So went the life in a decayed realm. Monsters fresh born fought to despair and when tired of wasting away looked to a corner of the ruins where the misery receded. They submitted to join and it was not much better. But it was better.
That held true under the mana drought, as all starved. But a human had brought mana and now the beasts remembered how good it felt to hunt.
The Shards wasn't big as a settlement. A couple hundred dens, half of them empty, burrowed in the ribs of long fallen giants. They filled the gaps with solid sand and bone shards; dusk filtered through those measly walls and now so did the sunny warmth and humidity.
Those walls were turning into a clay that looked like flesh.
And all over monsters clashed. Creatures born to kill, defiant of each other, struck at the slightest excuse. Most broke off. A few escalated. One such had occurred in the middle of the park where rocky algae formed messy groves.
The human had had to come and force the fighters off. They scampered in haste.
"And you better stay put!"
He was yelling in vain, panting a bit, but his presence was enforcing a new law. None should cross the human and so, none should fight. This had somehow prevented the Shards from falling into a frantic chaos.
Such a rule held on the surface. But the human did not venture in the tunnels and so, those that sought a thrill hunted there instead.
Behind the human came his lizard and the chieftain, the scarred menilis.
"Get off me!" The lizard pushed her off his back. "Who do you take me for?!"
She ignored his anger and leaped to the teenager: "Do you see now? You can run all you want, the fighting will only get worse!"
It was actually getting better. Receding underground, in part, while those on the surface were settling down. But the cat-rat could not tell this early how her own community had evolved. She herself could feel her nerves pushed to the limit.
The human removed his cheetah mask for a moment to rub his forefront, then put it back.
"I know their type! You catch them enough times and they start to fear their own shadow!"
"Isn't that bad?" His scaly friend wondered. "Isn't a horde about to attack this place?"
"Eh, what's this bunch doing?"
His finger pointed at a couple gatherers busy picking red shards on the algae. Before the human, they were few and scarce; now they practically hanged in grapes all over.
"Oh." The menilis fiddled with her claws. "They are picking monster hearts."
"Monster hearts?"
And he turned his black eyes to the rough gems near him. The dew pearled on them, magnifying their fiery glow.
From dust to dust. Mana accumulated into shards and crystals. Shards in turn formed a body and the monster was born. There was nothing more to life than that.
"We..." The menilis hesitated. "We can't hunt, so we... agreed to feed on the stillborn. Hearts have mana, however faint, so they cheat the hunger."
"You just munch on your kids?"
Pretty much, yeah.
Not that most of them could ever reach the threshold that would allow them to get born. With the human around, they could flourish by the dozens, by the hundreds. Without him one would be lucky to make it out.
The dullest gems were as good as rock but to deprived beasts that was better than nothing.
"We eat them and use them to trade services. And we... use them to bet on fights."
That was another thing going on at the Shards. With killing forbidden, monsters still fought each other in the pits, to first blood, surrender or exhaustion. It wasn't as good but again, better than nothing. And with the bets going wild they could delude themselves.
Their chieftain had had to agree to all of this. Any less and the frail peace that maintained this sanctuary would have long shattered.
"It gets worse and worse. Murder is rampant. They are making more rules for others to break. I don't know how to maintain the peace... I have tried everything..."
From her perspective, the Shards was doomed. But that was a bias caused by the opposite.
The Shards was thriving even before the human had come. Numbers growing and with them more frictions that caused this overwhelming illusion. Newcomers were still confused but as the old guard grew, trust actually spread.
Her individual experience was simply too narrow to realize any of that.
The human had snatched one of the shards and was gnawing at it, tasting the stone under his mask. He quickly gave up.
"You guys must have crazy teeth to eat that raw! Or it's like a nut and you have to open it?"
"You eat it raw." His friendly lizard confirmed.
"Well damn! No wonder you guys can survive an apocalypse if you chew on that like it's nothing! That's one kid who's going to live!" He threw the definitely-not-going-to-live shard to the menilis. "I feel like taking a walk now."
"Are we going to break up more fights?"
The hunched lizard was tired of it. He hated the whole place in general.
"Nah! I think it's time we go see what this horde thingy looks like!"
In his mind, there were monsters sieging the settlement and he would break them in a glorious battle. So he wanted to assemble all the monsters around the felt like killing and give them the occasion.
Reality was slightly different. The horde was more of a few dozen monsters that hunted together in the ruins.
While fewer, they could have overrun the settlement by pure might, had the human not come. But even before then, they actually feared the place and stayed put, growing in number as they attracted the newborns to them.
All of those nuances were lost on the teenager who had already settled on the best way to fix this.
