Author's Note

I swear the word count wasn't intentional.

2

Darius woke up first and he noticed it was a little colder than he and his friends expected. Typical, weathermen can never get it right when you want them to, he thought to himself. He grabbed his commlink, flipped to the homescreen, tapped the weather app to get the new hourly forecast, and waited for the screen to refresh. He rubbed his eyes as he waited, expecting it to be done by the time he looked at the screen again. What he saw was a swirling loading indicator.

After a few moments the app displayed that no connection could be made."What?" Darius grumbled. It was then that he looked at what kind of signal he had. He appeared to not be on the grid. "You're shitting me." At this time Alex woke up, sat up, and asked what his problem was. "I ain't got a signal on my link."

Alex snickered as he stretched a little in their somewhat confined space. "When was the last time you soft reboot that thing?" He asked and received the answer of last week. "Well you should be good. They weren't scheduled to push out any updates or anything that would cause you that kind of issue," Alex stated and grabbed his own commlink, seeing it too had no signal. "The fuck?"

"You too?" Darius asked and Alex nodded with a raised eyebrow of confusion. "Grab Iggy's and pray his isn't fucked too."

Alex leaned over Ignacio, at their head, and snatched the man’s commlink. Looking at the screen, he saw that the third of their number was in the same boat with no signal. However, he noticed something else that was amiss about the device. To his knowledge, Ignacio had gone to bed with less than half a charge on his commlink and planned to charge it in the morning. However, it was fully charged. On a whim he checked his own and saw the same, which he knew shouldn't be the case. What the fuck? He thought.

This moment of discovery didn't go unnoticed. Darius saw the look on his friend's face. "That bad?" He asked as he sat up.

"D, check your link again. What's your battery at?"

"Probably seventy or thereabouts," he said as he looked to his commlink again to check. The moment he saw a full charge, he stated his own surprise. “The shit is this? I'm maxed."

"Alright, it's probably something weird, having to do with them pushing out a quick update or a hotfix gone wrong. Let's just keep an eye on the links. I'm going to pair mine and Iggy's to the Ex-Wife for a centralized signal. You should too." Alex wasn’t too concerned about the issue. They could still use the satellite connections they had on in the Ex-Wife and the backup satellite uplink box. Darius nodded and Alex started putting on his boots, intending to get outside and start breakfast. He would handle the signal thing after they had food in their bellies.

Iggy had been partially awake for some of the conversation and decided to get up himself. "So I'm guessing our technical overlords have said fuck us?" He asked as he started putting his own boots on.

"Pretty much," Darius responded.

In short order all three of them had their boots and coats on, EDC items were all in their proper place, and Ignacio was unzipping the tent entrance. However the large man stopped in the portal, blocking the way, and his compatriots voiced their annoyance. "Hey, fuck you. I'm just surprised there's like half a foot of snow on the ground," Ignacio stated as he continued out. There was just enough ambient light before sunrise that one could see there was indeed a bunch of snow outside.

"God dammit. Now all our shit's going to be covered. Well there goes the next twenty minutes," Alex complained as Darius exited next, followed by himself.

As Alex stood upright Darius made an observation. "Or maybe not."

"What do you…" Alex's question died before he could finish it as the three men briefly stared at their vehicles, field table, folding chairs, and even their firepit, surprisingly not covered in snow.

"How does that happen?" Ignacio asked.

"No clue," Darius answered, "and I ain't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. We don't have to get a metric ton of snow off of everything." This received two grunts of agreement from the other two and they began, again, to get on with the morning. Ignacio stepped over to prepare their fire and Darius to grab the food.

They were, however, again stopped in their tracks when Alex voiced another observation after he took a second to look around. "Guys, wasn't there a boulder right over there behind the tent?" He pointed with a thumb over his shoulder. "I also swear these trees were denser and…" Alex's face grew further confused as he paused before continuing, "and unless the mountains fucking moved, they should be on our left to the fucking west." Quickly checking the compass in his watch he continued, "which my compass and the coming sunrise is saying is that way." He accentuated his last statement by pointing to his left, west, with his other hand.

The other two stopped what they were doing and looked around for themselves. It looked like the Rockies had moved to the north and the clearing they were in was indeed different than what they all remembered from yesterday evening.

"He's right D," Ignacio said. “I don't see the path we drove here on either."

