"We received another job request after leaving?" Zech asked after Nyz finished explaining the new job after they left the way station.

"Yes," Nyz answered. "Kal informed me of it after we reached the way station last night."

"But you were in the beetle all night," Harn said. "How did he contact you?"

"I told you," Nyz said. "We have long-distance communication, even through the fog. I'm not sure how Kal does it."

He also didn't care to learn how Kal did it. As long as Kal's tech worked, and it always did, then he would trust it and accept it. There was also the fact that it made his head spin to try to figure out how Kal did what he did whenever his friend explained it.

With the range of their wireless communication, he knew that Kal had something in the sky that enabled it, but never could understand more than that.

"Look alert," Nyz told the Scavengers. "Don't forget that we aren't alone, even if the FDKG clears a path for us. All it really does is ensure that fog monsters are weakened a little if they attack us."

Nyz did understand why that happened. Fog monsters relied on the Anomalous Magic Force for their power. The fog was saturated with it, and so the monsters absorbed it out of the fog to cast spells. If they weren't in the fog, then they had to draw on what lingered in the clear zones to cast their magics.

Some fog monsters had abilities which didn't rely on the AMF, and most had a small amount of mana as well. However, the spells cast using mana and the spells cast through the AMF were different, and the latter were more powerful by far.

Not all fog monsters fell into the normal categories, though. Bograls were one of the few fog monsters which didn't. As they absorbed the power in souls, they grew more powerful and acquired increased mana capacities. They more mana they held and the more powerful they were, the less they needed to use the AMF to use their abilities.

It was a much simpler explanation than most of the things Kal tried to teach him, and Nyz had an actual interest in it as well. As a result, he was able to retain that much information regarding it.

"What's the strongest monster you've ever fought?" Kacy asked Nyz as the group pressed on.

"A wyvern," Nyz answered. "It attacked me during a mission once, unexpectedly. Both me and my opponent were caught off-guard by it. It was one of the few times something went badly wrong on a mission."

"You've fought a wyvern?" She asked in surprise. "How did you manage to escape? I've heard those are quite dangerous."

"I was using Class S gear," he stated. "I managed to badly damage one of its wings before it decided to abandon the fight. Look alert, Kacy. Save the chatter for the way station."

"Yes, sir!" She responded.

Nyz pulled up a map of the region with their route marked on it. Other than weaving between some hills, there wasn't much in the path up until the next way station. Tracing a finger along the route, Nyz pulled up an alternate path for if they needed to change directions at various points.

"Do you really think we'll need to change paths?" Wys asked.

"I don't know," Nyz answered. "These are all routes Kal plotted for us based on the data he had of the region and the monsters. Naturally, the further in we go, the less data he'll have, so the less accurate the routes will be, but it shouldn't be too much of an issue. My main worry is here."

Nyz shifted the map to show an area past the way station in Norulb.

"We have to cross a river here," Nyz stated. "There is a bridge here and here, and another if we loop around to here. The last time any of these bridges was used was more than sixty years ago, so there's no telling if they're still intact or not."

"And if we can't use the bridges?" Wys asked. "How long would it take to get to Virtul?"

"If we travel by land," Nyz pulled up the alternate route. "It would take us several weeks to go around the river. However, the beetle can clear the distance if we go to a section of the river that isn't too wide. We can pull everyone back to the beetle, have their walkers fix back into their spots on its sides, then leap the river."

"The beetle can do that?" Wys asked in amazement.

"It can leap a total distance of one hundred and fifty feet in distance," Nyz stated. "Like combat suits, it has magitech thrusters."

"I don't like the sound of leaping fifty yards in a beetle," Gabe told Nyz. "No offense to your friend's tech or anything."

"It's not the jump that's the issue," Nyz stated. "And if we don't make the leap, we'll have to add on at least two to three weeks to the journey each direction just to go around the water."

"What's the issue?" Miyak asked.

"The river that we're coming across," Lyan explained. "Flows from northeast down southwest. It passes by a few towns still active before ending in a lake. Or rather, it used to. Around four years ago, water stopped flowing down it. A group of guards went up it as far as they dared, but couldn't find the source of the water's stop. It's entirely possible that there's a monster stopping the water, and we may end up facing it. Or the water will be dried up where we go, leaving a dry riverbed. Or there's a natural block, and it's turn into a lake in our path. We don't know the situation, and that makes it especially dangerous for us."