With fists.
"You can't fight them bare-handed!" His friend protested.
They were headed out and approaching the edge of the Shards.
"Why not? I don't see you with weapons!"
"That's because we have claws! And fangs! Don't humans use weapons?"
"My fists will be my claws!" His friend boasted.
Which, given how much mana he had, would be more than enough. That at least he had understood well enough.
On their path was a horned hare, humanoid, who stood around a bunch of monsters he had flattened on the ground. He himself was only slightly wounded, a few scratches here or there that he gladly neglected.
Those he had beaten just lay there, wincing or unconscious.
"Master Nzinga!" He greeted. "And his adorable pet."
"I'm not a pet!" The scarred menilis protested. "I'm the chieftain!"
"No, not... It doesn't matter."
"That little carnage is your doing?" The human asked.
"Ah ah, yes. I was right to follow you. When I first heard it it sounded so stupid to me. A place where you don't kill? What a waste of time."
He bowed at those words, in a form of apology.
"I see now how wrong I was. It is much, much harder to win without killing. And suddenly the thrill is back! Beasts I could easily finish are threatening again. I was at a loss, I was panicking, I thought I would die trying this little exercise!"
The stretched cat had hopped to his victims. Her rat tail started to flail. She was touching the fur on their back and hardly believed it.
"You found a way to knock out your foes?!"
"Silence, you. You may be the chieftain, but you are no one I care to impress."
"You would impress me more if you talked better to people, pal." The human noted. "I don't like it when my friends get trash talked."
"Oh please. Who needs friends in this realm."
But he still approached one greyhound he had laid flat and pulled the head up by the mane on its rocky back. The lizard groaned, barely conscious.
This was an art known to warriors. Against an armor, it was a way to hit past the layers of protection and just hammer at the soft parts behind. Hit after hit, it weakened the muscles, stunned the mind and brought a soft paralysis until the foe could not stand up anymore.
His art was still shoddy though.
"I found a way to hit that leaves no mark, no wound, yet does just as much damage. Want to see?"
And he punched.
The hit was clean enough that the rocky part did not even feel it, but the shockwave of his fist crossed all the way through. He let the beast's head fall back to the ground.
"I can't wait for the next fight. Will my fists learn? Or will I get cut before that? Coming here was the best decision I made in a long time."
"Can you teach us?!" The menilis asked, excited. "You have to teach us!"
He paid her no mind, so the human approached him in turn.
"You know what, you win this one! I would like to learn the technique myself!"
"Ah! Spare me your pity." The hare waved him off. "Who are you even trying to fool here? I simply wanted to show you that I am catching up, that's all."
"Okay? Then, how about you join us? We are going to check that horde outside!"
The humanoid hare had to shake himself off his surprise. After being asked to train a human, he was offered to follow him in war. And while his eyes screamed how much he trusted the teenager's strength, there was a limit to his imagination.
"Oh! You mean scout! Why not, it may get exciting."
Because outside the Shards, well, killing may very well be an option.
So the four of them departed. Human in lead, under his cheetah cape. The menilis on his shoulder. Behind them trailed both the hunched lizard and the hare who, after a time of silence, could not help but exchange words.
They were both, after all, feeling a kinship in exile. Many things did not make sense to them and so, while gauging each other, they talked about those oddities.
But the human wasn't paying attention to any of that. He was absorbed first by the flowing algae that broke off the rocks to try and drag themselves up in vain. The masses of shards on their bodies. And the massive bones laying around.
Then, he found a part of that horde and felt almost disappointed. Aside from the lack of fur on their back, they differed in no way from the Shards. He watched them drag their catches to a pile they had yet to lit.
So the human turned away, punched the air a few times, hopped on his legs and then removed his cape and mask.
"Wait here, I'm going to have a little chat!"
The chat lasted all but ten seconds. The whole troop fell on him, only to be met by a flurry of punches that sent them flat on the ground, paralyzed. They all watched him do, mesmerized.
The hare groaned in disgust.
Under the human's aura, those monsters lacked no strength. They were attuned killers using all their skills to coordinate, encircle him and overwhelm their prey. All the same, he took them out in detail, one by one, while seemingly not moving from his spot.
Not two minutes and the teenager was done. He slapped one of his foes awake and asked:
"Where is the horde? Where is the rest? You can't possibly be it!"
And the monster: "We will kill you, human!"
"Not afraid, uh? Good for you!" He let the felog free and crouched before him. "So, here are your options. You can shut up and die, or go get the others and die. Or you can take me to them and tell me how I can help."
"Help?!" The monster almost coughed.
"Of course! I'm Nzinga, it's what I do!"