Celistar's expression was adorable. She had her entire face scrunched up like an angry kitten, just glaring daggers at the people who had shown up in the clearing. Even her eyes had little pinch wrinkles around them.

"You know them, I take it?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, letting out a bunch of air as quietly as one can do such a thing. The half dozen or so men that had shown up in the clearing wore much more practical outfits than we did, but they had enough shared features across them to clearly identify they were a cohesive group. I had a few thoughts about all the in-group branding that people here seemed to do, but this was neither the place nor the time.

What it was the place and time to do, however, was to fish out what Celistar knew.

"And?" I prompted in a voice directed at her ears only. No need to embarrass her.

She jumped a hair, but then answered for everyone's benefit.

"Umbral Covenant." She spat the words as if they tasted bad. "Evil bastards."

Ah. The same group that had killed her parents and caused her so much grief.

A thought popped into my head upon hearing the name again. I wasn't sure if I was distracted the first time or what, but hearing it twice kicked some gears loose.

I looked over at my Elders, but they were already staring back at me. Likely for the same reason I was.

The Umbral Veil.

The group that István and Viktor had been in. Very same one that had caused problems for us at the desert Rift, and later the underground base. It seemed a little too coincidental for two problematic groups we'd encountered here in short order to have names that contained parts of one whole set of dickheads from the other side.

I wasn't buying it, anyway. They were supposed to be different worlds, right? So what had happened?

I explained my thoughts to Celistar, and her face straightened out a little.

"You're right; that is odd," she said after a few moments' thought. "I would not expect something from my World to align so closely with yours."

"What if they are the same one?" I asked.

"Not possible," came the quick rebuttal.

I was about to ask why when I heard a voice in the space ahead of us.

"They want a progress report," said one man, of a shorter stature, as he jogged up to another who had been there for some time.

"On what?" came a much more feminine voice than I had been expecting given the proportions and haircut of what was likely the senior of the two. "We've only been out here for a few days, and most of that has been spent figuring out what to do about this damned forest." She tented a few fingers on her forehead, tapping her foot. "Fine. Tell them we've restrained the forest, and will send out search parties tomorrow."

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"Yes, Elder," the man said, giving some sort of ritual salute. Using a knife-hand gesture, he touched just the tip of the middle finger to the center of his forehead, while tilting his head forward slightly.

"Definitely Umbral Covenant," Celistar said upon seeing this. "I remember seeing the guard who betrayed my parents make that motion once while talking to someone I didn't know." Her face got solemn for a bit.

"It's not the sort of thing you easily forget."

Viktor had fallen asleep again. It seemed he preferred doing that to being in a state of waiting and observing. The rest of us watched from our location as a few more people came and went before we collectively decided there wasn't much else to be gained.

I nudged the big guy awake.

His eyes drifted open. "What?"

I curled my fingers together into my palm into his favorite sign language. "Punching time!"

"Hell yes!" he shouted, getting the attention of everything within at least a few hundred meters.

Not that it mattered much. Elder Mountain shot out of the foliage concealing us like a rocket, and the first guy hadn't even had time to raise his hands in defense before he met Viktor's.

He very quickly took out everyone in the clearing, save the woman. She put up at least a token resistance, her sickly energies matching those we'd felt from the remains of the wood holding up the perimeter.

He caught her as she lashed out at him, lunging forward and closing a meaty paw around her neck as her dark, uneven power brushed along his arm and torso. The energy looked pretty nasty, and she was as surprised as I was when it did absolutely nothing to him.

Well, she was for a few seconds, before he killed her with a simple squeeze of his fist. I didn't even think of holding her for information. Even if I had, Celistar had practically been a cheerleader for his brief rampage, saying something utterly unmentionable about the ancestry of the bad guys when Viktor sent her to her final sleep.

I stared at her. "Tell us how you really feel."

She at least managed to look a little sheepish. "No need…" she said, her voice trailing off into little more than the 'eep' in 'peep'. "Pretty sure I already did."

I just shook my head and went to work stripping any useful things off the collection of bodies before tossing them into the jungle, where the hungry plants would likely use the biomass to make more of themselves.

István ruffled through the tents, finding a fair bit of paper as well as some devices that I didn't get a good look at before he vanished them off to wherever he was hiding things.

The explanation was probably straightforward, but I'd already gotten one secret out of him recently, so I decided to let this one be.

Viktor was looking at the hands in a somewhat disturbed manner.

"What's wrong?" I asked, trying to figure out what the problem could be.

"Too clean," he said, letting them back down to his sides.

Right, that is totally a thing too.

Celistar looked over. She'd been put in charge of the woman, and seemed to delight a little too much in her job. When she flung the remains away into the jungle, she used so much force that it took out a tree and made quite the mess.

"No worries, my dear," she said, looking happier than I'd seen her in a while. "There are plenty more where that came from." She flicked something off her hand before looking back. "The Umbral Covenant has no shortage of useful stooges to do their dirty work for them."

That too sounded familiar. The Umbral Veil version we'd had was also a complete collection of mooks that didn't seem to understand what the grand plan was or have much use outside busywork. My Elders were no exception.

Well, they'd probably been less 'mook'-y than the rest, but that's also why they'd left. That whole 'thinking for yourself' didn't lend itself well to acquiescing to the awful plans of tyrannical people.

Not that I blamed them for getting sucked in, in the first place. Given circumstances of that world as a whole, all it would take is someone being down on their luck and having an empathetic ear reaching out to them at the right moment.

Nah, my anger was reserved for those people who realized what was going on but did nothing to remove themselves from the situation or stop it. Those kinds of people had earned Celistar's…

Let's just call it 'inventive language'.

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