A loud pop could be heard in the distance, and orange smoke began spewing out of a canister and engulfing the sandbar of a river. An attack helicopter hovered overhead, its rotors rustling the vegetation on the sandbar. Two black ropes slowly unrolled from the helicopter and two soldiers rappelled down and landed on the ground with the sound of a slight jangling of metal.

Team Leader Richard Tate landed, quickly letting go of the rope and lifting his SCAR rifle to his shoulder. The riverbank was thrown into silence, as the helicopter's rotors became nothing but a distant sound as it lazily gained altitude. The only things could be heard were the currents of the river and chirping of birds. Dead bodies were floating on the river with gunshot holes punched through body armor, plating and all. Other soldiers lay face down on the riverbank with arrow shafts sticking out of their backs.

Someone called for backup just before his or her radio echoed with the sound of snapping bone. Now the caller was nowhere to be seen.

"Keep your eyes open." Tate whispered to his squad mate. "Watch my six!" He put his eyes to his optics and scanned the riverbank. He followed the trail of bodies, trying to pinpoint where the assailant could have gone off.

There was nothing. Tate personally would have preferred being dropped into a heavy firefight. Silence was strangely worse.

Slowly, Tate advanced without letting his eyes off his sights. He waded into the river, feeling the cold seep into his legs. The water came up to his waist and gave Tate a false sense of security, like he was being enveloped in a protective blanket. If anything, it helped to still his heart rate.

Behind him, Tate heard a short grunt and then a splash. He whipped around and saw his partner slowly floating up to the surface of the river. Blood ran from his throat, turning the water red around him.

"Shit." Tate muttered to himself. His index finger slowly moved from the side of his gun to the trigger. He narrowed his eyes as he scanned the river currents. At one point of the water, there were two small currents that were going against the main current. Someone was clearly wading in the river with him.

"DIE ASSHOLE!" Tate squeezed the trigger and the staccato thumping of rounds going off broke the silence. First, it was controlled bursts of three. But as Tate panicked, it became a long-drawn out automatic. He saw bullets spark off the figure and the figure de-cloaked briefly every time a round struck it. The figure ran for the riverbank, which Tate could only tell by the reeds on the side of the bank being flattened. Tate's finger dropped quickly to his under-barrel grenade launcher and squeezed the trigger. There was the soft pop of a grenade leaving the barrel before impacting with a deafening explosion in front of the figure. Dirt and dust cascaded in a brief conical shower up in the air, before the wind broke it up into a hazy cloud.

The riverbank once more fell into silence. Tate whipped around back and forth, pointing his gun at everything: the shadows, the branches that were moving due to the wind, the muffled footsteps he seemed to be hearing from everywhere. He started getting a prickly feeling up his spine, and then he realized something.

Something was behind him.

Tate whipped around with his gun, but a hand grabbed the barrel of the gun and yanked it out of his grasp. Seconds later, Tate felt a hand on his throat and then he was lifted off the ground effortlessly. Slowly and surely, the figure de-cloaked revealing a humanoid figure made up of masses and masses of black-coiled muscle. Tate stared directly at the figure's face as he choked for breath. The robotic mask only stared back at him, no emotion showing behind that red visor.

A second later, he felt himself being accelerated through the air, before impacting into something hard. Just before he felt the world become blackness, he had one final thought. He must have gone from 0 to 60 m/s in less than a second.

Tate woke up and the first thing he noticed was that it wasn't particularly hot. The armor and respirator he was wearing were still suffocating, but not at all like the sweaty armpit of New York's newly formed rainforest. He was surrounded on all sides by trees that seemed more like woodland unlike the tropical forests of New York under the Liberty Dome.

The second thing Tate realized was that he was supposed to be dead. His body should have been broken and crushed against a tree. Tate remembered staring into the face of Prophet before Prophet threw him and probably killed him with the sheer force of the impact. He was for sure dead. There was no way any normal human could have survived that type of kinetic force.

