Three hours of walking can have their toll on you, especially when you start your day with an all-out battle against zombies and an unstable man that doesn’t know when to stop. Jay is way behind us, walking all by himself. Dale...well, he shouldn’t have done that. But he was right. Mosa is in no way the place it used to be before. Danger is lurking behind every corner.

It sort of reminds me of Primordial Earth, the place this adventure began. Instead of flourished plants and trees matching buildings in width and height, the planet is a forest of debris and half-buildings. How can dead humans cause that much destruction? Does someone control them?

In my mind, the first time we met those monsters pops up. It was back in the hospital while Jay, the platinum-skinned one, was severely wounded. We’ve just met Dale back then and didn’t know anything about his true identity, but still, he was able to help us in his own way, coming up with solutions about Jay and his alien nature.

Back then, the undead monsters appeared out of nowhere and almost killed us. Except they mysteriously stopped when they had the chance to do it. They had frozen in place and didn’t move until we were safe and they were unable to reach us. Dale thinks that the Originators control them, but I’m not so sure anymore. Aren’t they the ones that wanted us dead back then? Why didn’t they finish their jobs when they could?

I’m not sure about anything, anymore. Pyro, never removing his mask, is the most suspicious of them all. The Organization is nowhere to be found, and the Ocean, the other high-ranked member, isn’t here to help. I don’t know if I’m supposed to ask or anything, but I’m starting to feel less certain about the people I walk with.

Dale has done everything in his power to train and protect me, but he also told me that I’m just as important to the mission as Jay is. What did he mean by that?

“We’ll stop here for now,” Pyro suddenly says.

His voice snaps me out of my train of thoughts. Still, it strikes me as odd that he, of all the people, ordered us to stop before arriving at the City Hall. If anything, I thought he would want us to get in and out as fast as humanly possible. Something is going on.

I move closer to them; Pyro sees me and stops talking. “What do you want?” he asks, calmly.

“Why did we stop? I thought you wanted to get there as soon as possible. We’re losing light, and we’re not equipped for a night raid,” I say. Dale has also trained me to work in a team and made me memorize various pieces of equipment so that I could use them all with closed eyes. It was a busy year after all.

“For such a promising operative, you lack the perspective and the leading skills of a professional. Take a look around and tell me, what do you see?” Pyro tells me.

I follow his order and look around me. I see destroyed buildings, a thick, cloudless sky that’s sickeningly bright, and a team of exhausted members unable to keep going. Well, Zan and Jay are the ones that seem that way. I, Dale, and Pyro could go on for some more before stopping, and Silver is an Android. Androids don’t get tired last time I checked.

“Now I get it. You want all of us to be ready for the fight in the City Hall. That means that you’re probably expecting heavy resistance.” He nods and I can sense a smile forming behind his mask. “So, you believe that the black-maskers are here too and that it’s them that orchestrated the attack on Mosa, right?”

The words come out of my mouth as I’m thinking them; I’ve never connected the dots of the Mosa incident to the black-maskers before, but it actually makes sense. They’re everywhere; on Zeania, on Mosa, on every planet, we have been so far.

“Now, there you go. You can be perceptive after all. You have to keep this attitude every waking moment if you want to survive in this world girl. If only we had more time, I would’ve sent you to Ocean to train you and then you’d be all mine for a year. Yeah, that would have been great,” he says.

“I don’t plan on being an assassin any longer than I have to. And I don’t belong to this organization. You have to understand that my goal is knowledge and not killing off strategic targets with a religious fervor. I’m not a fanatic; I’m a scholar,” I say.

I can hear him giggle behind his mask; why doesn’t he ever remove that damned thing off his face to reveal his identity? What is he thinking?

“For a scholar, you’ve done a pretty good job hiding that laser gun. Also, your trail of dead bodies is too long already, even if they’re not of the living kind, but you’ve become way too attached at killing for survival. We all started like that but look at us now. We’re saving the Galaxy for the fifth time this generation.”

The fifth time? What is he talking about? “What do you mean?”

Pyro was ready to tell me, but Dale stopped him. “Eladia, you don’t belong to this world. If you learn more about it than what you already know, then you have to be ready for the consequences. You can’t live in the darkness if you’ve seen the light. And what Pyro is talking about is some kind of sick, twisted light that will drag you in and consume your life. So let it go and find a way to calm your friend. He’s still not in a fighting position, and we’ll need his strength down the road.”

Dale is looking at me straight in the eyes; I can’t look away, not before what he said sinks in. Being a scholar means you have to use your mind and logic to analyze your findings and then take your decisions. But right now, I feel an itch deep in my heart, the same itch that drove me in asking Jay to change so that I could choose him over his platinum-skinned self.

Yesterday I decided to never follow that itch again, no matter how much it bothered me. So, when I turn my body and move towards Jay, I mean to forget that itch and stop using my heart to make my decisions. I have to use my head, and my head tells me that Jay has to change back long enough to recover. If he doesn’t, then he’ll die way before we arrive at the City Hall.

When I get right beside him, I think of what Pyro told me before. I’ve been hiding a laser gun in my pocket for some time now, but it seems that both of them had noticed. The old Jay would have noticed too in mere moments, but this ashen creature standing before me doesn’t have his mind into noticing anything.

He just keeps his hand in his pocket and stares, worn out with black circles under his eyes. Jay is on the brink of a mental breakdown, and history has taught me that when this Esuh gives in to his emotions, bad things happen.

I steel myself and get ready to talk to him.

“Hey,” I say.

“What? Are you here to mock the parasite as well?” he says with a tired, calm voice. He’s...different.

“You’re out of your mind, Jay. You can’t keep going on like that. You have to change to your other form so that you don’t drag the team behind. You’re in no shape to fight like this.”

Suddenly, I feel like he stabs me in the heart with his hollow, hateful eyes. My hand is itching to draw my gun out and use it on him, but I decide to trust my instincts once again and just take a step back.

“You humans think you know everything. All you talk about is how your feelings change you, how you fall in love with someone and then when you abandon them for the next, best thing, you don’t feel guilty or anything. I’m tired of your bullshit, Eladia. You were the one that asked me to get to this form, so deal with it.”

Okay, that’s it. I’m done with being reasonable.

“I asked you to be your fun, adventurous self, Jay, not this horrible thing you’ve become. I love you and every different color of you. I’m just asking for you to step down and recover before the big fight. Why can’t you understand that?”

He shakes his head and presses his lips tightly. Then he turns his head and walks away. I can’t even cry anymore. My hands rest on gun’s grip. He’s not the same person I met a year ago. However, I’m not the same person as I was a year ago either.