Chapter 13: Wreck It Shrike (Patreon)

“Good morning!”

Oliver’s voice reverberated through the house even though he hadn’t even made it down the stairs. He hit the ground with an enthusiastic thud having leapt the last few steps. When he landed it was with a deep breath and a stretch.

“Who missed…” the rest of the sentence died in his mouth. “What’s he doing?”

Ash was seated in the living room, occupying the couch Zed had slept on. She thumbed through a novel with a cover so faded the name was nonexistent, flipping on to the next page when she looked up at him.

“Getting married,” she said, sarcastic. “What does it look like he’s doing?”

“Looks like he’s cooking,” Oliver said. “Which is odd.”

He joined Ash on the couch, forcing her to retract her legs for space. His eyes never left Zed as he sat down. There was worry there, one part for Zed and the other for the kitchen.

Zed wrestled with a flat pan over a gas burner. He turned the handle of the pan one way, then the other, spreading the beaten egg into a caricature of a circle. In the other pot was a sauce of soft red, simmering under low heat.

Zed turned the egg down on low heat and let it fry. Turning to the onions on a chopping board, he picking up a knife with an unconscious flair. He split it in half, peeled off its outer layer to reveal a succulent purple. After that, dicing it came naturally, and in a matter of seconds it was minced.

He scooped up the chopping board, moved to the sauce, thought better of it, and poured the onions in the egg. His hand crossed over the pan to pick up a spoon and he ran the spoon through the pan, scrambling the egg so that it mixed with the now frying onions.

In the living room Ash’s eyes never left her novel, even as she asked Oliver, “What makes it odd?”

“Well,” Oliver said. “We were in the market yesterday, and I swear he kept looking at everything like he’d never seen them before. You remember Mr. Edward?”

“Simple Eddy?” Ash scoffed. “Never could sell anything.”

“I swear he couldn’t recognize half the things simple Eddy sold.”

It seemed that was enough to draw her attention because she finally raised her head from the book to look into the kitchen.

In front of their burner Zed moved like a maestro in his workshop. It was something worthy to behold.

Ash looked back at Oliver.

“But he looks so in control,” she said.

“That’s what worries me. He’s never that focused.”

Zed tossed a last sprinkle of salt in the sauce, gave it a final mix and turned off the flames for both dishes. When he was done, he stared at the meal. His back was turned to Ash and Oliver and worry filled his mind.

It was just as he had feared. The memories from last night had come with a knowledge of The Berserker’s cooking skills. Not only was the man versed in the art of killing, he was also versed in the art of cooking.

If he was able to recreate the man’s cooking skills, then there was a chance he could recreate the man’s killing skills.

He took a small tablespoon from a cup where the cutleries were kept and took a taste of the sauce. His silence remained as he took a miniscule piece of egg.

He chewed once, twice, then swallowed. Only then did he turn around to face the rest of the house.

“Oh, good morning, Oliver,” he greeted. “And when did you get here, Ash?”

Ash looked at her empty wrist and answered, “Let’s say twelve minutes and forty-seven seconds ago.”

Zed blanched at that. “Quite specific for someone without a wristwatch. Wait, is that a mage thing? Are we, like, really good at keeping track of time?”

“No, Zed,” Oliver said. “She’s just messing with you.”

“Ah,” Zed mused. “Definitely your sister, then. Anyway, I was wondering, how do you guys make money around here. I saw the notes you’ve been using and was wondering how I can get cash of my own.”

“Usually through monster runs,” Ash answered.

Zed cocked a brow. “Monster runs?”

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “Normally, when we’re free, we head out to other nearby towns just like this one but significantly smaller and see if they need any help with any monster problems.”

“Or we just go look for monsters,” Ash added.

“Or that,” Oliver agreed. “We mostly do that, then sell the cores.”

Zed pointed at Ash, realized he was still holding the spoon and dropped it. “Go looking for monsters. That sounds difficult. Yours sounds better, Oliver. So tell me about these small towns.”

“Well,” Oliver began, a worried look on his face. “There are a few small towns around us. Not necessarily as close as I’m making them sound, but close enough. It should take about an hour to get to the nearest one. They always have one monster problem or the other that needs dealing with so we help out.”

“Wait,” Zed stalled him. “Doesn’t everyone have magical powers. I mean, if people can do what, say, Jason can do, what do they need us for?”

