New Chicago reminded him of nothing so much as a sprawling monument to what was lost, with a dash of acid trip to keep things interesting. There had to be some thirty or so thousand people scattered throughout the city. Towering skyscrapers, the ones that hadn’t fallen into ruin or been destroyed during the Pulse, still reared up over the skyline, with Lake Michigan a greenish blue for back drop. Those were inhabited, with laundry in windows, people visible to his sharp eyes crossing the thresholds of their apartments from time to time. Each fifty plus story building a neighborhood unto its own.

  Most of the old city had been ravaged by fire, consequence of so many structures so close together and ruptured gas lines there to feed the blazes. That and no fire crews to swiftly curtail the flames. Only the most resistant superstructures survived.

  Six years on, it was incredible how much of the rubble had been cleared away, replaced by much more humble construction in scale, if not aesthetic. An architect class, maybe a dozen, must have been involved, the newly built houses, shops, and whatever else had the appearance of a common theme, a shared design philosophy: distinctly gothic, to match the great towers of the old city.

  Alexander had to admit, he was a sucker for peaked roofs, arches, and buttresses, on account of they reminded him of the wall that surrounded Falcon’s Rest.

  He picked his way through the gridded out streets, enjoying much less the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of strangers, amongst whom now blended a creature that killed and ate people. He was the hunter, presumably, but circumstances turned on a dime on Gaia. Especially where humanity was concerned. He’d been prey before, many times, and did not care for it.

  As he looked around, Alexander noticed that here, in the outer circles of the metropolis, amongst the newest of construction, the most recent of cleanup efforts, a distinctly inhuman element of the population was prominent.

  That was the latest upheaval to life on Gaia, and, probably, the one with the most profound impact to the course of history, the greatest change to mankind’s paradigm. They were not alone the unchallenged sentients of the planet. They hadn’t been before, mind, but were too egocentric to admit that bees and ants had a well-established place, and couldn’t be bothered to challenge the whales, dolphins, and octopi their rule of the seas.

  The land was different though! Or so they had believed for a time. When the first wave of dungeon cores broke, some of them, rather than replace one space with the terrain of the other, turned into bridges between. Gateways permitted an influx of what amounted to cosmic refugees, explorers, and nomadic homesteaders, by the thousands, thanks to the number of Gateways that opened when a mankind still reeling from the Pulse failed to curtail the dungeon cores. The result was a not insignificant number of Otherkin. Some right out of workaday fiction.

  Through one ghetto, congregating in neat wood and canvas stalls for business, operated by cleanly dressed, frequently bathed, and sternly implacable, Gnomes. Like Tolkienesque halflings, childlike hairless faces, thick, curly hair in many shades of brown, rust, orange, and crimson, and standing a waifish three to four feet high, with the hair thick on their remarkably tough hided feet and the backs of their relatively large hands. Order and neatness defined this area, despite the clutter of ruined buildings that, even as he watched, were being cannibalized by industrious Gnomes with picks, hammers, and prybars, broken down to useful components for incorporation into the clockmaker precision of their society. Children followed parents like ducklings, and Alexander received passive looks as he tried not to disrupt the obvious patterns of their lives in his passing.

  Immediately, as if defined by lines on the ground, ended the Gnomish neighborhood and it opened up to a wood, concrete, and slapdash leather tent bedlam were the Elves, towering, many taller than he, catapulted around in a tumble to get on with their lives, some in mad dash hurry, some drifting aimless. The Elves were lithe of limb, narrow of shoulder, with harshly angled facial bones, slightly too large slanted eyes, and hair that ran the gamut from platinum white to as black as his own feathers, with most of the shades of grey between represented. As many ran as walked, gabbling in their tongue like water running through a mountain creek. There were probably folk trading, plying their crafts, the usual activities of society, but Alexander couldn’t tell who was who or doing what through the chaos.

