Katherine was the one who took it upon herself to facilitate the introductions. It made sense, because she was clearly the one linking us all together, but I was still a little miffed. I hadn't forgotten my second nickname for her, after Class President. She was supposed to be the Sidekick.

  Regardless, that was how I found myself getting a proper introduction to the Rando Squad of Mr. Agent, Wizard Boy, Little Toxic, and Boots. Respectively, their actual names turned out to be Laurence, Kevin, Chloe, and Maria. That was fine by me. None of their names were totally incongruent.

  From there, my pet Kitty Kat moved on to introducing me. I was a bit confused by the weird way she said my full name, though. "And this is Miss Alex-is-Hunting... field."

  The fuck kind of alien syllable accenting was that? Are you from Earth, Katherine? You kind of sounded like a tourist from Proxima Centauri, right there. "Why did you say my name like that?"

  "Like what?"

  I narrowed my eyes. She was definitely doing something on purpose, including trying to act innocent about it. I had absolutely no clue what it could be, though. Annoying. I would figure it out eventually, though. I always did, except for the times where I didn't.

  "Okay—anyway, does anyone know if there's something interesting planned or if we're all just supposed to stand around?" I looked around the small plaza, but it didn't look like anyone else had arrived. "Or was this actually all a trick?" I half expected a guy with a twirly mustache to pop out and start saying 'I suppose you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today.' Okay, that was a lie. I wasn't expecting that. It would totally make my day if it happened, though.

  "Nah, it's a complete waste of time," Wizard Boy—Kevin—confirmed. "There's no point in showing up other than to see who else is showing up to see who shows up."

  I nodded. "Classic."

  "Hey, wait, that's not entirely true," Maria—the one I'd been calling Boots—complained. "We should at least introduce them to Matthias."

  Matthias? I had no idea who that was. To be fair, that's probably because we haven't been introduced. I assumed this 'Matthias' person was someone important in the Guardian College, or Program, or whatever they decided to call it. I soon found out I was right, but first, the group of four decided to give me and Katherine a short tour. I was more than happy about that, because it was still stupidly cold outside, something that I wasn't a big fan of.

  The inside of the building was quite nice. It was all polished, tiled floors, high ceilings, and old, french-style windows. It made me think of a church or something—very different from the usual kind of architecture you would find in LA. It was also clearly old—like, probably at least a hundred years. There was a certain quality to old, fancy buildings that distinguished them from modern recreations of outdated styles. The weight of time itself was something that could only accrue naturally.

  "The building is pretty awesome," Kevin said, "as you can see for yourselves. Apparently it was built as a missionary orphanage or something, but who cares about that? They finally upgraded the WiFi over the break, apparently, which means you can actually load a single web page without it taking twenty minutes and a sacrificial chicken."

  "Oh come on," the Laurence guy complained, "stop skipping over the history. And it wasn't that bad."

  The other two—Chloe and Maria—shared a glance. "It kind of was," Chloe said.

  "Barely even an exaggeration," Maria agreed.

  We then spent some time walking around the first floor, and Laurence took over the duty as tour guide. He started droning on about the actual origins of the building, as well as its role in the history of the school and the surrounding area—blah blah blah. Meanwhile, Kevin fell back, and, in a quieter voice, continued his own explanation of things. While Katherine listened attentively to some dry story about missionaries, different immigration waves, and the evolution of the whole university, I got to hear about juicier details—like how the lady who restocked the vending machines would leave the cart out while going out to smoke. It was always at 10:40 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork, and that part of the hallway didn't have any cameras.

  "You can only grab one or two things, though, and only if there are a bunch of whatever it is you're taking. Otherwise she'll wise up. We even have a code, and part of that involves laying down the law for the new people."

  I snickered. What is this, middle school? Weren't we supposed to be the shining stars of the new generation of Guardians? I thought I was joining a community of student-defenders, not a sinister cabal of snack-food thievery. I felt like the fact that it was a bit too juvenile even for me was saying something.

  Regardless, it only took, like, two or three minutes for us to complete the tour. It was apparently then time for the two of us to meet that 'Matthias' person. Climbing the stairs to the second floor, they led us over to some kind of break room slash personal office. Office—perhaps the word 'nest' might have been more appropriate. There was a thirty-something man with long, greasy hair, a stained, Hawaiian shirt, and a week's worth of stubble lounging lengthwise on an old couch.