Ash raised three fingers and ticked them off as she spoke.

“First, you’ve been around town so you should know not everyone has magic. You can’t awaken until you’re seventeen, most times eighteen.”

“So even magic adheres to the laws of legal age,” Zed tapped his lip. “Maybe the governments were on to something.”

“Second,” Ash continued, ticking off another finger. “It’s one thing to have magic, it’s another to be a mage, and another to be a hunter.”

“I get the hunter part, but I thought a mage is someone that can use magic?” Zed frowned and looked at Oliver. “Was I wrong?”

“Nope,” Oliver answered. “My sister just likes being philosophical sometimes.”

Ash slapped his arm and he laughed.

“The difference,” she explained, “is simple. Having magic is something everyone gets when the time comes. Being a mage is having the willingness and ability to build it, to grow your magic. But being a hunter, that’s entirely different. Remember Aaron, Ollie?”

“The kid you went to high school with? He was such a nerd.” Oliver shivered. “I heard he had a crush on you.”

“Not him,” Ash said. “Aaron, you know, he was here briefly a year or two back. He had the plant specialization.”

“Oh, that guy.” Oliver’s face scrunched up in disgust, “Yeah. Definitely an example of a mage that’s not a hunter.”

“And what did that guy do?” Zed asked.

“Get this,” Oliver adjusted so that the upper half of his body faced Zed. “He could quite literally make plants grow out of the ground. If he focused well enough, he could even create vines, maybe use them as tentacles.”

Zed cocked a brow. “Maybe?”

“We never saw him get that creative,” Ash explained. “The point I’m trying to make is that plants weren’t the only thing he was good at controlling even if plant specialists are formidable in grass lands and anywhere with domineering plant life, which was already a plus for him. He was also good at improvised spell forms.”

“Oh, yeah,” Zed interrupted. “I wanted to ask about that yesterday but it skipped my mind. What exactly are these spell forms, and what do you mean by improvised.”

“Well, like Greg was saying yesterday, using mana creates magic or spells,” Oliver said. “Most people call it spells though. So, to create a spell, a mage has to connect to mana. Once they do that, they can create spells through words. Those words are called spellforms and the magic they create are called spells. Improvised spellforms are when a mage somehow cuts down the number of words he has to say to cast the spells.”

“There’s a catch,” Zed said. “What’s the catch?”

“Well, the pros of an improvised spellform is faster casting. The con is the spells created from improvised spellforms tend to be significantly weaker when compared to the spell when cast with the complete spellform.”

“Are you good at improvised spellforms?”

Ash waved his question aside. “That’s a question for another day. So, as I was saying, Aaron was good. A really good mage. In fact, Festus wanted to start teaching him about runes, he thought he could even get better than him with them.”

“Did he?”

Ash shook her head. “No. We learned all this about Aaron when he got here. The magic and everything. Then he went for his hunter screening and flopped like a fish. Froze up in front of a mutated animal of all things. Almost cost the life of one of the trainees.”

“Anyone find out why?”

“Yea,” Oliver answered. “Turns out he just wasn’t good with confrontations. Apparently, the same thing happened during a monster attack in the group he was in before he found us. So we had to let him go.”

“We have nothing against people that can’t hunt,” Ash said. “But we can’t keep someone who keeps secrets.”

“Well then,” Zed dusted his hands and smoothened his shirt, “I guess it’s a good thing I don’t freeze up in front of ugly looking things.”

He proceeded to move around the kitchen. He dusted spilled powdered ingredients, cleaned simple stains, moved cutleries to where they belonged. He was gathering the used utensils into the sink when Oliver spoke.

“So what’s all this about getting some money?” Oliver asked. “You didn’t seem that bothered by it yesterday.”

Zed was suddenly very aware of the food he’d cooked and how much ingredients had gone into each dish.

“No real reason,” he said. “I just figured you guys have to be getting paid for hunting for the town, and since I’m not a hunter yet, I have to find a way to make my own money. I can’t just be mooching off you guys for an entire week.”

“Oh, okay,” Oliver said. “We’re actually going out later in the day for a monster run. Chris picked a request some time ago and we decided we’ll go check if no one’s dealt with it yet. You can come if you like.”

“Good,” Zed nodded, then stepped out of the kitchen. He packed his hair up in a mess of a bun and let the single braid Cindy had knotted fall down the side of his face. He really needed to get his hair cut, or at least get it groomed.

