Lenny and I enter an undecorated two-story building and into a dimly lit room with mostly bare interiors, except for sleeping bags and padded mats on the first floor, filled with people either already passed out or high out of their minds-all this being cordoned off by what appears to be little more than a hallway up front. There was another recruit with us, but he split off at the hallway and went up a set of stairs instead. A pervasive smell litters the room, and I don’t think I like it very much-though it was at least kept out of the entry room as it was separate from the ‘crash room’ we were currently in, which forms the actual drug den. There’s a conspicuous-looking steel backdoor that I’m not sure you can even get back in from once you’re out.

“These are the people we’re expected to protect?”

“Well, they’re clients, so yeah. While we’re at it, if we could capture one of the attackers alive, that’d be a huge help from an information perspective.”

“Do we really have such a hard time of identifying the gang after us? I can’t imagine this Teneb substance is too common.” I’d never heard of Teneb or its… products, until I ran away to this city.

“Yeah, that’s the thing; Teneb is actually extremely rare from a global standpoint. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of any major drug routes for Teneb outside of Halych. Inside of Halych, though, it’s not all that hard to get your hands on some. We’re basically the Teneb capital of the world.” Lenny lets out a heavy sigh. “Thankfully, it’s still not all that much more common than the standard hard drugs even in Halych, but that’s just a cold comfort.”

I hadn’t thought before about the crime rate of this place, mostly because it hadn’t been brought to my attention before. It also clicked with something else Lenny mentioned to me earlier. “So the crime got so bad the police more or less gave up, solely because of Teneb?”

Lenny seemed to offer a half-smile as he looked over slightly, though it was hard to tell for sure. “Clever girl. They tend to drop the hammer pretty hard on any of ‘em that step into the nicer parts of town-the parts that the tourists tend to mill about in, in short. As for the rest of us? Well, they didn’t give up due to the volume of the crime as much as they did due to the sheer ferocity of it. You’ve already faced one of these roided-up shitbirds before, haven’t you?”

My thoughts trail back briefly to the second night I was here, and the two crazed men I had to fight against the same day. The one with the bat and the tentacle was not something I’d be forgetting anytime soon. I shudder as I ponder the possibilities of what this terrible substance was really capable of. “Yeah, I’ve had a small taste of what these guys are potentially capable of. They don’t seem to react to pain the same way normal thugs do.”

“Like wild animals, right?” The response came out a little faster than before. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought that Lenny was actually getting invested into the conversation for once.

I feel myself smile slightly. “Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Have you fought any yourself?”

“Well, I’ve had to slug a few in a barfight here and there.” Lenny lets a hand up to his face. “They’re a real goddamn headache, sometimes I need a barstool to ward ‘em off.”

“You wouldn’t just pull out a gun at that point?” I inquired sincerely, knowing how dangerous they could be up close.

“Guns are not easy to get in this city. That’s probably one of the few things the cops in this city get right, actually. So, no, I just deal with them the same way I deal with everyone else.” Lenny stated this almost matter-of-fact, like it was just another Tuesday to him.

“Really? I know how bad these things can get, and even I don’t like fighting them up close.”

“Maybe I just haven’t gotten the worst ones of the bunch yet-I have heard some downright eldritch shit about these guys from a few secondhand accounts, but I never bought into it very much myself.” This would certainly explain his relative indifference towards the ‘afflicted’ Charles spoke of earlier. Still, given that Lenny doesn’t visibly carry weapons, the fact that he could handle them himself-even the weaker ones-gave me pause. Was there some trick of his that he was hiding? “Well, now we just wait here for our guy to meet us.”

Two minutes pass, before a man in a dress shirt walked into the den proper. He walks over to us, crossing his arms. “So, that attack’s due today, yeah?”

“That’s what we were told. We’ll hang here and let another rook hang up in the business room with you, if that’s alright?”

“I don’t have much of a problem with it, so long as he knows to stay out of my shit.”

Lenny holds up a half-smile.“Well, good, because I already sent him upstairs.”

“Sheeit, really, Lenny? Forceful as ever.”

“Sometimes it’s best to just have an iron grip on the situation, Nick.”

“Oh well, guess I’ll-” It’s at this point I see a small, green, and heavy ball fall into the room from an open door, rolling towards the center, loosely resembling...

“SHIT, DOWN-”Lenny wastes no time in driving us both into the ground, followed by a deafening explosion and a flash of heat.