The final act of preparation unfolded not with the flourish of a wizard's spell, but with the prosaic clatter of a sliding van door and the grunt of a man heaving sacks of rice. By the time the last cardboard box of dubious snacks was wedged into the Wuling Sunshine's cavernous interior, the city had surrendered to a deep, indigo twilight. Michael stood back, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of a greasy hand. The van, now sagging slightly on its suspension, resembled a metal beast swollen after a gargantuan meal. It was ready.
His own hunger, a gnawing, insistent thing that had been growing all afternoon, demanded attention. He found a small, fluorescent-lit restaurant, its tables sticky with the residue of a hundred hurried meals, and ordered two simple dishes. The owner, a thin man with tired eyes, watched with growing alarm as Michael shoveled down bowl after bowl of rice. The steam rose, the cheap porcelain clinked, and Michael ate with the single-minded intensity of a man storing calories against a famine. By the fifth bowl, the owner's nervous glances had become a palpable presence in the room. Michael considered stopping, a flicker of social awareness piercing his hunger. But the memory of 'Spine-Tap' beer and jerky made of things he didn't want to identify rose before him. He ate the seventh bowl, the starch a comforting weight in his belly, indifferent to the spectacle he made.
It was becoming impossible to ignore: something had changed in him. His body, perhaps subtly altered by the ambient poison of that other world or the peculiar stresses of dimensional travel, now burned fuel at a ferocious rate. He was becoming a furnace, and the cheap rice and stir-fried pork were merely its kindling.
After settling the bill under the restaurateur's relieved gaze, Michael performed a final, sobering accounting. The thick wad of cash in his satchel had dwindled to a meager stack. 8,300 yuan. He found an ATM, its blue light cold in the gathering dark, and transferred 8,000 back to his family, a silent tithe for his mother's recovery. This left him with three hundred yuan and a van full of hope. The gesture felt necessary, a tether to the man he had been before portals and ogres.
His destination for the crossing was the Shizhu Mountain area on the city's ragged fringe, a place notorious in local lore for whispered hauntings and strange lights. By night, it was deserted, a perfect theater for his impossible act. The Wuling's headlights carved twin tunnels of yellow through the oppressive blackness as he navigated the potholed access road, the engine's grumble the only sound in a world gone quiet.
Parking in a small clearing littered with the ghostly shapes of discarded tires, Michael took a steadying breath. This was it. No bathroom, no cave. Just him, his van, and the open air. He focused inward, on that new, silent sense nestled in his consciousness. He willed it forth.
With a soft, electric sigh that seemed to draw the very sound from the night, the emerald vortex blossomed into existence directly before the Wuling's grille. It hung in the air, a perfect, spinning mandala of impossible geometry, painting the rusted tires and weeds in its unearthly, aquatic light. Without hesitation, Michael pressed the clutch, shifted into first, and eased the van forward. The world tilted, stretched, and swallowed him whole.
The familiar, gut-churning dislocation lasted only seconds. His vision returned to the sound of the Wuling's engine, still idling roughly. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the spatial vertigo to pass, a smug grin touching his lips. Driving a Wuling Sunshine, he thought, the image clear in his mind, I'll be the most dazzling bloke in the entire bloody Wasteland. John's jaw will hit the floor.
He opened his eyes.
The first thing he registered was the darkness. It was night here, too. The second was the deafening, enraged bellow that shook the very frame of the van. Zach.
In his meticulous planning, Michael had forgotten one crucial, idiotic detail: he hadn't turned off the headlights. The Wuling had arrived in the cave like a mechanical sun, its twin beams spearing the darkness, blinding anyone looking in. To Zach, a simple creature standing guard, it could only be an attack. A metal beast with blazing eyes had emerged from the Master's magic door.
The roar was followed by the thunder of massive feet. Through the dazzling glare of his own lights, Michael saw a mountainous shape charge into the cave mouth, a length of truck axle raised high. There was no time for thought, only primal terror. He fumbled for the door handle, his mouth working.
