Sata adjusted her bearings, since portals aren't really kind to her. She wanted to puke, but she also wanted to maintain that air of leadership she had after Hercule passed the mantle of group's leadership to her. As a younger member of the Order, chances for leadership tasks like these are at a premium.
She saw the two cats while still out of her bearings, and was immediately both delighted and annoyed at the same time.
"I'm back to where it all began." Sata straightened her cloak, as her senses slowly returned to her in full. The rancid stench of acid rain and feces assaulted her human senses. What she's seeing with her eyes were unappealing, and at worst straight up deplorable. And add to that being barefoot, the ground she's standing on seemed much worse than the unstable forest floor.
"Sata!" The two cat shifters finally saw someone that could be the object of their playfulness. It was someone they knew for once.
"You guys are here? How lucky!" Sata could finally smile a bit.
"We've been waiting for ages!"
"Are you the leader of this group? Where are the others?" The black cat shifter, a bald teenager, asked while hugging the voluptuous woman's silky white left arm. "Are they dropping in later?"
"Oh, yeah. Now that you've said it, there's only like a dozen of you here." The white cat shifter, a bubbly female with twin-tails, agreed after counting the number of people that climbed out of the portal.
Sata's face fell again, understanding that it was useless to hide the truth. "Prince Harambe and Mistress Cleo are still on the other side, they fled to the opposite direction of ours… Hercule also stayed back, to wait for them whenever they arrived."
"Oh, that's a relief! The Crown Prince is alive! Hail the World Tree!" The black cat wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. He had already forgotten the fact that their third division should have at least two hundred and fifty active members, so expecting at least two hundred here right now would be the bare minimum of a successful rescue mission.
'Fled?' The female cat gave Sata a questioning look with her eyes, as she clung onto her right arm. She also wasn't the smartest, but she knew just how terrible an operation like this one could go for his comrades. With an inkling of what happened to the rest of their beloved division, she interrogated Sata.
"Where did the rest of the third division go if it's only the prince, the mistress, and the bodyguard remaining?"
"Returned to the World Tree." There was pin drop silence after Sata announced the fate of their comrades. Half of the surviving bunch broke down directly in tears, for the first time ever since their camp had been eviscerated by King Uhuru's hunting force. They managed to suppress their emotions until their own safety had been secured. Now, all their grievances, their concerns, their death wishes, their vulnerabilities had been let out like the first rains of spring.
"Th-they… they… are already… with the maker?" The black cat bawled his eyes out. "Even those dogs? Where'd those three yeller nutjobs go? And… and those cheeky roosters! No way they're dead! What would happen to our mornings without them?"
He restlessly shook his head in disbelief. To him, the third division vanguard had been an invincible, untouchable bunch. His closest friends lived for the front lines, and had faced many an enemy, human or shifter, but always returned alive and with stories to tell. There's no way they all got wiped out like that, right?
"Don't ask me." Sata shoved the guy's hands away in a rare moment of frustration, before wiping away her own tears. "Hercule was the last to retreat. That's what he reported to us and the mistress. We can only take that at face value."
The gloomy atmosphere between the remnants of the once untouchable Third Division was palpable. Whether they saw their comrades die or not, all of them felt grief beyond their wildest imaginations due to the implications of what Hercule told them.
All of them had killed someone before.
All of them had lost someone they held dear before.
They'd taken part in several major battles which didn't forgive neither friend nor foe.
But this was different. In the eyes of the two cats that waited here in Nowhere, the plan was just to rescue Crown Prince Harambe from the coup d'etat. Once they got the confirmation from a sound transmission that Harambe was poisoned, yet safe and sound with them, they were already satisfied. The tone of Hercule's voice implicitly told them that casualties were zero.
Who could've attacked them in that place?
"Tell me, Sata. What... happened in the encampment? Please…" The cat girl asked in between her childish sobs.
"That despicable lion… his troops came out of nowhere…" Sata knew that she should've helped, but she was pretty much useless in large-scale combat. Once her stock death adder poisons run out, she's toast. Plus she's more of an assassin. "They came in like a tornado, decimating our scouts, and by the time we left… Hercule and the rest of the vanguard were locked in a vicious cycle of combat with them…"
Sata looked at the almost identical teenagers with a compassionate gaze.
Karan, the female, accepted the reality that had befallen their friends. She knows that it was inevitable. Their vanguard was not a group for the faint of heart. They charge into battle after battle fighting for their beliefs underneath the World Tree. Death could come knocking at any time.
Karam, the male, didn't accept it as quickly. Nor did he need to. His face bitter, he steeled his resolve to go on, telling himself that one day, he'll be qualified to fight alongside the people he treasured. He doesn't want to watch the starving kids of Nowhere anymore.
"We're moving out. We have a lot of things to do here." Karam's tone had subtly changed. Earlier, it was a higher, playful pitch. Now, it had a gloomy, almost self-deprecating feel to it.
Each and every one of them grabbed new clothes that would fit into the fashion here in the backwaters of Nowhere. The acidic rains haven't stopped yet, which is a pretty rare occasion considering rain doesn't last more than a few minutes in the middle of summer.
Before the downtrodden band exited the warehouse several minutes later, the portal reformed… and a bloodied, disfigured man, beaten to almost an inch of his life appeared out of it.
"Hercule!"
***
On Nowhere's largest plaza.
The sounds of hundreds, maybe thousands of boots, and shoes clacking on the brick paths of the main plaza— the only infrastructure with any brick in Nowhere— partnered with the chanting of cultist hymns and rebellious propaganda, filled the air.
Children watched from the surrounding deteriorating shacks with disgust on their faces, as the cultists of the Black Parade cried, and wailed in the middle of town. Their faces hid behind dark veils, and their clothing absorbed the resentful acidity of the rain, as they stopped and lined up in vigil of whatever God they believed in.
The people of Nowhere don't even care about whatever is going on around these parts, even if it involves these despicable cultists. But if something like this can spice up their somewhat stale existences, why not watch it?
After all, their way goes nowhere.