Mannis looked down apprehensively into the opening in the ground that he found nestled against the foot of the inky black megamountain Maroe Montes. Terrabellum had only just managed to fully cover the last bit of light coming from Archurus, causing the temperature on its moon Gewell to drop significantly and in the matter of minutes. Terrabellum and its three satellites shone brilliantly on the approach from space; the giant, ghost white godfreid trees that could be found across the planetary system reflected any and all light from between the waved grooves in their trunks, illuminating the okenite floor on Terracrysallum and, more importantly, marking your path.
From most directions, regardless of Gewell’s position in its revolution, it was impossible to see Maroe Montes from space, the reflection from the godfried trees behind it would suffocate the black megamountain out of existence right up until the moment you flew into it. It was only after you breached Gewell’s atmosphere when you would catch the first glimpses of Maroe Montes, then the mountain range came at you all at once, growing exponentially huge and close and by the time you could react you were already flattened against its side. Mannis had heard all the stories; an unfamiliar or uninitiated pilot, either blinded by Terracrysallum or the godfrieds, would drop down into Gewell’s atmosphere, often moving at a speed of ten megameters-per-second, and before they could inhale enough oxygen to release a scream they were dead.
You didn’t need the stories when you were on the ground, though, you could see it everywhere. Blown bits of engines, power coupling slicks, the odd landing-gear foot or even an entire derelict ship, often operational if not for whichever part had scraped across the top of the mountain and caused it to fail - all of which littered the mountain range from its foot to its thousand crests. Mannis would come across an especially bestrewn stretch of the mountain, and would always think to himself, I should start scavenging the ships instead of the caves, I’d probably make more scrapping than I make every two harvests.
But he never picked through the ships - not for the potential selenite he’d make at the scrap yard, not even for curiosity's sake. He was no mechanic, no engineer, he didn’t know what parts of the wreckage were worth his time and what wasn’t, and, at his age, he figured, he would never know. Where would he find the time? It seemed to Mannis that every time he dropped a harvest, it was time to turn back around for the next one.
As is the case with any job you stay at for long enough, the process had passed tedium and reached the point of numbed automation for Mannis; he was resigned to this line of work. Despite the ever-present danger of a mine collapse, or the odd toraforn pack that would wander out from behind the godfrieds of the Gewellin Wood, he did his work with little consideration given as to whether he should be doing something else, or if anybody should be harvesting tidornite in the first place. In fact, ever since he quit his job mining on Archurus with The Stellar Project to go into business for himself, he gave little consideration to his life in any sense; he was wholly unaware of his position in the universe relative to others or to nature or to the universe itself.
Mannis had followed the same routine for years; land at the far end of Maroe Montes, walk a kilometer to the same cavern, excavate a tidornite vein, walk the harvest back to his Hammond Expediarus, and repeat until he had an inventory of 2,000 kilograms or more, at which point he would make his trip across the Western Sector of Golenn-5 to the Hermitage System, where he would receive a gram of selenite for every kilogram of tidornite he delivered.
The Hermitagi, a race of industrialists that never saw the inside of a factory, would then unload the tidornite at the Range - an O-class-star-sized hypermanufacturing plant consisting of six separate and connected space stations fastened to one another and to their system's star through an amalgamation of garnet bridges. Somewhere inside the Industrial Range, through a series of refining and adding and cooking and cutting, the tidornite was processed into tidrant blocks. When inhaled, a tidrant block would produce a heavy tranquilizing effect that could potentially last an entire day, and demanded an extremely high tolerance to stay awake through. Unlike most other drugs that required the user to twist their life around its use, tidrant wasn’t created chiefly as a medical treatment; it had no medicinal properties at all, no matter how generous you were with the definition. The Hermitagi manufactured tidrant as a recreational narcotic and they profited hand-over-fist both from its trade, and from the acquiescing effect it produced in their Norcemen slaves.
Mannis put little consideration into the Norcemen quality of life, either.
His last inventory drop would be the last harvest he could extract from the cavern that he had been excavating for the last four years. The well was tapped dry - he knew as much three harvests ago. For the first time in four years, Mannis was outside of his routine, forced to find another tidornite producing cavern that met his standards.
After years of harvesting, Mannis had learned what to avoid and what was worth his time; he didn’t like vast cave systems because they afforded the troglobitic horkfens too many opportunities in the form of shadowy corners from which they could attack from. He didn’t like tidornite veins that penetrated the surface, as it often meant that there was very little ore left inside the rock.
