Matthew Silver and the Monster Hunters, Book One: The Darkest Waters

Chapter Thirty-Three

SilverCHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

According to Jace, we’d passed the exercise on a technicality. That fact didn’t sit well with me. If we were going to be graded on everything we’d done, I was expecting to be instantly promoted to the senior rank. If it came to it, I was ready to threaten every single Administrator by knifepoint to get them to realize that we deserved a lot of credit.

I was somewhat okay with the fact that the mission had been a training exercise. The Administrators threw those types of surprise exercises at us all the time, and we always came out stronger than we had before. In fact, it was a little relieving. No, that wasn’t why I was mad.

Stopping the Pukwudgies and Parker from capturing the monster and saving Scott and Sandy was an entire high-profile mission alone, and we’d done it, sustaining some serious injuries and facing countless setbacks. I didn’t see why they couldn’t take that into account for why we hadn’t passed the test to their standards.

Their “little test”had gone completely haywire. With all of the monster attacks going on of late, you would think that they would’ve kept a more careful eye on things. Reportedly, CCU bases all across the globe were seeing heavy casualties. Both Senior and Junior Agents alike were facing deadly circumstances. What did the Administrators expect? That the monsters would just ignore their little vendetta against all Hunters and leave us alone, so we could conduct our little exercise in peace? They seriously should’ve put a lot more security measures into the exercise.

I was also feeling a little grumpy about Parker. The extraction team had found the life raft we’d left him in on the shore, but there was no sign of Parker. The team had gone in fully armed to storm Parker’s cabin, but they had found the place completely bare. Everything, from the guns to the maps, to even the sheets on the beds—nothing was left. Parker had made a clean escape, and the CCU had sent out a kill/capture order against renegade ex-Hunter, Leeman Parker. It was out of our hands.

During our brief time with the Senior Agents, which was longer than any other time I’d ever spent with Senior Agents, we exchanged our stories.

Jace told us a heart-stopping story of how they’d been stuck in the underwater cave, thanks to us. The cave, instead of a monster’s lair, was actually an underwater base and docking station for Nessie II. They used Nessie II to refill the base with oxygen by storing it into massive tanks aboard the sub and filling the base’s reserves with it. It was a long process that involved many trips to the surface, filling the tanks with air, then going back down and filling the reserves with the air. We’d trapped them in the cave while they’d been filling the reserves, and it had only been their second trip.

With oxygen reserves barely filled, the team had done everything to try to destroy the rock barrier. They had considered using explosives, since even Nessie II couldn’t knock away the huge boulders. However, this would risk bringing down the entire cave on their heads.

During the last few hours they had left, they’d had settled on using explosives to try to reopen the passageway. They had been completely out of options. That was when Parker had blown the C-4 he’d planted. Since the explosion was from the outside, the cave didn’t collapse, and the Nessie II was able to refill the spent reserves with oxygen, saving the team from a very close call.

The team had been patrolling the loch in Nessie II, but after spotting flames coming from a forest, they had suspected that we were in trouble. After coming to a vote, the team had decided that we had, in fact, captured them, meaning that the exercise was over. The technicality was that they didn’t stay trapped.