  His eyes were closed, but I didn't think he was actually sleeping. Surreptitiously and unthinkingly flicking my tongue out, I confirmed that I could taste it. Okay, what the fuck? Alex. How the fuck can you taste that someone isn't sleeping? I could also taste that he was a Guardian, which at least made a bit more sense, and he was way stronger than anyone else in the room. Like, dramatically so. The taste of his power even overshadowed Katherine and her Star Core.

  It was also not even remotely close to the overwhelming taste of strength and danger that came from my dad—but I'd have been pretty concerned if that had been the case. A lot of seemingly large differences would shrink to be inconsequential when measured against a Tier Eight Star Guardian. Still, the feedback I got from my more primal, nonhuman instincts told me that a fight against him probably wouldn't go well for me, at least with my current strength. Tier 4, maybe? Definitely at least 3. I wasn't completely confident in judging that yet. I was confident, though, that he wasn't a Star Guardian, but just a decently powerful regular one.

  The man's eyes cracked open. Slowly, they rolled around in the sockets to glare at each and every one of us. Wow. This guy has a major, alcoholic pirate captain sort of vibe. He didn't have any alcohol in him though—that was something else I could taste—but that didn't rule out the broader possibility. Well, the alcoholic part. I'm pretty sure he's not a pirate.

  "Alright. What is it you fuckers want?" His voice was dry and gravelly.

  "Good morning to you too, Matthias," Maria snorted. "Feeling super pepped to have us back for the middle term, huh?"

  With all the speed and grace of a glacier falling upwards, Matthias rotated to sit upwards. Reaching over for a remote on the floor, he turned down the volume of the smooth jazz coming out of the nearby hifi setup. "Girl, I'd like to see how you'd be feeling after spending three straight days in Nevada."

  Oh, wait, damn, okay. While it would be really funny to imagine he meant that literally, as if common knowledge was that the act of simply being in Nevada was simply inherently tortuous across all of time, it was pretty obvious what he was actually talking about. For the past two weeks, the news had been saturated with coverage of the total chaos unfolding just a state over from us. A decent chunk of the state was currently going through the end times, with high tier incursions spreading over huge swaths of land and lower tier incursions sprouting all over like weeds.

  It was close to as bad as incursions could get, but not quite. The same factors that allowed it to get that bad in the first place limited the potential for it to spread further out through the country. Basically, no one fucking lived there.

  The most populated place was Las Vegas, and that place was already crazy. They had way more incursions than a city of their size had any right to, and they handled those—well, it was tempting to say that the residents handled it well, but that didn't adequately paint the full picture. There was an iconic photo that had been circulating for years and years at this point, taken in a casino resort during one of the low tier incursions the city weathered more often than they got rain.

  The scene, captured with someone's phone, depicted a janitor hitting a small skinner over the head with a push broom, while the skinner had latched onto the calf of a guy who seemed more interested in putting in more money than getting the Anathema off his leg. Nearby, a waitress leaned against another machine, hitting a vape and watching the rest of the scene play out. That picture had been making the rounds again, these past couple of weeks, and it was kind of annoying seeing a bunch of people say 'uhm, actually, that's definitely AI generated.' No it fucking wasn't, because it was like a decade old at this point.

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  Anyway, it was ironic, then, that Vegas was close to the only place in the whole state that hadn't been overrun. They kept getting hit with small, low tier incursions, sure, but they were already used to those. The massive influx of Guardians and the escalating military presence established the city as a sort of bastion in a sea of high tier Anathema. Another thing that had been going around were videos of people lining up at the walls to watch the artillery go off. They were literally setting up picnics, watching distant titans exploding like it was fireworks.

  Needless to say, the situation was still pretty bad. It was well past the point where local Guardians and Civil Guard detachments were sufficient, and the surrounding desert had turned into something of an apocalyptic battlefield between the forces of our own planet and the horde of interdimensional hunger. Huh. I liked that phrase—it sounded kind of badass. I'm part of the horde of interdimensional hunger, y'all!

  Anyway, it would have been the kind of once in a decade disaster that would permanently shift the history of a nation, had it started in, say, our own state of California. But, as things were, the relatively uninhabited land simplified things for our military, and that was enough to stabilize things quickly enough for a massive wave of Guardians to pour in and to start organizing bigger and better operations. There had been objections that people did live outside of Las Vegas and the five or so other actual cities. A single picture of what most of the landscape looked like now, though, was enough to convince most people that our own human weaponry was the least anyone out there had to worry about. By all accounts, the USAF was having a bit of a field day, and a lot of fancy new shit was getting its first real chance to shine.