He also didn’t like using caves that he had to descend down into as it was too difficult to scan, too many unknowns.
But Mannis had taken too long searching for the right cave that it had turned to night on Gewell, leaving him precious little time left to excavate if he wanted to make the next shipment when it was expected and keep his contract with Hermitage. So, he stood there, staring into the unknown. Gewell at the base of Maroe Montes was equally as dark as the godfried trees were bright; it was overbearing, all-encompassing blackness, especially so at night, and yet, somehow, the interior of the cavern beneath his feet managed to reach a, previously unimaginable, even darker shade of black.
Mannis inhaled roughly and exhaled smoothly, trying to take control of his breath. He looked up past the onyx black of Gewell into the sky where Terracrysallum hung above the rest of the planetary system like a benevolent overseer, frozen and pure and kind, acting more as an auxiliary star than a moon. He thought to himself, I either die from a horkfen bite, or I die from starvation when that damn Hermitagi cancels my contract. The horkfen would be quicker. If you’re going to be a coward, now is the time.
He turned around to face away from the cave, dropped to all fours and put his right boot down into the cavern, searching for a strong enough foothold to support his weight while he looked for his next foothold. With great caution and precise movements, he grabbed ahold of the cilirian crystal line wrapped around his waist and shifted his body weight from the cavewall to the rope and began descending hand under hand, kicking at the wall of the cave or grabbing onto it when he started to spin. Mannis spent what he felt was a few too many minutes climbing down and began to worry about running out of line; he looked up at the entrance to the cavern, which was nothing more than a distant gash in the blackness now. He grabbed his voider with his right hand, his body leaning slightly to the right as he did so, and sent a cartridge directly under him, the force from the cartridge’s propulsion spun him around on the line, but he saw where it had hit against the floor, disintegrating on impact and sending red phaser nanoparticles across the bottom. He continued his descent, voider hanging on his shoulder, now with a degree of confidence that directly correlated with how familiar he was with his surroundings.
He could tell that he was below the ceiling of the cave even if he only saw black. Before he dropped down and unfastened his line, hanging just meters from the ground, he paused and listened to the dark. He heard something scuttering off to the right, the sounds of a dripping liquid. He reached under his arm for his voider, slowly, then sent two cartridges into the far right wall - the scuttering intensified, it sounded like excitement - then, after a moment of silence, he tossed his excavator just in front of himself.
The horkfens were on it immediately, swarming something that they couldn't find. Without eyes the cave-dwelling reptiles relied solely - and stupidly, by Mannis’ estimation - on their hearing. The man-sized horkfens tore around at the dark giddilly, expecting something so loud to also be large and full of anything that could sustain them, the prospect made them hyper. Mannis, expended the rest of his voider cartridges into the circle of horkfens without aiming. The phasers illuminated the cavern and painted his ambush in so many red light sources of waxing and evanescing intensity, producing a strobing effect that seemed to be coordinated with the schizophrenically spastic movements of the horkfens reacting to the burning phaser blasts.
The cave returned to blackness, and he waited there suspended; there was no more scuttling in the dark, but the sound of dribbling liquid quadrupled.
Mannis uncoupled himself from the cilirian line and dropped, hard, into a shallow puddle of liquid which he didn't care to identify. He pulled a lightswitch from his pocket and stuck it on the barrel of his voider, putting a spotlight over the gruesome scene that blanketed his excavator. He refilled the cartridges in his voider and took a wide berth around the inanimate carnage, dropping his voider to leave it swinging from his shoulder and snatching away his excavator all in one fluid motion.
The interior of the cave mimicked the exterior of the mountain, he now was able to notice, except the floor seemed to be made of the same dirty white okenite as the godfried trees outside, stained red and not just around where his excavator had been. He found that he was surrounded by corridors inside of corridors. I'm breaking all the rules of scaving. I should just go and find a different cave, he thought, but he just continued deeper into this one with the dull and unthinking momentum of an object in motion.
He took every right turn he came upon as it would simplify his path back to the entrance of the cavern, should he need to make a quick retreat. Under normal circumstances Mannis would have turned his holopanel on the moment he entered the cave, its low-powered x-ray function made finding ore veins easier by a score of ten, but he was hesitant to make any more noise than was necessary - he still felt the overarching need to keep his attention focused on the lightless and yet undiscovered margins of the cave system around him.
