He’s so tired.

Noah shakes out a bottle of pills, uncaps it and pours the remaining contents into his mouth. He consumes them like mints, though the unsuspecting person would believe them to be opiates with how much he’d inhaled the past week – about ten a day, over fifty total. Addicted. The bitterness lingers at the tip of his tongue.

In many cases, he’s glad he downs enough suppressants for them to dull his scent gland and circulate in his bloodstream so much it masks the smell of his blood as well – not exactly a healthy dose by medicinal standards, but it brings a side effect he more than welcomes.

He’s overcompensating for the month and though his heat is unstable and very rare, he will not take any chances of his body failing while on the run.

Take, for example, the fact that he’s thirty feet above ground level, legs dangling from a brown branch, stabilizing himself on a thin, evergreen tree. His heart palpitates irregularly, not just a side effect from the suppressants but also because he’s hungry, thirsty, and his blood sugar is dipping dangerously low.

He was mildly shaken earlier when he came across the largest grizzly bear he’d ever seen. When the bear stood on its hindlegs, it rose past twelve feet, doubling his height and more. That particular height complex aside, it was incredibly intimidating from the way it was drooling at him, pouncing on him from a hundred meters away, the horns protruding out of its back like a mutated tyrannosaurus rex – and that, Noah is sure, is not an anomaly he’d like to see at broad daylight.

Noah has certain resistance to the radiation, to the sunrays and all, but there are things he’d much rather see at nighttime when the sky is dark enough to obscure the grim, the gore, the ugliness of the planet at breakpoint.

His survival instincts made him climb up the sturdiest tree he could find, which isn’t much at all, but he’s lucky it holds his weight. He’s even luckier when he finds the bear couldn’t jump far – his overly bulky top detracts from his short legs. If Noah had to fight it, he’ll have to forsake his firearm and maybe even his life – nothing will injure it sans an anti-tank grenade.

The mutated bear settled for bulldozing its head against the tree trunk a total of twenty times before giving up with a mild concussion. A few more times and the evergreen would’ve snapped in half – or Noah would’ve fallen, broken his leg and subsequently gotten eaten, in that exact order.

The sound of a light shuffle snaps him out of his thoughts. He immediately stiffens and looks under him.

A white hare dodders along the soil. A completely tame, fluffed animal with beaded eyes – no spiked ears, no protruding beaks in place of a nose, no signs of radiation. How uncommon. Noah watches it burrow its feet unsuspectingly into the soil. He slowly pulls out a knife.

Animals with little to no mutations are safe to consume – in Noah’s case, he could eat some more radioactive foods but the sight of twin-headed falcons, scaly pigs with an extra set of teeth, and creatures with more than the normal embellishments make him lose all appetite.

His head spins when he stands up. He gingerly supports his balance with his left hand. Roasted rabbit would be nice. Even if he wouldn’t eat it, he could bring it back to Yu Ying as a souvenir – “I didn’t bring anything for you to play with,” Noah can already hear his apology in his head, “but I brought you a skewered rabbit, Yu Ying.”

He thinks about it again. The little girl is a lover of all things cute and fluffy, so if she finds out he’d stabbed an Arctic hare, a pretty thing she’d seen in children’s books, she might not let him off.

“…Maybe not?” he whispers to himself. “No, it’ll be alright. I’ll dissect it before I give it to her…”

Sue him if he occasionally talks to himself – being stranded some miles down the Nordak without any civilization is bound to take a toll. He’s often a solo traveler, so speaking aloud does help clear his mind and ease the solitude. Noah makes up his mind. He will slay the rabbit cleanly, drain the blood out, skin it and then roast it over firewood before Yu Ying discovers it.

Before he jumps down the tree, however, a shadow flashes in and instantly swallows the rabbit whole. Noah pauses in shock. “…!”

He was too fatigued to notice the caterpillar camouflaged like a pinecone on the ground. It’s a bear moth larva covered in hair, looking half porcupine, half earthworm. To get pricked by one means a slow, painful death as the toxins travel down the bloodstream, rendering the victim immobile if they’re unable to extract the substance. The exclamations are running through his head.

“…That was close,” he whispers, feeling a bead of sweat on his temple.

The caterpillar’s stomach expands to digest the live rabbit. Noah still hears it squeaking inside, one of its ears bulging out from the insect’s mouth. He grimaces in disgust when red goo spills out from the crevices of its sharp-pointed teeth. It is fortunate he hadn’t eaten much sans a few plucked berries – no matter how many times he sees these anomalies feed, the nausea is unsettling.

Incidentally, it is a tad strange to encounter so many insects in one week. The ringlet outbreak was of unnatural scale and now he’s stumbling upon creatures that aren’t normally active in daytime. Noah waits for the caterpillar to slide away before climbing down the tree.

He’s only an hour from destination. The idea brings him some comfort. Along the way, he had rested inside half-broken shelters and cabins with cold, cracked floors and leaking roofs. The homes, long abandoned, provide zero protection and it’d be a miracle he could get a wink of sleep with the howling wind and potential howling wolves outside.

When he’s not running for his life, he’s freezing to death in a decrepit part of planet earth – if asked about his impending doom, Noah would irrevocably say he’s having the time of his life. Low on food, lower on sugar, little way to sustain himself minus eating a horned beast, and he needs a proper shower instead of wiping himself with a wet cloth warmed by a campfire.

He’d have to thank Colonel Yang for the backpack, though. Noah was pleasantly surprised by the clean clothes, MRE rations, hard tack, and a random box of dried raisins that he begrudgingly ate for survival – not his favorite source of carbs, but he convinces himself not to be so selective.

