Currently, the seven of us were resting in what seemed to be a laboratory inside the school; the desks were unlike the ones in other classrooms, there were sinks in the room, valves for gasses (presumably), and goggles were easy to access. I felt fairly confident in my conclusion that science lessons went on here.

It was already afternoon and the sun had passed its zenith as far as we could tell through the half-broken windows. My phone confirmed that time to be true.

As was suggested, we were having a break. As an example of the preparations made for this trip into a hive, the group of three that we had joined had all brought along food to eat during this expedition--no doubt due to experience clearing a large hive before.

All of us were scattered about the place in the relatively large room; both the servants were standing guard by both the doorway and the whole in the wall, Candace and Owen were huddled off together in a corner, eating, while Luna and I found ourselves sitting near Jonathon.

The food that Jonathon brought along was quite utilitarian; it was bland, without sweets, but seemed quite nutritious. It got me thinking about his history; his respectful demeanour and the way he carried himself just imparted a militaristic vibe in my mind.

As for myself, although I had no idea that I would spend enough time inside a hive that we’d take a break to eat, I luckily had the foresight to prepare lunch for myself. After my last attempt at clearing a hive, that served to impart the realisation of how woefully underprepared I was to tackling a hive and so I swore to myself to take along whatever equipment and provisions would be necessary for the next hive. Like a weapon. Or food.

And so, I found myself opening an admittedly childish lunch box for someone my age that I still had since school that was filled with sandwiches. Luna didn’t seem to care about it nor did Jonathon, so my embarrassment was mild at best.

In my bid to bulk up and eat healthy, however, I realised that I probably wouldn’t be able to eat all the food that I had brought with me once I began eating. It seems that I was a tad too optimistic there.

“Charlotte,” Luna called from beside me, “Do you have any food to spare?” She asked rather shyly.

“Did you not bring any yourself?” I asked after swallowing.

“No?” She responded uncertainly, like she wasn’t sure herself. Her embarrassment and subdued demeanour was rather cute--a pleasant contrast to her confident persona. “I didn’t expect we’d be in a hive for so long,” She clarified.

Deliberate, I put on a pensive face, as if I wasn’t already decided on my course of action. After imaginarily mulling it over for a few seconds, revelling in the hopeful face of Luna, I answered.

“I suppose you can,” I said with mock authority and gave her half of my lunch.

Now, it’s an amount I can actually eat.

After that brief exchange, nobody said anything else for as long as we continued eating. A silent ambience fell over the room, where the only sounds were that of mastication. 

Eventually, however, Jonathon broke that with a simple question:

“How did the two of you meet?” He asked us once we had all finished eating (He ate very quickly).

It seems the break is going to be longer than I suspected.

Instead of asking, I turned towards Luna to see what she would say. From my perspective, it was coincidence.

“It was circumstantial,” She eventually replied. Whether she spent the time thinking about how to portray her story or if Jonathon could be trusted with the information, I didn’t know.

“Circumstantial?” He probed.

“I needed someone with Charlotte’s Specialisation and so, that eventually led me to her,” She elucidated.

“We met inside a hive,” I added.

“Were you both independent before you met each other?” He asked.

“No, not really. Neither of us cleared a hive until two weeks ago and even that one didn’t really count.” Jonathon raised a curious face at Luna before getting her to explain. “It was a small one and we’d found it before it emerged; all it was was a heart.” With that, he seemed to understand.

Some time during this conversation, Owen and Candace had wandered on over to us.

“So, you two in a relationship then, or something?” Owen interjected. I was startled not only at his sudden and abrupt voice but also his insinuation.

“No no no,” I impulsively blurted out, “We’re friends.” I spoke with no hesitation.

“Friends?” Even Jonathon is interested too!

Taking me by surprise was an attack I had not expected at all! Luna’s arms wrapped around my torso and pulled my back towards her chest, encapsulating me in a tight and strong hug.

“Yep! The bestest of friends!” She joyfully declared while swinging me from side-to-side. I was burning with shame at her actions. She probably knew that anyway.

Thankfully, she let me go from her warm, strong embrace to resume my previous seat, now too uncomfortable to look everyone else in the eye.

“How did your group meet?” Luna asked them this time.

“Nothing that interesting,” Jonathon explained. “Owen and Candace were an established duo with the G.U.G. and I was new to this whole thing a few weeks ago. We met the same way we met you.” 

He was right; that’s rather mundane in comparison.

“And you’ve stayed together because…? It works?” Luna inquired. She seemed genuinely interested in their situation.

“Yeah; it’s worked well so far for small and medium hives.”

“Not as interesting as love, though,” Owen quipped as soon as Jonathon finished his sentence. I was not happy with that.

