“You’re Elijah Hart,” said a man of middling height. His shoulders bore a couple of chevrons, which Elijah interpreted as being a sign of his rank within Seattle’s military. He didn’t know what rank they indicated, but he was clearly the group’s leader, as evidenced by the fact that he’d stepped forward.

The others didn’t seem certain what they were supposed to do. A couple pointed their rifles at him, their fingers inching closer to their triggers with every passing second. The rest wavered, clearly unsure if he was a friend or an enemy. The fact that he’d saved them seemed to indicate the former, but his previous antagonism toward Seattle suggested the latter.

“I am,” Elijah said, dismissing his scythe. A few of the soldiers flinched. “Is anyone else injured?”

“You here to heal?” asked the leader.

Elijah nodded. “Or I could just be on my way,” he suggested. “Maybe you can all fend for yourselves.”

The head soldier hiked his thumb at the man who’d been impaled. “That was our second Healer,” he admitted. “The first never made it through the Underpass. Some sort of octopus creature.”

“I’ve seen them,” Elijah said, though he didn’t mention that the ones he’d encountered hadn’t dared to attack him. Whether because of his attunement or his power, they’d left him alone. Clearly, the soldiers didn’t have that advantage. “Explorers?”

He shook his head. “None were high enough level,” he stated. “I argued against it, but the brass insisted we didn’t have time to wait.”

That wasn’t surprising. It was easy to make those sorts of decisions when it wasn’t you who had to deal with the consequences. Choosing to send a group to look for a Primal Realm without any Explorers was the height of idiocy. But Elijah expected that the decision had been made because Explorers were notoriously slow to level. In a lot of ways, their pace was even more glacial than non-combatants like Scholars and Tradesmen, largely because they got the bulk of their experience from visiting new places.

And that was incredibly dangerous, even if someone had the right abilities.

Many an Explorer had been slain because he walked into a situation for which he just wasn’t prepared. It took a special sort of person to successfully follow that path, and just like most special people, they were incredibly rare.

The highest level Explorer Elijah had found was Helen, and even she lagged significantly behind her husband Lamar. And they’d been fighting together since the very beginning.

So, even if the decision was stupid, it was understandable given the time constraints imposed by the threat of excisement. Besides, they obviously knew where they were going, even if getting there was exceedingly difficult. Isaiah’s drones had seen to that much, at least.

“No offense, but it looks like you might be in over your –”

Just then, the corpse of the impaled Healer exploded, sending a shower of gore to spray across the desert sands. Elijah was moving before anyone else, and when he reached the site of the explosion, he saw something truly horrifying.

Larvae.

Hundreds of them, each a little bigger than a man’s thumb, all wriggling into the sand. Elijah plucked one from the ground only a second before it burrowed too deep. Of course, it bit him, injecting him with a low-level paralytic that set his hand to tingling. The ongoing heal that came from Blessing of the Grove took care of that.

The larva danced between his fingers, its tiny jaws working back and forth as it bit air. “What the…”

A scream snatched Elijah’s attention from the creature, and he whipped around to see a hundred larva crawling all over one of the soldiers. And she clearly didn’t possess Elijah’s constitution, because when the things started biting, she immediately went limp. Even as she collapsed, the creatures burrowed through her fatigues and, presumably, into her flesh.

Elijah raced toward her, already extending his Mantle of Authority. The boughs of his soul shot out, enveloping the area and cleansing it of contaminants. The larvae counted, though even in the short time it took Elijah to react, a few had already gone through a metamorphosis. They burst from the unfortunate soldier’s chest as fully formed wasps.

They were only as big as Elijah’s hand, so a long way from the others he’d just killed. But even that was horrifying, considering how quickly they’d developed.

One managed to zip out of range before Elijah closed, but the other couple fell to the ground, their bodies incapable of standing against his dense ethera. The lead soldier took aim with his sidearm and destroyed one, while Elijah slammed his foot down on another.

And then, only silence remained.

“What the fuck was that?” one of the soldiers breathed, her voice cracking with fear. “What the fucking hell was that?!”

“Get ahold of yourself, Jones!” the leader barked. “Might not be over.”

Elijah knelt beside the now-dead soldier. The wasps had drained her of all fluids, so her body now appeared like the mummies he’d seen only a couple of days before.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on NovelBin. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He looked up. “I don’t sense any others around,” he said, his eyes flicking from one soldier to the next. The fact that they could endure his Mantle of Authority without passing out was impressive, though all but the leader trembled with the effort. “Get closer. I’ll make sure no one else is affected. The rain is a healing spell.”

They didn’t need much more of an invitation. When compared to chest-bursting wasps, Elijah’s reputation wasn’t so scary. Especially since he’d shown himself to be an ally.

For the next few minutes, Elijah took care of any injuries the group had taken. He offered them food and water, but in that respect, at least they’d come prepared.

Elijah flicked his eyes toward the trio of dune buggies they’d parked at the nadir between sand dunes. That was where they’d made camp, though the battle had taken them almost a hundred yards away.

Nodding at them, he said to one of the soldiers, “Those look fun.”

“Pain in the ass is what they are. Do you know how hard it is to charge something like that out here? We have to use the ethera converter every night. We cycle it every night, but whoever takes that duty ends up feeling like shit for the next day,” he said, pushing his wet hair out of his face. “I’d almost rather go on foot.” He glanced around. “Not quite, though.”

