It was funny how the world worked sometimes.

Two of the men who were dressed in matching coats introduced themselves as Dominic and Albert Turner. The Turner brothers, the very same who Ed initially thought caused the town fire the previous night. It had barely been 24 hours, but with all of the events happening in quick succession, it felt much longer to Cain.

One of the other guys had a full beard and named himself just Eric, with a ‘C,’ not a K. He was very adamant on that point, but didn’t contribute much to the conversation otherwise. The last guy was Matt, and he was an older man focused completely on carving something into a piece of wood he had in his hands. Wood whittling?

When Cain reached the only woman of the group, she extended her hand and introduced herself.

“Lisa Bressel. I was good friends with Brian and Rose, and I want you to know the town doesn’t blame you for what happened. Most of us understand.”

Cain took the offered hand and shook it firmly, conveying his thankfulness through his grip. And with introductions out of the way, everyone already knew who he was, the group set out to start an informal patrol around the houses everyone was sleeping in. It was a lopsided loop, but it covered all around the center of the town, the current temporary residential area.

The Turner brothers were in a constant state of bickering, arguing over whether their coat looked cleaner or not, if their Numeral was cooler or not, if their traps were more dangerous or not. It had only been a day and a night since the nausea attack happened, and the entrepreneurial souls had already slid right into the whole fantastical business without a sweat. Dominic was somehow placing sound alarms on pieces of brick and scattering them behind him like breadcrumbs, whereas Albert was doing the same thing, but with light.

Cain spent most of the patrol keeping an eye out for possible stray wolves in the town, but was also actively talking with the brothers on their own understanding of the Numeral so far. They discovered that Vertex helped with managing to use two Cardinals at the same time without hurting too much, but they didn’t have it high enough to completely mitigate the pain. The traps they laid were thus sparse, but it was a welcome help anyway. They’d have to pick them up once the town started waking up, but until then it was a safety net he didn’t think they’d have.

At the same time, he taught them about the possibility of using the materials and objects around them, instead of making it from scratch. But that just sparked another round of arguing. Cain left them to it and decided to find someone else to talk to. He’d never been on any sort of watch or patrol duty, and didn’t know if staying awake through conversation was a good idea or not.

Matt was wholly absorbed in his whittling business and barely had the sense of mind to keep walking next to the rest of the group. The man might step on a trap once they did a full circuit at this rate. Eric didn’t really seem to want to talk much either, a look of concentration on his face. And Cain smiled when he noticed the telltale signs of someone trying to walk faster with force. Mainly that he was perpetually on the verge of tripping over himself. Lisa did seem to want to talk some more however.

“I know you’ve probably heard this from Tom, but Ed is somewhat of an outlier in how he thinks. Brian was one of his best friends, the two spent almost every other weekend going down to Harrison Slough to fish. I just wanted you to know the rest of us that knew him won’t be spitting on the ground you walk on,” Lisa said, indeed far more amicable with him than Ed was. But spitting on the ground, did he really do that?

“Thanks Lisa, I was hoping to have a talk with him soon, see if we can’t reach an agreement, but I have a feeling he won’t budge. But I’ve been meaning to ask, how did Tom figure out you all were good with Cardinals?”

“Oh that? He watches the whole town, keeps an ear out for anything interesting going on, and this whole end of the world business didn’t stop that one lick. He knew who did the best helping the town out with the wolves earlier tonight and he rounded us all up,” Lisa explained, some slang entering her words as she got more relaxed speaking to him.

Cain knew the man had been running himself ragged keeping the town safe and functional when all modern conveniences had been thrown out the window, and it showed too. He had a full group of people who could handle themselves better than most watching over the town. Cain was alright with people, but he wasn’t that alright with them.

“I got a feel for what almost everyone can do, except for you Lisa. You mind sharing?” Cain prompted, a little overeager to see someone else use the Cardinals as well as he could.

“Oh, sure,” Lisa agreed, and began to pull water out of the air from multiple points, dragging the currents into one increasingly larger ball of water. She began to pull new currents out of the ball as the old ones kept providing it with fuel, and soon a large amount of streams were flowing all around her, constantly in a state of motion, with a few, if any, disruptions to the surprising show of control. And this was all while she was still walking.

