bad to say I’m sick of hunting monsters? At least for the time being?” Katie spoke up.

“Sick of hunting monsters?! How?! Who?! Why?! Where?! What?!” Nate spluttered indignantly.

“Not permanently or anything, but you have to admit the commander was riding us pretty hard these past few weeks. It was just one hunt after another. It’s just a little much, you know?” Katie sighed tiredly. Jack sort of had to agree with her, they’d spent a great deal of time on the hunt lately. He wasn’t tired as such, just a little burnt out.

“Hell no I don’t know! Last week I punched a giant bear monster in the face then the very next day I used a goblin as an improvised flail to kill a group of other goblins, the very next day! Are you actually telling me you’re sick of that?!” Nate asked her incredulously.

Before Katie could say something to incense Nate further, Meredith stepped in.

“Well that’s fine, we have been going at it pretty hard, and there are always harvesting jobs available. Let’s go check the lounge,” she said, getting to her feet, everyone followed her.

The lounge was similar to the jobs and requests room back in the North Yorkshire branch headquarters, it had multiple terminal screens hunters could go to, log in and accept jobs that have been posted there. However for some reason it had far more comfortable seating areas than the room in York so someone had taken to calling it the lounge and the name stuck.

The team walked in together and split up to go to different terminals so they could find a suitable job faster. This was one of the ideas Noah had come up with that wasn’t rejected immediately, each team member would search for jobs in different rank categories. Then come up with one or two suggestions when the team gets back together.

Today Jack was scrolling through the D listings, most harvesting jobs fell into that category. He saw a fair number of potential jobs, he also saw something strange. A job simply called ‘Katie’s Arrows’. He smirked, he remembered when Katie had put that job up. After a few weeks and plenty of hunts in the Dire Woods, she’d misplaced more than a few of her expensive water crystal imbued arrow heads. So in a burst of desperation she put up an ongoing job that promised a cash reward for any arrow that gets returned.

After scrolling through the D ranked list of jobs, Jack had come up with half a dozen harvesting jobs that paid reasonably well. Normally, jobs like those would be considered milk runs in the outside world and much lower in rank, but in the Dire Woods things could get pretty hairy regardless of how boring you wanted the situation to be.

Everyone reconvened and shared what they found, Nate immediately suggested a B ranked hunt for an Acid Gorger but was swiftly vetoed. The rest of the group including Jack only had uninteresting but probably still quite dangerous harvesting jobs. Stacey however, did manage to suggest something intriguing.

“Have you guys seen the scouting mission in the C rank listings?” she mentioned.

Everyone gathered around a terminal and Stacey brought it up. It was a scouting mission in order to push the known boundaries of the Woods to hopefully or at least eventually discover the very edge. There was another similar job but that was to discover the top of the Woods, to climb up the trees, past the tree canopy and to get a glimpse of the sky above. Attempts at that using drones had been made in the past but they had all failed. Also, several times people had attempted to enter the trees by dropping down on ropes from helicopters, they were either never heard from again or they would disappear and reappear in a random spot within the Dire Woods. Likewise, whenever people tried to enter the Woods from different locations outside they would again wind up in random spots within. There appeared to be only one known reliable entrance and exit.

“It says here we’d be escorting a surveyor, the missions for two weeks, one week going out and another coming back,” Noah pointed out.

Everyone thought for a moment before debating amongst themselves.

“That sounds okay,” Katie said thoughtfully. “It's a long time to be out in the Woods though.”

“I think it looks good too, we can probably avoid dealing with any monsters if we have a surveyor with us, so we don’t have to fight if we don’t want to,” Jack said.

“Avoid dealing with monsters!? Don’t have to fight if we don’t want to?! Are you listening to yourself Jack? Did you hit your head?” Nate put Jack's head in a headlock and proceeded to examine it while Jack tried to fend him off, bumping into another hunter on the next terminal over.

While Jack and Nate were otherwise occupied with being nuisances to other hunters attempting to use the terminals, the other four continued to talk it out.

“I don’t really have any objections either,” Noah rumbled. “I’m still nowhere near the requisite job tally to be eligible for a promotion hunt, so some time on an expedition won’t be detrimental.”

“Me too, I doubt I’ll make A rank this year. But an expedition to push the known boundaries of the Woods sounds pretty cool, I’m all for it!” Meredith said cheerfully. “Good find Stacey!” she beamed at Stacey.

“Oh er, thanks Meredith.” Stacey smiled back shyly.

Meredith smiled before turning to the still wrestling Nate and Jack. “Hey guys! It's decided, we’re doing the scouting mission!” she yelled over to them.

“Aww!” Nate let go of Jack’s head and let out a groan of disappointment.

“That's great! Haha!” Jack mocked Nate before shoving him over one of the padded chairs, sending him tumbling over onto the floor. Laughing, Jack ran out of the room with an indignant Nate staggering after him.