"HEY! GET UP! WE HAVE VISITORS!"
After so long sleeping basically with one eye open — one on the darkness of the Oasis, the other on the bedroom door, always waiting for the next attack, the next scream, the next crash that meant someone had crossed what they shouldn't — I finally managed to have a real night of sleep.
In truth, it wasn't a night of sleep. It was a religious experience.
The bed was soft in a way my body had forgotten existed. The pillow had a smell that wasn't iron, nor blood, nor damp stone — it was fabric softener. The sheet didn't smell of mold. The temperature was perfect. And the silence — the silence was the kind that comes from a place where nothing wants to kill you, the kind that allows every muscle in the body to relax at the same time for the first time in months.
If it were up to me, I would stay for days. Maybe a week. Maybe the rest of my life, just lying down, feeling the bed as though it were humanity's most important invention — because it was.
But the news that I had come back seemed to arrive too fast for the bigwigs of Colony 22.
"They're already here…" I mumbled with my face still buried in the pillow. "It hasn't even been ten hours. They could at least give me a few days, couldn't they?"
Helena's voice came again, anxious. I could hear it in her cadence — the haste, the worry, the nervousness of someone who received important people in the living room and doesn't know how long she can hold them.
"Sorry, but they really want to talk to you…"
My sister was always in favor of solving things. To her, I was still the younger brother — shy, weak, the one who needed to be protected. Even after hearing my stories about the Oasis, everything still seemed to be just that: stories. And honestly, thinking about it, at no point had I shown what I was capable of. Maybe she hadn't yet understood what I had become.
In truth, I myself hadn't made a point of showing.
"No problem. Tell them I'm getting ready and I'll be right down."
Helena went quickly downstairs, the four Shih Tzus following her as though she were the leader of the pack — Sam in front, Clover and Alex fighting for second place, and Roberta closing the line with the caution of someone still learning the dynamics of that pack.
The new house gave me a privacy I had never had — all the rooms were en suites, something that in the old house would have been unimaginable. Unfortunately, the privacy didn't solve the problem that appeared when I opened the wardrobe.
The clothes were from another body.
From a me that no longer existed. The pants were short — involuntary capris, stopping in the middle of the shin. The shirt looked like a vest, tight at the shoulders and leaving the abdomen exposed. I looked at myself in the mirror and what I saw was something between an underpaid bartender and a clown that had shrunk in the wash. The Oasis had changed my body in ways I was still processing — broader, heavier, more everything.
"It'll have to do."
✦ ✦ ✦
I went downstairs to the living room and found three people.
Two men seated. A woman standing.
The three had something in common that I recognized before any introduction — something that gave them away as belonging to the Oasis, something as obvious as a scar on the face. Most mutations caused by the merging with heroes interfered in some way with human DNA. It wasn't uncommon to see returnees with traits that weren't entirely human — vestiges of what the DNA merge did to the body of whoever went through the procedure.
In the woman's case, a pair of small wings on her back was the clearest sign. They weren't large enough to fly — they looked more like a reminder, a mark the Oasis had left as a receipt. She was the one standing, the one who commanded the space without needing a chair to impose presence. Her eyes evaluated me the instant I appeared on the stairs — a quick, efficient look that began at the feet and ended at the face without stopping at any point longer than necessary. The verdict was immediate and visible: not impressed.
Of the two men, one had a face half human, half feline — something that recalled the Burmans from afar, but diluted, like a faded photocopy of the original. The other seemed more normal, were it not for one of his arms completely covered in scales that shone with a greenish luminosity. This one was the oldest of the three.
"A fine day to you, sir." The one with scales rose with the rehearsed courtesy of someone who greets out of obligation. "My name is Benfior, and these are Cuper and Alexandra. We are the ones responsible for this farm, and we would like to congratulate you…" A minimal pause while he consulted something he probably should know by heart. "Leonidas. Correct?"
The other two didn't bother to greet me and merely listened to their colleague's dialogue. Cuper's eyes — the feline-faced one — ran across my body with the suspicion of someone looking for something and not finding it. I understood: no visible mutation. For returnees like them, someone who came back from the Oasis without any physical mark was either very weak — too weak to have connected to any hero — or something they didn't know how to classify.
"Thank you very much." I said, keeping my voice neutral. "But could I know the reason for the visit? I mean… I can't understand what's happening."
I wasn't an idiot.
