She was not in the slaughterhouse, the room where the ham radio, which she had certainly used to transmit the message, was found. Kave's report was just as short and stoic; regarding what he saw there, even the Wartopians who entered after him had a look in their eyes that displayed some level of shock.
With no more traces to follow, the group walked out with dazed eyes and grim faces. Adam took the lead, his puppet guarding the team from the front.
They headed back to the trucks they had found, and just as Adam disabled his puppeteering ability, reverting the four-legged puppet to its original fist-sized state, the two survivor students came out to greet the group with a third person, whom they held by the hem of his shirt.
"Let go of me. Stupid fuck!" He shouted, trying to free himself from the one holding him.
"We found a rat." The student said as he presented Tommy Dorset—Megan's younger brother—to the group.
"What the…" Adam frowned the moment he saw Tommy and quickened his steps to catch him by the shoulder, "What are you doing here?"
"She's my sister. She…" Tommy was about to throw a teenage tantrum, but the moment he saw Megan's jacket on Adam's left side, his entire being froze, tears forming in his eyes.
"Shit!" Adam immediately released his grip and passed Tommy to whoever was behind him, before addressing Tommy, "Hey, hey! She wasn't in there. She must have discarded her jacket to crawl away through a vent or something."
"…"
Tommy looked at Adam with eyes wide with shock, trying to awaken from the daze he felt, but the news still took its toll on him.
"She's not…" he said, swallowing his words, most of which remained unspoken.
"She's not in there, I swear it," Adam said, still with a regretful tone. "We didn't find her, which is good news, but we have no more traces of her. She must have snuck out when the fighting started, long before the Gobzkin even arrived."
"Alright… okay…" Tommy spoke, looking around like a lost kid before asking, "What do we do?"
"You need to calm down. We'll think of something," Adam comforted him before turning to Biscuits, "Private Biscuits will escort you, alright? Just until we think of something."
Finding that Tommy had followed along by hiding in one of the cars was surprising; realizing that he had been hiding in a small box the whole time was a whole different matter. The kid was desperate to find his sister, for sure, but now the team had an extra burden to take care of.
Meanwhile, the group gathered for a strategic meeting.
"Honestly, there is no point in being out here more than that." Ivan said abruptly, "We've got no clue where Megan is, and we can't track her without something at least."
"You do remember that the deal between our camps involved finding her." Adam frowned, not liking what was said.
"Look, I get it, I am upset too. She was one of the people who really did a lot of good. But even if no one wants to say it, she's most likely in Gobzkin's hands."
Ivan's reply came as no shocking news, but it was the last thing Adam wanted to hear.
The Gobzkin slaughter and consume humans, primarily men. Women, however, vanish completely within the bowels of Gobzkin fortresses. The prevailing theory suggests they either get sacrificed to some evil Gobzkin God or get devoured by the female Gobzkin, who neither hunt nor fight. This theory, however, is merely laced with wishful thinking and willful ignorance, as no one really knows the fate of such women.
"We can still try and track her, though." Aside from Ivan, Sharp stepped ahead and offered a solution, "The most direct way is to find the nearest Gobzkin gathering, hunt them down, and continue to the next one, until she is found."
"It is all nice and good, but we'll run into more problems than we could bear. There is clearly more than a single Gobzkin band here last night, and we need to find out which one exactly, if we are not to risk our lives running around aimlessly."
The decision was ultimately left in Adam's hands, so he decided to take a break until he could figure something out.
The group was all stationed inside an alleyway, where the vehicles were parked, and most of them were sitting outside for fresh air. Kave, on the other hand, chose to seclude himself in the van, making Adam worry about his last friend in the world.
He climbed into the van, sat opposite Kave, who was lying down but hardly sleeping, and they kept staring at each other blankly.
"What?" Kave asked, pushing himself up with a hostile attitude.
"Wanna talk about what happened?" Adam asked, offering his friend a venting space.
"It's a fucked-up world, is what happened," Kave replied, his body seething with anger, rubbing his hand violently, his expression twitching.
"I know." Adam replied and shrugged casually, "Sorry about getting you out of the shelter."
Kave's eyes met Adam's, and he wanted to cuss at him, but found enough sanity to hold it in.
"I just got one level in the Sanity skill." He said.
"Heh! I can only imagine," Adam replied, averting his face.
"How many levels do you have in Sanity?" Kave asked.
Adam simply raised two fingers.
"Fuck!" Kave replied, "You've seen shit too."
"Yeah," Adam nodded, staring blankly at nothingness.
A moment of silence hung between the two, each of them taking the moment to recount the horrors he had seen, and finally, Kave spoke:
"These are not monsters, man. Monsters are senseless. They don't behave like senseless monsters," Kave said, with eyes wide with madness. "They… they're fucking eating us, man. Not like some lion eating a fucking deer in the fucking jungle. No, not what I saw. They… they're like… butchering, skinning, gutting. We've been to a slaughterhouse once, remember? The pigs held up by spikes, each cut in half, guts open and spilled, skin peeled on the side, turned into cold slabs, ready to be chopped, their heads put on tables to be made into food for dogs."
Kave recounted everything he saw that day; Adam had been there. They were supposed to buy a whole slaughtered pig for Mrs. Tanaka's family, that was coming for a visit from Japan. Kave finished his recounting, then described what he saw in that room.
"It was exactly that. Only, we were the pigs, our guts on the ground, our heads on the table, our skin stretched on the walls, our bodies cut open, split in half, and hung on display from hooks like some sort of…"
Adam kept looking and listening, not staring, not making a peep, and only looked down when Kave ran out of words.
"These are not monsters. I know," Adam replied, remembering the things he saw. "These are invaders. Ones that don't see us in any light other than as food, hosts, or God knows what else."
"Yeah. They are not monsters. They are fucking Aliens. Filthy Xenos," Kave said.
Adam nodded, and for the first time, the madness in his eyes matched Kave's, if not greater.
"Adam," Kave put his hand on Adam's knee, leaned forward, and addressed him. "I don't know who gave us runes, powers, or the System, but it is Fate. I see it. You can bring the Solarium, the Scriporium, the Bellarium, and the Inquisitorium—everything—to Earth. They are the best at purging Xenos."
"You're right," Adam nodded, feeling rage swelling up within him. "And when we do, we'll find out which world these bastards came from…"
"And we'll genocide it!"
In that moment, in that unassuming van in the middle of a ruined city, a blood oath was sworn, uniting two souls as Brothers in Vengeance.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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