"Kal's accounted for a wide variety of scenarios," Nyz stated. "So we should be fine. It's doubtful we'll come across something he didn't plan for. Look alert, we have incoming from the right."

A group of fifty bograls swarmed out of the fog, and everyone began attacking them, the Scavengers shooting with bullets as Wys set the beetle's guns to bullet mode and fired using both the larger guns and the magic cannon, striking into the group of bograls.

As they fought, Nyz took snapshots of the bograls, highlighting several of them as he waited for the fighting to finish. With Wys's backup from the beetle, none of the monsters were able to draw close enough to start attempting to break into a walker, while the Scavengers did their best to finish the monsters off.

Once the fighting finished and everyone returned to their places, they resumed their journey. After removing the bad shots and the shots taken of the wrong things, Nyz sent the remaining snapshots of the bograls to everyone else.

"Did you guys notice that?" He asked.

"I did," Harn answered.

"Same here," Lyan answered. "Those ones were tougher than the others."

"I did as well," Gabe answered. "They were a lot tougher than the others.

"What the heck?" Kacy asked. "Are those-"

"Masculine and feminine forms," Nyz responded. "Six of the bograls had them. Five had masculine forms, one had a feminine form, including the development of the start of a dick and balls on the masculine and boobs on the feminine."

"Bograls are sexless creatures," Gabe said. "What the fuck happened there, Nyz?"

"They aren't fully sexless," Nyz explained. "More powerful bograls start to change in appearance based on the souls they've consumed. Those six must have consumed at least a thousand humans each just to develop that much. Another thousand or so, and they would have wings and a horn as well, their boobs or dick and balls fully developed. Consider yourselves lucky. Without this Class S equipment, you'd have died for sure."

"For them to have absorbed that many souls," Gabe said. "Just how old are they?"

"More importantly," Lyan said. "Why were they were? There were no records of any bograls that powerful in the area, and no signs of anything that strong."

"Monsters are unusually strong on this trip," Gabe said. "Will this continue all the way in?"

"Who knows?" Nyz answered. "What I do know for sure, however, is that it means something more powerful may enter our paths. Look alert."

They continued on their journey, the Scavengers more watchful than before, though Nyz continued to warn them of threats before their walkers picked up on them. Nearing eleven that night, they finally reached the second way station, which they entered and went through the decontamination procedure before taking advantage of its showers.

Nyz remained behind in his beetle, walking into its bathroom to shower there. After washing up, he pulled on a pair of shorts and a tee, then walked back to the front, sitting in the seat to answer the call that had been coming in.

"You again," he sighed as Sen came into view. "I was hoping it was Kal with an update on something."

"He's busy," she told him. "It says you've reached the second way station?"

"We have," Nyz answered. "It's also late, so I was getting ready to lie down and get some sleep."

"Sorry," she told him. "I was just hoping to chat for a few minutes. I know you don't trust me, but I figured we could at least talk a little so you could start to get to know me. Kal's had two weeks on you to trust me, and he does."

"Even if Kal swore to me you were trustworthy," Nyz told her. "I'd still not trust you until you proved it to me. And until we're in-person again, there's no chance of that. Now, is there something important? Because if not, I'm going to go get some sleep."

Sen was silent for several moments, then shook her head.

"I just wanted to talk," she told him. "Can you please just give me a few minutes?"

"Fine," he muttered. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Kal's avoided the topic when I ask," she said. "But I've noticed there's something different about you two. Just small things. But then Taylor showed me the combat suit you crumbled up. You did that with your bare hands. That goes beyond breeding and training, Nyz, and Kal refuses to talk about anything from before he was in the academy as well as what you were doing while he was there. Who are you and Kal really?"

Nyz drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair as he thought of it. He knew why Kal was avoiding mentioning it.

"We grew up in a complex," Nyz told her. "It was a pretty brutal place to be, but we're quite human. I know what you're thinking, that we were part of some project to create warriors with inhuman abilities."

Nyz shook his head.