Nobles didn't come down from their houses to give prizes to someone from the farms. In truth, nobles barely knew the farms existed — or pretended not to know, which was worse. The only function of the farms was to offer bodies as offerings to the meat grinder called the Oasis. The distance between the noble territories and the colonies wasn't merely geographic; it was the kind of distance built with generations of silent contempt, where one side pretended the other didn't exist and the other pretended it didn't care. Nobody visited colonists without a reason. And the reason was never generosity.
There stood someone who should ignore me — and who, even after greeting me, still looked at me with a contempt that didn't bother to hide itself.
"I see you're very intelligent."
The one who spoke wasn't Benfior. It was the woman — Alexandra. Her voice was sharp, polished, with the calibrated arrogance of someone accustomed to speaking and being obeyed without needing to repeat. The commander. The real bigwig.
"What's happening is that we have a problem."
Her words came out as though the problem were mine by definition — as though the fact that I existed on that farm meant that any problem of theirs automatically included me.
That brought out the worst in me.
"Well, I think that depending on the problem, the three of you are more than capable of protecting our farm." I said, crossing my arms. "Besides, if I'm not mistaken, being a returnee gives me guarantees that I don't need to do anything, for anyone."
The silence that followed lasted exactly the time the two men needed to process that someone — a colonist, a farmer, a nobody — had just said no.
Cuper and Benfior advanced.
Not physically — not yet. But the posture changed. The shoulders opened. The faces hardened. The kind of movement predators make when they decide the conversation is over and the next step doesn't involve words.
"How dare you?" Cuper's voice came from a place I knew well: the place where rage dresses up insecurity and pretends it's authority. "We came here only to talk and you don't even want to hear the commander?" The feline eyes narrowed. "Do you know what we can do?"
His words set me off in a way I couldn't — and didn't want to — hold back.
I had already been threatened by Infernals. By Aquamarines. By Burmans. Creatures that existed at scales those three couldn't imagine in their worst nightmares. And even those creatures — even Dioscuros, with his two hearts and his mountain of muscle — hadn't been stupid enough to threaten me inside my own house. With my sister in the corner.
Helena.
I saw her from the corner of my eye. Leaning against the back wall of the living room, the four Shih Tzus behind her as though they felt what was happening. My sister's face was that of someone who was cornered — not out of cowardice, but out of not knowing what to do before people who could cause harm and knew it. Alexandra had positioned herself near her with the rehearsed casualness of someone who doesn't need to say out loud what the movement means.
My blood went cold.
Not from fear. From something that sat well below fear — in the place where instinct lives and decisions are made before thought begins.
I reached into my pocket.
And took out the Vivarium.
"Very well." My voice came out low. Controlled. The kind of voice I used when I didn't want to shout — because shouting meant I was still trying to convince, and I had already passed that point. "Let's go outside. I don't want to do anything in here."
Alexandra showed interest for the first time. The ironic smile that filled her face was that of someone who thinks they're about to witness a spectacle — not of strength, but of humiliation. Cuper and Benfior seemed serious, but still carried at the corners of their mouths that presumptuous smile of someone who had already decided the result before the fight began.
But I saw something more in them. Something the smile couldn't hide.
Caution.
Everyone who went to the Oasis and came back learned the same lesson: strike first, strike hard, and above all never underestimate the enemy. They would smile, yes. But they wouldn't go easy.
We went out to the back garden — the terrain between the old house and the new one, wide enough for what I had in mind. Cuper and Benfior positioned themselves about ten meters from me, their bodies already on guard, the mutations accentuating as though the Oasis that existed inside them were waking up. Benfior's scales shone brighter. Cuper's face became more feline, the eyes narrowing until they became slits.
"Very well, boy." Alexandra crossed her arms at the entrance, Helena still beside her. "What do you want to do? I hope it's nothing foolish."
I didn't answer.
I brought the Vivarium close to my mouth. The dark sphere pulsed in my hand — the inner light accelerating, responding to what I asked, to what I called from inside the item that carried an entire world compressed inside glass.
The two men adjusted. More alert now. Feeling that something was different — that the boy in tight clothes with the face of someone who had just woken up was doing something they didn't recognize.
"Daughter…" I whispered against the Vivarium. "Come to me."
The shadow came first.
Not from below upward, like the shadow of something approaching. From above downward — as though the sun itself had been swallowed. A darkness that spread across the entire garden, covering the grass, the walls of the new house, the faces of the three visitors who now looked upward with wide eyes and the certainty I knew so well — the certainty of someone who understands, too late, that they measured wrong.
The shadow grew.
And grew.
And kept growing.
"What the fuck is this?!"