To my detriment, Luna just smiled, unfazed and not bothered to quell that misconception.

“If I may,” Jonathon forewarned, ignoring Owen’s statement, “What are your motivations for doing this?” Throughout the entire conversation, he seemed interested and invested in what we had to say.

“I just want a heart; nothing else,” Luna replied casually. They already knew that; no reason to hide it.

“What about you, Charlotte?” He asked me.

“Just helping out your girlfriend?” I shot a glare at Owen but he just smiled in return.

“I,” I spoke, but then hesitated to continue. Thinking about it, I hadn’t even told Luna why I was doing this--and seeing how she was staring intently at me, she was interested in my answer as well--so did I want to tell these, frankly, strangers?

Well, it’s not like it’s an uncommon motivation.

A disturbed look must have appeared on my face because Jonathon spoke before I replied.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.” He clearly considered this a sensitive subject.

“No, it’s fine. I’m doing it for the money,” I spoke succinctly.

Owen didn’t quip and Jonathon took a few seconds before replying.

“There are safer ways to make money.”

“I know, but this makes a lot of money,” I defended. Many B-rank users had very lucrative careers entirely from clearing hives.

“There are jobs that make a lot of money as well,” Jonathon insisted.

“Not in the short-term, though. For me.” I spoke rapidly and without thinking too much about my words. Am I saying too much?

“Well, this is dangerous,” I opened my mouth to respond once more but Jonathon cut me off. “Just keep that in mind; I’m not stopping you.” I didn’t say anything.

His words left a weird feeling in my gut. He seemed like an honest, genuine, heartfelt person. In truth, I had grown to like him over the past couple of hours. It felt like he was trying to give advice rather than be controlling.

“How much longer we going to wait here?” Luna asked, dispelling the somber tone that permeated the atmosphere.

“I’m pumped; I can leave at any time,” Owen said.

“Seems like as good a time as any,” Jonathong answered.

And with that, the break and rest was declared over. We had eaten lunch, asked some questions, and were rejuvenated from the ordeal that clearing a hive was.

Quickly enough, we fell back into the same, familiar routine. Monsters in weak hives were low-intelligence creatures; they were easy to lure, trick, and trap. Funneling them through bottlenecks--whether they were doorways or holes in the wall--was both an easy and effective strategy to clear them out en masse.

The first hurdle we encountered, however, was actually getting to the second floor. Going from the ground floor to the first floor was easy; the first stairwell we came across was blocked but the second one wasn’t. As we traversed through this hive, the number of permutations of paths we could utilise to move through it grew smaller with each floor.

From the ground floor, we had near total access to any path; multiple stairwells were free and clear as well as holes in the ceilings of some classrooms.

On the first floor, however, while there might’ve been multiple stairwells we could use, they weren’t easily accessible from the crossing of paths. What that means is how we ascended to the first floor locked us out of a way to get to a stairwell that wasn’t blocked.

If we wanted to, for example, cross over to the other side of the building to get to another stairwell, that’d require us to retrace our steps--a long an arduous process because this building wasn’t easy to move through--as well as kill additional monsters on that new route. It simply wasn’t a reasonable thing to go through.

Therefore, we were relegated to having to clamber on up through the ceiling of one classroom to access the second floor.

Thankfully, however, we had the aid of big, strong Jonathon rather than having to rely on meek, little me. The previous difficulty I had in climbing to another floor in the last hive I was in was nowhere to be found in this one.

After S2 confirmed that the floor above us was safe, with remarkable ease, both her and S1 managed to climb up with the grace and experience of veteran climbers. Their ability was truly envious.

After them, Jonathon helped up Candace and then Luna, lifting them up in his arms while the two servants helped to pull them up. Next was me.

It was a smooth and easy transition; he picked me up in his arms and then presented me to the willing arms of the servants who gently, but firmly, pulled me the rest of the way through the gap.

Once I had clambered up and was securely standing on my own two feet, I whispered to Luna:

“This is another reason I don’t like skirts.” She chuckled before replying.

“What? You don’t want either of the girls to see what you’re hiding under there?” She responded shamelessly. I shot her an unhappy glance but refused to reply.

Owen and, lastly, Jonathon both made it up easily as well. I choose not to comment that he pushed all the women up before the men.

Unsurprisingly, given the destroyed floor that we were now standing on, actually navigating around on the top floor was rather difficult; it was like all the damage below was cumulative. 

An increased amount of walls and floor was broken and torn down, and they were additionally dangerous due to the drop that they presented. There were holes that led straight down to the ground floor, sure to break many bones if you were unlucky enough to fall down there.

