It was only when he woke up to the sight of two locusts mating just below the bridge of his nose that Kayden realized how much of a mistake it was to not fully close up his sleeping bag. No matter how badass he felt for not caring about having all the bugs crawling over him, he couldn’t forget that the inside of his sleeping bag was still warm, dry and dark. And as he slowly pulled the zipper back down, horrified by the wriggling he was feeling, he indeed saw the manifestation of his greatest fears:

  There were dozens of bugs in his pants.

  Okay. Okay. Alright. He treated the time it took to gently disrobe himself and guide his many, many roommates away from his gonads without having a panic attack as a learning experience. Just because he could keep the man eating monsters from realizing he was a tasty snack did not mean they couldn’t bother him. There were some mistakes that simply could not be made twice. This would have to be one of them.

  He checked the time on his phone - five in the morning. Bad for his sleep, but good for his now desperate need to sit out side and hug his knees for a little while. If he’d been woken by his alarm (which would now go through the single earbud he wore when he went to sleep, so as to not anger his roommates), he’d have barely any time to shake off the experience before he had to grab the bus.

  A locust landed on the screen. He guided it onto his hand so he could put the phone away without bothering it. It didn’t quite work - he felt it twitch and turn suddenly around as it discovered it stood upon a five and a half foot pillar of all you can eat meat for a little while, but it didn’t get to rush to the meatier parts of Kayden’s arm before its mind muddled up again and it flew off.

  He’d have to add more long-sleeved shirts to the list. And gloves to tuck them into. And goggles too, probably. And a mask, in case they tried probing his nostrils.

  One thing after another went on his internal checklist as Kayden trudged back towards the rift, and even though he wanted to feel non-humid air like a starving man a pack of gummy bears, he forced himself to take a small detour to check on the water pools. What he saw was disheartening.

  What had been a thick layer of eggs along the bottom of the crystal-clear water, like some awful organic sediment, sat reduced to a mere thin smattering. The light shining from the oddly smooth blue stone beneath was almost completely uninterrupted. It would probably be at least a week until there were enough for another harvest to be worth it. That was good, because he hated every part of that experience, but it also meant he needed some other way to get enough money for all the things he needed.

  Whatever. Food for thought when he wasn’t groggy as shit and covered in bugs. Another few minutes of achingly slow walking so as to avoid startling any of the bastards taking shelter in the bends of his knees, and he was finally back somewhere habitable. A quick change out of his designated rift clothes, a bang on the door, and Frank let him back out under the sky with a weird look.

  “You look like shit,” the guard said, without a hint of pretense. He was probably right, but Kayden was already feeling better now that he could feel wind on his face and fresh air in his lungs. “Why’re you up at the crack of dawn? Got somethin’ to do?”

  “It’s when I woke up,” Kayden replied. He could feel the remnants of his bad mood clipping his replies into terse fragments of what he intended to be. Some vague guiltiness at being rude raised its hackles within his head, so he sighed and forced himself to elaborate. “Just… y’know. Forgot to close up my sleeping bag properly. Bugs got in.”

  “No, I don’t know. That’s not somethin’ a man should be dealin’ with.” Frank had a tone like he was about to go into a lecture as old men are wont to do, but Kayden cut him off.

  “I know that there are better options available.” His tone grew an edge as he leaned against the grey, rough outer wall of the box. He would raise his voice, but he was too damn tired to bother. “I am consciously aware that I am making the worse decision by staying in there. I know that.”

  Kayden slid down ‘till his ass pressed against the grass at a speed that had him wondering if Frank thought he collapsed. That wouldn’t really help his argument. “Call it my stupid fuckin’ huge ego getting in the way. I don’t care. This is what I’m going to do.”

  A pause, as Frank glared at him. Kayden watched his fists clench and unclench.

  “You’re killin’ yourself,” he said eventually, to which Kayden didn’t reply. “I known you for two days and you look half the man you used to be. But fine, whatever. Suits me right for tryin’ to do right by someone for once. Just get back in the box before Haley gets here.”

  Kayden nodded, and after a momentary battle between the logical and exhausted parts of his mind decided to just head back now rather than risk Frank’s wife seeing him. He didn’t really feel like mentioning to Frank that the need to hide made him feel less human than sleeping inside a cave did.

  If Kayden could actually afford food, he would have refused that norming’s bagel. As it was, he had to let his pride take the hit, and he sheepishly accepted the food, thanked Frank, and left before there was any time to speak further.

  He tried to let himself just sit at the bus stop. There were a million things that needed doing if he was gonna stop hanging off the edge of ‘barely getting by’ into ‘not surviving’, but he needed a minute to not think about it. But he couldn’t help it - his mind raced with ideas even without his input, and before he knew it he was poking at his phone like it owed him money, searching for another rift to sift through. He almost missed the bus when it pulled up, rushing into the first free seat he found just before it took off again.