“Where are you going?” Ash asked when he got to the door leading out.

Zed paused. “Uhh, I promised one of the ladies that I’d help her move somethings today. I think I might already be late.” He opened the door and stepped outside, only to put his head back in. “Also, I realize I can be a handful at times, and while I can’t assure you I’ll change, I promise I’ll try and be better. Just wanted you to know I’m sorry and hope you can keep forgiving me each time I slip up.”

Ash stared at him dumbfounded but Oliver simply shrugged.

“It’s no problem,” he said. “I used to slip up all the time, too, and she always forgave me. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Zed nodded thoughtfully, then he was gone.

Beside Oliver, Ash closed her book and dropped it on the couch. “That was odd.”

“Yea,” Oliver agreed, “He completely forgot you didn’t answer his question about if we could use improvised spellforms.”

“No,” Ash said, “not that. He apologized.”

“Oh, that. People do that, usually after they’ve thought things through.”

“Yes,” she agreed, standing up. “But not Zed. I’ve known guys like him and they don’t apologize after just one day. They only do it after really messing up. And even then it’s not so easily.”

She walked into the kitchen dropping the subject and took out a clean plate. When she turned to the pot and pan, she paused.

“There’s sauce,” she said.

Oliver got up from the couch and joined her. “Yes.”

“And there’s egg.”

Oliver peered at the dishes over her shoulders. “Yes, there’s that, too.”

“But I don’t see anything to eat them with.”

“I’m sure there’s…” Oliver trailed off as he looked around. He pulled drawers out and spied in the kitchen sink. Ash was right. There was nothing. “Maybe he didn’t want to do all the work?”

Ash sighed. “Let’s just take the sauce and the eggs in a container and hope Chris cooked something this morning.”

She took a spoon and tasted the sauce as Oliver looked in the cabinets for containers to pack them in.

Ash froze.

Her face twisted and she frowned with all of it. With a breath designed for those being given the benefit of doubt, she spat into the kitchen sink and turned the tap on to wash the abomination down the drain.

“What’s wrong,” Oliver asked, paused with a container in hand.

Ash ignored him as she took a spoonful of eggs. She chewed once then twice. There was a crunch on the third bite and her face contorted in rage.

“ZED!!!!”

…………………………………………….

The team was walking down a wide stretch of a destroyed city. It was uneven underfoot with a touch of sand not enough to raise any dust no matter how much activity happened on it. Plant life grew out of cracks in the broken road they walked on where they shouldn’t be growing out of. Zed found walking on it, odd, or perhaps he just found walking odd.

When he’d woken up his feet had been bare, always touching the dirt and it had brought him a sense of assurance he’d not been aware of at the time. In Oliver’s house he’d tried on a shoe and it had just felt wrong. Walking around not being able to feel what he stood on made his feet squirm. Unfortunately, Chris and Jason had insisted that if he was to follow them on the monster run, shoes were a necessity.

They’d parked the truck about a mile back with the mana stone still intact and had proceeded on foot. At first he’d thought it was a waste of strength until the road had gone from a valley of cracked road flanked by high trees and grassland to an apocalyptic business district.

The roads were upturned and disheveled, as if an earthquake had gone through it with the support of a hurricane and a really angry deity. There were slabs of tarred roads as thick as three feet curved as high as ten. There were cars long since upturned and abandoned so that the paint was peeled and the metals rusted.

The buildings around them were literal skyscrapers, and while Zed knew of them, had seen them in memories he was still regaining, they were a wonder to behold. There was just something about standing in the presence of one of them. To look up and see a human construction that went up so high. They were like humans’ defiance. They’re singular threat to pierce the heavens and tickle the feet of God.

To be flanked by them on all sides was to be reminded of his insignificance. To know that greater men than him had thought up monuments these massive, had worked together to bring such outrageous thoughts into reality. The fact that they existed was awe inspiring.

Their current state, however, brought dread.

Their size was the only place they existed as similar to what he had in his memories. Their gargantuan nature and facsimile of omnipresence was the end of it. Their beauty was gone, nowhere to be seen. This new world, this world with magic and monsters, had stripped them of their very beauty. The thing that made them really great.