  According to David, they were even considering a full scale test of the Liberty's Zenith—the orbital, Helium3-based array of atomic death that was variably also known as Heaven's Wrath, the Mini Death Star, the Killer Griller, or—my personal favorite—the Roast Beast.

  The network of satellite infrastructure couldn't come close to packing the same punch as what we could already put on a big enough missile, but that wasn't the point. Ostensibly, the point was faster delivery time and lower collateral and environmental impact. Personally, I think the reason for spending hundreds of billions on the thing was because it was cool as fuck and also super intimidating. Obviously, the Chinese were following suit, and the Russians were trying to pretend like they could afford it.

  With all that being said—yeah, I think I get why this guy looks tired. Everyone else caught on about as quickly, and there was a moment of uncomfortable silence. Matthias was the one who broke it. "Christ, y'all, it's not like something ate my Grandma. I'm tired, is all. I honestly didn't think I was prepared to handle Tier 6, and, uh, yeah, I was right."

  Tier 6? I imagined a whistling sound in my head. That was up there. From everything I'd ever heard, Tier 6 was a sort of all-around soft cap. The rarest and most powerful guardians you'd typically ever encounter were the ones that made it there, and it was also about the limit of what a Guardian-less humanity could have handled. Specifically, 'handled' meant 'continue existing without repeating what happened to London, but everywhere.'

  Tier 7, then, was the realm of true doomsday monsters, nuclear hellfire, and less than a thousand Guardians worldwide. The only Guardians who'd made it higher were true Star Guardians, and even then, most reports estimated there were fewer than one hundred. My Dad was one of them, being a Tier 8 who was a part of the very first wave. There were only two Guardians said to have reached the lofty Tier 9. Those were Aurora—widely considered to be the most powerful being on the planet, in the context of raw, destructive might—and Fabrica, the de facto leader and representative of the Star Guardians. If a Tier 9 Anathema ever made it through a breach—well, the species might live on, but it would probably be pretty terrible for most of us.

  We'd gotten a taste of what that might look like back in 2011 with the infamous Aurora-Saber fight. Thankfully, neither the strongest Tier 8 nor the one out of two Tier 9s were careless about ensuring their violent altercation stayed self-contained.

  So, with all that in mind, I think it was safe to say that the guy in front of us really had no right fighting and surviving through a Tier 6 incursion. I may not have been able to pin down his exact tier, but I was confident he wasn't above the lower end of Tier 5. And, once again, it seemed like I wasn't the only one to reach a similar conclusion.

  "But you're only Tier 4?" Little Toxic—Chloe, asked. She was quiet, so I kept forgetting about her, but she was also even shorter than I was. That fact automatically raised my opinion of her, since it finally gave me someone I could literally look down on.

  "Yup." Matthias cracked his neck. "Like I said—not very fun. The whole thing was a real shit show, even with a bunch of proper Star Guardians with us. Probably couldn't have survived without them, and even then—well, it took a Tier 8 showing up for us to start making any real progress." Grabbing a water bottle off the table, he took a long sip. "So, you two are new this term, right?" Katherine and I both nodded. "Great. Okay. Congratulations, you're not dead. Unfortunately, that means things will only get worse from here." Katherine and I shared another look, and Matthias frowned. "Wait, I assume you two are trying the whole 'active Guardian' thing?"

  We nodded again.

  "My condolences, then. Anyway, I'll be your generic mentor around here, unless I get killed doing something stupid. If you're wondering who I work for, that would be the AAG, not the university. They loan me out here because, apparently, my trainees have a higher average rate of success than any other LA mentors." He chuckled. "I would say that's not a brag, but it totally is. Don't ask me why, though. I have no Goddamn idea. There's no secret. I keep telling admin it's just luck, but they never believe me."

  "And we don't believe you either," Laurence interjected. He cleared his throat when our new mentor guy raised an eyebrow in his direction. "—With all due respect, sir."

  Oh god, please don't tell me we're supposed to address him in some stupid, uptight way like that. Matthias seemed to read my mind though, because he shook his head and jabbed a thumb in Mr. Agent's direction. "You don't have to call me 'Sir' or anything. That's just how he is. I like to imagine I'm a pretty chill guy, overall."

