The Hell Pigs were about as subtle than their name implied. Their party had crashed through the jungle like a carnival, plunging into jungle that got thicker and wilder as it sloped down into marshland. Their scent was lost in the brackish water, but I tracked Clive’s raiding party by following the corpses of the common Legions they’d left behind.

Because they’d had to fight their way home, the party had been slowed down despite the enormous lead they’d had on me. I was able to catch up with them in time to see them approach a ruined city. Ziggurats, hewn of enormous blocks of black stone half-sunken into the earth, loomed over the dripping humid jungle. The towering front gate leaned almost forty degrees to one side in the mud. It was carved with stylized images of howling, wild-eyed apes. They wrung the blood from human hearts into their gaping mouths.

Suddenly, the rolling boom of drums started up all around me, and I just about shat myself.

[You have discovered the City of the Apes.]

This place had theme music? That wasn’t good.

“Shh! Shut up!” I clamped my whole body against the ground and hissed, only belatedly realizing that no one else could hear the drums. Or me.

The leaning gate was manned by a team of four guards. Beyond them sprawled the filthy camp I’d scented on the wind. The Hell Pigs had set up in a big courtyard that probably contained about sixty or seventy people. The perimeter was surrounded by free-standing wooden spike walls. There were tiki torches planted at intervals to try and brighten the place up. It wasn’t working; the place was a slum. Lots of little shit-shack buildings. Shanty huts cobbled together out of wood planks and thatch, teepees made of poorly tanned hides, lean-tos and bedrolls. As I studied the view from cover, I couldn’t help but note that many of the people working in the camp wore rags and heavy iron collars.

The trail from Clive’s squad ended at the gate, but I had a pretty good idea of where to look: the ruined temple complex that stretched out behind the encampment. Torches lit a straight path from the camp into an ominous black building further back.

Cattails slithered over my skin as I followed the outer wall of the complex, not daring to enter the light cast by the fires in the camp. Only once I was sure that I was concealed did I slink out of cover and look up. Each one of the massive hewn stones was thick with moss, the seams between them glowing bright green under the moonlight. I backed up, wiggled my butt, and sprinted forward into a bounding leap. Claws and tentacles found the cracks between the stones, punching in and pushing me up. I scrabbled with my back feet until my feet found purchase, and then jumped off, leaping up a second time. The jump was clumsy, and I landed half-on, half-over the wall on my belly. Kicking and struggling, I used all eight limbs to haul myself onto the edge, only to see one of the guards in front of the main building shade their eyes and peer in my direction.

My heart hammered as I dropped down low, clamped the pud squad to my back, and narrowed my glowing eyes to thin slits.

“What? Something there?” The distant buzz of their voices carried to my ears.

“Maybe?” The Hell Pig craned his head, squinting in my direction. “Can’t see anything, but I swear I heard something.”

He was maybe fifty feet away. How the fuck could he miss me? I was a twenty-foot-long dragon-shark thing. But then I remembered: most animals had senses that were hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands more sensitive than humans. It was no different here in the The Jungle. Just because I could see these guys didn’t mean they could see me.

“Don’t worry about it. Worry about what we’re gonna do after Razor’s dead.” The guard’s companion said sourly.

“Razor? You think Vanara is going to niner him?”

“If Vanara doesn’t kill him, Clive will. Did you see the gear they were packing? That crossbow is spec’d for player killing. He’s not in there to fight the boss.”

“Fuck, man, keep it down!” The first guard hissed. “Don’t say that too loud!”

“I’ll say it and I’ll stand by it. Razor cleared one lousy outpost and now he thinks he’s hot shit. Go check the odds on your channel. The fans know something we don’t.”

There was a pause as the second guy looked over his menus. “The odds on my channel say they’re both gonna die tonight.”

“Shit, really?” Another pause. “Fuck, they updated. Dude, we’re going to need to make a plan before the Iron Centurion smell the blood in the water and try and conquer this outpost. If Clive and Razor both die, who else here’s managed to collar a Brute? The Centurions’ll crush us. I’m just about to hit Level 9; I don’t wanna die in this shithole.”

“Should we send a message to main camp about it?”

Each overheard detail added to the picture I was assembling of my environment. The Hell Pigs had a rival guild, the Centurions. Clive and Razor were ambitious middle-management guys vying for a better position in their gang, and the competition threatened to leave a power vacuum. There was a ‘main camp’ that was not this place, which implied that the Hell Pigs had more members than what I saw here. This was an outpost. I could deduce there was a war for territory in full swing on The Jungle, then. But was it a hot war, or a cold stalemate?

I relaxed as the door bitches continued their nervous chatter, and studied the building they were guarding. It looked like a temple or a church. The place was basically a cross with a big chamber in the middle, a rotunda capped by a domed roof. The roof was supported mostly by pillars all the way around, leaving an open space at the top. Judging by the sounds coming out of there – whoops and shrieks, screams of agony – I figured that was where I’d find Sam.

The spaces between the pillars looked big enough for me to enter. There was also a way to climb up there: two big arches that had once linked the main temple to the outer walls. Careful to be quiet, I took the slow first step out onto the arch, then trotted and bounded across to the temple roof. The gap was about twenty feet up. I jumped up easily, anchoring myself to minimize sound, and crawled inside.

The first thing that hit me was the metallic, sweet odor of human blood. Lots and lots of blood, the blood of many different people all mixed together into one big sensory overload. I circled around until I could get a good view of the altar, and rumbled softly. "Oh jeez."

