“This is as far as I can take you,” our guide said. “Our scouts said that the manticore is further upriver. Just send a message through the Communication Amulet when it's safe, and I'll find you through the Teleportation Stone. Good luck.”

With that, the guide disappeared in a flash of mana.

The instructions were slightly confusing to me. I had seen the Communication Amulets that many guards had, and I had even received one myself.

Communication Amulets worked something like cell phones. First, Cities and Towns had to build a Communication Tower. With an F-ranked Communication Amulet, you could send and receive messages as long as you were in a District with a Communication Tower. Messages could be typed using the Schema interface, recorded audio, or live conversations. E-ranked Communication Amulets would connect to a Region City’s Communication Tower—regardless of if you were in a District that had a tower or not.

Things grew even trickier when considering inter-Region communications. While Districts in the same Region could communicate with each other without a Region City’s Communication Tower, all communication between Districts that were in different Regions had to travel through both Region’s Cities, making communication between Districts in different Regions using Amulets impossible, unless there was a City in both Regions.

All this was to say that I had no idea how Adia was supposed to contact the guide, since there was no town in our current District, and there was no Region City, either.

I had been a part of the Crucible for less than a day, and I was still impressed by how…complete the organization was. The Crucible had abundant Communication Towers and Amulets, at least two teleportation mages, which allowed us to travel to this manticore’s hunting ground, and so much more hidden infrastructure.

Most of Uman’s job, it seemed, was managing the people who were not Chosen. Hundreds of people were employed by the Crucible, looking for Region Lords, District Lords, and any other vaguely interesting resource.

It was this same network that led us here--a national park in Missouri. Autumn was in full force, with red and orange shades carrying far in every direction.

“Mark Twain National Forest,” Adia read, studying the map that the teleportation mage had left us.

“Now there’s a great author,” Amos said, approvingly. “Witty and wise.”

“Another old, dead, white man,” Adia said. “I think I know why you like him so much. Move straight upriver.”

We moved forward in formation. River, Petrov, and Parker were in the middle of our group, with Hank at the front, flanked by myself and Amos. Adia and Ryker brought up the rear.

“Come on,” Amos said, refusing to give up. “I know I’m not the only one here who appreciates Mark Twain’s genius.”

Parker spoke up from behind me: “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was a good read.”

Adia laughed. “Oh, yes, what do you think about Connecticut Yankee, Amos?”

I could practically hear Amos blushing. “I haven’t actually read that. Really, who has? The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are really where it’s at. Of course, I understand why you don’t like him so much, Adia—”

“Oh really?” Adia asked. I could practically hear her raised eyebrow. “Do tell.”

“Well, Mark Twain uses the N-word, but it was historically—”

“Shh—something’s in the bushes!” River hissed, casting a sudden fireball out of her staff, passing just above Amos’s balding head, and then careening into the bushes just ahead of us.

The flames lit the dry leaves with ease, and in an instant, the whole bush caught fire.

Everyone tensed, but two very normal-looking birds flew out of the bush, cawing loudly.

“False alarm,” River said, nonchalantly.

“Next time, you should not strike,” Petrov said, as he put out the fire. “The smoke will draw them to us.”

“And…that’s… bad?” River retorted.

Petrov shrugged, and we continued our walk.

The first monsters to attack us were winged foxes. They scurried up trees, and then dove, gliding towards us.

There were hundreds of them, each around level 25-30.

We were already in a somewhat defensible location. We had a river to our backs, and a wide enough river bank that we could spread out slightly.

It wasn’t too hard to clear out the foxes. Petrov created icy spikes to our left, and River turned everything to our right into flames.

I had to wait 30 seconds or so before the first flying fox reached me. I killed it with a casual swipe of my bade.

The flying foxes showed no signs of letting up their frenzied attack. Mixed in among them were rock badgers—sturdier, slower, tank-like creatures whose skin flaked off like sheets of layered rock when damaged.

As a rock badger approached me, I stabbed my dagger through its right eye—one of the few weak points that they had.

It seemed flames and icicles were effective against the foxes, but not the rock badgers. But I wasn’t very worried. Our team was packing enough firepower that we weren’t truly threatened yet.

