“Come on, Mr. Prodigy.”

Someone was shaking my arm. I decided not to bite it off. It was the least I could do.

“What time is it?” I grumbled.

“Twilight,” Andy said. “You slept over four hours. Must have been exhausted.”

“Yeah, I was really tired after…” I looked down at my core. The sphere of energy continued to spin. I couldn’t be completely sure, but it looked like it hadn’t slowed overnight.

“Gotta get ready to go,” Andy said after it was clear I wouldn’t say more. “Pack it in.”

“Yes, sir!” I threw a lazy salute.

I was already dressed. Perks of not getting undressed the night before, I suppose. I wondered about that. So far, I’d simply changed into brand new clothes as they became dirty. I hadn’t had to wash any of my clothing yet. How long can you wear clothing before it needed to be washed? Or before it began to chafe?

“Forrest?” Andy asked. I realized I was just standing in the middle of the room, not doing anything while my thoughts ran away from me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Out of here before sunrise?”

“If you can get your shoes on before then.”

I hurried to put my boots on, and I checked my weapons. I didn’t have a gun, and it wasn’t like we had ammunition to spare anyways. I lifted the sword in its harness over my shoulder, the weight settling in comfortably. I loosened it in the scabbard before I left the living room, joining the rest of my group in the front hall.

“Are we going to wait for the tiger?” Carter asked.

“No,” Andy said. “We don’t know when she’ll be back.”

“Then let’s do this,” she said.

“Bragg?” I asked before I moved.

“He’s got his gun and plenty of ammo,” Chavez said. “He’s got a nice perch upstairs where it’s tougher to see him.”

“Alright, I’ll take point,” I confirmed. It wasn’t like anyone was going to disagree with me.

We were down to a four-person team, though I would have preferred five. The difference is with five, you have three watching forward and two watching behind, so they can keep up. With four, you have a choice. You sacrifice one person looking ahead, or one looking behind. Since we knew we were heading directly into danger, we opted for three ahead and one behind. It meant we had to slow down as Chavez took up the rear with his crossbow, but I knew this wouldn’t last long.

“Movement, 9:30,” Andy said to my left.

I turned slightly. My attention was still forward, but I could see the movement out of the corner of my eye. I felt Carter shift on my right side. “Eyes right, Carter!” I barked.

“Yes, sir.” She immediately did as she was told. She would have been a good soldier.

I could make out the glow of a core as whatever the creature was slipped through the tall grass next to the house. The core was as bright as my own, or it would have been if I hadn’t condensed the mana in my core the previous night. The tiger slipped out of the tall grass, her eyes focused on me.

I felt the lump rise in my throat again but quickly realized her eyes weren’t predatory. At least, no more than looking into her face usually was. Her eyes flicked to the core in my chest before she cocked her head to the side as if questioning what had happened.

I just shrugged. She padded over and nuzzled Andy out of the way to take his place. We were back to a five-person – five-member? – team.

We moved down the street, making our way toward the freeway, passing overhead just a couple of blocks away. There was no sign of any life or undeath in the area.

“Is it just me, or is this too spooky?” Carter said behind me. “I mean, shouldn’t we have come up against something before now?”

“I was thinking along the same lines,” Andy said.

“It was the same way when I was coming through the first time,” I said. “I think our newest friend here is scaring away the local predators.”

“Never thought I’d be grateful to have a tiger as a companion,” Andy said.

“Oh, I totally thought about it,” Chavez said. “Or at least a tiger as a pet. You think she’d let me groom her?”

“I think she might eat you if you tried,” I answered the big man.

“So, I’ve got some work to do.”

“I think cats usually groom themselves, man,” Andy said.

“Yeah, but this is a tiger that’s been in captivity, right?” he asked. “She’s probably more tame than other tigers would be.”

“Tamer doesn’t mean she’s less likely to kill you if she gets hungry,” I said. “If it weren’t for the fact that I don’t know how to get rid of her, I wouldn’t exactly be handing her an invitation to our little party.”

“I’m pretty sure you said you wanted her in our group, man,” Chavez said.

“A sword cuts two ways,” I said.

“Was that supposed to be deep?” Andy asked. “Because it really wasn’t.”

“Also,” Chavez chimed in, “not all swords cut two ways. A Katana only has one sharp edge.”

“You know what I meant,” I said. “We are unsteady allies with an animal that would have no moral compunction with turning on us and killing us.”

“Yeah, but how do you know that?” Chavez asked. “Isn’t it possible that all this mana gave the tiger a higher level of intelligence? What makes you think that she doesn’t understand what we’re saying right now?”

“That she somehow learned English in a week after a magical transformation?” I asked.

“Yeah, I guess when you put it that way,” Chavez admitted.

“If it means we stay fresh for the threat ahead, I’m all for it,” Carter said.

“See? That’s a sensible position to take,” Andy said.

“We moved through the suburban area. Grass in once neatly-trimmed lawns had grown wild, reaching up to my hip in height. On Carter, that was practically her shoulder. Okay, it wasn’t that big of a difference, but it certainly felt like that. The tiger somehow parted the grass without a rustle, while the rest of us bumbled through the undergrowth like a raw recruit learning to reassemble his weapon. It didn’t take us long before we abandoned the relative cover of the houses to simply walk down the middle of the street, trusting our mana sight and the superior sense of our tiger to warn us of any approaching dangers.