"Well I don't remember us taking any drugs. So either we've finally snapped and we're freaking out in sync, or we fucking teleported to a new clearling."

"I'm checking the Ex-wife," Darius stated.

"Why?" Ignacio asked.

"I'm checking the log on the console to see if we woke up, got plastered or some shit, and moved spots."

"Oh… makes sense. I'm pretty damn sure we wouldn’t do that. We aren’t that stupid.”

“I doubt that too, but look around us.”

“Good point.”

Darius opened the driver-side door of the Ex-wife, hopped in, woke up the computer, and brought up the logs."This can't be right," he said as Ignacio and Alex approached the truck. "It says the last time the bitch ran was when we got here. Also says the batteries are full."

"What's the GPS say? Where are we?"

"It says we aren't getting any satellites."

"Okay, this fucking weird shit has to go," Alex said as he hopped into the front seat and started going through some of the logs himself. He spent a few minutes sifting through logs with Darius and Ignacio watching intently, lending their own eyes. "It looks like about half an hour ago the batteries started to fill back up, fast… like stupid fast. But there’s no input for the power. It just started climbing. At the same time we lost all GPS signals. Also… wait, what? It says the temperature dropped from fifty-five degrees to fucking thirty."

"What's weird about it?" Ignacio asked.

"Well it's weird when it happens in a fucking second. No gradual change. It's just one temp one second and then the next it's fucking freezing temperatures."

"Right, definitely fucking weird."

Darius had begun leaning out and standing up, in the door of the Ex-Wife, looking around and over the truck to get a better look at his surroundings. None of this looks right. He thought to himself after a few moments. I've been coming to this area for years. I should at least see something familiar.

The three of them had been to Colorado a fair few times up and down the Rocky Mountains and something occurred to Darius, something that he asked in an open question. "Guys, do those look like the Rockies to you?"

This got both of his friends’ attention and both of them looked toward the mountains. No, they didn't look like the Rockies they were used to. They were too extreme on the incline. If anything, they looked like they should be seeing Russians or assholes trying to reach the highest point on the planet, most likely the latter.

"Where the hell are we?" Darius asked no one in particular.

“Fuck this, I’m getting some water from the creek… if it’s even fucking there.” Ignacio briskly walked over to their firepit where they had a twenty liter water jug. “If I see polar bears or fucking Santa, I’ll inform you. Oh and Lex,” Ignacio added while looking back, “get the azimuth of the sunrise when it happens. We can start figuring out where the hell we are with that.”

“You got it,” Alex acknowledged. As Ignacio went on his way, Alex spoke to Darius. “D, can you handle the fire and breakfast? I’m gonna troubleshoot this connection thing.”

“Sure. I’ll give Iggy a hand first. Keep us posted.”

“Yeah,” Alex answered offhandedly. “Actually, let me test something.” He then ran a quick command and received the desired responses. “Good,” he said with obvious relief in his voice. “At least some shit’s working right. Local coms should be good. Just don’t go out too far for now. I don’t want to push our absolutely fantastic luck right now.” Alex’s voice was dripping with sarcasm.

“You got it.” As Darius walked away, he put his earbuds in and turned on the microphones in them from his commlink. Plugging his datajack into his commlink, he then mentally keyed his microphones and sent a coms check. He received an affirmative and continued on his way.

With that done, Darius caught up to Ignacio. The man had found a creek. It was frozen over with what looked like an easily broken lair of ice.

“Well I found a creek,” Ignacio skeptically stated. “The one from last night didn’t look this deep or narrow.”

“There also wasn’t a big fallen tree in it over there,” Darius added.

“Exactly.” Ignacio set the jug down in the snow, picked up a football-sized rock from nearby, and threw it with great force at a spot where the water almost met their side of the creek. With a satisfactory breaking sound and splash, a large hole was created that they could collect water from.

Darius looked to his friend with an amused look on his face as he picked up the jug and walked over to the new hole, unscrewing the cap on the jug. “You feel better?”

“Oh, I’m not annoyed at all,” sarcasm blatant in Ignacio’s voice. “We don’t know where we are and there’s no reason we would have blacked out and moved to wherever here is” Ignacio looked in the direction of the rising sun. “Once we get the direction of that, we can start figuring this out.”