  Volume dropped immediately as Alexander strode into the carefully placed almost circuit logic driven arrangements of squared off stone that was a Dwarven neighborhood. Dwarves, stockier than Gnomes, and taller, like full cheeked round nosed humans of a few thousand years ago, averaged a stumpy five feet, with back and shoulders like a powerlifter. Counter to his expectation, they were not all bearded, that was a social convention amongst them. Only older, successful, or high status Dwarves wore long beards with length in proportion to standing, meaning there were any number of clean shaven and goatee or mustachioed members in view. Patient and methodical, with outbursts of laughter and smiles from time to time as they chanted a rolling guttural language, they were all of them engaged in refining and expanding their settlement with steady hands.

  That was not the only subversion of expectation.

  Elves were supposedly structured, in many tales, but Alexander found them chaotic, without direction, their actions driven by immediate wants and desires and completely unpredictable in their whims. The Gnomes seemed almost east Asian in attitudes, with a rigid social hierarchy of public face and ritualistic behaviors, but they never lied to you, and they always kept their promises. Likewise, they always collected on debts. “Go cheat a Gnome” was a euphemism for suicide nowadays. Dwarves, other than their facial hair, managed to stick most closely to expectation. They were industrious, dignified, but in an earthy way that left room for joviality. Gruff they could be with strangers, but once you had a Dwarf friend, you had a Dwarf friend for life.

  Altogether, the young man found the Dwarves the easiest to get along with.

  Otherkin were not always so…human…however. The fish folk Alexander had called Sahuagin, because that’s what other people referred to them as, actually went by C’thula. They were not, as he had assumed when killing a score of them to get to the dungeon core that spawned them, all murderous savages. Those were a dungeon manifested tribe, a darkened, corrupted caricature of the real creatures, led by their crystal heart bound guardian, created in that one’s image. Such were not representative of the species.

  The more you know.

  He had also learned, over the years, that C’thula sexual dimorphism was extreme. The males were the ones that looked like fish people, the females were Scylla, lushly beautiful women from the waist up, octopi from the waist down. Alexander shuddered when he imagined the reproductive processes involved. Not that he would ever find out, the female C’thula never surfaced, always they remained beneath the waves, abstaining communication with the surface dwellers. He had a feeling the part about drowning sailors might not have been so mythical, and resolved to keep himself firmly on dry land around those.

  Fortunately, if they were present in New Chicago, they’d be found in stone encampments along the coast. C’thula could only breath air for ten minutes before their lungs began to burn for water. He didn’t understand how they could be both salt and freshwater tolerant, but they were. Or perhaps there were different variants, and he was too ignorant of the races to know. It didn’t matter, he had no intention of prying on that front.

  Not present here, but encountered in settlements farther north, Vampires, Dracul, were another unwelcome surprise, but only until he’d gotten over the shock of meeting what had been intelligent and dangerous enemies within a dungeon of eternal night. Non dungeon born Dracul were actually just tier two versions of batfolk. They could metamorph, a commonality to creatures of Nut, to become more humanoid forms at tier three and were quite sensitive to sunlight, hence they were highly nocturnal. However, outside of being wholly nurtured from, and invested with, dark mana in a Nut dungeon, they were not prone to catching flame in the sun. Not immediately, anyway, it took a few hours for the trace dark mana of their bodies to ignite under Sol’s glare, plenty of time to remove themselves to cover.

  Vampires did subsist on blood. Any blood. They enjoyed pork mostly. Beef commonly. But Moose was, for all, a prime delicacy, like a richly seasoned sauce. Which meant that he was going to have many Dracul neighbors when they found out where Moose were most known to frequent. The good news was that Dracul were shy, quiet folk who kept to themselves and were quite scholarly, enjoying the documenting of goings on. Almost all Dracul kept a journal a Life’s Journy, in which they recorded their personal history for the edification of their children. The Dracul dungeon boss he’d faced was another corrupted tyrant, invested with the power of the dungeon core and consumed by it. Such was the fate of any who leashed themselves to the aetherical madness of a dungeon heart, it seemed. While he was gladdened that Vampires were, generally, harmless herders, weavers of cloth, and rarely seen neighbors, the best kind, he was not going to go out of his way to interact with them. Just as well, they seemed happier to be left alone.

  Werewolves were also found skulking around in the wilds. Fortunately, werewolves were bloodthirsty shape shifters maddened by dark mana everywhere, so no readjustment of his entire world views necessary on that front. That they would drag a man or woman off to be twisted by dark mana was another reminder that some creatures were fundamentally not compatible with civilized society.