"Zach, stop! It's Niko—!"
The word 'las' died in his throat. The axle, a blur of rust-pitted iron, descended. There was a sound like a glacier calving—a great, crystalline CRACK-WHOOMthat echoed in the confined space. A spiderweb of fractures exploded across the windshield directly in front of Michael's face, the safety glass crazing into a million frozen droplets. A hail of glittering daggers showered into the cab, catching in his hair, his clothes, the folds of the seats.
Miraculously, the blow stopped a hand's breadth from crushing his skull. His shouted name, mangled though it was, had pierced Zach's battle-fury. The axle hovered, trembling with arrested momentum. Through the fractured mosaic of the windshield, Michael could see the Ogre's single, enormous eye, wide with dawning horror.
"Master, I—"
"Shut up!" Michael yelled, his voice shrill with adrenaline. He sat there for a long moment, heart hammering against his ribs, watching a single, large glass pebble tumble from the dashboard into his lap. The new-car smell (which had largely been mildew and old upholstery anyway) was now thoroughly infused with the scent of cold sweat and shattered dreams.
The cleanup that followed was performed in a strained, prickly silence, illuminated by the chilly white beam of his phone's torch. He picked glass from the footwells, brushed it from the seats, his movements stiff with residual anger and a profound sense of foolishness. Zach, for his part, had shrunk to the side of the cave, wringing his massive hands like a chastised child. The fearsome Ogre, the terror of the badlands, looked utterly wretched.
"It's… fine," Michael said at last, the words grating out. The anger had burned down to embers, leaving behind the cold ash of responsibility. It washis fault. He'd driven a roaring, blazing machine unannounced through a secret door. "I forgive you. No punishment."
Zach's head lifted, a flicker of hope in his eye. Then, with the sublime, tone-deaf timing of his kind, he asked, "That is… most generous, Master. But… the Feast? The glorious soupy feast? Did you remember?"
Michael closed his eyes, the last of his patience evaporating. He leaned into the back of the van, rummaged in a box, and threw a brightly colored packet at the Ogre. It hit Zach's chest with a soft plap.
"Here. Supposed to be a hundred times better than your slop soup," he muttered, turning back to the tedious task of glass retrieval.
Zach caught the packet, holding it between thick finger and thumb as if it were a rare butterfly. In the glow of the Wuling's one surviving headlight (the other had taken a glancing blow), Michael could see him squinting at the packaging. It was a garish thing, covered in frantic, indecipherable logograms and the words 'Wei-You Spicy Strips' in a font that screamed 'counterfeit.' Zach had encountered pre-Collapse food before. It was tasty, certainly. But a hundred timesbetter than the complex, greasy, profoundly satisfying symphony of the Master's earlier offering? Preposterous. His limited cognitive powers could not conjure a flavor that transcendent.
With a shrug that seemed to say 'might as well,'he hooked a claw under the seam and ripped the packet open. The scent that wafted out was alien—sweet, pungent, aggressively spicy, and laden with enough artificial flavoring to resurrect a dead taste bud. He peered at the contents: a tangle of reddish-brown, oil-slicked strips. He tipped the packet, and a generous half of its contents slithered into his cavernous maw.
Michael, elbows deep in glass, was puzzling over a strange new quiet. The absence of sound was wrong. Zach, after a scare, a mistake, and the promise of food, should be a torrent of apologies, explanations, and eager questions. The silence was unnerving.
He turned.
There, silhouetted against the headlight beam, stood Zach the Ogre. Tears, each the size of a grape, were carving clean paths through the grime on his broad, ugly face. They dripped from his jaw with soft plinksonto the dusty cave floor. His single eye was screwed shut, his massive shoulders shuddering with silent, profound emotion.
He felt Michael's stare and opened his eye. It swam with tears, reflecting the broken light. He looked at the tiny human, the Master who had passed through fire and green light to bring him this, and in a voice thick with a wonder that bordered on religious awe, he whispered the only three words that could encompass the cataclysm of flavor still unfolding on his tongue:
"So… good…"