"I give up," Nathan muttered to himself.

  The Berserker reluctantly stood to his full height. The token or whatever the demon lord had pointed at him had gone 'poof'. Maybe it had disintegrated like skill books after being used, but Nathan remembered that it hadn't worked, and the last tokens he'd seen back at the camp hadn't disintegrated after being used, which meant that something else had probably happened to the shiny object the demon lord had pointed at him.

  "Oh well," Nathan sighed.

  He shook his head at the corpse of the demon lord before dragging the corpse by its foot back into the camp. Already a mound of bodies was starting to rise, the squad throwing the bodies they'd looted into a pile. That wasn't all of the bodies, but in time he was sure that the rest of the squad would take care of the others. With a grimace, he turned away from all the corpses.

  He'd checked out the most interesting two, and he highly doubted that the minions of the two leaders would have anything better on them. If they did, then it'd be the luck of whoever found them. As for Nathan, he'd discarded the idea of checking out the corpses. At the moment, he was more interested in checking out the buildings, but before he did that:

  "Strip them of any piece of clothing that is salvageable," Nathan yelled.

  Winter had come, and while he wouldn't feel the effects of it when it got colder, he had to consider the weaker members of the squad with poor constitution. He didn't bother to listen to the replies; he simply walked towards the first temporary building he saw.

  Well, well, well.

  A grin lit up Nathan's face—all his troubles had just been washed away by the sight before him. Food, lots and lots of food dominated the temporary building. If Nathan was to guess, this would have been their storage facility or their imitation of it. While he hadn't even thought about it before, the logistics involved in running a small army, or group of miners in this case, had to be huge.

  Just the number of miners alone made something as mundane as feeding a hard task, or an expensive one depending on how one handled it. Nathan had opted to hunt as the fruit he had was definitely exhaustible, a decision that had almost killed Pirlo and Ciara, but luckily he'd been able to handle the rapid soza without too much fuss.

  Hunting as a source of food for the miners was definitely unsustainable unless they resorted to cannibalism, a thought which made him wonder if the gremlins would've eaten him up like he'd done the soza if they didn't have these rations. It was definitely a question worth pondering, but Nathan wasn't going to do it now.

  Around thirty vats were filled with packets of food. The vats themselves were as wide as an average tank and the same size too. They had various etchings which made Nathan suspect they were runes, runes that he had no idea of their function. Perhaps the runes could be to preserve the food or to ward off unauthorized access, or maybe it was both and then some.

  That's at least eight months worth of food, a year if we're strict.

  Of course, with Ruben as a factor, it might probably not last longer than five months. Shaking his head, he focused on the present, content to stare at the packets from afar. Sure, he could've easily picked up the packets, but he'd decided to be sensible as he had no idea what the runes actually did.

  From what he could see in the transparent packet, the individual ration contained a serving of a weird-looking grain, dried-up meat which he couldn't identify, and a fruit which was well preserved. It looked a lot like an apple but was purple instead of the red and orange of Earth's.

  "Talk about weird."

  It felt as though the miners had been sent on a spaceship from another planet rather than teleported by an apocalypse. After all, much of their food rationing setup reminded him about how humans sent their astronauts up to space; the food rations were almost the same thing. Perhaps they were actually aliens close by Earth, but their scientists and astronauts hadn't been able to figure out a way to find them.

  Nathan snorted at the thought. The apocalypse had brought the aliens which humans had been so obsessed with finding straight to their doorstep, and the aliens didn't seem interested in just exchanging call cards—they just wanted to dominate Earth. Now the very scientists and astronauts who were the frontliners in that project were officially out of jobs. Well, technically everyone on Earth was out of a job. They'd been thrown back into the dark ages where survival was winning and everything else was... meh.

  He rolled his eyes as he considered his options on what to do next. He could leave the storage unit and keep on canvassing the settlement, or he could actually call up the squad members and get their two cents on the matter. The latter seemed like the better option, as he knew that he wouldn't be able to focus on looting other buildings if he still had unanswered questions about the contents in this one. So without wasting anymore time, Nathan went outside the building, staying silent a moment to observe as the rest of the squad went on with their tasks, some simply doing it for the sake of it and some actually taking their time to rifle through the bloody corpses. Daniel, Tasha, and Diane looked fidgety and shook as they focused on their own corpses, Pirlo impassive, Ciara disgusted, and Ruben behaved like someone who expected to find a bucket of candy in the pockets of the corpse he was currently searching.

  Stolen story; please report.

  "I think I found something interesting guys, huddle up," Nathan yelled.