The buildings flanked them on both sides as they stepped over cracks and around upraised roads and abandoned cars. Where they had once had reflective glass polished to a gleam, they were cracked and shattered, stained green with moss. The once beautifully painted walls were now the left overs of a forgotten world. They were cracked and battered, pieces were missing from a few of them, leaving open caves in the side of the buildings. One of them still had what he assumed was what was left of a helicopter stuck in its side too high up to be sure.

From the cracks vines spread, climbing grasses growing and making their nest. The silence of the path was a lost echo of the bustling world in his memories.

“It hurts to look at,” he said, meaning every word of it.

“Is that why you’ve been looking around like a tourist since we got here?” Chris said blandly.

“I’m sure you’ve seen it countless times and you’re probably numb to it,” Zed said. “But it’s my first time. Can you be nice to me just this once and cut me some slack?”

“Nope. Cutting you some slack would’ve been leaving you behind and not dragging you out here to get killed.”

“You sound so certain I’m going to get killed,” he said.

“You’re a Beta, following Rukh’s to clear a den of monsters,” Chris said slowly as if talking to a child. “The only reason I didn’t completely fight this is because Jason’s here. He’s a good babysitter and I can trust him to keep you moderately alive. But if push comes to shove, I can’t say there’s much hope for you.”

Zed shrugged, conceding the point. If he was correct and the information he had was accurate, what he was doing was the equivalent of an untrained soldier going to war with someone who’d done a few tours.

He turned to Ash, the only other Beta mage here.

“Do you think that way, too?” he asked.

She gave him a scathing look before turning away and matching ahead.

Zed paused. “Are you still angry with me? I said I was sorry.” He turned to Oliver. “I said I was sorry.”

“Not really,” Oliver said.

“But I gave a whole speech and everything,” Zed protested. “You were there, weren’t you?”

“You mean the heartfelt manipulative speech before the fact?” Jason said. His head was moving from side to side, eye looking into buildings.

“Uhh, I wouldn’t call it manipulative,” Zed said.

“Well, I would,” Chris said. “I heard the whole thing.”

“You heard the whole thing?” Zed asked in disbelief. “You were still home at the time. There’s no way you could’ve heard the whole thing. Wait, is that a mage thing at Rukh rank?”

“What?” Chris asked, confused, then frowned. “No, of course not. What kind of stupid idea is that? Oliver told us.”

“Oh.” Zed thought about the idea of Oliver being the one to tattle for a moment then shook his head. “No, he didn’t. That sounds more like Ash than Oliver.”

Oliver was certainly talkative, but he wasn’t one to easily give out information that would prove detrimental to someone else. He felt too nice for that. Zed hadn’t known Oliver long but nice seemed to be the word the simple townsfolk would describe him with; nice and kind.

Chris eyed him defiantly before succumbing.

“Yea,” she said. “It was Ash. Doesn’t change the fact, though. Do you have any idea how many rune-dollars worth of ingredients you put into those pots?”

“One was a pan,” Zed mumbled.

“What was that?”

“I said it was a lot. And that’s one reason I want to start earning some money. I don’t want to be a burden.”

“What were you even going for?” Chris went on. “I mean, the sauce tasted like a cat died in it, which is saying a lot, cause how do you even make something that bad.”

“And the eggs still had shells in them,” Jason added absently, now spying a building thoughtfully.

“Wait,” Zed said. “You guys had some?”

“Yea,” Chris scowled, turning to cuff a very prepared Oliver behind the head and missing when he ducked out of her path, laughing. “The team mascot over here thought it was an amazing idea to pack some for us and bring over without telling us the poisonous contents.”

“In his defense,” Ash said, finally cracking a smile since they’d left the town, “we couldn’t suffer it alone. There is, after all, love in sharing.”

Chris shot her a glare. “I’d smack you if you weren’t a responsible part of this group.”

“Alright.” Jason stopped and the rest of the team stopped with him. “Enough of that. I Just spotted something in the building I think we should take care of.”

With the speed of a cloudburst everyone grew serious. It was quite impressive how they did it. One moment they were laughing and the next moment they were alert. Zed experienced the same phenomenon, but he couldn’t say it was the same. Where the others went from jovial to alert, he went from Jovial to mildly terrified.

He sidled up to Oliver and asked, “What exactly is he spotting?”

“No idea,” Oliver answered, then pointed. “But it’s up there.”

“You can’t spot it?”

“It’s not about seeing with your eyes,” Oliver explained. “You know that Aura sense I was talking about teaching you? The one you were supposed to learn the moment we got back yesterday but opted for sightseeing.”