Saying that, neither servant seemed to notice that it was perilous to move about up here. They both walked with a grace implying they had traversed this place many times before; no gap seemed to large for them to cross, no hole or tripping hazard would be unnoticed.

Owen even asked why they seemed so carefree in comparison up here, but Luna just answered that she didn’t know. Heart stuff, I concluded. They were a bundle of mysterious and this was just one of them.

The change in terrain did mean we had to adjust our tactics, however. Too many rooms had too many holes in them that our previous method of funneling the monsters through a choke point would be effective.

Instead, it was like the whole top floor was a singular room rather than the compartmentalised nature of monster habitation like it was down below. Monsters strolled about like they owned the place and without a care in the world that we expected them to just hold themselves inside their respective classrooms.

The monsters were also varied in nature. Sure, we saw the occasional limb eater here and there, trapaising gangly and clumsily due to their lack of feet, but we also saw other monstrosities.

For instance, there was an eight limbed creature not unlike a starfish now that I think about it. All eight limbs--rather than remind me of mandibles like on the limb eater--were more like limbs in that they displayed a full range of articulation and allowed the mound-like being to move across the uneven terrain with relative ease.

One thing that seemed common amongst all the monsters that we had faced, however, was that they all lacked eyes. They responded to Candace’s sounds so they likely had ears, but there were no observable eyes on them and, to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t seem all that receptive to sight.

With the starfish, it seems this lack of sight often pulled them away from protective groups of monsters. While this could be seen as a good thing because they were often alone, it actually put us on edge; at any moment, there could be a starfish that heard us and moved in to attack. 

It was only made worse by the fact that they moved rather silently, clambering and climbing all over the floor, wall, and ceiling. They were agile creatures.

For some reason, we hadn’t found any on either of the lower two floors--it was like the hive had turned each floor into a separate biome in a tiny ecosystem; the starfish were native to only the first floor.

It was only natural, therefore, that the first one took us by surprise. S2 was constantly asked whether rooms or directions were safe but she seemed to genuinely not know anymore--everything just blurred together, apparently, for her.

Owen didn’t seem to think this was too much of a bad omen but it put me on edge and nervous; I was perhaps more aware than the others on how much we were reliant upon her Specialisation to ensure a sense of safety and security.

S2 being useful and my Specialisation not being used to spot monsters meant that the first person to actually notice the presence of this creature was, in fact, S1. She paused us in our moving and we all held our breaths. She readied her knife and her body was poised; she was like a frog, ready to leap at whatever target at a moment’s notice.

She turned her head, and then her body, as if tacking a sound. Luna and I had already pulled out our bows, ready to shoot.

And then we saw it. Behind us. It ran with such speed it took me by surprise; it was all I could do to activate my Specialisation and draw back my bow instinctively. The arrow was loosed and lodged itself in the torso-sized creature.

From its perch on the wall, one, two legs dangled loosely, knocked off, before it regained its grip. Its legs have no adhesive property.

The quickness, the alacrity, with which it regained its footing reminded me of the scurrying of ants. With mere seconds, it had already ran up to Candace who was at the back of our group.

Luna had also shot an arrow at it but, annoyingly, it was just like the limb eaters; the arrows punched into them and threw them around for a moment but didn’t seem to do much damage.

Jonathon, as fast as he could react and move, tried for an unsuccessful combination of care and haste in pushing through our group to get to it. Candace, as a non-combatant, unsurprisingly didn’t have the skills or experience to adequately react in time. She flailed around and fell over, hitting her feet against loose debris.

It was then that a loud, ringing sound pierced my ears. In a split second, a cacophony of noise flooded my ear canals like I was listening to a firework mere feet away from me before dying down.

The creature fell to the ground unceremoniously, a red, bloodied hole cut straight through it.

My eyes immediately darted to the imposing form of Owen; he stood tall and cut a striking figure. In his hands was a gun, a pistol, no doubt where the shocking thunder had emanated from.

Fuck!

No one spoke; silence was all that one could hear apart from the ringing in our ears.

What followed after that was more encounters of that sort; the starfish always managed to sneak up on us. S1 had a good success rate of hearing them approach but it was always Owen who took them out; Jonathon couldn’t respond in time nor did he have good reach to do so. Luna and I couldn’t hurt them.

With that one encounter added to the wheel of possible ways to die, we ventured forth through the rest of this floor. The multitude of monsters, whether they be limb eaters, starfish, or bears (masses of wiggling flesh not unlike a clump of weeds), we slew them as we came across them with ruthless efficiency.

There was no idle chatter; all talk was professional and concise. Our nerves were sharpened and our teamwork was competent.

Eventually, after two hours of cutting down monster after monster, we had made it to what S2 believed to be the heart.

There was only one more thing to kill.