If you had to camp outside of a Campsite, this was probably as good as it got, Gora felt. It was on the third level, so high enough that casual street roamers wouldn’t notice them unless they were dedicated climbers. And it had only a single still functional and currently barricaded door in and out that they had to watch. The room was also located in the corner of the large Otherstone building with two windows set into two different walls giving a great view of the ruins down below.

She’d even been able to finish off the last of her share of those little purple berries that the Nightmare Tree had so thoughtfully left in their last Campsite. They always made her feel a little constipated, but rather that than the opposite.

Yes, as far as she was concerned, this place was almost ideal: surrounded by mortal danger, fierce enemies, nightmarish surroundings and, most importantly, far away from the noisy ‘civilized’ city life. Well, almost.

“Miss Gora? You reckon I can take my ma a bit of one them purple berries?”

Except the idiot. He was an idiot.

“They won’t be like poison or nothin’, will they?”

Gora glared down at the freckled young man gazing up at her with innocent eyes. With his overalls and faded shirt, he really looked like some hick farmer. Even his boots looked like he had stepped in cow dung one too many times and the smell did little to dispel that notion.

“Bob, I told you not to eat those things. You should stick to meat” a voice called from off to the side and lower to the ground. “It is a far healthier alternative for the disposition than foul vegetable matter. With time, your constitution may even improve to the point where you no longer need to burn the flesh before your fragile stomach can process it.”

His master, on the other hand, spoke with the crisp eloquence of the aristocracy. Which was a little jarring, since he was also sitting with his leg in the air, licking his… nether region.

“But Mr. Zee, Sir, my ma said that a growing boy needs healthy veggies to grow big and strong!” Bob protested.

“Nonsense. All he needs is a healthy diet of rats and mice. That he preferably catches himself to build stamina, reflexes and strength. But worry not my boy, you may have been born a human, but we will overcome that unfortunate disability yet!”

Zaxier Nofrax was, in fact, a cat. But a talking cat was not particularly strange to Gora. The bond of wizard and familiar that the two shared was one that she had seen many times before.

“Yes Sir, Mr. Zee Sir. I’m your eager student!”

It was, however, the first time she had ever seen a cat wizard with a human familiar. She turned to look at the other two members of their current expedition but if they had heard a word of the exchange, they gave no sign.

Ava Lungren was only about twenty but was apparently some kind of child prodigy of magic at the local Grailmane Academy for the Study of the Forbidden Arts. Her preferred role was that of an ‘Animator’, which was just a fancy euphemism for Necromancer. A few of her ‘Anima’ were even now spread throughout the building they had made camp in as tripwires for anything trying to sneak up on them.

She had black hair, pale skin, dressed mostly in black and had her nose stuck in a particularly leathery looking grimoire on her lap, all of which was rather at odds with the way she kept sneaking glances at the last member of their party.

Samual was handsome, she had to admit, but mostly he had a determination and focus you could bend steel around. He was so intense, it even gave Gora the willies. He apparently only slept three hours a night and while Gora took one shift at watch while they rested, he insisted on taking all the rest. She didn’t know if he was suicidal or if he would somehow just implode if he was ever forced to just relax.

He was a knight or a holy warrior or something along those lines as far as she could tell and wore a rather flimsy looking set of plate without a properly closing helmet, which she’d originally thought was very fucking dumb of him.

Now, after seeing him in a fight, she still thought it was dumb but couldn’t help but be impressed by his stubby little mace. When he hit things with it, they fucking stayed hit.

At present he was staring out the window, keeping watch outside while the others finished packing up.

“Gora come look at this” Samual called, fast and clipped as always. As if every moment spent speaking and every word he uttered cost him something dear.

With a rumbling sigh she got to her feet and made her way over to his side at the window. They had closed the rotten curtains, but there were plenty of holes to see out of. Through it, she could see what appeared to be some kind of spider-thing running down the street, pursued by a steadily growing stream of Masked.

“A minute ago that multi-legged creature burst through that door the Masked are coming out of. It appears their intent is aggressive” he summarized.

“Must have disturbed a hive” Gora mused before looking down at Samual. “What do you all want to do about it? Could be decent haul.”

The spider tried to go in a door, but couldn’t get it open. Instead, it scrambled up the wall next to it while the Masked began surrounding the building.

“When two dogs fight over a bone, the third slaughters both of them” Ava spoke. “Sounds like easy Essence to me.”

“Might be the easiest way to take down a Mask Hive” Gora agreed.