We spotted the mana cores long seconds before the group tore around the bend of a building. The group of mana-corrupted humans came at us at a run.

“I want one alive!” I said in the moment before the groups closed on each other. I was, of course, at the center of the fight. I took on the biggest of the mana-corrupted group. In fact, big was the only way I could describe him. His arms were thick around like what you’d find on a bodybuilder, but not in an impressive way with all the rippling veins and bulging muscles. His arms were just thicker around than most people’s thighs. His chest was broad, but not huge. He was lean like a linebacker, built for the optimal combination of speed and power. I’d taken hits from guys on the field bigger than me. Hell, I’d taken hits from guys bigger than him. I’d practiced hand-to-hand combat against other JSOC operatives. This guy was on another level. He hit me like a freight train. It didn’t matter that I’d buried my sword up to the hilt in his chest. He didn’t seem to care as his hands closed around my throat as we went down.

I’d missed his core. If it had been a clean thrust, the core would have been destroyed, and his life along with it, but my aim was off. The sword’s weight, a nuisance to every other person I’d dealt with, seemed not to bother him as the handle stood out from his chest. My head hurt, for some reason I couldn’t fathom. Also, I was lying on my back. What was up with that? I reached up to the sword in the man’s chest, but his reach was longer than mine, and I couldn’t quite wrap my fingers around the weapon.

An orange streak saved my life. One moment I was lying on my back, trying not to blackout, then I was gasping in ragged breaths. I looked to my left from where I lay on the cool pavement, my head caught on something sticky, and I saw the tiger go to work on the mana-corrupted human.

“Ward, get off your ass!”

My head snapped around to my friends, who held their ground around me against the onslaught of the others in the group. I pushed myself to my feet, drawing my combat knife from the sheath at my belt. Without thinking, I dove back into the fight. Andy was having difficulty holding back one of his assailants. I kicked it in the leg, the appendage crumpling before I swiped the combat knife across the figure’s throat.

I turned my attention to Chavez, who was beset by two attackers. They were grabbing at the big man, trying to take him to the ground, but he’d set his feet wide and was raining blows down on them with his aluminum bat. I grabbed one of the mana-corrupted by the back of its neck and lifted it into the air. It was remarkably light, even as I brought it accelerating down, face-first onto the asphalt. There was a satisfying crunch as it hit the pavement. I took the brief reprieve to stab my knife into the back of Chavez’s second attacker. It didn’t let up on its attempt to pull the man over, but he had the upper hand now. He brought the butt of his bat down onto the back of its neck multiple times in quick succession until it stopped moving.

Andy had helped Carter with her own attacker, and they held it down between them on the pavement. The one at my feet was still moving, so I brought my boot around into its face, snapping the head back with a resounding crack. The body fell limply, though I could tell it was still breathing.

“Ward,” Andy said as I approached him, Carter, and one of our conscious assailants. “Time to snap out of it.”

“I’m good,” I said. “I’m still me.”

“Okay,” Andy said, his eyes still on me. “Wanna give us hand with this one?”

I looked down at the mana-corrupted they were struggling with on the ground.

No. I looked at the person.

It was a person.

Or it had been, at one point.

She. It was a she, though, from the emaciated form under the tattered clothing, you could barely tell.

Wait, emaciated?

I looked at the other mana-corrupted around us. Aside from the big one that charged me, they were all thin and frail. Thin, white hair wiped away from the nearly bald scalp of the man I’d just kicked in the head. I turned to where the big man had died moments before under the jaws of the tiger. Most of his neck was no longer attached, and what little was left of his already-tattered shirt was now covered in blood.

His pants were distinctive though. Blue, like the sky on a clear day. Drawstring around the top. The shoe he still wore was in good condition and looked ideal for a person who would be on his feet all day. The final piece of the puzzle slid into place when I saw the stethoscope dangling from the pocket.

“Shit,” I said, turning my head back down to the old woman struggling on the ground.

“You going to do that thing?” Andy asked.

“Fuck, man. She must be nearly ninety years old. I’m more likely to kill her.”

“If you don’t do something,” Carter said, “then we’ll have to kill her. It’s not like she’s going to stop coming after us.”

“Fine, I growled.” I stood over the woman and looked down at her core. I could practically feel her eyes boring into me, fixed on the core in my own chest, but I focused. I tried to remember what I did with Bragg that day we first met. Was it only a week ago? I shook my head, then envisioned some of the mana coming out of my core and into my arm. I brought my hand down, palm-first, and placed it against the center of the old woman’s chest, directly over her core. It felt like an electric shock going down my arm as if my hand was a defibrillator and I was jump-starting this old woman’s heart. I pushed the mana out through my palm, and it blasted into her chest. My mana flooded into her core, burning away the corruption I saw there. Just like with Bragg, her core went dark. Once again, my mana didn’t stay in the corrupted system but seemed to circulate through the body until it left in a large exhalation.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said down to her. “We’re here to help.”

She simply stared at me, her eyes wide as if she couldn’t think of something to say.”

“Here, we will help you up,” Carter said. Where they’d been pressing down onto the old lady, Carter and Andy were quickly helping her up, trying not to hurt her as they pulled her up under each arm.

Slowly, she brought her hands up to her face. She ran them over her eyes and her lips. Awkwardly, she opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue.

“Ma’am?” Carter asked. “Are you okay?”

“I have teeth.”