Victor and the others rushed forward towards the prone form of their missing teammate. I hung back, racking my memory for anything that might explain his sudden appearance. I wanted to be happy that Victor and the rest could have their friend back, but I was cynical and suspicious by nature; something about this wasn't right. There was nothing I knew that could explain this; there was nothing that appeared in dungeons we had records of that could mimic people, not people that it had never had direct contact with.

  That was the rub.

  There were Dungeon monsters and even members of the Unseen that could mimic others, with a startling degree of efficiency. Not a single one of them that I knew of could do it without direct contact with the individual that they were attempting to copy. Given that Matt had been missing for weeks, months even, by now, that was pretty much out as a possibility. At least for a dungeon monster, for a member of the Unseen, the equation was a little different. The primary problem was that even if they had contact with Matt, how would they have arrived here before us, and battle all the way through the dungeon solo, and left no trace at all on their way. The Unseen that were capable of mimicry weren't exactly built for open combat.

  None of it made any sense.

  I watched on while Sofia took charge of the others as the most medically well versed out of the group of us. Victor held the unconscious body down while Alex began dumping potions down Matt's limp throat. All the while, Sofia checked him over from head to toe for any hidden injuries or wounds, while Dave wrung his hands from a few feet away. I could tell he wanted to be helping, but there was little more he could do, and enough people crowded around Matt already. I could feel all of their auras fluctuating rapidly between disbelief, hope, and worry until the lines between them blurred into an inescapable morass of emotion.

  As delicately as I could, I blanketed the chamber in my aura, gently prodding Matt's aura with my own. It felt odd, muted, dull. It was his, it lined up with the memory of him I could still see in my mind's eye, but dull, like looking at something through frosted glass. The shape and the contours were there, even some of the colour bled through, but it was murky, and the details were lost in that murk. The aura was so weak it was barely there at all, so much of that could be explained away by whatever trauma he had likely been subjected to during these weeks he had been missing.

  Sofia moved on rapidly from checking for wounds to addressing the ones she found. She dropped a roll of canvas on the ground that had previously been strapped to her back. Unrolling it, she revealed a wide array of vials, containers and even some surgical implements. Selecting several containers, she set them out before opening their lids. Without a moment of consideration, running on a significant amount of training, she liberally smeared several open wounds with the white paste present in all of the containers. I assumed that it must be some type of salve or coagulant, possibly a sealant of some sort. Any of those options would make sense.

  Sofia moved up towards Matt's head, pulling a pen light from within her vest. She held open his eyelids one at a time, flickering the light over his eyes, watching for even the smallest reaction.

  "Back, back, he's coming around," She announced, waving Alex and Victor back. Matt jolted as if bitten, head thwacking the stone and mouth opening in a soundless shriek. Both arms windmilled upward, warding off attackers; his legs thrashed. It took a fraction of a moment for Alex and Victor to dive in and pin him again. There was some part of me that knew it must be horrifying to watch for the others. In those scant moments, his muscles knotted and corded like steel cable, and his eyes—bloodshot and slick with tears—went wild. Sofia had to grab his chin to keep him from smashing his own head again.

  "Matt!" Sofia called, pitching tone brooking no argument. "You're safe. You've made it back. It's us—Victor, Alex, Sofia, Dave. Remember?"

  But the wild light stayed in his eyes. If anything, it burned brighter, his gaze lashing from face to face like he was trying to find a trick behind the words. For a moment, it seemed like he was about to scream again, but the sound stuck in his throat. Instead, he went limp, then curled in on himself with a trembling whimper. He buried his face in his arms and wouldn't look at anyone.

  I turned my senses back on him, gently extending my aura to encase his own in my grip. Steel encased in a soft cushion. Safety.

  Slowly, the shakes subsided, and his head came up from his arms. Matt stared at his hands, flexed them, then clutched at his arms as if to confirm they belonged to him. His face, crusted with dried tears and sweat, wrinkled into something unrecognizable: not fear, nor grief, but the desperate, animal horror of a man who'd woken up buried alive. The spell or shock of it held for another minute, during which the others pleaded, cajoled, and called his name, and I observed the minute shifts in the air around him. He was a shell. The right thoughts echoed around in there—clearly, he recognized the faces, picked up the correct cues—but there was a gap between input and output. Like something inside was still stretching, trying to fit itself back into the space left behind. His aura was still glassy, oddly blank, and muted, and a colder dread started to thread through my mind.

  He spoke at last. Voice ragged, not hoarse but frayed, as if the language itself was something half-forgotten. “Sorry,” he choked, “sorry, I can’t—” He cut off, breathing so fast his chest fluttered. Sofia knelt close, murmured a low reassurance, her touch feather-light on his arm. It took a few tries before Matt seemed even to hear her.

  "Fuck me," he breathed, voice all gravel and acid, like his throat had been put through a cheese grater and left out to dry. "You guys look like hell."

  Alex let out a weird, rumbling noise that might have been a laugh or a sob, then clamped a hand on Matt's shoulder with a gentleness I'd have bet my car he didn't possess.

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  "Yeah, well," said Alex, "you look like you got run through a wood chipper. Welcome back, buddy."

  They helped Matt sit up, propping him carefully against the wall. Dave hovered at the edge of the group, hands twitching like he wanted to fix everything, knowing there was nothing to fix. Sofia gave him a quick examination, shining her pen light in his ears, checking his pulse with fingers that were steady as a sniper's aim.

  "Matt," Sofia said, that no-nonsense edge still in her words, "can you remember anything? What's the last thing you remember?"

