We made our way through the front entrance, placing our feet carefully around the twisted metal. Most of the iron had been smashed flat and ripped apart in places, leaving jagged pieces of metal pointing directly up at us. I could see bits of fur and blood on them, a testament to both the metal’s sharpness and the fury of the rushing animals.

I swallowed down a lump of hesitation as I considered not going into the war zone, but I looked over my companions. We were stronger than we’d ever been before in our lives. Every core shone brightly, swirling with the different colors of mana. And, of course, the lingering black as well.

I saw large speakers mounted on the walls on either side of the gate. Normally, they would have blared announcements for places to eat or exhibits to see. Now, however, the entrance lay eerily silent. The fluorescent lights I found obnoxiously bright sat dark behind empty space where glass used to be. The overpriced souvenirs I would find in any gift shop, but never buy, lay scattered over the floor inside the small building.

Directly ahead of us was the exhibit for the "Western Lowland Gorilla". The twenty-foot-tall fence separating the gorilla from freedom had a sprawling hole in it large enough to fit a freight train.

There were no animals to be seen, however. I looked at the map of the zoo, which was set into a wall and left undamaged. I frowned as I examined it more closely. There was a red dot indicating “YOU ARE HERE”. In theory, the map was next to the “Information Booth”. But something seemed to have changed with the landscape. Where the information booth was supposed to be sat a blank wall. The map indicated a path leading behind the booth to the “Lair of the Komodo Dragon”, but the wall blocked the way. Our target for this mission was directly on the other side: a mana-patterned maelstrom of light pointing down from the sky to touch ground on the far side of the wall. This close, I could feel the very air rippling with magical energies, even if I could not touch the pulsing power.

“Find something?” Andy asked as he came up next to me. Everyone else was looking for signs of hostile targets.

“Something strange,” I answered and pointed to our location on the map.

Andy grunted when he realized what the issue was. “Walls appearing out of nowhere. I mean, we didn’t think it could be too easy, did we?”

“Couldn’t we just climb the wall?” Bragg asked.

“I didn’t exactly bring a ladder big enough to scale castle walls,” I said as I looked up at the smooth gray stone. It rose thirty feet over our heads.

“Fair enough,” Andy said. “So we go around.” It was a sound enough plan.

We tentatively made our way around the grounds, past the exhibit for the Red-flanked Duiker. Whatever the hell that was. There was no sign of anything with red flanks, either living or dead, so we continued. Finally, we reached the bear exhibit. At least I assumed it was the bear exhibit. I didn’t get a good look at the sign before a black bear the size of a freaking tank came lumbering out of the dark recesses of the enclosure.

Despite its mass, the strong limbs of the animal ate up the distance between us. I prepared to move out of the way of the charge, but the bear died to bullets just like any other animal we’d encountered before, though it did take an inordinately large number of rounds to take it down.

Chavez wasted no time in extracting the core from the corpse while the rest of us kept a constant lookout. Once he was done, we formed back up, moving as silently as possible deeper into the park.

We passed exhibits for the “Stanley Crane” — seriously, though, what is special about a crane? — and the “Pygmy Hippo” before we abruptly halted in our tracks. A tiger lay in the middle of the walkway. It did not move, aside from its eyes following us and the occasional twitch of its tail.

“That’s different,” Carter said after a tense moment. “All the creatures have just attacked us at first sight.”

“Look at its eyes,” Chavez said in answer. “It ain’t crazed like the rest of them monsters.”

I was looking at its eyes. The tiger regarded us coolly, then slowly rose to its four massive paws. I realized with a shock that the creature was no larger than I would have expected for a tiger. I was no tiger expert, by any means, but I always assumed a full-grown tiger would stand about four feet at the shoulder. This one was just about that size, and not an enormous overgrown monster like everything else we’d encountered. The tiger stretched, arching its back as if it didn’t have a care in the world — it was a cat, after all — and padded lazily into the exhibit nearby.

“Did it just leave the path clear for us?” Bragg asked, his disbelief breaking through his usually stoic manner.

“Yeah, that’s what it looked like,” Carter said, her voice a forced nonchalance.

“Let’s go,” I said. “If it isn’t going to bother us, then we won’t bother it either. We’re trying to get to that mana funnel.”

As we passed, the tiger went on sunning itself. Its eyes remained closed, but even as we walked, I could see its ears twitch as it caught the sound of our passing. For a moment, I considered ordering someone to keep eyes behind, not daring to leave a dangerous animal at our backs. I discarded the thought when I remembered the light of intelligence in the thing’s eyes. There was no trace of the madness in the eyes of every other creature we’d killed over the last two days, and I hated the thought of killing a majestic animal like that without a better cause. So I like animals. Sue me.

