I looked around once more, my senses straining, and was met with pure, undisturbed silence.

  There was no single sound aside from my own slight, hitching panting, the air still and heavy in this forgotten place.

  My gaze swept across the scattered, broken dead bodies of those pale, dwarf-like creatures, strewn like grotesque dolls all over the rocky floor of the dungeon below where I stood.

  Then, something caught my eye, rolling almost languidly towards the west of my line of sight: a small, bright orange object, tumbling weightlessly on the uneven ground at the far, shadowy end of the cave.

  I quickly, yet cautiously, walked towards where the object was heading.

  I didn’t bother to chase it; it wasn't going anywhere fast.

  It finally bumped gently against the damp cave wall and came to a rest.

  I got close to it and stooped to pick it up.

  It was a crinkled, discarded wrapper from some kind of processed food.

  It had a garish, stylized picture of some food item that I clearly hadn’t ever seen or, God knows, eaten before in my entire damn life.

  The mere sight of this flimsy wrapper, this ghost of sustenance, made my stomach rumble loudly once again, a hollow, painful clench.

  I couldn’t read the fancy, foreign-looking script of this food product’s name, but I knew from experience that stuffs like this always had identifying details printed somewhere on them – information regarding where and when they were manufactured.

  So, I turned it over to its less colorful back and scanned the fine print.

  I saw “Higashi-sumiyoshi” clearly legible as part of some longer address, which might possibly be where it was made, or perhaps sold, or some other equally irrelevant detail.

  The southern and central parts of Higashi-sumiyoshi were notorious slums, sprawling urban cancers much like my own beloved Sumiyoshi shithole, while its northern part edged into the comparatively wealthy Conquest district.

  Some of the older guys back home, the ones who’d been around, used to mention it having a few operational factories still chugging along.

  I looked away from the wrapper clutched in my hands, down to the dusty, debris-strewn ground, and tried to mentally trace the wrapper's improbable journey here.

  I walked slowly in that general direction, my eyes scanning for any subtle clues, and soon I reached a shadowed corner that initially looked like yet another depressing dead end.

  But then, tucked away on the left side of that gloomy corner, I spotted a small, almost concealed opening, roughly the height of my knee from the cave floor.

  I knelt carefully on one knee and observed it closely, every nerve ending tingling with a mixture of hope and apprehension.

  There was some kind of strange, green, semi-solid, viscous substance clinging around the rough-hewn walls of the narrow opening, with tiny, iridescent bubbles slowly forming and then silently popping on its glistening, pulsating surface – it almost appeared as if the damn thing was breathing, somehow alive.

  I cautiously placed my right palm a bit closer to it, feeling for any change, and I began to perceive a very soft, almost ethereal sensation of moving air, a faint, cool draft.

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  My internal worries, the constant, gnawing anxiety that was my shadow, were a bit lifted by this faint promise, even if this was very likely just my desperate, exhausted mind screwing with me, manufacturing false hope out of thin air.

  I then drew my head forward, leaning in carefully, to make absolutely certain I wasn’t just bullshittin' myself.

  I pressed my left ear closer to the small, slimy opening and closed my eyes, forcing myself to solely focus all my attention on my sense of hearing, straining for any tell-tale sound.

  After some long, agonizing seconds of absolute stillness, I could finally hear extremely faint, almost subliminal sounds, distant but definitely recognizable.

  It sounded like someone was shouting, their voice muffled and far away, and some kind of heavy vehicle was moving, its engine a low, guttural rumble.

  I’d had that creeping, ice-cold feeling in my gut that I might not ever make it out of wherever this bloody, godforsaken place actually is, that I’d never find my way back to my own world, however shitty it might be.

  But that soft, almost non-existent wind and the very distant, yet undeniably real, noise completely, gloriously crushed that suffocating doubt, at least for this blessed moment.

  Finally, some fuckin' good news, for a change!

  I was so freaking happy, an almost painful surge of raw, unfiltered relief washing through me, that this truly wasn’t some inescapable, isolated Fort, and that I could, I really could, get the fuck outta here.

  I almost started frantically trying to widen the small opening right then and there, before a crucial thought slammed into my brain: there were fresh, dead Arcane-beings lying just behind me.

  Elixirs, prime fuckin' elixirs, just waiting for the pickin’.

  I quickly rushed back to the piled-up, cooling corpses of the white-dwarf creatures and immediately began the grim, messy business of harvesting their most valuable internal organ – the heart, or, more accurately, their arcane-core, the rumoured source of arcane energy on the streets.