  Matt’s eyes raked the chamber, frantic, before sliding shut. “Don’t—don’t even know,” he said, words crumbling over one another. “I was with you, then that thing. Then nothing. Maybe dreams, but not mine—someone else’s, I think. All… sideways. I tried to scream, but it was like being stuck behind glass, a TV maybe, watching myself fuck up every step.” He shuddered so hard it rattled through his whole frame. “Sorry, I’m not making sense. Brain’s all porridge inside.” He braved a look at the others, face twisted with shame.

  “You’re making sense,” Victor said, clearly putting as much certainty into it as he could muster. “You were taken."

  Matt's aura flickered dully against mine, refusing to come into focus, like a mirage. "All I remember is dark. And being so cold, I thought it had crept into my bones. And hunger…" He looked stricken, "I remember hunger."

  "It's over now," Victor said calmly. Matt's body jackknifed in on itself at Victor's words, like the phrase had a physical edge. For a heartbeat, it looked like he might retch, but nothing came. I had heard before about the mind retreating from trauma, but never seen it play out so raw in real time, like a program looping on a crashed segment and refusing to restart.

  I let the silence stretch while Sofia finished her check, and I swept the chamber again with my senses. Vipera gave no warnings, but I trusted my own brand of paranoia just as much. Matt’s aura felt wrong. Too weak, too out of phase. Not gone, but like the person in front of me was fighting not just to exist but to convince the universe he had a right to keep existing.

  Vipera’s voice whispered in my mind, soft as velvet, and deeply pointed. That is not all of him. Not anymore.

  I pushed back mentally. How much is left?

  There is no way of knowing without time to observe, many things could have happened to him. Some possibilities so dire, so damning, I dare not speculate without more evidence. I felt a pause in her words, a hitch, unusual compared to her usual flowing speech. Things in the dark that should not be spoken of, lest we draw their attention.

  I sent back the mental equivalent of a grunt. So she knew more than she was letting on but was choosing to remain silent for now, to not taint my own judgement. Along with whispers of larger secrets she was keeping. I let out a sigh, sometimes I couldn’t help but wish she would return to being mute. It left me with fewer unanswerable questions.

  I wanted to compare Matt to how I had been both before and after the Soul-Sheer. The same person, but changed by an experience. That didn't seem right; however, it felt lacking. Deeply lacking.

  I watched as Victor glanced over at Sofia, who nodded. "Let's get him out of here." In the rapid fashion of soldiers, Matt's squad had him bundled up in a trauma blanket pulled from Sofia's pack, laid out on a collapsible stretcher Sofia had apparently thought to pack for one reason or another. If I hadn't thought she was the team medic previously, I was assured of that now. Dave and Alex took either end of the stretcher while Victor took the lead as we began to move back through the dungeon we had just cleared. I was grateful we'd been thorough when we had cleared out the monsters on the way to the boss chamber; there should be no threats left. That wasn't a reason to let our guard down at all, however.

  We moved at a reasonable marching pace, as fast as Alex and Dave could manage without jostling Matt any more than they had to. Ever since he had been bundled onto the stretcher, Matt had seemed to shut down, become almost catatonic. He came out of it at random intervals as Sofia kept trying to talk to him, keep his mind active as she walked alongside the stretcher.

  "It's all a blur…." Matt answered at one point, "I think I was unconscious for most of it." He replied to Sofia, seemingly more settled as they moved further and further from the far end of the dungeon. As if being surrounded by his old team was working like its own form of curative for his wounded mind. From where I was in the rear of the group, I could hear Alex and Victor discussing next steps, calling in Matt's reappearance, calling the chopper back for a med-evac to the nearest Banner facility, where he could receive care. I stared hard at the back of Matt's head as I followed along, dragged along by the team's desire to care for their lost friend.

  There was something wrong here, deeply wrong.

  The further we got from the chamber we found Matt in, the more settled he seemed, but at the same time, the more his aura felt wrong. I couldn't put my finger on why. It was like feeling a gap in your teeth with your tongue, only to look in the mirror and see that everything was as it should be. I examined his aura as gently as I could from every direction and perspective I could think of, and all I found was the same dull, muted expression. [All-Seeing Eye] found nothing unusual; there was nothing external affecting Matt at all, though his mana levels were quite low. Low enough that he would likely be suffering headaches and other symptoms, it was like he was running on barely more than fumes. The pressure only built behind my eyes as I pushed [All-Seeing Eye] harder to find any symptom, any sign of a problem. There was nothing that my eyes could see that could explain the hair standing up on the back of my neck or the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Then it clicked.

  Matt's aura wasn't dull. It wasn't muted, or weakened, or suppressed.

  It simply wasn’t there.

  It was as if I was staring at that Vish captain again, only this case was far more advanced than even his had been. As if it had reached an endpoint of whatever process was occurring. That realization caused my blood to run cold. There was a fundamental principle, an irreducible bedrock principle, that I suspected I was one of the only people on the planet to truly know. To have experienced it over and over enough to recognize even unconsciously, thanks to my Class.

  Everything had an aura to one degree or another, greater or lesser; every living being had one. Even normal people and animals, lacking a connection to the System and magic, had an aura, as weak as they were. Even monsters had an aura, even if the source was a little different. In the case of monsters, the aura was the expression of their motive spirit, the animating force that gave them life. For people, for Rankers, the aura was the outward expression of your soul.

  That was fundamental. Unchangeable. Irreducible bedrock.

  To lack an aura completely was to lack a soul. Or anything that we knew and recognized as life.

  My earlier question to Vipera returned to haunt me.

  How much is left?