“Woah,” was all Cain managed to get out. The cloud cover had parted a little over the night, and the moon illuminated the streams of water in a way Cain didn’t think he would ever forget about. He had been using the Cardinals out of pure necessity, out of the need for survival. It didn’t even occur to him they could also be used for beauty as well.

“It is pretty, isn’t it? But it takes me a minute to set up, and even then it isn’t much good for attacking. Eric was dropping wolves left and right while the Turners managed to place some kind of spike trap around the houses for when the wolves started trying to climb,” Lisa explained, and Cain laughed at the last part.

“You also call them the Turner brothers?”

“Yeah, they introduce themselves to be polite, but then they both want to be called Turner,” Lisa said, cracking a smile.

“Come look at this,” Eric shouted, interrupting everyone’s conversation. The group huddled around a fairly large hoofprint. Perhaps too large.

“Too large to be a cow. Buffalo? We don’t see them up here too often though, they usually stay further South, or just in Montana,” Dominic explained.

“Montana?” Cain asked, slightly embarrassed.

“Yeah, you know, the state one over,” Albert said with a pointed finger East.

“Did you think you were in Montana this whole time?” Dominic asked, and the brothers devolved into laughter. Cain put his face in his hands and just sighed. That damn Joe, never correcting him. He’d get him back for this.

“We’re in Idaho. Are these tracks a problem?” Eric said succinctly, returning attention back to the hoof marks.

“Shouldn’t be, but then again the wildlife ‘round here hasn’t been too friendly,” Dominic, no, Albert said. How was it becoming more difficult to tell them apart over time? And with that, the hoof mark was promptly ignored, and the group continued patrolling. It was suspicious that it was found inside of the town, but there was no sign of a cow or buffalo anywhere.

No time keeping devices worked anymore, digital or analog, so there was no way of telling how late it was, or how much time was left until the sun began to peek over the horizon, signalling dawn. The moon provided a very rough estimate, but it was roughly directly overhead, meaning half the night or so was left.

Apparently guns didn’t work either, too mechanically complicated to fire bullets. The same principles the mechanics figured out on how to get the cars running could be used to get the guns working, but it would be too much effort. Manually moving the parts of a gun to fire a single bullet and moving them again to do it a second time? Not worth the effort, not when Cardinals sufficed for now.

Cain did let the rest of the group know that putting Origin into their Cardinals made using them easier, and with his newfound knowledge of Vertex, it provided some interesting possibilities. It took Cain 10 Origin and a reached Vertex of 5 before the pain of using two Cardinals at once turned into a mild annoyance in the back of his head, something he could ignore for a while. He had a suspicion that he had spent far more Origin than the rest of his group, and still had some to spare, but he kept that to himself.

The moon was about one fourth the way to the horizon when the patrol encountered their first group of hostile animals. A group of bears, wolves, and now foxes burst from the tree cover without a shred of stealth, roaring and growling and yipping on their way to attack the town.

The Turners began to layer the ground with spike traps made of brick, a neat use of solid that Cain hadn’t thought of using. But why all the brick? Eric ran to meet the charge head on and Matt finally dropped his whittling project to just...start writing on the asphalt? Cain and Lisa stayed back, choosing the ranged approach. She began to conjure her defensive streams of water around herself, but wouldn’t be of help for about a minute.

Heat and other Cardinals in general became harder to conjure the further they were created from Cain, but he simultaneously created bursts of flame in the path of the charging bears while firing needles at whatever animal presented the clearer target. They all also continued showing signs of disfigurement in the form of extra limbs or flesh jutting out in places where it had no place being. As if all of these animals were mutated in some way.

There must have been over a hundred bodies charging at the five of them, but nobody broke and ran. Matt finished whatever he was carving, and a wall about twice as tall as Cain rose out of the ground, providing an obvious obstacle the horde would have to break down. It was made of asphalt, so it wouldn’t take much punishment, but Cain did have to whistle in appreciation at how the man managed to do something like that.

“Hey, watch it! You put that thing over our traps!” A Turner shouted. Matt grunted in response and began to climb up the wall, making hand and footholds for himself. It was a clever idea, making a defensive wall to block the path of the animals, while also providing a good vantage point at the top. Cain elected to stay on the ground however, and he chose the left side of the wall to keep up his assault. The Turners decided to take the right, and Lisa was still working on her own thing.