“Bob, kneel” Zaxier commanded and obediently Bob went down on one knee and crooked his arm. Using it as a springboard, the cat jumped onto the little basket his familiar wore on his right shoulder, making himself comfortable lounging half in the basket and half on Bob’s shoulder. “Normally I would say that if two dogs want to waste their energy fighting over a bloody bone, let them have it. In this particular case, however, letting us harvest monster Essence is exactly what we are paying you for, is it not? Bob, third position.”

The idiot twisted his hands in the way wizards tended to do when preparing spells, and blue sparkles began flowing from Zaxier’s paws and accumulating between the boy’s outstretched fingers. Gora picked up her already packed backpack with one hand and her large weapon with the other.

“Well then” she rumbled. “Let’s go earn my keep.”

YOU’RE A SPIDER YOU DAMN WELL BETTER BE ABLE TO CLIMB!

“SHUT UP I’M TRYING!” Rita screamed, barely audible above the racket of what had to be nearly a hundred chattering, screeching and mocking teenagers, all wearing those stupid masks and waving a variety of makeshift weapons not ten metres behind her. She wasn’t sure who was controlling their body between her and Alice, but it didn’t really matter. Both were trying to scale a vertical bloody stone wall with every fibre of their collective being.

Her sharp, flexible toes were indeed quite adept at exploiting the tiniest footholds and having eight legs to grip with really offered a lot of helpful redundancy when said footholds turned out to be just a little bit too tiny, even for her. And if this had not been her first climb in a new body she was still getting used to while a mob of screaming psychos bayed for her blood down below, it might even have been a fun and relaxing experience.

As it was, she probably broke several records, both for climbing speed and number of times nearly slipped per meter. And knowing that slipping meant the horde below would rip her spleen out was not helping her stress levels any.

DON’T YOU DARE LET GO! HEAD FOR THAT OPEN WINDOW TO OUR LEFT!

“ITS TOO SMALL! WE WON’T FIT!”

SUCK IN YOUR FAT ARSE AND MAKE IT FIT!

A few tense moments later, during which they only slipped twice and nearly got stuck once, Rita collapsed through the second-floor window onto a mouldy and rather funky smelling carpet. As she just lay there in relative silence, her chest heaved as she sucked in big gulps of air and tried to calm down.

Her journey to the local electronics store had started off so well too. The street had been blessedly quiet, the only bit of excitement being a detour through an old clothing shop to avoid the single blob of greenish-grey slime that Alice had spotted rolling down the street in their vague direction. It hadn’t followed them, and Rita had annoyed Alice for a bit by doing a quick browse through the clothing selection on offer.

It was when she reached the strip mall that things really started going wrong.

The first shop she’d passed had had another masked kid in it. She didn’t really feel like a repeat of the last time she met one, so she ignored Alice’s suggestion that she sneak in and slit his throat from behind, and rather darted past while his back was turned.

That was when she saw another one of them coming out of the store in front of her, carrying a broken television. Why he was carrying a broken television out of a furniture store she had no idea, but the thing blocked him from seeing her so she didn’t stop to question her luck. She slipped down into the underground parking level down a nearby staircase before he could turn and spot her. This turned out to be the point her luck ran out as she ran into three of the masked teenagers, none of whom were carrying any luxury goods to block their line of sight.

Unable to go back as that would mean running into the other two, she instead chose to duck down a maintenance corridor off to the side when they began shouting and chasing her. That seemed to go pretty well, at first. The maintenance corridor had been quite narrow, but led to a stairwell that connected to an alley that had once been used for deliveries behind the mall.

And in the back of an open delivery truck still parked there, she found the other gazillion of the creepy masked things.

They were all crammed in there, lying in what appeared to be a giant fur pile except with creepy blank masks instead of fur. They noticed her at pretty much the same time and began screeching and hollering as they started crawling over each other in an attempt to reach her. She didn’t wait for them to finish disentangling themselves before noping right out of the alley as fast as eight legs could carry her. Unfortunately, that turned out to be roughly the same speed that two legs could carry them and the ones she had passed earlier were already giving chase.

What had followed was an exhilarating and absolutely terrifying sprint through the streets until her legs felt like they would fall off.

Well. That was unpleasant.

“Please tell me they’re going to get bored and leave soon” Rita groaned. She could still hear them chattering and battering against the door and windows downstairs.

I don’t think they can get in. We should be able to wait them out.

Then there was the sound of breaking glass. She paused for a moment as the cold feeling of dread once again eagerly slid down her spine and made itself comfortable in her belly. Before she heard the first scream from inside, she was on her feet and sprinting up the nearest stairwell.

“WHY WOULD YOU EVEN SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT ARE YOU TRYING TO GET US KILLED!?”

HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW MOVIE LOGIC APPLIED IN THIS FUCKED UP WORLD!?