  I took out a medium-sized, thick nylon bag from my battered, singed backpack and started unceremoniously stuffing the bloody, still-warm body parts inside it, the rich, coppery smell of alien blood filling my nostrils, a scent I was far too familiar with.

  I really, really wanted to pick up their ornate little spears too, because they looked stylish as all hell,, and eye-pleasing arcane-weapons tend to be considerably more valuable, since better looking weapon meaning better quality or arcane energy.

  But I can’t just go around casually carrying obviously looted, exotic shit like that on Osaka’s crowded, watchful streets, not if I don’t want to be jumped and iced by every cop, Enforcer, or rival scavenger crew in a five-mile radius.

  Halfway through the gruesome, methodical task of harvesting the hearts of the white-skinned creatures, I suddenly recalled the ‘elf-queen’ and that bizarre ‘black tear-drop’ entity.

  Since they seemed to be distinctly different from these common grunts, and were definitely superior in the obvious hierarchy I’d witnessed, their parts would undoubtedly fetch a significantly higher price, a shitload more coins in the right, shadowy markets.

  I quickly ran up to their remains, which lay undisturbed on the raised dais, and started the process of carving out their hearts.

  The ‘elf-queen’ appeared to have one, a delicate, surprisingly resilient, pulsing organ, but the ‘black tear-drop’ thing didn’t have a recognizable heart, or, in fact, any discernible internal organs for that matter, as far as I could tell.

  It was just a solid, unsettlingly uniform chuck of black, foam-like, rubbery meat inside its strange, hollow, teardrop-shaped body.

  I wasn’t too shaken up by this particular discovery, because it wasn’t the only damn Aggressor I’ve encountered that doesn’t possess a standard mana-core or what you'd call typical organs.

  A lot of Aggressors are known to not have hearts or even what you’d call a conventional internal organ system; I’ve seen it with my own two eyes plenty of goddamn times.

  For example – not all Zipper-spines, those slimy Glue-fish, or the particularly nasty Spike-fuckers have hearts you can easily carve out and sell.

  That distinction didn’t matter too much in this specific instance, however, since its unique, unidentifiable meat and tough, patterned skin could still be sold, probably for a decent price, in the slum’s less… regulated markets, to buyers who didn't ask too many questions.

  I used my recently acquired short sword – one of the dead dwarf’s – to roughly tear off several large, manageable chucks of flesh and thick, rubbery skin from the ‘black tear-drop’s’ inert corpse.

  I then reached back to the ‘elf-queen.’

  I carefully, almost reverently, gouged out her luminous, otherworldly eyes and her surprisingly sharp, almost needle-like teeth.

  As I hacked her once-beautiful, serene face into unrecognizable, bloody pieces, my eyes unfortunately fell upon the still-visible, perfectly formed infant nestled within her transparent, now-deflated and cooling belly.

  I couldn’t possibly carry all the potential elixir material from this entire damn charnel house, so I had to prioritize carrying only the ones that might be of more significant, immediate value in the ruthless, unforgiving market.

  I plunged my gore-slicked hand and the short-sword deep into her ravaged belly, the blade grating against small, delicate bones, and roughly, quickly, chopped off the infant’s tiny, perfectly formed head.

  My nylon bag was rapidly running out of available space; it had precious little room left for any more elixir or harvested parts.

  So, after carefully harvesting the ‘elf-queen’s’ surprisingly potent arcane-core, her valuable teeth, her unique eyes, her unfortunate infant’s surprisingly developed arcane-core and its severed head, and some choice, dense chucks of flesh from the ‘black tear-drop,’ I figured I was about as loaded as I could get.

  Then, I suddenly remembered the uniquely crafted weapons I’d initially decided to pass on, and a new, opportunistic idea sparked in my pragmatic, greedy head.

  I used the already dulling short sword to quickly chop off the ornate, well-crafted heads of some of the more interesting-looking spears and unceremoniously stuffed them inside the now bulging nylon bag, along with four of the better-conditioned, less damaged short swords.

  I then crammed all of that valuable, illicit loot into my long-suffering, singed backpack.

  I threw away the hideously chipped and hopelessly bloody short sword I’d used for all this grim harvesting, since it was now extremely dull, practically useless as a weapon, and caked in multiple layers of gore; it would be worth less than absolute shit in its current sorry, battered state.

  I immediately ran back to the small, slimy opening, began frantically widening it with a combination of brute force and leverage from a discarded spear shaft, and then started awkwardly, urgently crawling through it into the unknown, beckoning darkness.

  I hooked the reinforced strap of my heavy, precious backpack with my foot and laboriously dragged it along with me as I crawled and squeezed my way through the tight, constricting passage.