Darius, finished filling the jug, screwed the cap back on and began walking back to their camp with Ignacio joining him as he passed. “You’re right. Pretty sure our resident prepper has all the documentation we could ever need to find our position on those harddrives.”

“Yeah. I still remember most, or all, of the fieldcraft I’ve learned and we could probably figure it out. But having the math and reference material with all of it in black and white is going to be good for my sanity.”

“Eh, everyone knows you aren’t sane to begin with,” Darius retorted. “Oh, throw your earbuds in. Local communications are up and running.”

“Well at least something fucking works.”

They entered their clearing and Darius went over to their long dead fire to light it anew, dropping off the jug next to his chair. Today’s plans for an early morning trek through the woods for small game had clearly gone out the window once they woke up to a clearly different location than they stopped in originally.

Ignacio walked over to the Ex-Wife. He noticed that the truck box was partly propped open as he opened the back driver side door, stepped up into the cab, and stopped in his tracks as he went to turn on the stack in the back, behind him. Alex was crouched next to the stack, left arm between and behind several boxes in the stack and their neighbor devices. In his right hand he held a small testing unit, a cable coming out of the top of the device and following the man’s left arm behind the equipment.

“You’re working quick. Anything broken?”

“No. Not yet.” Alex’s eyes never left the device, his left arm moving slightly. He was checking physical ports and data flow. “And that’s the fucking problem.”

“You going to do anything that would stop me from getting access to the harddrives?”

“No. What you need ‘em for?” Alex looked away from his work, giving Ignacio an inquisitive look. When Ignacio explained why, Alex snickered. “You don’t need the stack up for that. The front console has all of that kind of shit, two sticks in the front have copies of the same, and all our commlinks have copies in a folder on those microsticks I put in our links.”

“No shit, those things aren’t just so you can fill ‘em full of malware?”

“That was one time!”

“Sure it was.”

“Go fuck with D. I’m trying to work here.” Alex then returned to his troubleshooting and Ignacio got out of the Ex-Wife.

Ignacio navigated to the folder on his commlink and, seeing the list of documentation, browsed for a moment until he found the documentation he was looking for. With a quick search in the table of contents he found the reference table and interactive map he was looking for.

“What’d you get for the azimuth?” Ignacio asked Alex and he received a text message as his only reply. It had the azimuth and time that the sunrise crested over the snowy, tree-covered hills to the east. With an amused grin he closed the door to the truck and walked over to Darius, who was building up the fire after getting it started.

“Can you start filtering that?” Darius indicated the jug of water they’d fetched with a move of his head, as his hands were preoccupied with the fire. Ignacio hummed an affirmative in response and began the task of running the manual pump on the side of the jug to begin filtering the water inside while controlling his commlink through his datajack.

“Well that can’t be right.” Ignacio said, confused, after a couple of minutes had gone by of the two doing their particular task.

“What now?” Darius looked up from his fire building at Ignacio, while still poking at the fire with a stick and waiting for it to settle.

“Give me a sec.” Ignacio plugged the information into the map again, went through the table again, and went over the documentation again to confirm, just to come to the same conclusion. “This makes no fucking sense. I keep getting that we’re either somewhere so far south we’re in South America or it’s fucking July.”

“What?!”

“You got the same shit on that stick Lex made for us. You do it, because I must be fucking up somehow.”

“Okay…” Darius then found the same folder and when he got to the appropriate documentation, Ignacio gave him the azimuth and time of the sunrise. He then went through the same process Ignacio had, came to the same conclusion, and triple checked his work. The results were the same each time. “This can’t be fucking right.”

The two of them spent the following half an hour discussing, debating, and verifying this outlandish conclusion while Darius started cooking up their breakfast and Ignacio continued pumping. Their talk was interrupted when Alex stormed out of the Ex-Wife, kicking snow around in frustration as he grumbled loudly.

“SITREP?” Darius called over.

“The situation?!” Alex growled. “The situation is that there apparently ain’t no fucking satalites or antennas!” Alex walked over to his friends as he continued. “As in none at all. I can’t pick up any type of signal, transmission, or literally anything that isn’t coming out of our devices. I’m picking up noise,” he accentuated with air quotes, “but even that doesn’t seem to be doing anything. I should at least be able to detect solar radiation having some kind of effect on some of our signals but it’s as if we’re in a vacuum that’s a radioman’s perfect wet dream. All the equipment I’ve checked is working fine… better than fine, actually.”