He produced three more lightswitches from inside of his coat and threw them one-by-one into the three adjoining corridors, pausing for a moment between throws so he could react should the sound of the lightswitches draw out any more horkfens. The soft, almost blue, luster of the lightswitches continued to increase inchmeal in strength. His apprehension had only been met with intensifying silence which served to underscore the goofy shame he unconsciously felt when he would catch himself being unnecessarily cautious.
Even from inside of a silence so stark that he could hear himself wheeze with his mouth closed, a silence through which he was able to hear every bump in the okenite floor as the lightswitches rolled across it, Mannis couldn’t rid himself of the presumption that he was not safe. He could almost hear it, the voice of his own nagging anxiety that whispered to him uncertainly. That voice that told him to mistrust himself and his senses, to second-guess whatever he thought was honest and accurate, that forced him into taking any readily available precaution, that was capable of lulling him into a state of catatonic inaction; like the lung scarring that caused his wheeze, that voice had been with him since he left The Stellar Project. He knew that it was a symptom of his occupation; that voice that keeps a scavenger alive by reminding them of a corner they haven’t checked was the same voice constantly telling Mannis to focus his attention on inconsequential neuroticisms.
How many times has that voice saved my life, he considered, and how many times has it kept me from opportunities? Mannis waved his index finger past his right temple and opened his holopanel which blinked into hazy translucent existence from inside the nanoscopic projector implanted in his eye socket. The holopanel’s x-ray function was already powered on from his last harvest and all at once it had scanned his more-than-immediate surroundings, opening any structure past a certain level of density, pulling it apart from itself and dividing that part into groups of light-refracting and mathematically equal portions before setting whichever structure, if not its natural size, back to its natural shape.
He turned in a full circle where he stood, keeping in tight formation as he scanned the cave through the new perspective that the holopanel made available to him - the adorably faint buzz of its projector beside his eye was the only noise that could be heard. He turned to face the wall that obscured where he had entered the cave, and could only just make out what was a potential tidornite vein, only, tidornite was more of an ocean blue, and this was closer to cyan. So, Mannis doubled-back the way he came, this time taking every left turn.
He looked up into the sky through the fissure in the main corridor, the earthen rock that comprised its edges now pulled back from his holopanel - it was as if the cave ceiling had disappeared if not for the few rays of light from Terracrysallum that it managed to absorb and send refracted back through itself like so many curtains of solid space that warped everything behind them, sending the once inanimate stars in the sky to waving lazily around their relative positions.
The holopanel’s x-ray also managed to recognize and conceal the scaled dermal armor of the dead horkfens, and only their dermal armor. Mannis saw into the skin and the innards beneath the horkfens scales, consisting of equal parts dull-grey flesh and dark, relatively colorful, blood splatters, thick and sinewy. The horkfens blended into one another without their scales to distinguish one lifeless body from the next; the pile of horkfens was never more accurately defined as a pile until it had been stripped of its intricately gradient colored scales and left with just the rare few anatomically necessary organs and structures that were base enough to belong to any other sentient life form in the universe.
There are nine horkfens within that pile. Nine horkfens, and just one swipe is all it would’ve taken for me to be the one on the ground.
Why the hell did I ever leave Archurus? What kind of a life was I expecting outside of The Stellar Project? It couldn’t have been this. Not on this frozen antagonist. It wasn’t in the Hermitage System, selling ingredients for narcotics to slavers. What was I looking for?
What the hell are you always looking for? Mannis responded to his own inner monologue. You left because you wanted to get away from yourself. You want to get away from yourself because you want to get away from the past.
Mannis, he laughed. The circumstances to which a person could be arbitrarily born into could be so ironically cruel that it was almost profound, but all Mannis could ever do with that realization was laugh about it.
Mannis. I should have just worn a shirt that read “No one cared enough about me to give me a name, so eventually someone just decided to name me after the moon I was born on”.
I should have told everyone my name was John. /Mannis/. He shook his head. And without any effort on his part, memories of his life as a child, growing up inside of a Consortium Assignment Center on Mannis Ulta, had pushed their way to his waking conscience. Instructors that only kept their jobs at the Assignment Center to exist in contrast to their bitter and often brutal peers, who were among some of the first people to treat Mannis with kindness. The handful of friends he had made in his two decades at the Assignment Center, whose contributions to Mannis’ development meant so much more to him than his inability to remember their names would lead one to believe. Girls who he had maintained crushes on for longer than he would care to admit, whose existence in proximity to his own and their subsequent unrequited acknowledgement had defined his relationship to love and positive reinforcement more so than any of the wonderful women that he had loved and who actually loved him back.
