David stared at the pathetic pile of twigs and leaves he’d assembled. It looked less like a fire pit and more like a bird’s nest that had given up on life. He was doing his absolute best to mentally replay every episode of Survivalist! he’d ever half-watched while eating takeout, but the memory was frustratingly vague on the actual how of it all.

  Thankfully, Evans walked over, glanced at the sad arrangement, and without a word, dismantled the entire thing with a few swift kicks.

  “Hey,” David protested, a bit wounded. “I thought that had a certain… structural ambiguity.”

  Evans just began stacking wood with a practiced, efficient motion.

  Alright, fine, David conceded internally. I’m a city boy. My closest experience to this was when the power went out for three hours during a storm and I had to use my phone’s flashlight to find the candles. This is a bit outside my skill set. Still, he watched Evans’s hands carefully, trying to commit the process to memory.

  Evans produced a simple lighter from his jacket, and a minute later, a proper, crackling fire was dancing before them.

  Hmm, David thought. So the real survival skill is remembering to pack a Bic. Noted.

  As the warmth reached him, a deep, primal part of his brain he didn’t know he possessed sent up a signal flare. You are safe. Fire equals safety. Fire good.

  He immediately scoffed at the instinct. What absolute nonsense. Fire also equals ‘giant beacon for every toothy horror in a five-mile radius.’ But it was a nice warmth all the same.

  He helped Evans string up the massive warg hindquarter against the plane’s torn fuselage, using stripped wires and shards of possessed armor hammered into the dirt as stakes. The logic was sound: if it attracted visitors, at least there would be a metal wall and several hundred pounds of free appetizer between them and the main course. Someone had suggested burying it for a ground-oven, but that meant hauling the bloody thing back to the stream, which sounded like a great way to season their water supply with monster guts. The fire method was decidedly less… contaminating.

  As he tightened a knot, David looked at the bizarre scene—the jet wreck, the hell-beast carcass, the magical dagger at his hip, and the very normal, very welcome fire. This is all deeply, profoundly weird, he decided, and that was the most accurate assessment he’d managed all day.

  Corbin joined Evans, the warlock knife on-loan to him from David—for cooking duty— looked natural in his hand. David watched, fascinated, as Corbin made a precise incision near the warg's hind leg. "Okay, first thing," Corbin said, more to himself than anyone, "you gotta get under the skin layer… See? It peels back if you don't fight it." The thick, purple-tinged hide peeled away from the muscle beneath with a soft, tearing sound, revealing dark, dense meat that looked nothing like any steak David had ever seen.

  The smell that wafted up was a potent mix of iron, wild animal, and something faintly, unpleasantly sweet. David’s stomach did a small, rebellious flip. Note to self: skinning a magical wolf-car is an olfactory experience. He forced himself to keep watching as Corbin efficiently opened the carcass and began removing the organs, which glistened with an unsettling, healthy sheen.

  "Damn, man. You've done this before," David commented, trying to sound casual.

  "Some," Corbin replied, not looking up from his work. "My uncle had a hunting lease. Spent a few weekends there. Been on a few trips with Evans, too." His movements were methodical, devoid of flourish. "Mostly deer, though.” The knife flashed, separating a complex web of tissue from the main muscle. “Nothing like this."

  Meanwhile, the water in the scavenged fuel canister had finally boiled. Simeon, Henderson, and Robert were already sipping from plastic cups, blowing on the steaming liquid.

  "You guys feeling okay?" David asked, his tone light but his eyes watchful.

  "None yet," Simeon replied, his eyes darting toward the tree line. "Tastes like hot metal."

  Henderson, however, tapped Robert, who was eyeing the butchered warg with deep suspicion. "Are we sure about this? We cook that thing and the smell will drift for miles. It’ll be a draw for every... whatever else is out there."

  Corbin didn't pause his work. "Our presence alone does that. The canister contains the scent. The alternative is eating it raw and hoping we don't bleed out from the inside." He wiped his bloody hands on a piece of hide and looked at David. "The water's probably fine. Those two aren't dead yet."

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  David agreed. There were no showers in the aircraft, a fact he had not begun to notice, but had anticipated. A group our size already smells like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The canister's our best bet.

  David observed Simeon, Robert, and Henderson. They looked pale, their attention fixed anywhere but on the butchering. "How long to cook the meat?" he asked.

  "In that? A minimum of three hours," Corbin said, his voice taut. "To be certain any... pathogens are dead."

  "I'm hungry, but I'm not 'gamble on magical food poisoning' hungry," David said. "Let's do three. If our two volunteer taste-testers are still vertical by then, we'll all dig in."