  Case in point: Skin Peelers, Xiptotec, had also come through Gateways as interdimensional travelers. But. There were no peaceful versions of a Skin Peeler. To a one they were callous zealots enthralled to their demon god, and Alexander would kill them on sight. Everyone, if they knew what was good for them, killed a Skin Peeler on sight. To let them establish a breeding colony was to invite disaster.

  Alexander was too temporarily lost in thought on those cruel perversions of the Human form to notice how his glare was encouraging people to keep their distance. Just as well, he was too busy to stop and chat, and his frustration was mounting. It was inevitable now, but the young man was still stewing because even the faint hints of scuffs and disturbed ground he’d followed were impossible to track as the city outskirts encompassed him.

  The crunch of gravel and degraded pavement under his boots was mostly lost to the rustles of cloth, the thousands of footsteps around him, and the hum of New Chicago’s various ghettos, all fully engaged with their lives at this daybreak hour. Now the hunt got tricky, his prey had broken their trail in the press of peoples, the movement of sleds, carts, draft animals, and food animals herded to their fate upon a butcher’s block. It wasn’t a surprise to him that they’d elected to hide amongst the din and drum of people in the city; twice now his quarry, unable to shed his pursuit had done so. No, what was surprising was how far they’d fled, bypassing other more convenient stopping points. They could have made for the city state of Baltimore, younger, smaller, east coast version of New Chicago.

  Those folk were kind of paranoid though, so maybe not.

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  They’d had trouble with Doppelgangers too, and that shit made you keep track of who came and went within the city.

  There were other towns though, smaller towns, less careful towns. Somerset Pennsylvania on one side of the mountains, Winchester Virginia on the other, with good roads between them, if impassable in winter. The killer hadn’t even attempted to force him to choose a split in trails near the ruins of Philadelphia, one that took you south along the coastal side of the Appalachia’s, the other along the western side. No, they’d kept a hard west slant with the Great Lakes fifty miles on their right, essentially the whole way, and made straight for Chicago. An animal being chased only did that when it had a den.

  Alexander’s helmet was on his belt, his weapons slung, as he was not trying to provoke the guardsmen or Adventurers of this place by being a stranger making aggressive spectacle of themselves. He kept his long Messer handy though, it’s polished Fiend ivory hilt clear of the heavy cloak he wore. It was a slasher of a war knife, crafted himself of a complex alloy, a super metal enhanced by rune magic, of the spoils he gained by melting down the weapon of a Tech Duinn dungeon boss, a type of undead necromancer called a Reaper, dragon fang, as well as the remains of his old Messer, destroyed by a tier four Dracul in a separate encounter.

  The demon bone and starmetal scythe that Reaper had wielded had proved challenging to utilize, but he’d worked with difficult materials before, and had the best help a man could ask for in his fellow townsfolk. Their alchemical skills and talents had been part of the reason he’d hired and or convinced them to help him found the city to begin with.

  Singer, the bow on his back, was a warbow with enchanted limbs that slung arrows as hard as any crossbow. Mandrake poison on his arrow heads made sure that any hits he landed stuck. Alexander didn’t want to appear overly hostile because he was already, clearly, not walking around on a holiday. Anyone not stone blind would see that the young Outsider was searching for something. Too bad he didn’t know for what exactly he searched.

  Sure enough, he drew the sort of attention he’d been avoiding not half an hour after entering the outskirts. A trio of Humans, two men and a woman, and a Gnome. Alexander couldn’t distinguish the Gnome genders by facial feature yet, they all looked like kids to him.

  The quartet were all wearing the same indigo and orange uniform, which Alexander recalled from a time before the Pulse were the colors of the Chicago Bears, a football team. American football, of course, not soccer. It was funny how similar armor looked to football pads sometimes, they bore commonalities in design.

  Sleek and flexible, the armor the guards wore might even have been patterned from the thin plastic plates of sporting equipment, with clever straps to hold things just so, even in the violence of battle and there were some very slick interlocking design principles at work of which his Warforger’s pride took note, committing the tricks to memory for later. Smithing arms and armor had come as a necessity, born from his learning to precisely shape plates for a steam engine and other technical machinery, but he never passed on a chance to learn.