Now, he felt that he could only accurately remember any of their voices, or maybe the shape of their hair or a certain smell they produced after a certain time of day. He was so far removed from childhood now that his memories were less like memories and more like recreations of his memories starring actors with blurred faces and faces that were combinations of multiple other people’s faces.
He thought, then, about all of the beauty he had been fortunate enough to witness, and was thus equally as unfortunate to forget; meaningful interactions that, even though he couldn’t remember what was said or how he felt or who was there at the time, still managed to shape the landscape of how he thought or spoke or reacted. And when he thought about all that he had forgotten, while he was still riddled with so many unpleasant memories he would have much sooner gotten rid of - so many thousands of instances in which, after someone had learned his name, how their expression would turn from one of mutual human understanding to that of pity, and often fear for some reason, or hundreds of instances in which some older kid had openly mocked him for being an orphan. And then, there was the death of his family before he was even able to form memories.
The Consortium has everything on file - he’s seen images of them, but they were as abstract and distant to him as if they had been photos in a history book. He felt no connection anytime he’d see a picture of his parents, no matter the angle, nothing about them struck him as intrinsically familiar or close to him. He had no memories of them from which he could relate them to, or none that he remembered.
And that must be God’s final bit, another of his mean jokes at our expense, just of a higher order, the joke that would qualify all of his other doozies. Those little moments wherein an uncountable set of circumstances all align to create the precious few moments of genuine, simple, floating happiness, or a feeling you haven’t felt before that and it makes you want to keep looking for whatever other beautiful and new feelings there may be left for you to experience - to forget the best parts of life only managed to compound the cruelty of all of the other cruelties of life.
You’ve given me so little to last me a lifetime, but I always just assumed my memories were a given; why do you even take /them/ from us?
Mannis was stirred out of deep thought at the flashing of a red directional icon on his holopanel that indicated the large ore vein he had seen was just off to his right. He turned the x-ray function off and the light on; the world slowly circled back into one singular and still version of itself as his eyes reacquainted to reality. He flashed the holo light down the corridors he hadn’t searched before he produced his excavator, still slick with horkfen blood.
Mannis lowered the hood of his coat down over his face where it formed into a visor, then pulled the jack of the excavator back and released a sustained column of heavy plasma from it into the hole it bore into the cave wall. The world was now a deep cyan from the blue of the visor and the green of the excavator’s plasma cannon, running silently enough that he heard every clump of rock as it tumbled down the widening column he was creating. After a few angular adjustments he made with the excavator, searching for his harvest to no prevail. Mannis flicked his holopanel back on only to realize he had already been cutting through the mineral ore vein, it had only been camouflaged by his visor. And it wasn’t tidornite.
Mannis lifted up his visor, and that voice in his head that told him to make sure now told him run a scan on it first. He scanned the light-blue mineral clusters that abounded from where they covered the tops of his boots all the way back to the where his excavator’s cannon ended, and the scan from his holopanel returned with just the answer he wouldn’t allow himself to believe; Selenite. An ocean of it, practically spilling out of the cave wall.
Mannis, still in half-disbelief, couldn’t decide what to do or where to begin. He swept the piles of selenite around his feet into frenzied and useless piles, the whole of it all too great to make neat. Then, his brain caught up with his present circumstances, and Mannis dropped his gravity disperser on the ground of the cave then unfolded his hauling apron on top of it. He started in on the muckpile at his feet, inefficiently grabbing at the onyx-dusted-selenite clumps by the handful and throwing them onto the stiffened slat of the apron. Once the ground in his immediate area had been swept clean of anything worth anything, Mannis turned to the stope in the cave wall, greedily scraping out priceless selenite gems by the clawful, shoving his arm deeper into the hole with each haul. Between pulls, stuck in a series of attempts to loose a block of selenite large enough for him to fully wrap his around and with his mind preoccupied with what his hand was doing inside the stope, Mannis was just barely aware of an assortment of closening and accelerating footfalls. He immediately recognized the fastly approaching symphony of slapping then scraping as narrowing horkfens. Unable to determine in a split-second how many bipedal steps he heard and how many quadrupedal, the latter crazed into devolved movement by their bloodthirst, and with one arm still in the stope of the cave wall, Mannis grabbed his voider and blasted searchingly into the void in front of him. The first two, exploratory, phaser blasts each hit true, the second landing into a crouched horkfen’s head and it dropped on the spot. Having revealed the horkfens through the ever-thinning red haze of phaser light, Mannis withdrew his right hand from the stope and readied his voider for the, thankfully still distant, approaching wall of blue-grey flesh. He pushed the apron covered in selenite back behind him effortlessly with his newly freed hand and sent it floating diagonally across the cave floor thanks to the gravity disperser.