“Fair enough,” Elijah answered, though his inner teenager couldn’t help but want to hop into one and give it a try. “You feeling okay?”

The soldier nodded. “Right as rain.” Then, he looked up at the falling precipitation and let out a small chuckle. “Rain.”

After that, Elijah checked the man for a concussion, but he found that he was perfectly healthy. So were all the others, though with night having fallen, it was clear that they weren’t going to move on anytime soon. While Elijah had no issues traveling in the dark, he was something of a special case.

Still, he chose to stick around, if only for the company.

As it turned out, the soldiers weren’t bad people – not like the faceless, rifle-wielding enemies he’d conjured in his mind. Most of them were around level one-thirty, but the captain was closer to one-fifty. He was also a Tactician, so the entire squad benefited from his presence. With him around, they could far exceed their levels.

But they were no threat to Elijah.

The deployment of his tent brought with it quite a lot of attention. The soldiers all wanted to know where he’d gotten it, and he told them the truth. “Killed a gnomish golemancer and took it,” he explained, though he didn’t elaborate.

“You do that a lot?” asked the captain, whose named turned out to be Mike Weston.

“Kill people?” Elijah asked. Then, he shrugged. “More than I’d like. Less than I probably should. Just a couple of months ago, I let someone who’d tried to kill me walk away.”

“Why?”

Elijah shrugged. “To be honest, I’m not really sure,” he admitted. But he’d given it a lot of thought, and what he’d come to realize was that people trying to kill him didn’t really elicit that much anger. By contrast, if someone attacked his friends, family, or the grove, he would respond with great violence. “But in the golemancer’s case, she was bad news. Using some sort of weird blend of necromancy and sorcery. And she was attacking a herd of cattle for no other reason than for the levels. I wasn’t going to stand for that.”

“I see.”

Elijah knew Weston didn’t. Not really. But Elijah didn’t care enough about the man’s opinion to explain it further. So, he asked, “How long have you been in the desert?”

“We left Rubibi two months ago.”

“Damn.”

“The Underpass was not as safe as we were led to believe,” the man explained. “And the desert has been…inhospitable.”

Elijah nodded. “Have you seen any of the cities?” he asked.

Weston nodded, though he never stopped staring at the campfire someone had started. “Tragic,” he said. “Our running theory is that most of the Pacific islands ended up merging with Australia and New Zealand. Plus some extra territory. The lucky ones got put on the coast. The unlucky ones…well, you saw what happened to them, I guess.”

“Honolulu?”

“Drones found it a few days from here. If you keep going inland, you’ll probably see it. If you get to the Painted Wastes, you’ve already passed it.”

“Painted Wastes?”

“It’s supposed to get worse in a couple hundred miles,” Weston answered. “I’ve seen some photos. Believe me, the name fits.”

Elijah was silent for a few moments before he asked the real question on his mind. “Have you found any survivors?”

Weston didn’t answer, but he didn’t really have to. Every second of silence told Elijah the story he expected to hear. Finally, Weston said, “You don’t look Hawaiian.”

“I’m not.”

“But you have some connection to the islands.”

Elijah nodded, though he didn’t feel like explaining. In fact, he didn’t want to stick around for a moment longer. Not when he knew he was so close to finding an answer to a question he’d been too afraid to ask for almost a decade.

So, he pushed himself to his feet and said, “Be careful, captain. Those wasps aren’t the only dangerous creatures around here.”

Then, Elijah stepped away from the campfire and headed toward where he’d left his tent. After collapsing it and packing it away, he strode away from the camp. None of the sentries tried to stop him. Clearly, they knew it would do no good.

For the next couple of hours, Elijah walked through the dark. As he did so, he focused on Soul of the Wild, and he realized that the desert was even more alive than he’d come to believe. Not only were there plenty of wasp larvae deep underground, but there were also large worms that fed on those creatures. And in turn, there were other beasts like giant, trapdoor spiders, snakes, and lizards that fed on the worms.

On and on it went.

None of the animals were close to powerful enough to challenge him, but if the soldiers kept going, they would probably liken it to hell on Earth. Elijah didn’t want that for them, but he wasn’t in the business of babysitting people that were effectively his enemies.

After all, they were still loyal to Isaiah. Or at least the government he’d created. So, there was a very real possibility that Elijah might find himself facing off against someone like Weston sometime in the future.

He didn’t look forward to that.

Elijah continued on, climbing and descending the massive dunes until, at last, he caught sight of a familiar silhouette.

The First Hawaiian Center was the tallest building in Hawaii, and with its modern design, extremely recognizable. Especially when it glinted in the light of the rising sun.

Elijah stopped atop a particularly tall dune, and as dawn stretched into mid-morning, more familiar sights came into view. He recognized the volcanic tuff cone known as Diamond Head, the Aloha Tower, and the Hawaii State Capitol.

Seeing it all in person – even when he had expected it – came with a knot of feelings that all coalesced into intense anxiety. He hadn’t been born in Hawaii. In fact, he’d only lived there for a decade. But it had seen him through some of the most emotionally difficult times of his life. On top of that, it was where he’d become a true adult.

It was his home.

And at last, he’d returned.

So it was with no small degree of nervousness that he took a deep breath, then descended the dune as he headed back to Honolulu.