"What in the name of all that is holy..." one of Clara's team whispered.

The rest of us were stunned to silence as we watched what could only be described as some twisted ritual sacrifice. Humanoid Tendrils of each of the Attunements stood around a raised platform. Spell chains were visible around all of them as mana flowed through them into the air. The rainbow of light that I'd seen in the Blessing of Magic around Tec was mimicked on a smaller scale. The central feature of the energy was another of those corrupted crystals held in a familiar scale-patched face

As if passing through the opposite of a filter, the energy darkened. Vibrant red turned to a muddy maroon. Clear brown dimmed into a sludge grey. Shimmering gold tarnished into brass. A refreshing blue tainted with slicks of the other colors. The grey of air turning molted, flickering between the once-midnight black turned matte. The six Attunement manas and Dreg versions. I wasn't sure where the connection was forming, but the knowledge flitted through my mind before I suppressed it. There were more horrifying things than the tainting of the mana.

Gathered on the platform, laid out like lambs to the slaughter and hogtied to posts were the trainees. Not all of them, just a group of ten, but enough to set my blood boiling. No one tied people up to posts without something nefarious as the goal.

"Clara, please tell me you've been able to contact the other teams," I said. My eyes jumped from the ritual to take in the various beasts, an assortment of slimes and almost a dozen humanoids standing around watching the ritual with rapt attention. It only added to the unnerving scene to see hounds, deer, racoons, ants and spiders perfectly still.

"Dai got back to me, but he's still probably fifteen minutes out. The other groups are heading this way, but they are even further away," she replied, whispering quietly for the benefit of the others in the group without Implants.

"Then we need to sit tight. There's no way we can take on that many Tendrils," I said through gritted teeth. The mental math of the engagement was not coming up positive. Even the element of surprise would not be enough.

"We need to keep an eye out for that other roving patrol," Devon added, clearing the grass at his feet and drawing a rough map of the area. He used a stick to sketch where we were relative to everything. "I don't hear anything behind us, so it's possible they took this route."

The elf worked to outline and mark the locations of everything he saw, the sketch quickly filling with information. The two other teammates added their own quick suggestions, but the hushed tones fell on deaf ears. Specifically my deaf ears as a single word filled with emotion cracked through my Perception.

"Billy..."

I spun. Eric had a nearby tree in a stranglehold. His fingers like claws shredded the bark with his Q3 Strength all while ripping the nails from their place. The man's face was marred with tears and his muscles twitched as he used everything he had not to rush out. Not to rescue his child. I couldn't make out all the details of the children from here, especially with all the distortions from the mana in the air, but that didn't seem to stop Eric.

"Eric, we will get them. We just need to be patient or we'll lose them all," I said, crouching next to the man and placing my palm on his shoulder. He's not listening... My words didn't so much as stir the man and I could feel his coiled muscles even with the gentle touch of my hand. "Eric," I repeated, gripping his shoulder tighter.

Just as it seemed I was going to be able to pull the man from his singular focus, thunder clapped and lightning cracked across the sky. The magic gathering over the platform ballooned as the Tendrils around the platform staggered to their knees. Threads of mana unspooled from the crystal. Like snakes seeking out prey, they drifted along the air. Some prodded at the Tendrils on the ground, bypassing them, before one brushed against one trainee. The boy's throat ripped with a scream as the thread coiled around his leg. Soon enough other threads surged from the crystal in the trainee's direction. They wrapped around his arms, torso, up along his throat until his head was covered and the screams disappeared.

Now all the trainees were screaming.

A kicked-hornet's nest of magical threads snapped onto most of the trainees. Some had slumped in their posts, the strange magical formation ignoring them for the moment. Then my arm bucked.

"BILLY!" Eric's war cry stirred through us as the man unloaded with his rifle. The clap of bullets beat a staccato against the thunder in the sky. Even enraged as he was, the man's attacks hit their mark. Most if not all the Tendrils responsible for the ritual took bullets to center mass. Kirby at the head of the platform seemed to recover only for two bullets to tear a hole where his lung was. The councilman fell out of sight, covered by the platform.

"Charge! Secure the trainees!" I called out as I rushed after Eric.

A zipping green blur shot beside me before splitting three ways. One such blur tangled up Eric just in time to drop him and save his life. A trio of ice shards cleared the space between the line of humanoid Tendrils and the desperate father.