He spent his first two cartridge fills blasting into the horde of horkfens in indiscriminately circular lines from one end of the horde to the other. Then, as the hungriest, most desperate horkfens managed get out in front of the group, he began prioritizing his cartridges, holding his refills in the same hand he steadied his voider with, he hit six consecutive horkfens in their heads, refilled, then hit two more. Mannis reached into his coat and produced a pulsar device that, historically, he used to clear out large areas of a mine - he tossed it just in front of the oncoming line of horkfens and activated just as it hit the ground. The pulsar emitted a circular blast wave that struck the wall on either end of the cave, dislodging a collection of old dust up in plumes of rebounding vortices and sending the approaching horkfens tripping forward over themselves and each other.
Those few stray horkfens with enough presence of mind to remember what they were after began appearing through the unspecified noises of scrapes and groans and hisses hidden therein, popping up suddenly from within the unmoving blockade of dust particles and slashing at the air, premeditatively, yet with such pathetic results it appeared random. He shot them each in turn as they revealed themselves. He heard a huge crack off to his left that couldn’t have originated from a horkfen, coming from the opposite end of the cave, and with it he saw what seemed to be a load-bearing stone slowly being squeezed out from beneath the weight of all of Maroe Montes, and he tossed another pulsar at that stone. Another huge crack, and with it came a thunderous, rolling roar that never seemed to end.
He ran back from the collapse, keeping the fissure and Terracrysallum above him in case the rockslide were to reach his only escape. He stood there, one hand on the cilirian line he lowered himself down with, as the side of the cave tumbled back into stasis just before him and the onyx-colored dust it disturbed jumped up and encircled him in black clouds. He shut his visor and through the x-ray on his holopanel he managed to cobble together a sort-of version of sight. Through this cloud, he went to his apron of selenite and guided it towards where his cilirian line hung limp, and lightly lifted it up towards the fissure at the top of the cave. Mannis stood, craned-necked from age, and watched as the gravitational disperser lifted what was easily five-hundred-kilograms of selenite to the surface of Gewell when a set of four distinct footfalls appeared within his register and closed the gap between them all at once, and before he could turn to meet his assailant he felt three heavy and blood-shivering cold streaks lash across his back. He dove and turned around as he did so, voider in hand, just in time to watch as a lone horkfen with patches of his scaled dermal exterior hanging loose at several points slash at where Mannis had been, and before the horkfen could recuperate from his failed lunge he received five voider cartridges in center mass.
Mannis, surveying his surroundings from the ground to ensure that there were no other horkfens lurking in the dust, fell back into himself once he was sure he was alone again. And that voice in his head said, see, this is what happens, this is why we have protocols we follow. He felt where the wounds on his back met with the dust on the cavefloor, cutting and opening his wounds on microscopic levels that registered as a singular burning sensation. Mannis wanted to react to the sensation, but was physically paralyzed from a combination of the pain from the cuts and the exhaustion from the battle. This can’t be where you die. For all you’ve taken from this moon, this is where you deserve to die. But this isn’t where you die. Just get to the ship. Get your selenite, and get it to your ship, and get to a doctor. Then, you can decide if you’re going to die. Just get to the ship. First, get up, then get to your ship.
And, at length, Mannis found his footing, then he found his cilirian line and allowed it to carry him up to the cave opening, retracting into itself and lifting him out of the cavern as it did so. He passed the apron of selenite and dragged it up alongside him. He climbed out of the fissure, which was more just an aperture at this distance, and once again fell into himself at the top. He padded at the wounds on his back and the amount of blood that accumulated from doing so worried him. Just get back to your ship. Get the selenite back and die in your ship. Just don’t die here.