“Care to elaborate?” Ignacio asked.

“Sure!” Alex answered with an over-exaggerated grin, his annoyance and frustration starting to actually get to him to some degree.

“Lex,” Darius interjected, “calm down.”

“Right...right.” Alex took off his beanie and rubbed over his metal-covered cranium with his free hand as he took a deep breath. One of his flaws was that he sometimes let his frustrations get ahold of him when he had no answers to a problem.

“Okay,” Darius began, “what’s up with the equipment?”

Alex sighed before he began. “There is nothing wrong with the equipment as far as I can tell. Everything is working beyond perfectly, except that I can’t hear or pick up anything that’s not ours. Even the batteries are full. And I mean all of them.” He gestured to himself. “Even the internal batteries in my warez are full and I haven’t charged them since yesterday. Iggy, at this rate I’d bet a case of beer that your leg is full too, along with the wireless parts of both of y’all’s datajacks.”

All of their datajacks had wireless capability but for only so long as the internal batteries in them did not have the greatest capacity. Even when not being continuously utilized, the simple act of being connected to their commlinks meant that they should be slowly draining the battery. So with infrequent use when one didn’t wish to physically manipulate or to go through the motions of jacking into a paired device, a twice weekly recharge was usually required.

In response, Ignacio checked his leg while both Darius and himself checked the power on their datajacks. As Alex predicted, they were all at full charges and the two of them expressed their confusion.

“If it was just the links and the boxes in the stack that we have pulling updates automatically, I could maybe explain it as some really weird update spanning multiple companies and types of devices.” Alex put his beanie back on. “But it isn’t. Every single battery I’ve checked is full, even when there is no reason for it to be. I’ve seen some really weird, and wide in scope, technical problems in my life but this is the first time where I can legitimately say this can’t be happening. I'm expecting to wake up from this weird dream any second now, because that’s the only way this makes sense.”

“I hate to burst your bubble,” Darius said, “but I'm pretty sure that’s not happening.”

“Ditto,” Ignacio agreed.

“I know.” Alex replied, pinching the bridge of his nose. He then looked to his friends. “We at least have some idea as to where we are?” The look he received from them both gave him his answer. “Well are we lost or just definitely not where we’re supposed to be?”

“Both,” Darius answered.

“Well that’s just fantastic.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what we were saying.” Ignacio looked at the breakfast Darius was cooking and saw an opportunity to take a break. “Let’s eat, take a breather, and regroup.”

His two compatriots agreed and they took the break they all needed. They did some conversing during the meal in the form of talking about the trip so far and their usual shit talking. When they were done, Ignacio and Darius updated Alex on their navigational glitches. After some discussion involving combing through the virtual library they had, the three couldn’t make heads or tails of the impossible situation they found themselves in.

Once the discussion on that topic had ended and a plan for moving forward had been formed, they split into two teams to begin execution. Ignacio was to assist Alex with going over all their equipment again to see if anything got missed, while Darius collected more wood for the fire while getting a better gauge on their immediate surroundings.

****

Darius folded the handsaw and hooked it onto his belt. He had spent the last ten minutes breaking up a pair of large fallen branches he’d found into smaller, more easily transportable pieces that would be able to fuel their campfire for a couple hours. It had started lightly snowing as he worked.

In short order he had a stack of the pieces tied up in a bundle with two large loops of paracord hanging loose. He picked the wood up and put it on his back, using the loops to wear it as a backpack. He then picked up the rest of the pieces, also tied together in a bundle, and carried them under an arm.

He’d had this feeling of being watched for a while and as he walked back to their campsite, his head was on a swivel. His path back to the campsite was more direct as it had taken some time to find a good, large source of firewood around their new, snow covered, location.

As he stepped over a large rock, he noticed a disturbance in the snow. Stopping, he looked at it and they looked to be tracks. Something about the size of a small deer or other medium-sized game, at least by Darius' estimation.There also appeared to be several of them. He looked around him and followed the path of the tracks. It seemed that whatever animals these were, they had been moving to the northeast.

In short order he was back at the campsite offloading the firewood. While he piled the new wood onto what had already been brought in, he watched Ignacio and Alex running an experiment on the Ex-Wife.