“Yup.”

Oliver looked at him, saw he didn’t seem bothered by the insinuated scolding, and went on. “Well, aura sense allows you to sense creatures and people from far away.”

“And how does that work exactly?” Zed asked, looking around. Maybe he could see it if he couldn’t sense it. “Is it like echo location; you know, like bats and dolphins?

“Well…”

“It’s more like walking into a house and smelling the food someone’s cooking,” Ash interrupted Oliver. “The stronger the food, the stronger the smell. As for the person smelling it, the stronger rank the better the sense of smell.”

“So if Jason’s smelling it but not Oliver,” Zed tried, “then that must mean it’s not that strong?”

“No, it means it’s just that far away,” Ash said. “As for how strong it is? Considering it’s you we’re talking about I’d argue that anything is strong enough. So stay close.”

Her voice reduced with each word until there was nothing left of it. They followed Jason as he turned them off the road and towards a building. It was dilapidated like all the buildings around it, green with moss and cracked by growing plants, but it was not the same. Unlike the other buildings it had never been completed. It had the skeletal framework they suspected was beneath all the other buildings. The pillars were in place, balusters to hold the building upright now green from climbing grass. The floor demarcations were properly cemented out so that all the sections and floors were clearly separated though some were broken and cracked with gaping holes.

They turned onto the side walk, slightly raised pavements of concrete slabs, cracked and eroded from time and the aftermath of the second awakening. They walked across it and into what would’ve been the compound if the building had ever been finished in the first place.

The ground tilted and they walked its graveled sands downwards, out of the sun of the afternoon and into the shade of the building. The first floor was empty, spaced out and dark with no windows or space for sunlight.

“Must’ve been an underground parking lot,” Chris mused, as they walked.

Today she wore knee high boots with tight fitting black pants. The torn leather jacket she wore over a white vest that was more brown than white and her hair up in a ponytail gave her a pixie look. With her swinging bat with residue of bloodstains, she looked more down the line of a pixie more likely to kill a person than spray them with pixie dust.

“If she sprays anything it’s more likely to be coke,” Zed chuckled.

“I could go for a good bottle of coke right now,” Ash moaned.

Zed looked at her, then gestured around them, somehow encompassing the chaos both within the building and outside the building. “You’d think with all that’s happening, they’d have gone out of business,” he said. “At least I thought they had.”

“They kinda did for a while,” Jason said. They found a small room with a slab of the roof in front of it lying on the floor and there was a pause as they stepped over it.

The room was actually the pathway to a stair case and Jason continued as they went up.

“They were out of business for a year,” he said. “Then they came back after VHF established their control in California.”

“Oh, yes,” Zed interrupted, stepping over a broken step. “Is anyone going to tell me what VHF is?”

“Vested Humanity Federation,” Ash said.

Zed had a thoughtful pause before shaking his head. “Doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t have to,” she said. “All that matters is that within two months of revealing themselves, they effectively took over most of the continent.”

“Country,” Zed corrected.

“No.” Ash shook her head. “Continent.”

“That makes zero sense,” Zed said. “How do you take over most of an entire continent in just two months? Even if America didn’t put up a good enough fight, you’d think it should’ve sufficed to stall them before they could spread to most of the continent.”

The team’s ascent was slowing as he spoke, they’re faces taking on a slow change as they listened to him. Zed’s latest pocket memory had given him a lot of information gotten from The Berserker’s mind, governments, geographical locations, basic knowledge. He was not appreciative of the memory itself, but the residues that slithered from it—the basic information—was most appreciated. And he was more than happy to share it.

“Think about it,” he went on. “Obviously America wouldn’t have just rolled over when they started. They would’ve tried their best to retain autonomy, greatest country in the world and all that. Then, if they don’t have what it takes to win, you can best believe they’ll die trying. And if they actually fought in support of the VHF or whatever they are, then you can be sure America would’ve retained their name—they’re just too proud not to. So it would probably be the United American Federation or—if the VHF is too invested in their boring name—the Vested Human Federation of America. I mean, hasn’t anyone questioned this?”

Everyone had stopped now and they were staring at him. Whatever was on their minds, Ash was the first of them to speak.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

Zed hesitated.

“Iowa,” he said with a smile he hoped they believed.

“Alright,” she nodded. “And where do you think you are, now?”