  See, Kayden wasn’t strong enough for proper rift work, yet. Typically, cores were on the inside of something very bitey, and you had to put in a lot of work to bring it to the outside. That wasn’t the only valuable thing inside rifts - there were edible monsters, and apparently a precious few had rich veins of ore, but the kind where you could make a decent buck without heavy manual labor were rare. And typically picked over by others, as well.

  Thankfully, given how the powers that be quite wanted rifts cleared out, the money making opportunities for each rift were clearly listed in the FWS database. It was simple for Kayden to restrict his search to only the first rank rifts he was allowed to enter that were relatively close to the city.

  “First rank” was a pretty broad category. A year or so ago, rifts were ranked by the mana that came out of them - it was short and sweet, took maybe five minutes so long as you had the equipment, and mana outflow generally correlated to danger, anyways. The issue was that sometimes tons of the stuff would flood into some exotic natural feature that was mildly annoying at best, while other rifts would barely give any readings at all from the outside and then lead to an atmosphere without any oxygen - completely mundane! Nowadays, the official designation for first rank was “Not containing hazards that render passage impossible without common hunting equipment.” Rank two was the kind that needed more specialized or military stuff, and past that the threshold turned into “stuff that’d help in the lower ranks won’t work here”.

  The highest rank rift currently known was rank nine based off of the old mana classifications, which perhaps on the level of a nuclear missile factory. It hung over the Atlantic, a few dozen miles off of what used to be Long Island.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The locust cave was rank one because you could, apparently, cover yourself in enough bug repellant to drown in and the natives would ignore you for a little while. Kayden brought some with him the first time he went, actually, just in case, but if he had to sleep while the stench of bug spray invaded his nostrils, it wasn’t a viable option.

  The one he now had his eyes on was rank one because it was only barely more dangerous than any uncivilized area on Earth, so long as you kept to the parts already mapped out. Whatever was in those other regions wasn’t the type to let people back out, and there was a classy $300 ready for anyone willing to go explore with a body cam.

  That was a lot of money for Kayden, but still woefully little for dealing with a very dangerous unknown. He was only considering it because they were apparently “certain beyond a reasonable doubt” the danger was a monster of some kind, rather than some giant venus flytrap or whatever; his talent didn’t work on things that stupid. Plus, anything he nabbed while he was there would still be his - that three hundred was a minimum.

  Really, the most inconvenient part of the ordeal was the rift’s location - the bus it by not ten minutes ago, now that he checked. With a huff and a silently muttered curse, he got off at the next stop and started walking.

  You would think that the city would have stricter policy regarding the rifts in reality that spewed forth calamity, but really things were quite laissez-faire. Fish and Wildlife acted mostly as a middleman between people trying to profit off the stuff in the rifts and the people getting it to them, occasionally posting requests of their own.

  There was the classic ‘the free market is more efficient’ argument for it, of course - after all, if you want anything to be efficient, it’s keeping rifts in check. There were a few more reasons to it than that, though.

  The Gifted, as a whole, are not particularly respectful of authority. Police with guns just can’t do much when faced with the bulletproof. The current philosophy on keeping superhumans in line was simple - just let ‘em work it out themselves. Even if a fifth rank or, God forbid, sixth or seventh rank joined the police force or military, they’d spend all their days patrolling actual rifts instead of solving the relatively petty disputes of people who’d probably just punch holes through each others’ rib cages, anyways. Keeping the next Godzilla at bay was far more important.

  It worked out well enough, as far as Kayden could tell, though many considered it to just be lazy. Maybe it was just that his as-of-yet-unnamed city was unique since it was Champion’s old stomping grounds - it was one thing to know there was always a bigger fish, but it was another to be krill in front of a sated whale.

  And, of course, the most direct reason for the government’s lack of involvement with hunters and the like stood right on the street corner.

  Though the boy of about fifteen in front of Kayden looked to be on his way home from a renaissance fair, or perhaps a historic war reenactment, the truth was anything but. No matter how ridiculous he looked in his pristine navy blue waistcoat and feather-accented tricorn cap, the pimply teen wore an expression of stern focus. A silver saber sat at his hip, where his hand rested softly gripping the hilt. An old musket would fit the theme better, perhaps, but guns aren’t efficient when you can punch harder than some of the higher calibers.

  Kayden nodded to the minuteman as he walked past, ignoring how the many mirror-polished buttons on the kid’s uniform reflected sunlight painfully into his eyes. It was supremely lucky that the man with the ability to empower an army of supersoldiers was enough of a patriotic nut to let someone else rule in his place. The extra American dose of mistrust towards federal authority was just the cherry on top, at least for people like Kayden - Ol’ Johnny simply would not stand for the new American government to restrict the peoples’ second amendment right to bear superpowers. He and his minutemen were a strictly mercenary force, though apparently whatever power Ol’ Johnny’s talent let course through their veins ran out the moment they went against his orders.