Eric was doing very well for himself, each punch either braining the animals or shattering bones. He moved in that jittery way that Cain did when he tried to use force, but hopefully he was practiced enough to not trip and be too far away from the rest of them to get help quickly enough.

Once Lisa completed her water currents, she took over for Cain from the left and began to wade into the fray just as Eric did, whips of water spearing nearby animals, while the currents redirected pounces and bites from overly aggressive wolves. And she said it wasn’t good for attacking, a very humble underestimate of her power. The bears had to be dodged, but Cain was doing his best to focus on taking them out first, being a larger and thus easier target to aim for. The few creatures that managed to get past Cain, Lisa, and Eric were caught in the replaced spike traps of the Turners, which also apparently lit them on fire. Cain did not want to get on their bad side.

It must have taken only a couple minutes to clear out the entire drove, but the patrol were all panting and covered in blood by the end of it. All of them except Matt were injured, and they took the time to heal themselves as they gathered together once again. The man in question was right back to whittling on his piece of wood, each rendition becoming more intricate than the last.

“Matt, how did you manage to make a wall that large, that fast?” Cain asked, trying to connect somewhat with the man.

“Wrote it down,” was all he said, and promptly returned to his own business. Writing it down? Writing what down?

“That was a good fight, got the blood rushing, ha, ha, ha!” Eric shouted, extremely pleased that he had the chance to fight. The man must have been a boxer with the way he was duking it out with the animals. Cain noticed he struggled with the foxes that darted out of his grasp, but Lisa had no problem guiding her whips towards their heads.

All five of them had in the span of only a couple days become lethal killers, and this was without exploring the full extent of what the Cardinals could do. Cain thought this would do more harm than good in the long run. Animals could be trusted to be hungry, to be aggressive, and could be prepared for. People? Unpredictable. And who knew what the criminals in the world would end up trying to do with a weakened or perhaps nonexistent government in power.

Their teamwork could also be improved upon, but Matt wasn’t feeling very conversationalist, and the Turners were probably just going to try and work around him selfishly throwing walls up wherever he wanted to.

Throwing walls up. What a thought, how a person could now create architecture just by wanting it.

“Hey Lisa, would it be too hard for you to keep your water currents flowing the rest of the night?” Cain asked her, hoping she wouldn’t remain a liability at the beginning of every fight.

“Maybe some of them, but keeping my focus on all of them for a long time is hard,” she said, but a few currents started to lazily slug through the air around her. It was better than nothing.

“Turner and Turner, you think you two could make some traps and keep them in your pockets, ready to throw if we get attacked again?” The two brothers nodded and began to silently bicker on the best way to do it, and who could make the most pocket traps the fastest. At least they were passionate about it.

“Eric, that was good fighting you did earlier, are you a boxer by any chance?” Eric brightened at that, happy someone noticed his ability in the fight.

“Close, I do MMA in my spare time, and I run a gym for it in Spokane,” he said, pride in his voice.

“Have you considered putting some Origin in your Arc? I know you moved well, but if you ever take a hit, you don’t want it to be lethal.”

“I thought about that, but decided it wasn’t worth it. I find guard does a better job than Arc.”

“Guard?”

“Yeah, Second Cardinal, Primary Ordinal.” Interesting.

“Alright, if you’re confident in yourself. Try not to be so far away from the group next time though.” Eric nodded at that, and everyone kept walking their route, contemplating what they could have done better, placing their Origin in Elements or Ordinals. Cain should have been doing the same thing, but what Eric said wouldn’t leave his mind.

He thought of the Second Cardinal as resistance, and Eric thought of it as guard. They were both probably used the same way, and did the same things, but everyone had their own interpretation of their Cardinals. Strange how there was flexibility in that, but all of the Elements were apparently the same for everyone. A quirk of the Numeral that would have to be thought about another time. And if that was something different between every individual, were there other secrets the Numeral was hiding?

The moon was three quarters of the way down when the second wave came out of the trees, in almost the exact same spot as the first wave. With one major difference: they had found what was making the hoof prints.