“Eyes on the ground!” River called. “Something’s coming!”

Not long after her warning, I felt a tremor in the ground behind me.

I spun around, noticing what looked like a foot-long mole in front of me, popping out of the dirt. It had a disproportionately thick and muscular body, and a quick Identify showed it to be a Muscle Mole.

I beheaded it with an easy strike, but then two more Muscle Moles popped out of the tunnel it had dug.

“Whack-a-mole, anyone?” Parker called out, stomping down on the head of a Muscle Mole. His foot sunk down about six inches into the mole hole.

“No more playing. Get out.” Petrov said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him gesturing quickly. He pulled the water from the river behind us at a steady pace, and poured the water into the holes in the ground.

Then, the ground under our feet turned frosty.

Parker just barely managed to get his foot out of a mole hole before the water inside froze.

“The moles are not a problem,” Petrov said.

I turned my attention back to slaying any beast that approached.

Flying foxes, rock badgers, and soon enough, I saw some familiar faces. Large, uprooted trees marching towards us, with sinister faces in their trunks. I’d seen them earlier, when I fought the Hydra. Treants, according to the Schema.

They looked scary, but River took care of them easily. They were, predictably enough, susceptible to fire.

“They’re trying to exhaust us,” Adia said, after five minutes of fighting the foxes and badgers. “We’ll start fighting in shifts. Petrov, River, take turns meditating. Amos, I’ll take your place.”

The foxes, badgers, and treants weren’t particularly challenging enemies. For me, it was like having experience come running up to me. This was the leveling speed I’d been missing since I returned on Earth.

“No, I can still fight!” Amos said, next to me. “Why don’t you swap out with Hank or Jarek.”

“Fall back, Amos,” Adia said, sharply. “It’s an order. Hank could fight for hours, and Jarek’s stamina is far greater than yours.”

Grumbling under his breath, Amos fell back into the protected circle.

It was somewhat mesmerizing, watching Adia fight from the corner of my eye. She had complete control of each movement, and every motion had a deadly purpose. Foxes would fly at her from any direction, but she would consistently cut them down before they reached her, or dodge slightly and cut them down anyway.

“She’s a gymnast,” I heard Amos say to Ryker behind me. “Just barely missed the cutoff for the Olympics. Shame. We’ve got quite the sports team, here. Me, I’m a fencer. Two-time state champion. Adia’s a gymnast, and I’m guessing you’re a boxer?”

I heard Ryker grunt affirmatively. “Was.”

I stabbed both my blades into two approaching foxes, tuning in to Amos’s whispered conversation out of boredom. “Petrov there’s pretty quiet. Keeps his past to himself. He was picked up near ADX Florence—one of the U.S.’s highest security prisons. Rumor has it he’s Russian Black Ops.”

I saw Petrov turn to Amos, so I turned my head slightly as well, just in time to spot an icicle nick Amos’ ear and draw blood.

“If I am,” Petrov said slowly, “Then you die first.”

I turned back to slaying the monsters around me. The only conversation for the next ten minutes or so were Adia’s terse commands, or interspersed calls for Parker’s healing magic.

“How do we know the manticore isn’t just running away?” I asked, after ten more minutes of fighting.

Parker spoke up first. “Manticores are proud creatures. They would rarely run from a battle in their own territory, especially if they have a higher level than their opponents. We are clearly in their territory, so it is only a matter of time before the manticore comes."

“Read that in your internet stories, Parker?” Amos asked.

“They’re called web serials, grandpa,” Parker said, in a tone that made it clear that Amos was not, in fact, Parker’s grandfather. “And yes, it did come up in the webserials, but was I really the only one who researched manticores in the Crucible’s Information Crystals?”

Nobody else spoke up, and the battle continued.

“I never thought the hardest part of the battle would be the stench,” Amos said. I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. There were hundreds of corpses littered around us, half charred and burning. Petrov had frozen much of the ground to prevent the moles from tunneling, which had the downside of leaving much of the blood trapped on the surface of the earth, running in rivulets downhill.

“Incoming,” River called. “From the east.”

I glanced up and saw a massive, winged creature flying towards us.