We continued past more exhibits until the trail of the zoo began to circle to the right. This part, at least, was consistent with the map at the entrance. As we rounded the curving path, we faced a stark change in the atmosphere of the zoo. Up until that point, the zoo had been like every other zoo I’d been to in my life. Granted, that wasn’t many, but it had the open spaces and the placards that explained the animals for viewing. The path was concrete, with symbols of different animals on the ground and arrows indicating directions.

In front of us, the concrete flowed together into an opening only wide enough for two people to pass at a time, maybe only one, given my size. The concrete turned into a darker stone like onyx where it flowed up from the ground. On either side of the opening, the same black stone flowed out to either side of the path, forcing anyone who wanted to continue forward, to enter through the opening... The opening shaped in the form maw of a reptile.

Some kind of liquid oozed down from the roof of the entrance, reminding me of a venomous snake. A draft of air glided out toward us, the slow movement creating a hiss in the confined space. The air carried with it the stench of stagnant, standing water.

“God, that smell is awful,” Carter said. “And does the snake look wrong to anyone else?”

“No fangs,” I said, swallowing down my own bile from the stench.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Carter said. “It should really have fangs. It’s like when my grandfather used to smile after taking out his dentures. Just about the same amount of drool, too.”

Most of us laughed. It was too out of place for the situation, and Carter was clearly trying to relieve the tension with a little humor. For most of us, it worked.

“It’s a Komodo dragon head,” Bragg said, his voice trembling for a moment before he regained control. “They don’t have snake-like fangs the way you’re thinking. Just large teeth. Their bite isn’t super venomous either. It’s the bacteria in the saliva that causes infection and can kill just about anything.”

We turned to look at Bragg, eyeing the tall, lean man who had his gun trained on the entrance.

“What? I’ve been to the zoo before.” Then he paused. “Also, the Komodo isn’t a serpent. It’s a lizard.”

“Eyes up,” I said. “The mana tornado touches down in there.”

A long, slender ramp led straight into the lizard’s mouth, the end closest to us forking out along the ground.

“Yeah, this ain’t creepy at all,” Chavez said behind me.

For the first time in the past couple of days, I wondered why I was stupid enough to be the one in front. I mean, before it was because I was the big guy with experience. I guess I was still the big guy, but Chavez was stronger now too after all the energy he’d absorbed, right? I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I was the one who kicked down doors. Andy was the quarterback who called the offensive plays. I was just the middle linebacker who organized the defense. I stepped onto the stone ramp, my boot sliding a bit on the slick, polished surface. When I stepped over the lower jaw of the entrance, torches flickered to life in the gloom, revealing a murky layer of liquid covering the ground.

“Looks like we’re getting wet,” I said and stepped over the lower jaw of the reptile and into the thigh-high pool. I was surprised by how warm it was, once it soaked through BDU pants and sloshed its way into my boots. Moving through it was a struggle – it was much thicker than water. I scanned around me, paying particular attention to my mana sight. Even in the faint torchlight, I could see mana swirling in the water, fogging the surrounding air, and radiating out from the heat of the torches. I could also see several condensed points of mana lying in the water ahead of us, not twenty feet away.

“Something under the water,” I said to the rest of the team. “Like it’s just waiting for us.”

“Crocodiles,” Chavez said. “They had four different species listed on the map.”

I could have kicked myself for forgetting about the map. I had paid little attention to the actual species of animals inside, instead just the Komodo dragons and the mana tornado.

Moving at a slow, deliberate pace, I secured my MP5 over my shoulder and drew the sword at my back. The shining, silver mana seemed to ward away all the other mana that tried to come close to it. I took a step forward. The mana cores under the surface didn’t move. I took another step forward. Still, there was no movement. With each step, my heart rate increased, and my vision darkened around the edges as I focused on the crocodile closest to me. I pointed my sword directly at the mana core and took a more confident third step. The crocodile surged through the water toward me. I saw the swirl of the mana in the water, whipped about by the monster’s tail.

I was hoping the monster would simply impale itself on my blade. I was mostly right. My simple plan would have worked flawlessly if the body of the damn thing weren’t so long now. It was enormous, and I was still a few feet short of actually piercing the core. Which meant it was close enough to open its jaws wide and snap onto my leg at the thigh.

Pain exploded up my limb, and if it weren’t for the fact that my body was stronger and tougher than a normal human’s, the thing would have ripped off my leg. It tried doing just that, thrashing and pulling me into the muck. My shoulder hit the hard floor, and the wind left my lungs in a large air bubble as I went under, surrounded by blue mana and the fading white of my precious oxygen.