Then, Tate's heart sank. So did he end up in heaven or hell? According to him, he didn't know which category he belonged to. Before being enlisted in CELL to "work" away his debt as a corporate mercenary (beauty of the thing was that no one ever worked away their debt), he was a psychologist. He had done extensive research on people throughout history, and how their personality led to their rise in power. Ironically, he couldn't use his own research to get himself out of his debt pit-hole. He spent much of his life doing what he was told, and didn't go around looking for trouble. So that means he deserved heaven right? Of course, the real question was why heaven was ok with Tate keeping his weapons and grenades from earth.

Tate lifted his cheek off the dirt, and pushed himself to his knees. With a grunt, he tore off his respirator, helmet, shoulder pauldrons, and goggles and left it on a heap in the floor. It would only weigh him down. There was no lingering Ceph viral material here, so none of that stuff would be useful to him anyway. He felt around his backpack and did equipment check. He had his M12 Nova, SCAR, and a couple magazines in pouches on his vest as well as pouches of MREs in his backpack.

He had to get out of this woodland, except he didn't know where he was. "Better to die going somewhere than die sitting here." He muttered to himself. Tate rose to his feet and began walking idly through the forest.

Tate found soon enough that there were no visible landmarks, and there were no bodies of water to follow.

"This is great. Just fucking great. I'm in hell." The more Tate thought about it, the more his little theory made sense to him. Maybe he was damned to wander the forests forever. He'll be like those restless spirits stuck in houses and historical sites, transparent with nothing inside their bodies but air.

He slumped down on a rock, and put his head in his hands. His stomach rumbled and his throat reminded him that he was parched. Of course, maybe there was no point in eating and drinking anyway. Maybe, the gods of the world drew Tate's judgment from a hat and he probably ended up with Tantalus's punishment.

Tate sat up and kicked a rock down the clearing. The rock rolled down the clearing and came to a stop before a pair of red eyes.

Wait.

Red eyes? Tate stood up quickly with his gun to his shoulder, flicking the safety off. The red eyes lowered and a white head like bone lowered to the ground to nudge the rock with its nose. Then the monster stepped into the clearing.

It was like a grizzly bear, except it looked like a demonized version of it. Its back was jet black and white spines protruded from its back like it was a damn stegosaurus. It's head looked more like a skull than anything, and prominent red vein-like structures was spread across its face like a spider web.

I don't give a shit what it is. Tate opened fire immediately. CELL small-arms technology was definitely no Star Trek high-powered phasers, but its chambered 4 mm hypersonic armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds were not joke. Unfortunately, stacked up against the satanic Ursa Major…it might as well have been.

The monster ran forward despite the fusillade of gunfire and swiped with one paw. The SCAR flew out of Tate's hand and slammed so hard into a tree-trunk that it fell onto the ground bent at a 45-degree angle. Tate fell over backward on his butt, fumbling for his sidearm. His hand closed around the grip and he lifted the gun to the beast's face and fired several times.

At close range, the Majestic 6's .50 cal slugs slammed into the beast's face noticeably stunning it. It roared in pain, walking backward now on it's hindlegs and swiping at its own face with its paws.

But then it fell back down on all fours and pawed a long trench in the ground. Tate squeezed the trigger again. The gun clicked as the chamber loudly declared to the world that it was empty.

"Shit."

The beast made as to charge forward when a hundred leaves shot forward through the air. Tate dove to the floor as the leaves sailed overhead like a flurry of miniature knives.

Dozens of it impacted into the beast, but it didn't look necessarily too harmed. It roared and turned around, its attention diverted from Tate for a moment.

Tate opened his eyes and saw a girl wearing a red dress on the other side of the clearing, with little fire symbols running down the length of the hem. She couldn't have been older than a high-school student.

Her face was pale with fear and she was biting her lip. But she drew two swords from her back, and clicked them together to form a bow. The beast pawed the ground and then charged straight for the girl. The girl pulled back the string, and her fingers trembled as she steadied her aim. Moments before the beast could claw her, the girl let go and the arrow sailed straight into the beast's right eye. Something like an orange aura began spinning on the beast's skull, and then the arrow exploded, blowing the beast's head up into a cloud of black dust. Moments later, the massive body slumped to the ground and dissolved into black powder that faded away into the wind.