After some effort and a series of carefully orchestrated twists, he managed to pull the hauler apron out of the hole in the earth. It was a near two-kilometer walk back to the Expediarus, and the whole length of his return journey all he could think about was how much selenite he had - he tried to focus on how grateful he was for the gravity disperser instead of obsessing over the wounds across his back.
Finally, he made it back to his ship. He pushed the apron hauler up the gangway and closed it behind him, the hydraulic expulsions of the pistons marked his return to familiarity. Once again, he collapsed, this time more from joyous exhaustion than pained exhaustion. When Mannis mustered up enough energy to move again, after what he had hoped was only a few moments of having his eyes shut, he retired to the sanitizer station. The blistering hot solution from the sanitizer station physically made him jump and yell loud enough that even the horkfens he left in the rubble could have heard him. He looked at the reflection of his back in his holopanel and it looked like torn gift-wrapping paper. He wrapped a bandage around his entire torso weakly and replaced the coat he wore, feeling only slightly better at the end of it all.
He had found so much selenite that weighing it was a chore in itself. The final count; 512 kilograms. 512,000 grams. It would have taken him two-hundred-and-fifty-six full harvests to earn 512,000 grams of selenite from The Hermitagi. He had made it. He could retire. He could sit in one spot for the rest of his life and still die, marginally, rich. He looked over either of his shoulders, paranoid. Mannis had reclaimed enough selenite to truly scare him as to the possible consequences. This was enough selenite for someone to kill him for. I have to find somewhere to hide this before I do anything else. Then he wondered, How much selenite is Yarbro Minton worth? He thought about the planet where the PSC was headquartered, Selaprin, and he wondered how much selenite it took to construct the planet, let alone its star. He consulted his holopanel, and it read, ‘Selapor weighs 2.34 x 10^18 kilograms.’ He didn’t even want to look up what the star Selsani weighed. All of the selenite, all of Yarbro Minton’s, and here I am, nearly dead for five-hundred kilograms of it.
The revelation shook Mannis. He went from unbelieving, anxious giddyness to embarrassed realisation as to just how much selenite five-hundred kilograms amounted to; which equalled out to less than what any individual member of the Hermitagi Board of Supreme Directorate was worth. And he was mad. He could live a fine life for as long as his life persisted with five-hundred kilograms of selenite. But he didn’t want a fine life. He wanted everything. He wanted to have so much selenite that it bought him power without having to spend an ounce of it. He wanted a sea of selenite. And, thankfully, he knew exactly where he could find one.
After resuiting to withstand the cold of middle-night on Gewell, he opened and descended the gangway. The little voice in his head that consisted of all of his insecurities was shooting off in all directions, only now Mannis could ignore it before the little voice could penetrate his basest layer of thought. He tightened his hood. He had to walk in a way to minimize his coat rubbing against his wounds, and the posture it required began to hurt his hip. He could see a bend in the foot of Maroe Montes that he recognized from his initial approach and it told him that the aperture he found was near.
He looked up to Terracrysallum again, pearlescent, calm, unlived, but, uncharacteristically dark, he noticed. Then, just below Terracrysallum from his current point of view, he noticed what looked like the dissolving of a mushroom cloud, followed by the formation of another mushroom cloud lower down from where the other explosion had originated. That poor son of light, Mannis thought, immediately recognizing an uninitiated pilot entering Gewell space for the first and last time. He stood there, unable to move, disabled by the profundity of not-too obscure death. Another explosion sounded off below the last one, the parts were tumbling down the giant mountainside, Mannis concluded, then thought he should probably get going. He bent down to one knee unsteady, then to the other knee, and he looked down into the hole in the ground, and despite all that had changed inside of that hole since he first crossed its threshold, he felt that he was back in the same position he was in the first time around. It was in that position, on his knees, his back hooked into a straight line to limit exposure, when a stray thruster, aided by the momentum of a three-kilometer fall at a hundred-and-five degree incline and the onyx-black shade of Maroe Montes, hit off of the foot of the mountain and bounced into Mannis’ upper half with such force that the scavengers entire body was jerked back in over itself, breaking everything from his waist up. The thruster would later be found half-a-kilometer from where it crushed Mannis. Mannis’ corpse stayed where he died until a pack of toraforns, drawn by the scent of his decay, drug him into the depths of the Gewellin Wood.