  The thought of what would happen if the man ever went crazy went through the head of anyone willing to ruin their day. Kayden was not one of them. Really, his only real complaint was about the constant fife and drum enactments of Yankee Doodle, but there were blessings to be counted even there. They only let the good players perform out in public.

  There wasn’t a minuteman around every corner of the inner city, the little radius where reconstruction first started a few years back. Over there, there didn’t need to be an eye on every person who walked around with a little too much grace or floated above the ground to keep from stepping in the litter. Here in the tents, it was necessary.

  Outside the few proper paved roads where cars made their way to the civilized part of the city, you couldn’t go two feet without bumping into some kind of improvised shelter. Actual, proper modern tents made do with blankets held up by sticks and the tiny solid stone cubes of Earthshaper construction. The streets between them - when they were wide enough to even be called streets - were thin and cramped and always, always crowded.

  It was baffling to Kayden that people would willingly stay here. He hated it more than anything during the few weeks he spent in a shitty lean-to against a cube of stone inhabited by someone trying to get meth back in vogue. He would have left the city ages ago if he weren’t one of the first people moved into the fresh constructions. But out in the rural ruins were monsters roaming the land, dregs from extermination attempts that preyed on the lonely and unpowered. Close to the city it was safe. Predators would be crushed underneath the swell of humanity.

  Kayden never went to the tents anymore if he could help it. Even if there were soup kitchens he could use, or “housing” cheap as the physical cost of keeping someone else from taking it, the fact that he had to hide his phone and wallet under his hoodie and watch every person who didn’t look downtrodden and hopeless with a wary eye filled him with a hate he couldn’t really direct. His destination was, unfortunately, right around heart of the place.

  At least the crowding improved as he got closer. No one wanted to be cannon fodder when the worst happened.

  The rift Kayden was headed two was actually popular enough to garner a nickname - a low bar, really, but a bar nonetheless. The boxy concrete fortress built around “Green Hell”, which was a fairly common name, actually, so technically “Green Hell-11”, looked eerily like a thin, squished version of the locust cave one, likely to save space since people actually lived around here.

  Far contrary to ye olde locust cave, however, people actually had to form a queue to get in. The guards, plural, were far more exacting in their checks - mostly for reservations, since this was still rank one.

  “Ten thirty reservation under Miller,” Kayden spouted as he handed over his ID, and after a thorough once over and a scan of the doohickey the door was opened for him without fuss. “Oh - by the way, is there any tape in there?”

  That got him a raised eyebrow from the guard, but she was professional about it, thankfully. “There’s a box of zip ties for the plants and stuff people bring out, but not tape. It’s by the pamphlets.”

  There were a few edible plants in there, and one in particular that tasted almost exactly like basil, but that was Kayden’s secondary concern. He thanked the women and moved inside, beelining straight for the kiosk and grabbing a few zip ties. He caught another glance at the signboard:

  G15779 | “Green Hell” | RANK ONE

  ENVIRON: TEMPERATE FOREST

  HAZARDS: DIFFICULT NAVIGATION, NO MAN’S LANDS, IRRITANT FLORA

  No breach trigger on this one, unfortunately. Kayden guessed it might just be overpopulation of some kind again - it was a common one, especially for low ranked gates. There wasn't enough magic for things to be too esoteric. 'Irritable flora' probably meant poison ivy on steroids, or something. He'd keep his hands bunched up in his sleeves and tuck his pants into his shoes, but it wasn't like he was trying to pilfer much.

  Kayden took five zip ties - three for his own purposes, and two in case he actually found use for them. After a few minutes of finagling, he managed to tie his phone surprisingly securely to the strings of his hoodie, with the plastic being used as insurance and to stabilize the construction a bit. He had no doubt that any sailor would look at his knotwork and burst into tears, but he tried shaking it around and it didn’t look to be at any risk of falling. It would work so long as he didn't go at a dead sprint, which was unlikely since that would probably keep his talent from working anyways.

  With his ghetto body cam ready to go, Kayden took a deep, careful breath and stepped in front of the rift. This one was a dark, filthily textured orange, like jello covered with dirt. The shape was far more regular. Almost like an actual door, though there were a few wibbles and wobbles around the edge. That happened to rifts that got actual foot traffic - whether it was a natural process or some kind of trick people did, Kayden wasn’t sure. He’d have to look it up, see if he couldn’t make his own rift easier to get into.

  ‘Forests are better than swamps,’ he thought to himself. ‘People take hikes through forests for fun. It might even be a downright pleasant experience.’

  He didn't step through until he was sure he believed it.