"What the f-" Tate stopped himself just in time. It wouldn't do to curse in front of kids, although he was pretty sure she would know at her age.

"Are you alright?" The girl asked, as she ran forward to help him up. She quickly holstered the swords on her back.

Tate looked at it in disbelief.

"I'm fine. I'm fine." He waved off her attempts to help him up.

"What are you doing wandering the forests? Don't you know that it's dangerous? Even my parents don't leave the city boundary unless they're with a troop."

"Well you see. It wasn't exactly my choice." Tate muttered sarcastically.

"What was that?"

"Never mind. What's your name, kid?"

The girl flushed a slight shade of red from being called that. "My name is Cinder Fall. I'm from Sanctum Academy in Mistral. What about you? Where are you from?"

"You can call me Tate. I'm from…" Tate paused. "…New York. You might hear that it's nicknamed the Big Apple."

"Oh." The girl frowned. "I've never heard of it. Is it a city?"

"Yeah. It's a big city, with a lot of skyscrapers and taxis…" Tate trailed off when he saw that the girl wasn't following. So obviously, this wasn't Earth. He might as well been speaking Chinese to her. "You know what, it's not important. So you're a student huh?" He put a hand to the back of his neck. "Do you…" He pointed to her swords. "Where did you learn to fight?"

"Sanctum academy. That's where everyone goes to learn, before they go to Haven."

"Oh I see." He put a hand on his chin and looked to where the monster had died. "So those creatures.."

"Grimm." She corrected him.

"Okay. Grimm….are they…" Tate realized that there was no point asking so many questions. If she said she came from an academy, she could point him out to her city and there on he could figure things out without drawing too much attention from himself. "You know, I'm just lost. I was coming here to Mistral to…teach. I'm a bit lost and if you could point me out to the nearest city, I'd greatly appreciate it."

"Sure! Oh you teach?" Her eyes brightened.

"Yeah. I teach Psychology...or at least used to teach Psychology."

Cinder looked blankly at him. "I'm not sure I'm following."

"Well. You don't have to. I studied a lot about politicians and how a lot of them achieved power through their personalities and tendencies. Interesting stuff. But then I fell into debt and ended up being forced to work as a cor…actually I don't think you care, right?"

She shook her head.

"I thought so."

"Except for the politics part." She gave him a shy smile. "Because someday, I'm going to be on the Mistral Council. That's the career path that I been thinking of taking."

"Oh." Tate chuckled. "Well, it's good to dream big dreams at a young age."

"Yeah." She shuffled her feet. "Unfortunately, my parents aren't helping my case."

"Why not?"

"They're crooks and thieves." Her face darkened. "When the neighbors see me, they…" She looked intensely at Tate and then sighed sorrowfully. "I don't know why I'm telling you this. I'm sorry for wasting your time."

"Not like I have anything better to do." Tate shrugged. An idea came up in his mind. "Say…I haven't been able to find a place to stay in Mistral. How about.." Inwardly, Tate was shaking his head, but it was a worth a try and a much better alternative than ending up homeless. "I can crash at your place if your parents are ok with it. In return, I'll give you lessons. I know about politics and I think I can help you a lot in that department. If you don't like what I say, then I'll move out and go to a different place. How does that sound?"

"I think my parents would be fine with it."

Her face lit up, but then suspicion crossed her expression.

"That's sounds awesome, but really? You don't want any actual payment?" Cinder looked genuinely surprised.

"It's on me." Tate raised his hands. He felt slightly bad for manipulating her this way, but it was the only choice he had. He didn't think he could get her on this Mistral Council, but teaching her would give him enough slack time to find out more about Mistral and move on from there.

"I don't know what to say…thanks so much! If I get on the Council because of you, I'll make sure to pay you back! " Much to Tate's surprise, she ran forward and hugged him.

Tate flinched, but then awkwardly put his hands around her. "Yeah, don't worry about it. I'll do my best."

Or bullshit my way as best as I can.