There were clearly two sub-factions of Hell Pigs here. Razor’s Reavers were all dressed in black and red, though their gear wasn’t much better than the mish-mash of trashy armor Clive and his men wore. Most of the Reavers were gathered around the giant altar at the back of the room. It was styled in the shape of a gaping gorilla’s mouth, with the tongue forming the table where they were busy brutalizing someone. Male, female, it was hard to say. I couldn't exactly see what was going on. By the garbled screeching and the spreading pool of blood on the floor, I got the gist.

There were two crude wagon cages to my right. One of them contained a small woman dressed in dirty rags. She had her face buried against her knees. A mop of ragged white hair hung over her face and arms, obscuring everything but her size. The cage next to her contained a huge stag. It was a graceful, sad looking thing, with a brilliant copper hide that flexed with shimmering embers. Its crest of antlers burst from its skull like twin trees, the tips scraping the insides of the cage. They were made of orange crystal. As I gazed at it, a little magnifying glass sprung up in my HUD, along with a rapidly filling meter.

[You have identified a New Legion: Runtina.]

The Runtina wore a collar. It didn’t look like mine. This one was wider and spiked, and when I focused on it, it came up as a [Suppression Collar]. The item was flagged in orange text, not the usual white. It was a dark, evil-looking thing, flaring whenever the Runtina struggled against its magic. Staring at it earned me a tooltip:

[Suppression Collar: Used to control a Greater Legion without binding it to a specific master. Unlike Control Collars, Suppression Collars may be removed without destroying the Legion.]

Wait. If I tried to take my Control Collar off, I'd kill myself? “Well, fuck.”

The Suppression Collar didn’t look like it was much fun to wear. The Runtina’s muscles spasmed like it was being shocked, and every time his legs twitched, one or both of the guards watching over the cages looked back with visible anxiety. They did not want this guy getting loose.

"Number nine! Num-ber nine!" The Reavers took up a chant, drowning out the piteous screams of their victim as a machete rose and fell, rose and fell above the heads of the crowd. Within seconds, a cheer went up, and the hooting gang of men parted to reveal the body of their sacrifice. It was Birch, the guy Clive had tied up to exchange for a go at one of the captured girls. Clive and his warband were standing at the far side of the rotunda, watching with stony expressions. The Pigs closest to the altar were covered in gore.

"We're almost there, Piglets! All we need is one more, and we're off to boss town!" A tall, thin man with a black mohawk and the crazed dark eyes of a junkie thrust Birch’s severed head up in one hand, the other white-knuckled around the machete he'd used to butcher him. He was addressing an unseen camera, hamming it up for his audience. "And then, Razor’s Reavers will face Vanara for the first time, with Clive’s Hyena Boys waiting in the wings to back ‘em up!"

My stomach turned as laughter went up among the gang. They were all staring off into space, watching their stream chats. Only the guards were paying any kind of attention to the room: but the ones near the monster cages weren’t watching their own backs, trusting in the wall behind them.

"Thanks everyone! And thank you, Lorenzo_666, for your donation of a Bronze Tribute! Now, it’s time for our grand finale. Let's clear some space for the lovely lady, boys!" Razor dropped the head of his victim and threw his bloody arms in the air. “Chop chop! HAHAHA!”

Two Pigs went down the line and opened the cage with the woman inside. She flew up as the door swung out, but it was no contest. They grabbed her by the arms and wrenched them behind her back, revealing her face. I sucked in a deep breath. By her size and hair color, I'd mistaken her for an old lady. She was a lady, but she wasn’t old. The woman was small and thin, her ice-blue eyes blazing with silent fury. Her hair and skin were both a pale, pure white that flooded with scarlet as she began to struggle, lashing her head from side to side.

Hell no. Fuck a whole lot of this. I felt a rumble curl deep in my chest, and flexed my claws into the stone.

"Well, well, well, look at this exotic little flower." The ringleader – Razor, I was guessing - purred. He leaned in to her as the guards dragged her struggling to the altar. "Sorry about dicing up your girlfriend before, sweet teats! But it’s so nice to… MEAT YOU! AHHAHAHA! Get it? Meat? Aww, c’mon – did I really lose viewers from that?"

The girl didn't seem to hear him, thrashing soundlessly in the hands of her captives. Her hands were bound in front of her, but she was making the same repetitive gesture over and over again: chopping the blade of her right hand into the palm of her left, fast and desperate. She was deaf. Speaking sign language. ASL: a language I recognized like a native tongue.

"STOP! STOP STOP STOP STOP!"

The temple scene withdrew into a buzzing haze as a memory swallowed me, as vivid as a hallucination.

A woman, faceless, lunging toward me as I struggled with another man. I shouted in rage, banging his face down on a counter over and over again. The air was pungent with old alcohol and cigarettes and blood. She made a strangled, frightened sound, chopping her hand down into the other until I thought she'd bruise her own palms. “STOP IT! NO! STOP! THAT’S ENOUGH!!”

She pulled me away from the man by my shirt, screaming at me with her hands and expression as he slumped to the ground. I couldn't see her face. It was like television snow, blanked out. But I knew who she was. She was the woman I'd die for. She was the woman I needed to help. The woman who talked with her hands.

My kid sister. Sam.

A hot pain shot through my head, jerking me back to the present. The Hell Pigs had pressed the albino girl onto the altar, where she snarled and struggled, bucking against the circle of hands holding her down. Restrained from all sides, she couldn't sign as they tore her clothes off. Her voiced scream was silent, or so quiet it was drowned out by the hooting and laughter of the men that surrounded her.

This girl, the one they were about to kill, wasn't my sister. I was ninety percent sure she was a stranger. But I was going to save her anyway - because whatever kind of monster I was, these men were worse.