A huge monstrosity as tall as a house was lumbering out of the woods towards the town. It looked like a buffalo, with horns longer than a person that could skewer a car, and shaggy fur that covered the entirety of its body. Small wisps of green smoke were trailing out of its mouth, and its beady black eyes focused on the group as it steadily made its way towards them. Another horde of wolves, bears, foxes, and now crows streamed towards them, in greater numbers than the earlier wave.

This was not going to be easy.

Matt set about writing on the asphalt to create another wall for defense, and the Turners waited until he was finished before starting to place traps around it. Eric chose not to charge the swarm this time, and instead hung back, intending to defend the left side of the wall. Lisa joined him, and Cain and the Turners took the right.

It was standard fare to take care of the grounded animals, but the crows dove in at unpredictable intervals, attempting to claw out their eyes, or open them up for a pounce from a wolf or fox. No bears managed to get anywhere near the wall, Cain made sure of that. He also managed to time narrow jets of fire well enough to where they could intercept the dive bombing crows and singe their wings. The birds couldn’t fly with charred wings, and were effectively taken out of the fight.

The shaggy buffalo had been standing still since the beginning of the fight, but once it became obvious the smaller creatures couldn’t break through the wall, it opened its mouth and spewed a thick, roiling green fog towards the patrol group. Any animals touched by it started to instantly slow and decomposed, melted, before Cain’s very eyes. Fur and flesh and bone alike were dissolved under the touch of the fog, all organic matter equal in its grasp. Something like that couldn’t be allowed to reach the town, or else hundreds would die in seconds.

He reached for a barely used Cardinal so far, gas, and willed a gust of wind to blow the acidic fog off in a different direction, but the wind was akin to a breeze, lightly tickling the fog. It was moving slowly, but the buffalo kept producing more of it, and was walking closer at the same time.

Cain tried to light the fog on fire, but it just passed right through whatever flames he sent at it. He was running out of ideas, and it didn’t seem like anyone else had any either.

“Cain, take over here!” Lisa shouted, and he nodded, hoping she had a plan.

She combined all of her running currents into one, and sent it towards the fog, where the deadly vapor was stopped by the wave of water.

“I can’t do this forever,” she warned Cain, a look of determination on her face. So they had to end this quickly.

“Eric, Turner and Turner, take over for a while,” Cain ordered, and the three of them nodded. Matt was doing his own thing, and didn’t seem inclined to stop. He needed the firepower the man had in order to do anything of note to the house-sized beast though. Matt said that he just wrote something down to conjure the wall. Was it a symbol, or just a word? Cain tried to remember what the markings on his wood looked like, but they were just a jumble of lines and curves he couldn’t understand at all. The simple way it was.

Cain conjured a needle, grabbed it, and wrote the worst spelled ‘spike,’ he had ever written in his life on the asphalt. And an asphalt spike as large as he was shot out of the ground and towards the shaggy monster. It grazed its side, and Cain received a roar of pain as his rewards.

He carved another ‘spike,’ this time a little more gracefully, and the projectile hit true, striking the beast in one of its forelegs. It tumbled to the ground while bellowing out in pain, the trail of acid fog finally having ceased to be made. One more written ‘spike’ through the head, and its struggles stopped altogether. It was a cleanup job after that, with everyone having grown used to their Cardinals enough to make it a job of triviality.

The Northeast part of Mullan had essentially become unrecognizable at this point. Two tall walls made of asphalt and in differing states of disrepair were standing in the middle of the road. Corpses and metal needles dotted the street, and there were burning bits of brick strewn all over the place. Courtesy of a Turner’s exploding trap. The two of them were geniuses at using the Cardinals like that, and Cain genuinely felt bad at not being able to remember who was who. But they didn’t seem to mind.

This battle only took a few minutes, most of the action happening in the span of breaths. The rays of dawn soon illuminated the sky, and the night gracefully receded, but promising to be back again soon. The patrol group was completely exhausted, and even Matt was gazing emptily at the wood in his hands, instead of actively carving on it. When Tom personally came over and greeted them, they followed him without a word of complaint to someone’s house and collectively fell asleep in the living room.

The night of protection was one of the most difficult things Cain had ever done, but it also felt like one of the most rewarding. He was actively contributing to the safety of hundreds of people, letting them all sleep safe and sound, unaware of the war being fought right outside their doorsteps. The lull of unconsciousness beckoned, and Cain fell into its grasp with a smile.