Seeing that a straight run would get us cut down at range, I surged a spell chain right in front of the struggling Eric. An empowered wedge rose out of the ground, grass and vines clinging to the top. A moment later I was at the man's side, deflecting a fireball that tried to arc over my wall. I let a trickle of mana flow into my pickaxe, shaping my usual umbrella shield while I waited for the others to charge forward.

A black fog covered the space between my wall and the stage. Taking the small opening that Clara gave me, I peeked around the corner. There was a slew of information scrolling by my eyes, details about the Attunements, Refinements and Quotients of the creatures and humanoids around me but I pushed past that. The time for scouting was over. The Dreg ritual was still ongoing, threads wrapping tighter around the trainees, even as the beasts and Tendrils formed up to the left of the stage. My mind drew a chilling connection between the whole process and the plant Infusion experiments back at the Bunker. Nonetheless, it wasn't the time for correlations.

Not bothering to spot where the others were I sent Daniela a message. "Bombard that crystal above the kids!"

With that, I sent two into the midst of the Tendrils. My first hunk of quartz missed, but the fragmentation got most of the backline. The second hit a fire attuned in the chest, shredding its face and chest into fiery spaghetti. This scattered the lines long enough for three concentrated spurts of Daniela's to shoot over my head. Flames washed over the trainees, but her aim was unerring.

The twisted balance that had been maintained between the Dreg energies shattered. Crimson and vivid red surged through all of the threads. Where the red touched, dreg disintegrated into particles of light. The crimson on the other hand caused a massive boom that flattened the trainees to the ground, several snapping from their posts completely to fall on the ground. An echoing cry shook the clearing before fading into the quiet whining of my injured ears.

By the time my hearing returned, the others had made it to the defensive wall. It was a tight fit, so I sacrificed another twenty percent of my mana to expand our defensive wall. I left a gap between both of the sections, hopefully to funnel any enemies or divert a charge.

"Let me go, Ronan!" Eric screamed, pointing his gun in my direction. I smacked it back into his face, breaking his nose and snapping him out of it.

"Get it together Eric! We need you to give us covering fire!" The pain of the injury finally snapped the man from his nonsense, but his determination was not diminished. When I spun, Clara was already meeting my eyes.

"Devon, Garen. You two are on retrieval duty," she said, snapping off commands. The two elves nodded. Before Devon could get too far, I unstrapped my shield and passed it over. He didn't question it, only responding with a nod.

"Daniela, get that wisp up there. Sammy, hit them with your buff and build up our cover if you--" a boulder the size of my head clipped the top of our wall before deflecting into the air. "Crap!"

A sneaked peek of our enemies showed that a trio of Earth Attuned humanoids had jumped to the fore. A berm of earth had risen between our two groups even as fire flickered on the baked soil. Another catapulted rock sought out the gap between our walls and I ducked my head just in time.

"Clara, can you them?" The clap of gunfire told me that Eric was in the mix. Wind rustled through my overgrown hair as the retrieval pair vanished towards the trainees.

"I can do you one better." The stinger staff spun in her hand as she boldly stood. Her eyes burned with purple light, but flickering strings of red snapped at the air. ""

A boulder cracked against my defenses, spraying her with flakes but her gaze didn't falter. I could hear yipping and whimpering as the beasts I'd missed trying to flank us ran for cover.

"" Samuel called out before brambles encased my wall. The growing plants didn't crack the wall like I would have expected, instead they seemed to add a layer of verdant armor to it. The spell chain around my blonde friend continued to expand as the growth took root in the unmanipulated earth and shot up nearly six feet. Sam staggered, but Clara's other teammate caught him.

"He's overused his Gift!" she announced.

"Give him a minute, he'll pull it together." I said, moving to the part of the wall where the creatures were flanking. A pair of grey blurs appeared and dropped off an unconscious body. The first trainee. "Nine to go!"

"Reloading!" Eric called out. The slide of metal as he exchanged magazines was practiced and smooth. In that brief gap I pulled Clara down to behind cover.

Even with her darker skin I could tell she'd gotten close to overdrawing her mana. She was as green as the bushes around us. "Focus on getting us some back up! Get Dai to flank them. I think they are digging in and so should we. I've only got so much mana and I bet they have their own limits after that little ritualistic nonsense."

The rat-tat-tat of gunfire started up again and I risked another ten percent mana to lob a at the enemy line. No creatures were moving in the haze of attacks that had formed between us and the Tendrils. Eric's shots petered out as soon as Devon and the other elf returned. There were now four trainees laid out behind us, guarded by an alert Anthony who was chewing on a blindingly white rat. Daniela was leaning against his carapace taking deep breaths and releasing steaming clouds with each from her mouth and fire gills.

