"I’m hungry!"
Elena broke the quiet, her voice weak and strained. She ca to a halt in the centre of the area, as she pressed a hand firmly against her stomach. Her expression was one of genuine distress, her brow furrowed with a body pushed to its limit.
"ntioning this..." Ricky paused, wiping a sar of black blood from his forehead. He turned to face the group, his tone shifting into the authoritative rasp he had adopted as their de facto second-in-command.
Since John’s departure, the hierarchy had settled naturally; Luke lacked the ambition to lead, Cissel loathed the administrative headache of it, and Elena was content to follow.
"We don’t have food or water," Ricky continued, his eyes scanning their weary faces. "We aren’t machines, guys. We can’t keep doing this forever, even with our gear and our attributes partially restored. Our bodies are still human, and they’re starting to scream for fuel."
The weight of his words hung heavy in the air. They had been so focused on the gain of the cores that they had forgotten the basic biological debt they were accruing to their bodies over the hours.
"What do you suggest then?" Cissel asked, her eyes darting toward the piles of monster remains at the edge of the area. A dark, mischievous glint flickered in her gaze. "Shall we try to eat them?"
Luke’s gaze followed hers, landing on the faceless, grey, skinless husks of the Fog Seekers. He rembered the viscous, ink-black blood that sprayed from their wounds and the weird stench of their insides during dissection. The re thought of it made his stomach do a violent sorsault.
"No... No way," Luke stamred, his face turning a shade of pale that matched the monsters. "I am not putting that thing in my mouth!"
"Oh, co on," Ricky teased, noticing the tremor in Luke’s voice and deciding a little levity might break the tension. "We’ve been eating their magical cores for hours now! What’s the difference? It’s settled then—we’ll test the first monster steak on you, Luke."
"Stay away from !" Luke snapped, taking the joke far more seriously than he should have. He hoisted his club, his knuckles white as he levelled it at Ricky’s, retreating toward the edge of the area without breaking his defensive stance.
The sight of Luke cowering at the thought of a monster-at dinner drew a round of exhausted laughter from the group. The sound was a rare commodity in this cursed place, and it allowed Luke to finally relax his guard, realising he’d been the butt of a silly joke.
"Still, the problem remains," Cissel said, her voice dropping back into a serious tone as the laughter died away. "We need food and water. Does anyone have an actual suggestion that doesn’t involve eating toxic sludge?"
With the Fog Seekers firmly off the nu, the team fell into a stony silence. They stood motionless, four figures of iron and grit trapped in a black nightmare, thinking hard about their bodies’ needs dilemma.
After several minutes of quiet, Luke suddenly knelt. He reached down and grabbed a handful of the dirt beneath his boots, holding it up to the light of their expanded area. He watched with a strange focus as the dark particles slipped through his fingers, dancing like heavy dust.
"What are you doing?" Elena asked, giving him a bewildered look. She stepped closer, her concern for him outweighing her own hunger for a mont.
"This ground..." Luke murmured, his voice carrying a sudden, sharp clarity that made the others stop. He looked up at them, his eyes bright. "It’s fertile land."
For a second, the team looked at him as if he had finally lost his mind to the hallucinations of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. But as his words sank in, they shifted their focus from him to the dirt beneath their feet.
They had been fighting over this patch of ground for hours, treating it as nothing more than a stage for their survival. They hadn’t cared to look at it, to feel it, or to understand it. But now, under Luke’s guidance, they realised the truth.
This wasn’t barren rocks, or desert sand, or so artificial tallic ground. It was rich, loamy, and dark—the exact kind of fertile land one would find in the most prosperous reaches of Athanasia.
"That ans..." Cissel’s eyes shone with a sudden brightness. The realisation hit them all at once.
If the soil was this rich, then this wasn’t just a battlefield—it was part of thriving, fertile land. And where there was fertile land, there had to be life that wasn’t made of black fog, malice, monsters, and death.
They couldn’t stomach the thought of eating the skinless, black-blooded flesh of the monsters, but trees, shrubs, and leaves were a different story. If they were lucky, the canopy might even hide wild fruits or sturdy vegetables capable of sustaining them for quite so ti.