"In order to do that," he stood up and stepped between the two seats of the cockpit, then pulled off his shirt. "They'd have to incorporate the genetics of beasts into us. However, there would be several serious flaws."

He dropped his shorts, leaving him standing there holding his shirt with his shorts around his ankles, then he slowly turned around.

"I look fully human," he told her once he was facing her again. "Yet if they'd incorporated the DNA of the magical beasts necessary to increase my strength, I wouldn't look it. I'd have noticeable blemishes and deformations. A job I did recently was to acquire the data for a project to create super-soldiers from the ruins of Troak. That data confirmed they would need to alter our genetic with monster DNA for it, but that every attempt they had made failed. They were also unable to figure out how to remove the obvious signs of monster genetics at play.

"This," he tells her. "Was done by Zenitk Pharmaceuticals, the leader of something to do with genetics and all that other crap I can't remember the words for. They spent nearly a century on it, and only had failure after failure. We were raised in an unrelated compound. It just wasn't a pleasant childhood. To explain my strength, I am simply me. Sometimes, freaks are born. You can ask Kal about this, I'm sure he'd confirm it."

Nyz realized as he finished his explanation that Sen had averted her gaze, her face crimson.

"What's wrong?" He asked.

"Nyz," she said. "You're very naked, and very erect, and with the training program you put yourself through, you aren't unattractive."

"What?" Nyz looked down at himself, then realized that he had, indeed, bared himself before her. He pulled up his shorts and pulled his shirt back on, then looked at the screen. "Sorry, I was thinking only of showing you that I don't bear the signs of the genetic manipulation to be what you thought."

"Alright," she looked back at the screen, though her face remained a little red. "So you're claiming you're just a freak?"

"Yes," he answered. "Sorry, Sen, I hadn't thought about you not wanting to see me naked."

"No, no," she said. "You're actually quite nice to look at, it was just… unexpected. So Kal avoids the topic because he didn't like living there?"

"It's why he ran away," Nyz told her. "With his inhuman intellect, it wasn't difficult for him to break out, though he stayed in contact with me. Now, if you don't mind, I want to get some rest, Sen. Goodnight."

He hurried to end the call, then walked into the general room of the beetle and lay down on the couch. Lying to her about their past made him uncomfortable, but he, Kal, and Wys never told anyone about their origins.

About the hell they really went through. Kal escaped when they were five and hid himself in the academy, while Nyz strong-armed his way into being treated better.

Closing his eyes, Nyz wondered, not for the first time, if Kal had something to do with the AMF's attack on Troak. The facility and nearly every last person there was killed in the attack, with only Nyz, Wys, and Kal surviving it.

His mind drifted from those thoughts to his stripping in front of Sen. From there, he wondered if he should have told her it would only be fair if he got to see her, too. Deciding she wouldn't have gone for it, Nyz pushed those thoughts from his head and went to sleep.

When morning came, Nyz changed and ate breakfast, then summoned everyone together for the day. They departed the way point and resumed their journey. Most of the creatures they fought on the trip were smaller, but more numerous, and Nyz learned that Harn hated insect monsters.

As Nyz ate a sandwich for lunch, he noticed something strange in the beetle's readings. Accessing the files Kal had uploaded, he looked for what they meant as they journeyed forward, Wys giving him a concerned look.

"Is that saying what I think it's saying?" Wys asked.

"Yes," Nyz told him. "Everyone, we have a situation."

"What is it?" Gabe asked. "Something big?"

"Yes," Nyz answered as the source of the readings came into view, the clear zone stretching into it. "Notice that big darkness?"

They rolled to a stop at the edge of the cliff.

"We have a cliff," Nyz told them. "One which wasn't here two weeks ago, I take it?"

"It wasn't," Lyan confirms. "We're on-course, so this is definitely the route we took. We're even on the path forged by countless walkers passing over."

Nyz turned on a spotlight which used the Fog-Dispersing Kal Light, a concentrated form of the glow, and shot it across the gap, the light pushing out more than three hundred yards. He swept it from side to side, obliterating the fog in an attempt to find the edges of the gap.

"It appears," Nyz turned off the FDKL spotlight. "We'll have to go around. Look alert, folks, because something made this, and whatever it was, it was here recently, and it's powerful."