Devon had a number of cuts along his body, and steam was rising from my shield. The impact of some kind of ice projectile was obvious. Garren helped him back and put pressure on one of the larger cuts. The fae that had been looking over Samuel rushed over and channeled green magic into Devon's wounds, halting the bleeding. "They rounded up the others!" Garren said between gulped breaths.

"YOU IMBECILE, INFANTIL MEDDLING CHILDREN!" a voice boomed through the space around us. It was warped, hollow and guttural, but all of us consciously recognized it. Kirby.

"I don't find those things offensive coming from a kidnapping madman!" I called out from behind cover. A few short gestures from Clara and the recovering Devon and Garren were already scanning the surroundings. Even as their breaths became more ragged they scanned the forest and shook their heads in the negative.

"This is beyond your comprehension, Bunkerborn," he spat. "The business of Wildwood is nothing to you. You should go back to the hole you crawled out of."

"See, I think that's where you are wrong. Everything going on right now is sort of my business. You are the one that's been lobbing rocks at me!" Clara met my eyes, the question clear in them. What in the hell are you doing? "Stalling," I said through the comm-plant.

"This is much bigger than this town, child. The world is doomed and only the strong survive. I am the strong. The Wild Guard plays at my whim. How else do you think they would have gotten as far? They are but lambs in a slaughterhouse, all I can do is lead them back out into fields of green pastures!"

"That metaphor doesn't even make sense..." I shook my head and tried to come up with something else to say to stall further. Fortunately, it seemed the councilman was one to monologue when he got on his massive high horse.

"When I bring the trainees to them, they'll take us back. The whole of Wildwood will be safe and it will be because of my efforts; not some economic policy Irwin came up with or some fancy speech Dylan used to 'rally the troops' or 'boost morale'. Survival on the surface is all about power. And I gave us that!"

Stifled cries from the other side told me that the other trainees were not having a good time. Eric's grip on his gun was white, but he kept himself from rushing out there. The wild look in his eye told me to do something fast or he was going to do something.

"Five minutes out. Group after that is seven minutes out!" Clara told me through the comm-plant.

My mana had only regenerated to about half way, but I could see that my friends and the elf duo were already doing much better. With a deep breath I jumped up and stood in the gap between my walls.

"I didn't take you for such an egotistical maniac, Kirby! You can't possibly think what you are doing to those kids is a good thing. For god's sake look at the other Tendrils around you. They aren't really human!" I wasn't sure if that last line was more for me than for him, but I pushed forward regardless. "Your power is borrowed. You are just a scared old man playing with the lives of others."

The scale-patched councilman climbed over the berms with ease, staring me down through our no-man's-land. "You don't even know what you fight. How could you possibly have the right to judge my decisions?"

My eyes drifted to the convulsing trainees on the platform. Two hounds and a Life Tendril hovered over them. "That's not living," I said with as much contempt as I could while pointing at the trainees. "Something has gone very wrong if that's the extent you'll go. Why didn't you do that to yourself, Kirby? Why aren't you leading by example?"

"Minute out!" Clara told me.

My words looked like a physical blow to the Councilman, but his expression hardened. The rising red of his human skin paled instantly and his voice deepened again. "I don't have to explain myself to you. You are just a snot-nosed child with delusions of grandeur and power."

"Holding!" Dai's voice reached me directly through the comm-plant.

"As soon as shit hits the fan you nab Kirby!" I told Dai, keeping a straight face I focused on the comm connection to Devon and Clara. "You guys get to the other trainees. Take Anthony with you!"

"Did you run out of garbage to run your mouth, Ronan? I really expected better!" Kirby called out. I could see the man gesturing to the other Tendrils now that his monologue was over.

"I'm not interested in wasting my time, Kirby. You can let the kids go or you can rot in a hole somewhere," I spat out. My mana started to gather as the anticipation for the fight climbed once again.

"Your deaths will be a shame. You could have been strong Tendrils indeed. Maybe even retained some of your egos. No matter. Your meager squad cannot stop me. I would have thought people as pampered as Bunker-born would have taken the time to learn arithmetics."

"Maybe not, but we sure as hell are going to try!" I released the mana monstrosity I'd been holding. My voice flowed through all the comm-plants within range. "Go!"