"It’s not just about trees and plants," Luke said, rubbing the excess gri from his palms as he slowly rose to his feet. His voice carried a rare weight of authority. "To keep a piece of land this fertile, you need a stable and secure source of water running nearby. It’s the only way the soil stays this moist and fertile. So..."
"We’ll solve our food and water problems at the sa ti!" Ricky’s eyes flashed with a sudden hope. He turned toward Luke, looking at him as if the latter had suddenly transford into an expert farr. "Can you tell which direction is the most fertile? Which way leads to the water?"
"Well..." Luke stamred, feeling the sudden, heavy pressure of their collective gaze. He wasn’t a farr or a geologist, but the anticipation in their eyes—especially the way Elena was looking at him, as if he held the keys to their survival—forced his hand. He swallowed hard and nodded. "Let see. I might find a clue that can help us if I look closely enough."
What followed was a tense, silent observation. The group watched as Luke moved ticulously around their territory. He would stop every few ters, leaning down to scoop up a handful of dirt, sniffing it, feeling the texture between his thumb and forefinger, and then moving on.
His search was interrupted by the inevitable. Another wave of Fog Seekers roared as they breached the periter, but this ti, the team’s motivation was different. Ricky roared at the others, commanding them to form a protective circle around Luke.
"Protect him! Don’t let them interrupt his search!" Ricky shouted, his blade carving through a monster’s neck. "Luke, keep looking! Find the direction!"
After the skirmish was over and the cores were harvested, Luke returned to his task. He felt the weight of Elena’s presence beside him; she didn’t say a word, but her sparkling, rounded eyes followed his every move, full of silent encouragent. Cissel approached Ricky, leaning in to whisper so as not to disturb the "expert" at work.
"What do you have in mind?" she asked, her eyes darting toward the black fog.
"We’ll find a direction," Ricky whispered back, his gaze fixed on Luke’s silhouette. "And once he points the way, we’ll use every single core we have to carve a path directly into that fog."
The logic was sound. Cissel nodded slowly, her mind already calculating the cost. "I have about one hundred cores that I’ve saved on the side for an ergency. How about you?"
"I have seventy," Ricky replied. He gave her a sharp, sidelong glance, wondering if she had been skimming more than her fair share of the loot, but he decided to let it slide. In the end, their goals were aligned. Every core spent on the path was a core spent on their collective survival.
"Found it!"
The sudden shout rang through the area, triumphant and clear. Luke stood up, his hand covered in dark, clumpy mud, raising it high like a trophy.
"How can you tell?" Elena was the first to ask, her face lit with amazent. Ricky and Cissel ran over, crowding around the mud-caked Luke.
Luke took a mont to savour the attention, standing a little taller as he enjoyed his role as the man of the hour. "See this?" he pointed to the consistency of the dirt in his palm.
"This dirt is soaked with more moisture than anywhere else I’ve checked. It’s not just damp; it’s saturated. This is the right direction. There’s a water source out there, and it’s close..."
*Roar!*
The black fog, as if offended by their hope, erupted in a series of guttural roars. Another wave was coming, larger and louder than the last.
"Let’s kill this wave first!" Ricky shouted, drawing his sword with renewed vigour. "Then we use every core we have to carve the path to water!"
They fell upon the Fog Seekers with a ferocity that bordered on desperation. Once the field was clear, they began the work. Cissel suggested a wide path—five cores broad—to ensure they had enough room to fight should they be ambushed while looking. They moved in the direction Luke had pointed, the cores eating into the blackness of the fog like acid.
However, the fog was deeper than they anticipated. Before they had covered even half the distance they hoped for, their combined stockpile of cores was exhausted. The path simply stopped, ending in the sa impenetrable black wall.
"Tsk! We need more cores," Cissel said, rolling her eyes in frustration as she looked at the dark wall ahead. "Let’s go back to the main area. We need to hunt enough to finish this search."
For the first ti since the nightmare began, they actually hoped for John to take his ti. If he took another few hours to clear those devices, they could harvest more cores and eventually find water and green.
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