Looking at slime guts on his shoes, Lark grumbled about getting new battle armor, before glancing further into the pile of office supplies. There he saw the shiny monster drop. His blood boiled as he walked towards his reward.

The crystalline object was cold to the touch and rough. He noted the pattern looked similar to a polished ore with a green spiral design.

He observed it for another couple seconds before, rushing into his bag to retrieve the ring he got from Wangshi. While holding the two objects side by side, he swallowed hard.

The color and patterns were eerily alike!

Though the ring seemed to contain a darker shade of green mixed in with black streams.

He drew in a deep breath. His nerves were still shot from all the adrenaline as he noted his accelerated heart rate on the Trinity watch.

Now that he had time, he should let Wangshi know he’s alright. But knowing Wangshi…his caretaker was probably already aware.

Better safe than sorry, he thought and sent a quick text to Wangshi about the school being under attack by slimes the size of refrigerators. He ended the message by writing his goal to meet up with Sky and Mishka at the computer lab.

He tucked the jagged edge crystal into his bag and wore the ring on the same hand as his Trinity watch. Surely, AA cultists were behind everything. If he saw any of them, the ring could provide protection if he could pretend to be one of them. Furthermore, they must have used this green crystal to make the slimes. Probably? But he couldn’t remember seeing it anywhere inside the slime’s body during the battle.

He rolled his neck and shoulders to get rid of the creaks. Thinking, while under stress was not his forte. Better go ask Mishka in this type of situation. Speaking of which, he wondered how they were faring with the toilet monsters. He hurried to retrieve another bat for Sky and departed.

Sky wondered why the school hadn’t fixed the servers yet. He and Mishka were with their fourth-period class taking an excursion to the library to begin research on their three-hundred point essay. The couple used the computers when Mishka received a notification from her contacts that the state capitol was defending attacks from an army of bats, particularly abnormal bats made of slime. Again, like the loose cultist plot, none of the students received notifications of the apparent emergency.

“Slime bats?” Mishka asked again to the person on her phone to make sure she wasn’t hearing things. After confirming, she hung up and grabbed Sky by the arm. “We’re getting out of here.”

He had finished checking up on the news when he readily agreed. This time the AA cultists used new tricks. But to genetically alter the composition of a bat was a new low for the terrorists. An army of slime bats could potentially be a small sample size of a new type of biological weapon, Sky reckoned.

Mishka and Sky ran up to their substitute teacher, who got upset by their disruption. “You two, go back to your studies.”

“You don’t understand, we’re all in serious danger,” Sky explained.

The teacher looked down at their own phone. “I’ve just gotten word from the principal that Dubois High will be entering lockdown. It’s happening sooner than I thought it would.”

“Huh, what are you saying—” Sky began to talk loudly, attracting the attention of the other students.

“Don’t worry students” —the teacher showed a devious smile as the large bay window behind her vibrated — “You’re all here to witness a very special event. One that is only done once every fifty years…”

A large crack jittered through the glass frame as a viscous gray body came into view and slammed its entirety against the building.

“The Culling.”

Mishka took Sky and dove behind a bookcase as chunks of glasses blew into the library.

Some students, too curious for their own good, got a face-full of glass fragments. Others, too slow to respond, had bloody cuts running up their limbs.

Moaning from the pain and cries from embedded glass shards in their skin could be heard. But luckily no had died from what Mishka could see. The AA cultist was nowhere to be seen, but a resounding siren echoed on school grounds. Mishka frowned, the school district acted too slowly. Chaos was already here!

“We’re gonna escape through the window,” Mishka said as she pulled down her cat hood, revealing a metal headband encrusted with bright red gems. Off to one side of the headband, a faceted flower contained a smooth stone with a strange character carved on it. For lack of a better word, it looked like a rune to Sky.

“Grab some books to throw at the cultists and whatever slime creatures we saw earlier, and message Lark! We’re meeting him at the computer lab!” Mishka ordered as she donned on a green ring from her backpack.

Sky grew wide-eyed. The ring’s design was similar to the sketches Mishka drew of Lark’s pyramid alien tech; green hexagons looped over the silver band like a race track. He texted Lark first on his smartphone and then grabbed a dictionary.

“I’ll explain this as we go, but right now trust me,” she said as she hauled Sky by the arm towards the broken window.

“Alright m’lady.” Sky smiled as they rushed towards the window. “But just so you remember we’re on the second floor, and I would rather jump to my death than let you get hurt…oh…oh-no—AHHHHH!”

Mishka held his hand, and together they jumped across the bay window’s threshold. She moved her ring-equipped hand in a flashy pattern, “Wind-walker!”

“Bulbaulaubaaa—” Sky made a whirring noise as the sides of his mouth hung open. It complemented his feelings of someone taking a leaf-blower to his face as Mishka raced them across the schoolyard and into another building.

“Sky, did you see that? We’re surrounded!” Mishka said as they took cover inside a portable.

“Surrounded by what? You know I’m only slightly distracted by the fact you can fly.”

“That was not flying, that was more like falling with style.” Someone snorted behind them.

They turned around with surprised relief.

