“Goblins. Those are goblins!”

  “Aliens.”

  “No! Goblins!”

  Luke, the owner of the house we were hiding in, slowly shook his head.

  “Alien goblins,” he said, pointing at the table as if a goblin’s image were hovering there.

  Ilse, the woman we had just rescued from the goblins, snorted angrily and shook her head with far more vigor.

  “Goblins are just goblins,” she snapped, tilting her head as if daring him to argue.

  The air inside the house was warm and damp, reeking of sweat, dirty socks, bad food, oil, and farts. I tried to breathe as little as possible, wondering how they could talk so freely while ignoring the smell. My stomach churned, threatening to return my almost digested lunch.

  I pursed my lips and pushed a rebellious strand of hair out of my eyes, desperately trying to think of a spell that could filter the air.

  Luke refused to open any windows, terrified that the “alien drones” outside might notice the movement and realize someone was still living here. So we were left to endure both the heat and the stench.

  Giant wasps, ten to twenty centimeters long, flew past the house at irregular intervals, more than enough to explain his fear of “drones.”

  I had brought everyone here because I’d noticed from afar that this place was inhabited. I hadn’t needed to see an open window; the trail of rotting, foul-smelling cans scattered around the entrance had been the first clue. Beside that, I’d spotted his infrared silhouette as he was peeking through a window hiding behind a curtain. And he wasn’t alone.

  Patience, Lores, I told myself.

  I couldn’t just start asking questions as if I hadn’t lived the last month in this reality. I had to let them talk first, listen carefully, and shape my questions around what they revealed.

  I glanced at Luke. He was in his late twenties, maybe close to thirty. His brown hair was combed forward in a futile attempt to hide the beginnings of a receding hairline. Small black eyes flicked nervously between Ilse and me. He had an athletic build, well-defined muscles visible beneath his simple shirt, his bare arms crossed defensively over his chest.

  He did look a lot like Joe, at least at first glance. And yet, I felt nothing, no interest at all. Somewhere deep inside, my instincts delivered a simple, hard verdict: not worthy.

  After the shaman’s diagnosis, I’d worried that my “condition” might make me behave in strange ways. Apparently not. Luke registered as so thoroughly not worthy that all I felt for him was pity. In hindsight, even the ambassador had felt the same way. At least he had been worthy of a challenge; that was why I’d given him one. But still… not worthy.

  A bit unsettled by my own reaction, I shrugged and looked around, taking in the surroundings.

  The house had no electricity, no running water, and a toilet so full of shit, it reeked even through the closed door. Luke was waiting for rain so he could collect enough water to flush it again. Gas was still flowing, but the pressure was low, and he feared it would be cut off soon.

  There was another person inside—a little girl, maybe ten years old—hiding behind a closed door and spying on us. Luke hadn’t mentioned her, but every now and then his eyes flicked anxiously toward that door.

  I took a deep breath, as much as my sensitive nose would allow, and turned to look outside, trying to tune out their argument. Sean and Nora were no longer in sight; they’d gone off to “inspect” the neighboring houses.

  If there were goblins here, this area had to be under the control of some kind of evil overlord. I couldn’t imagine those goblins ruling a town like this.

  Flo had been convinced that the final, higher overlord was Mephisto, even after that dramatic incident at the hospital, when the general—whatever his name had been—had mentioned His Highness, the Supreme Judge of this corner of the galaxy.

  I involuntarily huffed at the memory.

  “What?” Ilse asked, turning toward me. “Where do you think all those stories and myths about goblins and orcs come from?”

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head, choosing not to answer. I left that battle to Luke and turned back toward the window.

  The sky was gray, visibility reduced, as if a heavy cloud were hanging low over the town, layered with a thin veil of fog.

  From time to time, distant explosions echoed through the air. That meant the army—our human army—had to be somewhere nearby, fighting something.

  But what exactly were they fighting?

  What was the situation now? No more playing nice with the orcs? And what could possibly be stopping the army from simply rolling over this place? Those scavenging goblins couldn’t be the reason… could they?

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  I let out a heavy sigh. That whole episode at the hospital had been so bizarre, so far outside anything normal, that even now it made me question my own sanity.

  On the one hand, it was almost impressive that Mephisto’s orcs had managed to come up with the story of a High Galactic Judge. I was fairly certain my orcs would never have invented something like that.

  But the truly mind-blowing part had been the harpies and amazons fighting over the fountains—one to restore youth, the other to accelerate age. The fountains had been Thorwal’s inventions, Ju - alias Mrs. Thorwal - had said. Narrative additions to justify things that he could not explain otherwise. Maybe there were other explanations, like clones, or rejuvenation spells or elixirs.