  Better every day was a lifestyle, not a choice.

  The guards were led by a blond woman, middling height, short sword, flanked by a bigger, broader brown headed man similarly armed but with a longer blade, and a Samoan guy near as big as Benjamin Grisham, who himself was modeled after a pickup truck, bearing a huge battle axe. All the gods above, below, and in between, what are they feeding you? Alexander mused. The Gnome, fire red hair, came up to the pacific islander’s thigh and carried a long dirk, a bola, a net, and a blow gun, unless Alexander missed his guess.

  “Hold there! Stranger! I don’t recognize you, traveler, would you mind giving me a few minutes of your time?” Asked the woman of the Humans, her melodious voice at odds with a plain, no-nonsense face, and she was clearly taking the lead.

  A slightly higher crest on her helmet, of something like turkey tail feathers rather than short dark starling pinions, must have been an indication of rank then.

  It was nice that she’d posed the stoppage as a question, courtesy and civility went a long way in his eyes, especially when you were keeping a hand on your sword.

  Alexander stepped to the side of the wide street at her direction, with an easy “Certainly! No trouble at all.” And a smile to back it up. He hadn’t missed the too casual stances of the other guards, who placed themselves to cut off his retreat if he should run. Competent, he conceded, and was glad for it. Incompetent guards got a lot of innocent folk relying on them killed.

  “What can I do for you Captain?” Alexander asked, letting the guardsmen do their thing.

  They relaxed, very, very slightly, at his passivity, and the Captain of the squad flashed a cool, practiced smile meant to put folk at ease.

  “Just the usual. You’re new to the city, yeah?” She queried.

  “Certainly,” Alexander confirmed, “Just arrived this morning.”

  There were no checkpoints on the outskirts, that was reserved for the inner ring walls around the city proper, where most of the Humans lived. Out here was where the newcomers were making do, the people who hadn’t yet been truly accepted as citizens of the city. And the Otherkin. That kind of thing set his teeth on edge, but it wasn’t his place, and these weren’t his people. Alexander had problems enough without getting riled up at ghettos and gentrification based on race. He had questions for these guards too, and didn’t need them getting defensive about all these people left, essentially, undefended.

  So, best to hold his tongue until after they’d gone through their rap, otherwise they got cranky. He understood, it was the same protocol as guardsfolk pretty much everywhere nowadays, they were just doing their job.

  “Gotta name there traveler?” He was asked by the man to his left, the brown haired one, without rancor, but with a bit more edge to his tone.

  The refrigerator sized Samoan guard and Gnome held their peace.

  “Ayuh. Alexander Gerifalte, of Falcon’s Rest, way up in Mainerland. I’m here on business, chasing a murderous cannibal who fled Concorde New England, just a couple days ahead of me. Been forty-seven days on the trail, and they came right straight here.” The young man said, answering the next two questions in order for them.

  Who What When Where were the common lines of interrogation, and he wanted to go ahead and get ahead of a potential good cop-bad cop routine. Best to simply tell them what they want. If they got suspicious, how and why would come later, mostly on cross examination, since it was easier to catch someone up in a lie on the more abstract questions.

  The guards looked at each other, including the Gnome, and turned back to him with greater interest.

  “From Falcon’s Rest, you say?” The lady cop said, a hint of a question in her tone.

  “That’s a long trip, you said you made that in a month and a half?” said Bad Cop, obviously doubting.

  It was a long way, and Alexander had made good time. Relatively speaking. Of course, that tended to happen when you averaged sixteen-hour days on the move. They didn’t know that, of course.

  “Ayuh,” He confirmed, “You guys and gals probably noticed, but I’m a tier three. Got some dungeon cores under my belt too, so I move well. Thanks for not laying an inspection on me without asking, by the way. It’s rude, or so I was told one time.”

  He had, in fact, been told that twice. The first time by his one day wife and Adventurer, Brig of the team of Adventurers Getsome, who had found him slowly going bush in isolation in his hometown. The second time by a Dracul Dungeon Boss who had slapped down his Greater Analyze painfully, before returning the favor with an analysis skill of its own that had felt disturbingly thorough.