“Iggy, when I said gun it, I meant foot on the floor.” Alex was in front of the truck with the hood open. He had a blocky portable terminal with several cables coming out of the back and connecting to several ports and nodes inside and around the engine and battery. “There we go.” After about a minute, Alex told Ignacio to kill it.

Ignacio stepped out of the Ex-Wife and moved next to Alex, looking at the screen of the terminal. “What we got?”

“Jesus, you’re impatient,” Alex complained. “Give me a sec.”

Darius joined them and watched as Alex opened up all the recorded readings they had just acquired. At first, everything looked normal, except that the batteries didn’t seem to be depleting. Even with the stack inside completely powered up, every single device and doodad turned on that could pull power from the batteries, and the engine being floored while in neutral, it didn’t look like the batteries were affected. Then they started slowing the data playback and looking at the numbers on a practically microscopic level.

“There, you see that?” Alex pointed to the screen. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

Alex was right. What the readings were showing was that they were pulling power and batteries were depleting. The catch, however, was that as they were drained, they were somehow replenishing almost immediately.

“Just to be sure,” Darius began, “what are the chances that the software is bugging out and giving us false readings?”

“For only one, definitely possible,” Alex answered. “However every single way we have on hand of measuring this shit glitching in the exact same way with every battery we have, practically impossible.”

“Yeah, not likely that everything is broken,” Ignacio agreed.

For the sake of being thorough, the three of them moved over to their new vehicle and did the same test. They got the same results.

“That’s crazy.”

“Iggy, that’s not just crazy,” Darius said.

“That’s insane,” Alex stated as he rubbed his temples. “Okay, with that, what I saw when I was checking all that other shit earlier, and our warez, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are somehow charging all our shit through magic.”

“Not funny, Lex.”

“It’s a little funny,” Ignacio countered with a snicker.

“It’s really not.”

“It will be funny a year from now when we’ve gotten past all this weird shit,” Alex added. “But for now, this some bullshit.”

“True.”

“Hey Lex,” Ignacio began, “didn’t you get a drone or two from that old timer?”

Alex stopped rubbing his temples and looked at his friend. “Yeah, I got that larger one with the repeater and sensor rig. There’s also the four small ones he threw at me for shits and giggles. Pretty sure one of them needs to be fixed though. Why?”

“Well with this battery thing figured out, for now, maybe we use the drones to get a better look at our surroundings?”

“Well the batteries are prolly dead or low a…What am I saying? They’re probably fully charged.” Alex had an expression of resignation on his face.

They got into one of the boxes in the back of their larger truck and pulled out all the drones. The larger one required a bit of reassembly and while Alex and Ignacio did that, Darius looked over and tested the smaller ones. Two of them weren’t functional and required some repairs that they could look into later. He put them back inside the box.

With the three drones ready, and unsurprisingly with fully-charged batteries, Alex connected them to the Ex-Wife, started them up, and sent the smaller two out in a slow and tight outward spiral around their campsite to sweep their surroundings. The larger one, they took direct control of and began by sending it straight up a hundred and fifty meters for a bird’s-eye view.

They took turns watching the feeds for over an hour, each doing various tasks that needed to get done for their new survival situation. However each of them had the three feeds to the sides of their AR to keep multiple pairs of eyes on the video streams.

“I got something.” It was when Alex was flying the large drone over a clearing that something other than trees and rocks was spotted.

“Looks like a pack of wolves have their quarry stuck on a rock,” Ignacio stated. “Prolly be dead in a few. Credit where it’s due, it’s keeping them back fairly well.”

“Lex, can you get a better look at this? Might be able to know more about our locale if we know what those are.”

“Too easy, D,” Alex answered and began zooming in the camera. Ignacio looked to be right in his assessment as they got a closer picture. “Looks like a big cat. Maybe a small mountain lion?”

“What’s that on it’s back? It got something stuck to it?”

“Not sure.” Alex zoomed in further.

“The fuck?!” The three of them exclaimed.

“What the hell is that?” Darius asked, to no one in particular.

“There’s no way that’s what I think it is.” Ignacio was simply beside himself and it was obvious in his voice.

“It’s wing looks broken or something,” Alex pointed out after seeing that one of its wings seemed to be bent in an unnatural fashion.

“How is that the first thing you’re pointing out?”

“I hit ‘fuck it’ a while ago.”

“Is that… does it have something shiny under it?” Darius asked.