  There had been a lot of research into aging in Aldea. There had been plenty of studies, searches, and failed attempts. But the Fountain of Youth and the Fountain of Age did not exist.

  Which contradicted what I knew from White Flower.

  And I felt another headache coming on.

  Meanwhile Luke was laying out his own theory. According to him, Earth had been occupied by technologically superior aliens. In his view, humanity had already lost the war and was now reduced to hiding like rats underground.

  The orcs and goblins we’d been seeing were, in his theory, merely the scourge—the homies of that alien society. Tolerated auxiliaries, allowed to roam freely and scavenge whatever remained, keeping the ruins picked clean.

  That belief was what had driven him to start expanding the basement beneath his house.

  Over the past two weeks, he’d even begun exploring an abandoned oil pipeline that ran not far from his property, imagining it as a future tunnel connecting what he called “resistance nodes.” His plan was to link his basement directly to the pipeline—an oily tube a little over a meter in diameter that surfaced near the garden, forming a shallow inverted U before dipping back underground. There had once been some sort of control station there.

  The town itself had fallen several weeks earlier. According to Luke, it had happened abruptly, right after a military offensive against what people called “the zone”—an offensive that had clearly gone wrong. An evacuation order followed, and most residents fled in a frantic scramble. Those who hesitated discovered too late that leaving was no longer an option.

  He hadn’t witnessed any actual fighting. One day, everything had simply… changed. Orcs began appearing in neighboring houses—small groups of “enforcers” rounding up anyone still around. He had escaped by hiding beneath the inverted U of the decommissioned pipeline. After that, the idea of using it as a refuge had taken root in his mind. He’d even used bolt cutters to cut into it and started exploring the interior.

  I glanced at him, incredulous. How desperate—or unhinged—did someone have to be to start cutting into an old oil pipeline?

  Then the “drones” appeared, and he spent even less time outside. Since then, he’d focused entirely on connecting his basement to the pipeline.

  Which finally explained that persistent oil reek: he’d probably never managed to properly wash himself after crawling through that filthy tube.

  At least Sean and Nora had a working radio and were therefore more grounded in reality. They’d found it in the basement of one of the houses they’d broken into and had left it with us temporarily while they went exploring.

  Most electronics had been destroyed—but not all. Some had survived, perhaps better shielded, or simply in the right place with less exposure to whatever had fried the rest.

  We’d just finished listening to the news, and much to Luke’s and Ilse’s surprise, life on the other side of whatever this was seemed to be continuing almost undisturbed. Which raised an obvious question: why were the reports talking about rebels instead of orcs and goblins?

  That was what had started their argument.

  “They’re afraid to tell the truth,” Luke concluded. “Afraid to tell people we’ve been invaded by aliens!”

  “No! Orcs!” Ilse shot back. “These are orcs and goblins!”

  They were starting again! I almost reached for my horns in despair, then stopped myself at the last moment.

  Luke sighed.

  “And they just spawned out of our fairy tales?” he countered. “No. They came from somewhere—and that somewhere isn’t Earth. So…?”

  He raised his brows, waiting for her to explain.

  She shrugged.

  “How can you know? Where do all those legends come from in the first place?”

  I huffed, looking at her.

  Ilse turned out to be much younger than I’d initially assumed. Now, after being partially healed by Lili, she looked to be in her early twenties. Since she had no open wounds, a quick healing done when nobody was watching didn’t look like the miracle it actually was. She simply appeared to have recovered.

  Wrapped in the blanket we’d carried her in, legs tucked beneath herself as she sat on a chair in Luke’s kitchen, she was explaining her theory—that goblins had always been here, living inside a hollow Earth… or perhaps in some parallel reality.

  I rolled my eyes and focused on Lili’s progress instead.

  My little “drone” had been following Sean and Nora for a while as they searched the nearby houses, but now I sent her out to make wider rounds.

  Nearby, on the kitchen buffet, stood a glass full of olives. Every time my gaze passed over it, my mouth watered. I knew there were many more in the next room—Luke must have taken them from a shop in the neighborhood—so I decided it would be fine if I tasted a couple.

  The cap popped as I opened it, but at that exact moment something heavy whistled through the air and slammed into the ground not far from the house, digging itself deep into the black soil.

  I blinked in surprise, already probing it with my mana—it was still well within my domain. An artillery shell. I hadn’t realized just how large those things were. If it had exploded, it would have shattered our windows at the very least, if not blown out an entire wall.

  Why hadn’t it detonated?

  I grinned. At least the impact had masked the soft pop of the jar’s lid. I slipped two fingers into the glass and picked an olive.

  The door flew open, and the little girl burst into the kitchen.

  “Luke! Luke!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. The shell’s fall had clearly terrified her.