It was Lark!

Lark couldn’t find Wei anywhere within his view and figured Wei must’ve hidden somewhere from all the swooping slime bats. Because that’s exactly what he was doing right now!

Peering from behind a stone column, Lark felt his heart drop as countless bats circled overhead, dripping slime guts. A drop of it almost hit him in his hiding spot in the outdoor hallway.

Lark suppressed a gag by cupping his mouth. The stench of a thousand toilets filled the air.

Holy shit, did they use sewage water to make these gross slimy creatures? The last time he smelled something so putrid was during freshmen year at the wetlands, which were located conveniently near a water treatment facility. The monsters were even green-colored like the algae.

Oh no. Lark wanted to roll his eyes to the back of his head when his eyes began to burn as he made his way to a broken, floor-to-ceiling window. Leftover gray fluid settled on the sill. He used one of the bats to scrape out excess glass shards and entered the room.

The room contained office supplies and a computer desk. Whoever used this office left in a hurry, Lark suspected, noticing the toppled over picture frames and the oozing slime trail to the door.

His heart squeezed again as he heard a terrifying scream outside. He wielded the two clubs in his arms in an ‘x’ formation awkwardly as he peeked out the window to see who was in trouble. His eyes bulged at the sight of Mishka and Sky falling from the second floor. He wanted to cry out until he saw a green glow wrap under their feet and the next thing he knew, the two were zipping through the air.

Lark’s adam apple drummed. He walked out the door and followed in the opposite direction of the slime trail to meet up with Sky and the teenage witch.

“And are you alright?” Sky looked down at Lark’s dirtied sneakers. Sky already explained the ordeal at the library with the information they learned prior. But Mishka had yet to say anything about her extraordinary gifts.

“I took out a toilet slime and it melted on me,” Lark shrugged it off, but Sky knew these pair of shoes were a birthday present from Grandpa Rune.

“Oh yeah, it dropped this crystal looking thing.” Lark pulled out the monster drop out of his pant pockets.

“My goodness, you’re always carrying strange things,” Mishka said with a puff, pulling back one side of her lip in a pout. Her blue eyes flamed with jealousy as she examined the crystalline object.

“I can’t do a careful analysis right now, but I’m assuming this is the monster core. The thing responsible for its existence as its energy source,” she said in deep wonder. She soon snapped out it, when the trio heard screams echoing from outside. From a window, they could see students fleeing from slime bats. The two-story high slime Sky mentioned to Lark, couldn’t be seen, but feeling the wa the ground shook, it was moving around the campus.

“Why did you two want to meet up at the computer labs anyway?” Lark asked as he kept an eye out for any troubling slime monsters in the hallway.

“It was the first place that came to mind.” Her cheeks turned pink. “Anyways! How come I don’t get a bat?”

Lark tutted. “The mage wants a bat— I think you’re gonna destroy the party balance if you take Sky’s.”

Mishka bit down on a corner of her lip as she looked guiltily at them.“I guess I should explain a bit…”

Sky fixed his glasses, which surprised Lark to see not a scratch on them, as he held up a hand. “Wait, let me clear the air for a second about some thoughts I’ve had for awhile.”

“Mishka, love of my life…”

Oh my god, this is not the time…

“Since I’ve met you, I’ve always been drawn to you like a puzzle. And that hasn’t changed. But there were moments when I felt like I was close to solving Mishka the enigma, but it seems like you’ve always hidden a part of yourself from everyone. Not just magic. But I’ve never been to your place. Never met your family. And I just don’t know much about your life besides robotics and before freshmen year.” Sky’s wishy-washy, sentimental expression morphed into a forlorn one.

Mishka’s eyes beaded.

Lark agreed with everything Sky had to say. Although he understood the necessity for secrets, there were still very few things he knew about Mishka.

Catgirl was a nickname, he and Sky coined up for her when they first saw her in their beginner’s robotics course. She stood out with her cat-like eyes and her cat hood clothing line. Sky was the first to talk to her when they ended up together in the same row(they still used those seats.)

And could she chatter!

Catgirl introduced herself as Mishka, and she was a foreign exchange student from where they assumed was Russia. They hadn’t asked and she didn’t tell them for the last four years.

The couple held both their hands together, and Sky gazed into her crestfallen eyes.

“I admit this bothered me for a long time, but I was truly happy with all the moments we’ve been together as friends and when we started dating… But I realized after the get-together at Lark’s place last week, maybe why you hadn’t been so forthcoming with your past is because of your family business,” he said with a straight face.

Please don’t say her family is the mafia or some underground shit. They already had enough drama with toilet monsters, he didn’t think he could handle it.

Mishka finally shed tears and cried out to them that she wanted them to know. But everything was too complicated. Or that’s what Lark interpreted through the hiccups.

“You don’t understand how hard it was for me to convince my dad to date you and stuff. But I made our relationship sound plausible enough for me to blend into society.” She hiccuped some more before Sky pulled her into a hug.

“Mishka—do you know you’re starting to sound like an alien?”

She sobbed even harder into his shirt and balled her hands into tiny fists.

“The truth is…alien-technology is magic.”