The forest was unnervingly quiet, broken only by the Marshal’s low, steady voice. “Keep it to a whisper from here on out,” Corbin instructed, his eyes scanning the gnarled trees. “If you see water, anything wet, or just something that doesn’t sit right, you call it out.”

  They crept forward. The situation was almost comical, David decided. A group of grown adults, led by a man with a handgun, tiptoeing through what looked like a perfectly ordinary wood, if you ignored the faint, coppery smell of blood and the purple hue of the sky. He stifled the urge to chuckle. The point, he suspected, would be exceptionally grisly.

  Well, if it all goes south, he’s the most expendable, David mused, his eyes flicking toward Corbin. Evans might object, but objections tend to be quieter when you’re running for your life.

  The terrain was at least cooperative, the trees spaced widely enough to allow for quiet progress. He decided to leave the stat points for later; a more controlled experiment was needed. Instead, he quietly pulled his sword from where it was tucked through his belt. The metal, some weird demonic alloy that was warm to the touch and perpetually rust-flecked, felt reassuringly solid in his grip.

  Theo, Mara, and Henderson were clearly rattled. Theo, despite his natural athletic build and long reach, and Mara, with her obvious agility, hadn’t escaped the fight unscathed. The imps had a brutal, unnatural advantage.

  “Rot in hell, you ugly bastard,” Henderson muttered, delivering a sharp kick to the imp’s corpse. His voice shook almost as much as his hands. The bravado was as thin as paper.

  “Think you can manage carrying that?” David asked, his tone neutral.

  Henderson stared at him as if he’d just suggested juggling live grenades.

  “If there are more, we don’t want them stumbling upon a dead comrade,” David added, before any protest could form. “Messes with the ambiance.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Henderson gave a grim, resigned nod.

  “Mara.” She looked up, her gaze sharp. He liked that. No panic, all David saw was focus. “I’ll take the other one. You stick with Evans.” She nodded, already understanding the plan.

  “Just the bodies. Leave the scrap metal for the marshals. And maybe keep them at a distance from the others for now.”

  She nodded again, all business.

  As they moved deeper, David kept his sword in hand. The blade was a mystery, but it cut well, and right now, that was all that mattered.

  He turned to Evans. “You able to muddy our trail a bit?”

  “I can try to obscure the path we’re taking,” Evans replied, already looking at the ground.

  “Appreciate it.”

  It seemed likely, given the man’s earlier demonstration of tracking. Maybe Corbin could too—they were partners, after all. He decided to verify. Corbin was staring down at the thorny imp’s body with a look of pure distaste. David moved to his side.

  “Theo and the others are moving the other two corpses. I’ve got this one. You can handle the weapons?”

  “I’ll collect them. And I can help with the tracks, too.”

  Interesting. David gave the older marshal another, more appraising look. Best to keep a closer eye on this one.

  He watched as Corbin began methodically scuffing the dirt and rearranging fallen debris. It looked practiced, but for all David knew, he was just drawing arrows for the next wave of monsters. He maintained a careful watch until Corbin seemed satisfied with his work in the immediate area.

  Then, David knelt, grabbed the imp by its limbs, and hefted its unsettlingly heavy body into a fireman’s carry. He had to keep a tight grip on its clawed hands, feet, and tail to stop the limbs from scraping against the forest floor. Being just over six feet himself, he almost shook his head at the thing's ridiculous proportions.

  A surprised, undignified sound was forced out of him as he took the full weight. It was like carrying a refrigerator filled with rocks. It was far heavier than its gaunt frame suggested, a dense, solid mass that had to be pushing over two hundred pounds. Skinny bastard must have bones of lead, he thought, adjusting his grip on a limb that felt unnaturally dense. Dense bastard. Goddamn overgrown weed. Did it eat a whole family of smaller, denser imps for breakfast? Somehow, mentally cursing the dead thing made its weight a fraction more manageable. Shaky voice aside, maybe Henderson was onto something. It was a psychological trick, but in a place like this, you took what you could get. For a frame so lean, the weight was absurd. But then, he supposed applying human standards to a nightmare from an impossible dimension was probably a waste of time.