  Evans, cutting the large sections into smaller pieces, nodded. "We'll set aside boiled water. They eat first. We wait. If they are unchanged, we proceed."

  "Awesome. More waiting. My favorite activity," David deadpanned, but his impatience was false, really. At least they’d solved the food and water problem, maybe. He turned, watching the two designated guinea pigs. They shifted uncomfortably under his gaze as if he’d suggested something entirely unreasonable.

  Ungrateful pricks, he thought without heat. I’m over here trying to make sure we don't die from dysentery, and they look like I'm forcing them to watch a documentary. He turned back to Corbin. "So, three hours. We'll maintain watch in rotations. What's the internal temperature we're looking for on 'Juvenile Warg'?"

  Corbin gave a short, dry huff. "Let's do 'well-done’ and then some to be safe.'"

  David watched as they sealed the iron canister, the chunks of warg meat now submerged in boiling water. Someone had stuffed rags around the lid, a pathetic attempt at containing the smell. A modest proposal for a modest apocalypse, he thought. His eyes tracked to Evans’s fire, noting with relief the thin, pale smoke it produced. Small mercies.

  As they settled into the grim vigil, David tried to focus on the demonic energy simmering in his core. But his attention kept fracturing, his gaze pulled toward the dark tree line. It was as if his senses were now tuned to a different frequency, the energy around him a constant, low hum that made deep concentration feel like trying to thread a needle during an earthquake.

  Then he felt it—a subtle pull from where Mara stood. He glanced over, his demonic energy affinity painting a picture others couldn’t see. She was kneeling by the massive warg corpse, her posture still. But around her, the air shimmered with a deep, misty mana, darker than any he’d felt before. It wasn't a spectacle; it was a covert operation. The mana swirled, condensed, and then settled over the dead beast like a shroud.

  David’s breath hitched. The warg’s chest, for a single, horrifying second, rose and fell. Its head lolled to the side with a faint, grating sound of stiffening muscle. It wasn't reanimation, not fully. It was a probe. A test. He saw a trickle of something—essence, vitality, he didn’t know the word—coalesce from the corpse into a droplet of condensed, multicolored mana that hovered in Mara’s palm before being absorbed.

  Oh, he thought, the pieces slotting into place with cold, brutal logic. She’s not saying poking it with a stick. She’s using a skill.

  Necromancy? Life steal? Something even more overpowered? The label didn’t matter, but the effect was clear: she could draw power from the dead. If David’s earlier theory’s on leveling and life force were true, maybe she could even level from absorbing corpses. Reanimate them—he had undoubtedly seen it move. His mind jumped to the piece of the level seven she had taken. If she could do this to a warg, what was stopping her from trying it on the level seven warlock’s remains she’d insisted on taking? Or something worse?

  The practicality of it was almost admirable. An army of corpses? That was a problem for later. Or something he could use, if she was was an asset. The immediate problem was the lie of omission.

  Whether she was secretly hoarding power or afraid everyone would judge her for having “spooky death powers,” didn’t matter to him at all. It don’t change a single thing for him.

  Having power wasn’t a crime. Hiding it wasn’t either.

  David had a deep and abiding respect for a well-kept secret. He understood subterfuge; in a world like this, he actively encouraged it. But what he had absolutely zero patience for was incompetence. A hidden card was smart. Playing it badly was a death sentence for everyone nearby.

  It was incompetent.

  Hiding combat-changing power while the rest of them walked into meat grinders?

  That wasn’t secrecy.

  That was unreliability.

  And unreliable people got everyone killed.

  David prioritized survival and competence over morality. She had watched and she had done nothing. They had fought together multiple times, and each time she had lingered near the bodies. Every time she’d lingered over a body, he’d assumed it was melancholy. It was inventory.

  She was a liability.

  It meant that no matter how powerful your ability was, in a critical combat situation, you were a gun that jammed.

  A cold anger, sharp and clean, cut through his fatigue.

  Refusing to fight when walking into a meat grinder, when you had a potential crowbar was something else. She would have gotten them all killed, and still might.

  ”This is a problem,” his thoughts escaped him under his breath, unbidden.

  For the first time, the thought of walking over and ending the threat before it could blossom wasn't a paranoid fantasy but a tactical solution.

  He looked at her, now just a woman staring at a dead animal, and saw a stranger. She had been gathering resources, and they had been the distraction.

  David watched the droplet of stolen energy vanish into Mara’s palm, and wondered what she was doing with all of the collected dead, and how many of them she was willing to watch die to increase her collection.

  Well, David thought, that’s not good.