My hand still clung to the sword, and I swung it hard in desperation. The blade cut through the water as if it was open-air and bit into the head of the creature, slicing cleanly through its eye and part of its neck. I saw flashes of light and the trails of air under the water. The bullets thudded into the hide of the monster, while I tried desperately to pull myself up for a gasp of fresh air. The thing was so strong that all I could do was continue to cut at the creature with my sword, slicing into tough plates like they were armor to pierce into the softer flesh below. Repetition succeeded where my first stroke failed. Finally, the thing bled out from all the bullet holes and the gaping wound in its neck.

Flailing, I pulled myself from the mire and gasped for clean air. Unfortunately, I had to settle for the filthy stench, but I didn’t want to complain too much. Not because I wouldn’t complain later. I was just trying to catch my breath.

“Shit, are you okay?” Chavez asked. After I nodded, he continued. “That was too close.”

“Back up to the mouth of the cave,” I finally heaved out, and everyone moved away from the other cores we saw unmoving in the water, our weapons trained on the hostiles. I noted the heavy breathing and even Bragg’s muttering of reticence to continue. “Andy, toss one of your grenades into the center of those things.”

He looked at me for a moment, as if he might suggest something else, but then looked down at the shredded clothing and skin. He nodded and slid one of the hand grenades from the mesh holding it in place on his vest.

“Get down,” he said.

He pulled the ring, waited three seconds for us to hunker behind the lower jaw of the cave entrance, then tossed the explosive expertly into the middle of the group of crocodiles. The grenade fell with a soft plop before a roar exploded through the cavern.

Usually, the pressure wave of a hand grenade can incapacitate a person at fifty feet. Within fifteen feet, it would outright kill me. In this case, however, I had three things going for me.

First, I was behind cover, since the lizard’s lower jaw was about three feet high.

Second, having absorbed the mana from numerous cores, my body had grown more resistant to mundane damage. Mutant crocodile trying to rip my leg off? I had deep gashes and a lot of pain, but the leg was still firmly where it should be.

Third, the grenade blew up under three feet of water, or whatever the liquid was. Water is an incompressible liquid, which means that all that pressure built by the grenade doesn’t have anywhere to go. It floods outward until it finds pockets of air or other compressible matter to push into. The primary direction of dispersal was directly above the crocodiles. Oh, and into the crocodile’s bodies, of course.

That’s the great thing about hand grenades in water. It’s not the metal that will kill you. It’s the concussion that turns organs into paste inside the body. Which was what happened to the monsters lurking under the surface.

My ears still ringing, I leaped into the maw of the beast and charged toward the still-glowing cores in the water. If the bodies were only stunned, I wanted to finish the fight before it could continue. There was no movement as I came closer, and I swung down at the silhouetted bodies. One by one, I drove my sword into the forms, the point of the weapon driving through the flesh and into the stone ground beneath.

When I was finished, I turned to see the others spread out just behind the jawline, weapons trained on the surrounding forms. On the last beast, I drove the sword point-first into the core of the crocodile and was rewarded with the energy cycling up into the sword. I focused on that energy as it moved toward my core, cycling through my mana channels as if looking for an empty place to fill. Before it cycled out of my opposite arm, I willed it to move down into my injured leg. I gasped in pain as the energy coursed down my limb and into the damaged muscles. The fire surged in, sealed the lacerations closed, and even wiped/cleared away the blood

I reached down and pulled the tattered remains of my pant leg up to see that the deep wound in my leg had vanished/disappeared. The only sign that anything was different was a light, olive green sheen that colored the skin.

“That was awesome!” Chavez said. “We don’t train with grenades, so I ain’t never been near one when it went off.”

“That was actually pretty mild,” I said, wiggling a finger in my ear as if it would clear the ringing. “We’re lucky the grenade went off in the water. This close, we’d have a pretty serious case of tinnitus for the next fifteen minutes.”

“What?” Andy asked, loudly.

“He said,” Carter said, matching his volume, “we’d have a bad case of…” She trailed off as she saw the Cheshire grin on his face. Then she mumbled under her breath, “Stupid.”

“Andy, good work with the grenade,” I said. “You grab the core from one crocodile. Carter, you grab the other one. Maybe it will make you immune to Andy’s jokes.”

They moved over to the corpses to a chorus of chuckles, while Chavez double-checked that I really was okay after my brief swim. I didn’t miss the glint of envy from Bragg as he watched the other two. I guessed he was feeling the full-court press of the dark mana in his body, though he was certainly handling it better than I did at first.

“Let’s move,” I said after the two received their grisly rewards. Green energy flowed into the cores in their chests.

“We should be getting close,” Chavez said. “We can follow this hallway, and the Komodo dragon exhibit was right around the corner.”

“Eyes sharp,” I said. I hefted my sword again, holding it in two hands as I looked ahead.