“Yeah,” Ignacio answered. “Wonder what it is?” Both Ignacio and Darius had moved over to Alex as he piloted the drone.

One of the wolves circling the creature moved in, apparently sensing an opening, and what they saw next made all three of their jaws drop. The creature spun around and hit the wolf with what looked like a sword, hitting the wolf in the head. The wolf recoiled and the prey began spinning around, assumedly looking for more takers.

Alex zoomed in further, foregoing having a view of the whole scene. Now the creature was all that was in view in that stream and what they saw was the strangest thing they’d experienced so far.

They saw what they assumed to be a griffon holding a sword out, keeping it’s attackers at bay. It looked to be wearing a metal piece of clothing or armor that was so covered in dirt and filth that they just now could see it and some kind of cloth or scarf that was now lightly blowing in the wind.

“Lex, where is this?” Ignacio asked as he climbed into the bed of the Ex-Wife and opened up the truck box.

"Five-two degrees, little under three miles out," Alex answered.

"Shit, Iggy, what are you getting us into?" Darius asked as he moved over to the side of the bed, almost assuredly knowing the answer to his question.

"He's going to go help ‘em and drag us with him."

"Exactly," Ignacio confirmed. "If that thing is intelligent, we need to help them." He then handed Darius his just loaded rifle and grabbed Alex's and his own now loaded weapons, while moving to get in the Ex-Wife. “We can also ask the thing where the hell we are.”

"I hate when you're right sometimes," Darius grumbled, slinging his rifle to hang in front of him and getting in the driver's seat.

"That is assuming that they speak english. Recalling the small drones to watch our shit," Alex retorted and then informed, taking his rifle from Ignacio.

Kicking up some snow, the Ex-Wife was off to the northeast winding its way through the forest. While not as dense as what they'd seen last night, the trees did slow them down. Though they were still traveling much faster than they could run.

Alex zoomed out the camera again and positioned the drone almost directly above the clearing for a full view of the scene. It wasn’t looking good. The wolves were getting more aggressive in their probing of their prey. One or two of the wolves were making a move towards the creature every few seconds now.

“We should be able to scare them off with the Ex-Wife,” Darius stated. Hopefully they wouldn’t need their rifles. “Lex, you didn’t get those two speakers working again, did you?” They had a pair of loud baseball sized speakers on the roof of the Ex-Wife, next to the flood lights, that they’d run into a technical issue with a couple weeks ago during a post-competition party. Apparently they didn’t like large inebriated hispanic men falling on them while attempting to river dance on the roof.

“Should be good. Running test,” Alex answered, and a quick beep-like tone was heard as they sped through the forest. “We’re good.”

“Hit them with something loud to scare them off.” Ignacio, like his compatriots, logically assumed that a large loud something coming in and asserting itself into the clearing would be enough to make the pack leave. If they didn’t, it would at least cause them to back off enough that the three of them could get out, assert an intimidating presence, and hopefully extract the assumed griffon without incident.

“I got just the thing," Alex replied, already at work.

It was only a minute or so after their exchange, time enough for Alex to queue up a speed metal song during a particularly heavy solo and loop that particular segment, that they got close enough to begin to see the clearing through the trees. A few seconds more and Ignacio clapped Alex on the shoulder from his seat behind the shorter man. Alex then keyed the music to begin playing and the forest suddenly erupted with sound.

They saw the pack jump, on the feed and from what they could see through the trees as they rapidly approached. A couple of them seemed to spot the Ex-Wife on its approach and appeared to bark, getting the attention of their fellows. The majority of the pack immediately responded by looking in their direction. One of the wolves, however, did not.

The supposed griffon was also momentarily distracted by the sudden noise and one wolf saw this as an opportunity to strike. The predator bolted up to the griffin and sank its jaws into the sword arm of its prey. The three men saw the griffin scream in pain as it pulled a large knife or dagger from somewhere on its person and began stabbing and hacking at the predator's head.

The trio in the truck exclaimed their frustration at the new development with a few choice expletives. The fact that the individual they were trying to rescue was taking further injury did not sit well with them.

In response to the reprisal, the wolf let go of it's prey and fell back and down to the base of the rock. A few more seconds passed with the wolf continuing to reel from the damage to its head and the griffon seeming to look to its new injury before the truck crashed through a small young evergreen that was unfortunately in between two trees spaced out enough for them to drive through.