Noah walks at his fastest pace, passing by fallen tree barks, withered out grass and wood debris. Huru was an unconventional farmer’s village by the junction of land and snow-cloaked mountains. Temperatures in early December dipped below negative thirty Celsius and even in July, summers occasionally fell below zero. It is exactly this kind of harsh environment that the radiation didn’t reach as quickly as it did for sub-Arctic communities.

There was once an abundance of human-grown carrots and radish stored in greenhouses and protected in plastic coverings. Unfortunately, the land had since became completely unfertile.

Noah notices an insect nest buried inside the soil, covered in sleet and dirt.

He examines it cautiously from afar. It’s ripped open forcibly, like the cocoon was shredded in half and strewn to the ground. The silk is dragged across a distance, where it meets dozens of other small nests, all of them broken apart in the same way. Butterfly cocoons.

Noah understands it immediately when he sees the soil tiling out onto the road, streaks of mud and dried blood following the path. A little further and he identifies rotting human bodies, a week old at least, though it’s hard to tell from how mutilated they look, bitten and chewed beyond recognition. He resists the urge to gag as he inches closer.

Small holes on darkened skin, ugly blisters, organs ripped and dangling out – even post-mortem, there are small flies gorging on the remains. The black clothes and dog tags denote that some of these people were task soldiers. Among the deceased are three unidentified others in quilted jackets, their faces planted face-down, and one woman with long hair and a slim figure. The latter is fully nude and even black bug bites don’t hide the other marks on her pallid skin.

Noah only needs one look to understand exactly what sort of dynamic they had going on – a group of rugged army men and one young woman who clearly doesn’t belong.

“Disgusting,” Noah spits out. There is no merit associating with inner city folk nor soldiers – they’re despicable, elitist and rotten to the core. Some of them, predominantly the alphas, are the most uneducated buffoons to exist, thinking not with their brains but with their lower bodies. Noah sighs and calms himself before revulsion and rage could take over.

There is one vehicle overturned, but he also sees some soil curving to the side, like another vehicle had braked and turned a hard corner. Noah scoffs. So it looks like at least one of them made it out. How lucky to wreck a ringlet nest and actually make it out alive – or not, Noah corrects himself when he remembers a certain researcher. After all, the bunch of buffoons ended up destroying an entire gene bank.

Noah shakes himself out of his thoughts and proceeds forward.

---

“Now we’re stuck in this dump waiting for those Unit 1 bastards to pick us up?” The freckle-faced man throws his handset up in the air and catches it again. He’s aggressive, angry, and those eyebags of his sag low from lack of sleep. “Been a whole goddamn week. Who do they take us for?”

“We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t abandoned the damned car.” Another man, brown-hair, down-turned eyes, chews on a piece of stale bread.

“Yeah? How ‘bout you take it back from that whatever-the-fuck bear we saw?”

Three men sit on the floor of a dingy cottage, all of them riled up and crabby. They look worse for wear and their dirty clothes aside, they’re all sporting injuries on their bodies.

“Why’d you get rid of the woman?” one of them complains. “Could’ve had more fun instead of being with you jackasses.”

Adams cracks open a bottle of beer – the last one they had in reserve. “Rather I get rid of you instead, motherfucker? Besides she wasn’t that hot anyway. Got bored of her fast.”

The brunet sniggers. “If the Nexus finds out you took and killed a rare omega, they’ll hang you.”

“I’ll pick up some slum whores before I get back,” Adams laughs drunkenly. “Groom them up real nice then we can call it even, yeah?”

Through all the laughter and jest, the three men don’t notice the predator outside the walls until it’s too late. A pheasant smashes the flimsy wood apart with its beak and springs onto them, squawking and hissing in agitation. They had encountered and shot one of them earlier, a much smaller one the size of their torso. This one, however, towers over a grown man.

“Fuck!” the brunet screams as he gets bit on the arm.

Adams grabs his belongings and instantly runs, leaving his two companions in the shed.

A mutated willow bird – the average person would be terrified by its scabrous body, its cracked beak, jagged wings and razor sharp, scorpion-like tail. The radiation has distorted the specie into something completely monstrous. How toxic it is for a human to get bitten or stabbed by its claws can only be imagined.

“S-Sergeant…!” The other man also leaves the brunet behind as he chases after Adams, his voice gasping in pain. “Adams! Take me with you, help me!”

“Get the fuck away from me!” Adams yells back.

“I’m not bitten! Sergeant, I’m not—”

The man is dragged back before he could run away. General knowledge denotes there are three outcomes for an infected human. The first is to get eaten before the radiation can kill them. The second is to successfully run away, then agonizingly survive some minutes, hours, or even days with it coursing through their bodies until they either die or turn into an anomaly. The third is to end their lives themselves.

None of the men from Unit 641 have considered the latter. As prideful and afraid of death as they are, all of them would sabotage another when it becomes crucial. It is a common survival instinct, and so the three trample on each other in schadenfreude. The brunet, still alive but badly disfigured from waist down, latches onto the freckle-faced man, who in turn grabs his sergeant on the ankle.

“Bastards!” Adams grabs his gun and uses it as a hammer. The rifle stock bluntly but roughly collides with the man’s nose, and soon there is a bloodbath pooling on the ground, dying the sides and soles of his boots. The man lets go with a loud wail.

The creature doesn’t wait for them. It lets out a high-pitched squawk and sinks its beak inside the man’s ruptured stomach, pulling out severed flesh and entrails. Putting the hoarse screams and yells of his soldiers behind him, Adams scuttles away.

Adams, in a crazed panic, empties out his entire rifle clip.

“Piece of shit!” he roars out alongside gunfire. “Die, you damned bird—"

The creature roars even louder as its wings are pierced by a storm of bullets. The cavernous bird is enraged and is impaling everything on sight. The tip of its tail looms closer and closer to the sergeant.