“Iowa?”

“Wrong,” Chris said. “After the second awakening, the world was turned on its head. the first awakening gave us mana and some mages with a few earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis here and there, but the second one gave us,” she gestured around, “this.”

“Alright, but how does that make me wrong?”

“Before that,” Ash interrupted. “Don’t think we haven’t noticed you’ve been lying a lot. I’m even ready to bet you aren’t really from Iowa.”

“I haven’t lied to you guys, though,” Zed mumbled.

“Even if that’s true,” Ash continued. “You’ve been hiding a lot. You won’t tell us where you were coming from when you found us and you keep behaving as if you don’t know anything about the world you live in. In fact, the only reason you’re still with us is because we need all the mages we can find. So don’t think we don’t know what’s going on. Got it?”

Zed nodded sheepishly.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Jason said, and they resumed their ascent, “you can’t still be in Iowa because of the second awakening’s slip-space effect.”

Zed’s mind perked up at the mention of slip-space. He knew what it was but wasn’t sure how or which memory the information came from. For a moment he wondered if it was actually his, whatever little he still had.

Slip-space was a deadly phenomenon of the first awakening. Apparently, entire places had simply upped and disappeared during the first awakening. Buildings. Arenas. Even rivers. Places had simply disappeared along with their inhabitants. Then, after the awakening, some of them started coming back intact and undisturbed. The only downside, which was pretty much all that mattered, was that anything that had life when they had gone, came back dead.

“Didn’t slip space kill people?” he asked.

“Only the one from the first awakening,” Jason answered, signaling them to slow down with a gesture. They crouched down, proceeding slower up the stairs as he continued in a low whisper. “The slip-space of the second awakening was pretty much a storage event. Most of the people alive now were victims of the second slip space. Though a lot of people died before it happened. After, too.”

“Wait,” Zed interrupted him quietly. “You’re saying there’s a chance all of us are victims of slip-space?”

“There’s a chance everyone alive is a victim of slip-space,” Ash said. “For instance, Ollie and I were in school when ours happened. The town in front of our school just disappeared, then a few years later, we run into the woman we used to buy our shoes from and she claims we were the ones that disappeared. Our working theory is that everyone was taken into slip-space at some point and we just didn’t know.”

Zed opened his mouth to continue on the conversation but Jason cut him off.

“And our working theory can be put on hold for a while,” he said. “For now, we’ve got work to do.”

They were on a new floor, stepping out of the stair case and into the open. Like the underground parking lot, it was wide and spacious with interspaced balusters designed to keep the building held up. Unlike the underground parking lot, it had no walls, no protection on the sides. It made it more than easy to fall off the side of the building.

But that wasn’t what had Zed’s attention. No. His attention was held down by the beast panting and salivating at the center of the floor.

It looked like a mix between a panther, a snake, and a fish. It had the upper body of a panther with skin as dark as shadows under the brightest sun. Two front legs kept its head off the ground while the rest of it was a serpentine length that could’ve been mistaken for a snake’s because of how long it was and the scaled fins and what looked like spikes at the end of it.

The creature was as tall as Zed’s shoulder from the ground to its head and it stared at them with bloodshot eyes.

The team came to a stop as they faced off against the creature.

“What rank do you think it is?” Zed asked softly.

“Beta,” Oliver answered casually.

“So not really a threat for you guys,” Zed mused. “I say, the rest of you hang back while Ash and I take it. Y’know, flesh it out and see what it’s capable off. Then, if anything goes wrong, you guys can step in to… guys?”

No answer came and he turned to look around. He found himself alone with the creature. It stared at him and he swallowed.

“I think I came in with a few friends.” He stuttered, voice trembling as he calculated the distance between him and the beast. “Two females and one male. Do you happen to know where they went?”

One of its paws inched forward and it let out a low, spittle-blessed growl.

“Yeah.” Zed’s grip tightened on his tomahawk and he took in a calming breath that did nothing. “I thought you wouldn’t.”

Quest: [Wreck it Shrike]

You have found a monster in the early stages of establishing a territory for itself. Shrikes are known to be territorial and averse to sharing. You have traversed on its territory. Defeat it before it defeats you.

• Objective: Defeat the [Shrike] 0/1.
• Reward: Mana Beast core.

“What a surprise,” he spat, sarcastic.

He hefted his tomahawk and the monster attacked.