Darius held down the horn as they entered the clearing, along with the breaks. When they entered the clearing, the truck slid forward a few meters and spun to the left some on the snow covered ground on account of their speed. Between all the noise and the snow being flung around from the evergreen they hit on the way in, the pack backed away from them towards the opposite side of the clearing they were on.

With the passenger side of the Ex-Wife being the prominent side facing the large rock their imperilled target still stood upon, Alex and Ignacio burst out of their doors and Darius opened his door, stood up in the doorway, and posted up a supported firing position on the roof of the truck where he had view of the clearing with the exception of the area directly behind the large rock.

The griffon, still on top of the aforementioned rock, looked to have a bewildered expression on its face as Ignacio and Alex moved towards the individual, though they could still see that it was in great pain.

“Can you move to us?” Ignacio yelled.

“Please help me!" It pleaded in a rather young sounding voice and began to stumble towards them, down the rock, before it lost its footing and fell a meter, or so, to the ground. It yelled in pain as it landed on its back.

“Shit! Moving," Ignacio called out to his friends as he rushed to the creature and six loud cracks were heard as a wolf began to charge towards the creature and Ignacio, only to fall to the ground and tumble a few feet.

"Fuck, these things are aggressive," Darius observed. Both he and Alex had seen the wolf as it began its rush to their friend and sent three rounds each to the offending predator.

"Iggy, throw it 'n back," Alex called out and both he and Darius put several more rounds in another charging wolf. "Jesus, these things should’ve scared off by now.”

When Ignacio got to the prone griffon’s side, he could see that it was rather small, about the size of a medium sized dog, and no longer conscious. It appeared that it’s injuries and the fall onto its already damaged wing had pushed it past its limits. In light of this, Ignacio grabbed the creature by the collar of its armor behind the neck, lifted, and began to half carry, half drag the creature to the truck. While he did this, he kept his rifle pulled into the pocket of his shoulder and ready to be used, minus his now occupied support hand. This was a good decision, as several wolves rushed them.

A cacophony of cracks were heard as the three sent a few dozen rounds into the wolves, stopping all four of them.

"What the actual fuck is up with these things?!" Alex exclaimed as he began moving back as Ignacio met him on the way to the truck.

That was the last charge as the men got to the truck. It appeared the pack had finally seen the light, though they didn't run. The three covered each other in sequence as Ignacio got in the bed of the truck, pulling the injured creature with him. Then Alex closed both passenger side doors and climbed into the bed with Ignacio. When that was done, Darius sat himself back into the driver's seat and sped out of the clearing back to their camp site.

The drive back was a little bumpy but the wolves didn't appear to follow them, as Ignacio and Alex kept in eye on their surroundings. Assumedly, losing seven of their pack was enough for them to be dissuaded from pursuing their prey. As the three men approached their campsite, Alex recalled the large drone to hold above their campsite while Ignacio began looking over their new addition. While not the worst injuries they had seen in their lives, it didn't look too good.

Now that he was looking the creature over, it became apparent that this thing had been through some shit. One of its wings was bent in a way that couldn't be natural. Ignacio was no veterinarian but he was certain that the first big joint in the wing didn't naturally extend and wasn’t supposed to bend as far as it was bent right now. While there were parts of its body that were caked in dirt and grime, large scrapes and cuts could be seen on its six limbs and head. None of them seemed to be bleeding profusely. The same could not be said for it's sword arm.

Ignacio realized that the sword had somehow remained in the creature's grasp. Looking to remove the weapon to safely manipulate and better care for the limb, he saw that it had remained by way of one of the creature's fingers, or talons, being hooked in a finger ring above the crossguard. He removed the weapon and fleetingly saw that the finger was bruised and maybe more from the ordeal of being stuck in the ring as the sword was moved about. The creature had a tunic or undershirt and the sleeve was getting in the way. Ignacio tore off the sleeve and Darius placed a bag of medical supplies they kept in the truck in the bed for Ignacio to use.

“D, Iggy’s got this. Help me with security,” Alex requested. Darius answered in the affirmative and one of the first things both men did was to get some of their match equipment out. Namely, Alex retrieved his battle belt with extra magazines, a holster for his full-sized pistol, a dump pouch, a small trauma kit, and a few other nicks and nacks and Darius went with his only option, his plate carrier with all it’s accoutrement. Alex was quick to be ready while Darius pulled security and swapped with the man to begin the relatively lengthy process.