  Corbin collected the vicious shard of cooled demon armor—probably to keep as a personal weapon—then hoisted the jagged remains of demon armor the others had been using, David’s shield, and a small mountain of cursed junk, looking every bit like a man one bad decision away from toppling over. The rest of the team had the honor of being pallbearers for the two very deceased and surprisingly dense imps.

  They reached the spot where the whole mess had kicked off. Evans immediately got to work, his eyes scanning the ground before he started subtly rearranging debris and scuffing dirt over the worst of the evidence. Corbin joined him, and the two of them fell into a quiet, systematic routine of making their mess disappear. They were the professionals here; David’s role was apparently supernatural furniture removal.

  Taking in the aftermath, David felt a strange sense of gratitude toward that first set of possessed armor. If they hadn’t repurposed its cooled-off limbs as throwing weapons and used its own swords against the rest, their survival odds would have plummeted somewhere between “unlikely” and “not happening.” The death toll would’ve been much higher. Some quick cutting while the metal was still hot, and the cooled limbs made excellent projectiles. Even halfway decent knives.

  Thanks to their swords, the living armor were deadlier, but manageable. The imps, meanwhile, were far more persistent—less directly lethal, but they had the vitality of a weed someone thought they’d pulled. The imps just kept coming until exhaustion won, even if you stabbed them through the heart.

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  The lesson was too clear to ignore. Every time he faced an imp, before moving on, he would make sure it was permanently unemployed. In fact, that should be the policy for every creature: better to assume the worst than to die teabagging a corpse that might just be playing dead.

  “New rule,” David said, low, but loud enough for the group to hear. “From now on, we treat everything like it’s playing possum,” his voice cut through the quiet. “Imp, armor, a suspicious-looking rock—you make sure it’s dead. Assume it’ll get back up. Put it down until it can’t.”

  He saw the understanding click behind their eyes. Instead a suggestion for the imps; it was a new rule for this world. Theo gave a sharp nod. Mara hefted the body she carried as if looking for something else to stab it with. They understood the assignment.

  Eventually, Corbin looked like a walking junkyard, the demonic weapons and their gear strapped haphazardly to his pack. He fell in at the rear, watching their backs, covering their tracks, while Evans took point ahead, scouting. David was stuck babysitting everyone in the middle. Both marshals kept their pistols close, presumably in case the forest tried something.

  They moved in silence. Every few minutes, Evans paused to perform some small, arcane act of trail obfuscation, probably making it look as though they’d been abducted by a particularly careful tornado.

  Roughly twenty minutes later, they broke into a clearing.

  David noticed he wasn’t nearly as exhausted as he ought to have been after carrying a two-hundred-pound corpse on a cross-country hike. Sure, he’d deadlifted more, but that had been in a climate-controlled gym with motivational music.

  It was either a fantastic second wind or, more likely, those constitution points were already doing the heavy lifting. Not a bad return on investment.

  David turned to find Theo and Mara sprawled on the ground, drenched in sweat and gasping for air, their unfortunate luggage scattered a few meters away. Henderson and his two companions stood watch over the fallen imps, looking equally worse for wear.

  David unceremoniously dumped the ugly bastard from his shoulders, the thud satisfyingly final. Once again, it was pretty fucking obvious he was holding up better than the rest of this ragged crew. . It was like he’d accidentally joined a fitness program run by a sadistic personal trainer from another dimension—whatever was happening to him, it beat CrossFit.

  Henderson shot him a venomous glare, his face flushed with anger. David just stared back, his hand twitching toward his sword. What's his problem?

  “I swear to god I’ve had it with this shit,” Henderson spat, then wheeled around to face Corbin. “What the hell are we doing out here?”

  “Looking for water,,” Corbin replied flatly.

  “No kidding, genius. I meant—”

  Theo cut him off, his tone weary but firm. “Panic isn’t going to help, Henderson. If you need stress relief, hit something. Cry. But don’t attack us. We’re all in the same boat—the important thing is we’re still breathing. These things hit way above their weight class.”

  David mentally upgraded Theo from ‘question mark’ to ‘not completely useless.’ For a guy who usually looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, he was holding his own—surprisingly competent.

  “And they’re ridiculously dense,” Mara added, wiping her brow with a quiet sigh. “The one I hauled felt like it was packed with lead. Had to be at least 140 pounds, and it was the scrawniest of the bunch.”

  “No joke, mine was pushing two hundred easy,” Henderson grumbled.