  Fair enough. But—what now?

  "Alright, unless you idiots need anything, I will be closing my eyes again." He started sinking back into the couch. "Actually, wait. Can one of you go grab me a soda?"

  "What kind?" Kevin asked, "and what kind of delivery fee can I expect, here? Oh, and the ones downstairs are like, three dollars by the way. It's honestly a total ripoff."

  "The kind that's in the mini-fridge two feet away from you, smartass."

  We all turned to look at the fridge. "Oh."

  Chloe opened it and tossed a can over to the Tier 4 Guardian festering on the couch. Then, not seeing anything else to do, we all filed back out into the hallway. "Yeah, so, uh—" Kevin lowered his voice and looked back at the office. "He's not usually like that." The other three glanced at each other, and Kevin rolled his eyes. "Okay, you three know what I mean." Addressing me and Katherine, he continued. "Normally, he is a bit of a lazy, cynical pessimist, but he's never that low energy."

  "Yeah." Maria peered back around the edge of the doorway. "I think whatever happened in Nevada took a lot out of him."

  Gee, no shit. It was funny how much they were trying to sell us on the idea that the Guardian mentor for our uni wasn't some kind of total deadbeat. Like, all he had to do was say he'd been in Nevada. We didn't even need to know about that insane tier difference. The four were acting like his behavior was somehow a bad look. Like, yes, it kind of is, but I'm pretty sure most people understand the idea of context.

  It was ironic how more normal people could act so weird about other people when they were struggling. Usually, I was the one with the empathy deficit, but sometimes—like right now—there was this weird effect of secondhand shame where people implicitly held their friends or family or whatever to ridiculous standards. It's like they're projecting a ridiculous level of judgment onto me and Katherine, and then trying to defend him from it. Fucking weird. People are weird.

  After leaving Matthias's office and heading back downstairs, we decided to go to the yard behind the building to show off some of the group's developing abilities. I decided to drop my backpack by the door on our way out—something I should have done when we first entered, because it was a bit heavy. Unfortunately, I forgot to account for just how heavy it was, due to the scaling of my Anathema strength, as well as the reason it was so heavy in the first place.

  In short, that's how I ended up cracking one of the beautiful, polished limestone tiles with a 250 pound sack of steel bolts. The unexpected clanking sound was barely muffled, and everyone turned towards me in confusion. It didn't take long for everyone to notice the giant crack.

  Several different people said several different things, like "Holy shit," "What?" and "The fuck?" Without saying anything, I picked up the bag, moved it a few feet away and set it down on the opposite side of the hallway—and a lot more gently this time. Then I looked at the silent group, then at the crack, then back at the other five. "What?"

  They kept staring at me, the cracked tile, and the bag for a few more seconds. Then, Laurence was the one who shrugged and shook his head. "I don't think I even want to know," he muttered as he pushed open the door. One by one, we followed out behind him. Katherine was the second to last, and she shot me an inquisitive look—wondering about the backpack full of bolts, no doubt. I just shrugged. I really didn't feel like trying to explain it.

  The reason for carrying around a couple hundred pounds of hardware in my school backpack was to satiate my hunger. It was always terrible, and the more time passed, the worse it seemed to get. In terms of 'normal food,' I was probably devouring close to four thousand calories a day, but it wasn't doing anything to put on any weight. Unfortunately, I had to be discreet about it, lest David realize anything was up and get concerned.

  Regular, 'human food' was surprisingly good according to my Anathema hunger—well, maybe not so surprising, since humans mostly ate other kinds of living things. The other main thing I'd been eating was metal. Surpassed only by animal flesh, it was the second most 'nutrition dense' substance I'd discovered, in the context of my hunger. That was convenient, because metal was common and actually quite cheap.

  Pound for pound, bulk steel was less than half the price of mozzarella. Hardware pieces like nuts and bolts also came in convenient, bite-sized pieces.

  Still, the quantities of the stuff I'd had to consume over just the past two days just to not go insane was—well, it was bordering on unsustainable. I needed to figure out a better way to get a grip on my hunger—or my hunger would be the one to dominate with its grip on me.

  For the moment, though, I tried to put those worries out of the front of my mind. I had to admit—I'm a bit curious to see what these Tier 1 Guardians can do.

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