“Shit, I wish I’d done another division at least once,” Darius complained as he finished placing the last magazine in his rig. In the line-up of shooting matches they planned for the trip, Darius had opted for the more equipment heavy trooper, armored, or battle rig type divisions at each one. This was in contrast to his friends in that there was one match that both of them were competing in other divisions for a theme that, while funny, Darius couldn’t help but feel disappointed at the idea.

“It’s your fault for being no fun,” Alex chuckled while keeping an eye on the perimeter of their campsite with his eyes and the drones that were now strategically hovering or patrolling around them. “Even Henie thought it was cool and she wouldn’t know cool if it crawled up her ass an… I got movement. East side, fifty, no, seventy-five meters.” Alex interrupted himself.

“Iggy, how’s it coming?” Darius inquired as he and Alex visually scanned to the east.

“Good. Got everything but the wing. Not sure how to tackle that. Just keep an eye out for those bitch ass wolves.” Ignacio had stopped the bleeding in its swordarm, addressed all of the more minor cuts that needed to be looked at, and was about to begin the process of trying to set a joint that he had no history with outside of shooting them up on a couple duck hunts. He’d heard Alex’s call out but trusted that they would cover his ass as he worked.

“What’d you see?” Darius asked under his breath.

“Swear I saw something go behind that tree. With the testicle rocks,” Alex answered.

“Can we send…”

“Already on it,” Alex interjected as he directed a small drone to fly over and behind the tree for a better view. “I got this, look around.”

Darius agreed with his friend's wordless implication. While predators hiding and sneaking up on their prey wasn’t a foreign concept, so far this morning they had almost exclusively abnormal interactions with said predators. All three of the men were getting weird vibes from this whole encounter and that was excluding the fact that they woke up in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t long, with the both of them looking around, until the drone got a view of the tree.

“We good,” Alex stated.

“Way to freak over a rabbit, bitch,” Darius chastised while maintaining his watch of their perimeter.

“Fuck you. Keep looking. Imma see if Iggy needs a hand.” Alex sent the command for the drone to return to its previous circular patrol pattern. “You comfortable handling the drones?”

“Sure.” Darius then received a notification in his AR that he was the primary controller of the drones they had up as Alex turned and stepped over to the bed of the Ex-Wife.

“Need a hand?” Alex asked as he hooked an arm over the side of the truck bed.

“Put the tailgate down,” Ignacio instructed. When Alex had done so, Ignacio moved his exotic patient to the end of the bed, on the tailgate, and dropped down to ground level for a better position that didn’t involve his large frame having to crouch down. “I think I know how to fix this thing,” he said while holding up the busted wing.

“You think you know?”

“You want to impart some avian wisdom I’m not aware of?”

“Calm down, what d’ya need from me?”

“Well I think that it’s just dislocated and I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out where it needs to go. So you hold this here,” Ignacio instructed and Alex grabbed the segment of the wing closest to the body. “Hold it tight and I mean it.”

“Got it.”

“Alright,” Ignacio said, doing one final check and feeling around the joint to make sure of what he was about to do. Feeling as confident as he could with his findings, he took firm hold of the other side of the joint with his left hand and held the base of the segment, at the joint, in his right hand. The hope being that he would be able to feel his progress and adjust if needed. “Three. Two. One.”

It was a rather quick affair. Ignacio moved his segment against resistance to a wall but once he passed the wall, it seemed to just fall into place. His patient gave a gruff and loud grunt and Alex saw its eyes briefly flutter open as its eyes rolled back into its head. Though other than that, it remained unconscious.

“Expected it to wake up from that.”

“It’s been through some shit,” Ignacio replied.

“We good?” Darius asked from the opposite side of the clearing, only briefly looking towards the two to confirm that they weren’t in obvious trouble.

“We’re good,” Ignacio answered and then looked to Alex. “I’m good now. Just going to look it over again and clean it up some. See if I missed anything big.”

“Kay, but grab your belt,” Alex replied. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

Ignacio acknowledged with a nod and went to his case with his gear. Since they were in no particular rush, he did a triple check of what he was about to use and as he was doing a final adjustment of his sidearm holster, Alex spoke up.

“Well we got one thing going for us.”

“And that is?” Darius inquired.

“The fucker spoke English.”