  The guards relaxed even more, seeing as how their investigation was being abetted so openly. They’d had their doubts when they first laid eyes on the strange guy informants had called a “spooky one stalking around” that nobody recognized. Too many newcomers since winter, and there were some whispers of disappearances, they had to come see.

  “Yeah, well, you know, comes with the job. We’ll get to the inspection in a bit. For now, you said you were chasing a killer. Any details about that? We get a lot of newcomers through here, can’t vouch for them all.” The captain inquired.

  Alexander was getting impatient now, he was tired, cranky from long, rough days with little sleep, but there were rules to the game and breaking them just got you in trouble, so he kept a lid on it. Part of that was the frustration that he couldn’t actually answer their question with any satisfaction.

  His chagrin was obvious when he replied, “I’m really afraid I don’t have much more for you. Concorde sent us a courier that said there were disappearances for a couple of days. Then somebody opened a root cellar that should have been locked, was funky smelling, and found three half eaten bodies. The killer had eaten the liver, heart, kidneys and guts first, then started on the large muscle groups and back. Brain was exposed but untouched, maybe they got interrupted, saving the best for last or something.”

  Slightly disgusted expressions met that grisly bit of detail, but he kept on, eager to get this show on the road.

  “At that point the townsfolk got properly scared and called for me to come and see what nasty was hanging around. I thought it was dungeon spawn when I got word, but, when I got there, three people had disappeared the day before, three different men, only, nobody ever remembers seeing the three together, or even much about them, all three were recluses. That was how it started, and that’s how it is now. I don’t know what they, if there even is a they have in common. All I have is three poor descriptions of what might be victims or perpetrators and I know that the killer has a taste for human flesh.”

  As an afterthought Alexander added, “That, and they’re slick as owl shit at covering ground without leaving much trace, and can pace a tier three through the bush.”

  He knew he was dealing with honest peoples when the Captain grunted like she’d been punched and said, “Well, fuck me. That explains some things.” And the others nodded along with her.

  “Got some people going missing?” Alexander asked, his easy smile gone now, all business.

  They looked a little less comfortable, now that he had his game face on, but he wasn’t trying to make anybody happy now. He wanted to find this person, or thing, and end it so people could be safe again and he could go home.

  It was the Gnome that volunteered an answer, in clipped, precise English, “Just recently. Six suspected missing. All Otherkin, living outside the wall. Reported yesterday evening by concerned relatives. Interviews produced no leads, nothing to indicate how or when they were taken. Otherkin do not like talking to guardsmen, if it weren’t for the family we mayhap would not have known otherwise.”

  Yeah, he found himself nodding, that tracked. The target had gotten here two days ago, that meant it was already on the lookout for best eating. Six people though, that was, what? Over three hundred kilos of meat? The murderer must have been ravenous from running from him, tier threes could pack away the calories when they needed to. Maybe an Outsider with strange physiology.

  “Shit.” Alexander remarked, “That’s a lot of food. No wonder I found so little sign, killer was running right straight out, not feeding as they went. I’m now thinking we have a shape shifter bloodline, or a Class I’ve never heard anything like, and I’ve analyzed over a thousand of them, including the logs of every Matriculated in Safe Harbor. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous, with a hell of a lot of gas in the tank. I chased it, hard, for over a month and found no evidence it had foraged or even stopped much longer than an hour a day, tops.”

  Nobody was willing to disagree with that assessment.

  “This is over my pay grade,” the blond Captain decided, “Come on Mr. Garifalte of Falcon’s Rest, you need to talk to my boss.”

  He cursed inside his head, but couldn’t honestly say it was a surprise.

  “Sure thing, Captain, lead on.”

  She did and he followed, with the other guards on his flank to “escort” him through the checkpoint and up to the monolithic skyscrapers that remained of the old metropolis. He was herded into one of the nicer ones and he figured it was going to be a long day as they hit the stairwell.

  “Where we headed? Ten? Thirty?” Alexander asked, knowing it wouldn’t be.

  “Thirty? Would you listen to this guy? Boss’s office is on sixty-eight.” The Samoan dude chuckled.

  Why in the hells hadn’t the elevators been fixed? His luck was holding strong. Too bad it wasn’t the good kind.