  Mara shot a look at the back of Henderson’s head that could have curdled milk. David made a note to never get on her bad side.

  Corbin ambled over to David’s imp, his grey hair looking almost silver in the dim light. He bent down, gripped the creature, and with a strained grunt, hoisted it off the ground. Surprise flickered across his face before he set it back down with a huff. “Definitely over two hundred.”

  A heavy silence settled over the group.

  “We ought to cut them open,” David suggested after a moment.

  Every head swiveled to stare at him.

  Well, that’s a reaction, David thought. You’d think I suggested juggling live grenades.

  David had waited a beat, hoping Corbin or Evans would be the one to say it. But they were still holding onto their badges, or their dignity, or some other useless shit from the world before. They didn't get it yet. They didn't fully grasp that the only rule now was "don't die.” This whole world was a butcher's shop, and they were on the menu.

  The chorus of horrified stares was predictable. David just met their gazes and gave a slow, deliberate shrug. What did you people expect? A committee meeting? His eyes flicked to Evans. Only Evans looked more thoughtful than disgusted, he seemed… focused, which was a point in his favor on David's internal scoreboard. David gave Evans name a gold star and moved him up in his mental scoreboard.

  "You don't have to get your hands dirty, just watch the trees while—"

  "I'll do it." Evans's voice was flat. No hesitation. "I've cleaned fish and game since I was a kid."

  "I've seen enough," Mara added, her voice steady.

  “Good.” David said. “Personally, I’ve seen enough movies and too many seasons of House of Scrubs to know what goes where—heart, lungs, kidneys—all the good stuff. I’m no expert, but I can fake competence for at least five minutes.”

  Mara looked at him. “Is that the show where the surgeons went medieval?”

  “Yeah. With the king who prescribed beheadings for stress.”

  She almost smiled. “The episode where they amputated the guy’s leg to stop the curse on Radiology?”

  “Good one. And then his ghost sued the hospital.”

  She gave a short nod. “I used to watch that.”

  “Great show. Terrible medicine.”

  The rest of the group—Henderson, his two friends, even Corbin—just stared at them, their faces blank with incomprehension. It was like David and Mara had suddenly started speaking a dead language.

  "Are you two for real?" Henderson finally muttered, looking from the imp corpses back to them. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  David glanced at him, unbothered. “Cultural reference. Pre-apocalypse stuff. You had to be there.”

  "I don’t know about that, but I'll help you," Evans repeated, his eyes already scanning for a spot. "But not here. We do it somewhere else. We don't know what the smell will bring."

  David agreed completely. The last thing they needed was to find out demon blood worked like chum in the water. He was also starting to get a real sense of who in this group might not completely fall apart when things got ugly. Maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t been saddled with a group of complete dead weights.

  Only time would tell.

  "You sure this is a good idea?" Evans asked, his voice dropping. "It's a risk."

  David didn't answer right away. He was looking at the dead imp. The weird words that had been floating over its head were gone now. That was good to know. The thing was built all wrong, all long arms and legs on a short body, but it weighed a ton. It didn't make any sense. David pointed his tone practical. "Might as well take a quick look inside while we're at it."

  He crouched and poked the corpse. The skin was thin, kinda loose. He pinched it and felt the shift; the skin was deceptive, sliding over rock-hard, densely packed muscle underneath. The bones felt unnaturally heavy.

  So that's it, he thought. It's not size, or thickness… it's density. Cheap fucking trick.

  “I am not carrying that thorny living plant shit again,” Henderson announced from the sidelines. Everyone promptly ignored him.

  The thing was hairless and sexless, with a digestive system, and covered in dark green markings up close. A specific symbol was burned into its shoulder, the flesh raised and scarred like an old brand. The other imps had the same mark. He tried to rub it off, but it was part of the skin.

  A gang sign? A cattle brand? The implications were bad. Marks meant organization. Organization could mean more of them, and probably something bigger and meaner in charge. He thought, or worse, an actual kingdom, run by demons with actual brains and real power?

  Holy shit. He hoped not. He hoped for nice, kind villagers they could kill in the middle of the night. He let his mind stay there, because the alternative was worrisome.

  He stood up, his mind made up. "Alright, forget cutting it all open. Let's just poke it a little and see what happens."