  He'd deliberately left out the details of what it was and made himself sound uncertain about the level of interest the find was worth. No point raising the hopes of everyone else just for them to find out that they couldn't utilize the rations due to one rune or another. Most members seemed to be eager to get away from the bloody work that was looting corpses as it only took a minute or two for the full squad to gather round.

  "You called?" Ciara asked.

  "Yeah, I found some food but don't raise your hopes up. I don't know if we can actually... use it," Nathan said uncertainly.

  "Oh shit, hopefully there's some pizza in there man, or a burger!!!!" Ruben said excitedly.

  Nathan resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the Berserker's words, but the rest of the squad didn't hold back. Pirlo, as always, was the only exception, the wiry teen preferring to let out a snort at the berserker's words.

  "Why would freaking aliens have a pizza or burger on them, Ruben?" Daniel said exasperatedly. "Sometimes I wonder if that big head of yours is just for show."

  Nathan and a couple of squad members chuckled at the Ranger's words, much to the chagrin of Ruben who flushed red at the jab by the ranger. It didn't look like it was going to escalate into a fight, which was the only reason why Nathan had decided to let the foolery go on—they all needed to unwind after the day they'd just had.

  "For show? You should be wondering if your bow and arrow is just for show. You've almost killed me like fifty times with your piss-poor accuracy," Ruben rebutted. "Maybe you're the one with an empty head. How long does it take to learn how to shoot a freaking arrow?"

  That's actually a good point.

  Nathan actually agreed a little with the Berserker's assessment of Daniel's shooting accuracy. Sure, the ranger had started to get better, but in the grand scheme of things, he was still a poor shot.

  "Well, since you're such an expert on how to use bows and arrows, how about we exchange weapons and you use a bow?" Daniel offered.

  Everyone turned to look at Ruben. The berserker had a look on his face that screamed 'gotcha', no doubt the playful teen had just led the ranger to a pre-planned line of conversation and the Ranger was none the wiser.

  "Why would I do that? I level up way faster than you do and I own a weapon that doesn't have me almost kill my teammate anytime I try to use it," Ruben said smugly.

  You, sly sly madman.

  The Ranger fell silent at the berserker's latest words, which was quite understandable. Nathan would've shut up too if he'd been on the ranger's side of the argument. Ruben liked to play the fool, but he might just have a working brain in that head of his; his respect level for the playful teen went up a notch.

  "So food?" Tasha asked Nathan, breaking the tense silence.

  "Yeah, follow me." Nathan walked into the miners' storage facility, the rest of the squad behind him.

  "Oh my word!"

  "On my days!"

  "No pizzzzza!"

  "Finally, no more bland soza!"

  "Food, real food!"

  These were the different reactions to the sight of the food rations. Nathan wasn't surprised by the reactions; to be honest, he'd had similar thoughts when he'd seen the thirty vats filled with different rations. This much food pretty much meant that they were going to be secured for a long time, and winter wouldn't make them die of starvation.

  For one, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that the monsters had started finding ways to hide from the cold, and the ones that had chosen not to probably had high constitution and were generally high-leveled. Nathan hoped to be able to test his blades against them but wouldn't recommend the same line of thought for anyone else in the squad.

  "Okay, glad you're all hyped, here's the problem," Nathan said. "I'm not sure that we can actually take out the food. Check out all those runes."

  "What runes?" Ruben asked in confusion.

  "Those runes, you dolt," Daniel said, pointing to the runes on the closest vat.

  "Oh, those aren't important, they're just preservation, compression, and decompression runes," Ruben said smugly.

  The back and forth between the Ranger and Berserker was starting to get to the point where he might need to step in, but at the moment it hadn't really come to that. The pair were certainly good at exchanging words.

  "How did you... Tutorial?" Nathan asked with a sigh.

  Ruben nodded to confirm Nathan's answer, and it was all he could do to keep from cursing. Even Ruben was apparently smarter than him when it came to these things, but at the moment he shoved the thoughts to the side. They'd sorted out the food problem that nobody wanted to bring up.

  That's that settled for a long time. Wait a minute, what do the other runes do?

  "What about the two other runes, decompression and compression do?" Nathan asked.

  Preservation was pretty straightforward to deduce; compression and decompression weren't that hard either, but Nathan would prefer to have the full image and explanation of what both words meant in that particular context rather than their dictionary meaning.

  "Simply put, the vat can act as a... zip file. Or bag of holding, whichever is easier for you to comprehend," Ciara started. "The compression rune would reduce the size of the vat into something that would be easily carryable, and the decompression rune... decompresses the vat."

  "Oh, why don't they just use it like a bag of holding then and just keep everything decompressed?" Nathan asked.

  "Because they can't pull out things from the vat when it's compressed," Pirlo said.

  "Huh," Nathan said. "Show me how to compress it."

  "Sure."