Free Monster Hunter Legion-eARC by Larry Correia Page A

asked, suspicious. MHI really did a have a lot in common with our competitors.
    “I am privy to some things. You could call me a consultant,” she answered innocently.
    “Consultant? More like secret agent ninja,” one of the Australians whispered to me. Apparently he was familiar with the woman.
    “An anomaly appeared on the ocean floor, in over two thousand meters of water. It rose from the mud overnight.”
    “Anomaly?” I asked.
    “A city.” When she said that it stunned the whole group. “It is two kilometers across, and sonar indicates that there are approximately twenty structures, the tallest of which was over a hundred meters.”
    “Deep Ones, maybe?” the Pole asked.
    “Far too advanced for such creatures. We do not know what inhabited it, but we were warned to be on the lookout, since it appeared that the inhabitants abandoned the city as soon as it rose from the mud. We do not know where they went. The beggar’s navy, pardon me, North Korea lost a spy ship over the disturbance, and then the Chinese navy lost a submarine to an unknown force while investigating. They then destroyed the city to keep it from falling into the hands of the Americans.”
    “When did this happen?”
    “Two weeks ago.”
    Her comments caused quite a bit of commotion. “Holy shit!” I exclaimed, and that was one of the most coherent comments of the bunch.
    Earl’s hunch had been right. There was a pattern emerging, and it was scary as hell.

    I wasn’t the only one with crazy news to report. The South Africans had confirmed to Priest that there had been reports of isolated villages being found totally emptied of people, cooking fires still burning, vehicles still running, all with signs of tunneling nearby. Lee had managed to get a similar story to that of the Korean woman out of one of the Chinese Hunters about the underwater city. National security was one thing, but most Hunters realized that there were some threats out there a lot bigger than any one country. The PLA interpreter was going to have a cow, but none of us gave a crap about their lost submarine, when we were more worried about what had destroyed it. Julie had gotten rumors of strange new activity in the Paris underground from the French, and Earl had heard that one of the Russian companies had lost an entire team to an unknown entity that had begun terrorizing a mine in Siberia.
    Earl had ordered us to meet back in his room. A cartoony world map had been bought from the hotel gift shop and affixed to the wall. Pushpins were stuck into various locations as more Hunters reported in. Over the last hour we’d gone through a fifty-pack of pushpins, and there were still more stories coming in.
    “How could we have not heard?” Julie asked in amazement. “This is staggering.”
    “It isn’t like we all hang out together, and you think our government-mandated secrecy is bad, we’re nothing compared to some of these places.” Earl read a message off of his phone, shook his head sadly, and stuck another pin into a comically distorted Mongolia. “More tunnels…Of course we’ve heard of some of these, but we always thought of them as random monster attacks, outbreaks, craziness…But this…” He stepped away, as if he was trying to see the whole picture.
    The three of us studied the map. I couldn’t put my finger on what was troubling me. “Rates have been up before. When I first got hired we were at an all-time high.”
    “Sure, but that was stateside, and mostly because of the private Hunting ban. It was individuals, monsters here and there, the natural growth of a predatory population that had lost the best thing that kept it in check. These, on the other hand…” Julie stroked her neck thoughtfully. “These are oddball events with bigger repercussions, and all over the last few years. MHI alone has faced two since then that if they’d gotten out—”
    “Three,” Earl corrected. “Copper Lake was another tip-of-the-iceberg type event. If I