Over the past couple of months, the humans had fought and killed hundreds of Fog Seekers through sheer desperation, leaving the bodies in the fog.
Now, they scrambled back to those old kill sites, digging through the remains to extract the cores. John watched as the survivors ate the cores, following his instructions to the letter.
The ecstasy of using the cores for the first time felt like true magic to the survivors. John watched as more than three thousand humans began to change before his eyes.
In the span of a single hour, they were transforming from a fallen race, a divided group of refugees, into a group that was actually accustomed to the brutality of the pocket trial. Their eyes grew brighter, their movements surer, and for the first time since they had arrived, they were finally playing the game right by the rules.
