The moon finally emerged from behind the dark clouds, revealing a patch of pale white. A large area of the night sky looked blurred and warped, as if distorted by intense heat, yet nothing visible could be seen with the naked eye.
Inside the nameless spacecraft, its optical camouflage engaged, several men in reddish-brown leather coats and pants laughed and shouted roughly as they crowded around the dazed little boy in the cabin, inspecting him as if he were some curious little animal.
"Gotta say, this kid's the best-looking one yet. What the hell were the others? There was even a slime-worm-looking creature. That guy really isn't picky."
Tears still clung to Peter Quill's face. His body trembled with each hiccupping breath, but the strange-looking men and mysterious spacecraft didn't seem to frighten or surprise him all that much.
A terrifying man with grayish-white skin and a face dotted with black spots like a crocodile leaned in to examine him. Peter looked up at him timidly and stammered:
"Y-you... are you Mutants? Is this a ship from the Order Whip?"
The four or five burly men in the cabin all had roughly human-shaped limbs, but their skin was red, green, or yellow, and some had fleshy tendrils or horny growths on their faces. Not one of them looked like a normal human.
Add their matching uniforms and the bizarre spacecraft, something he'd only ever seen in comic books, and it was no wonder Peter Quill had guessed what he had.
"Hey, you even speak the common tongue! Kid, we're the greatest warriors in the galaxy—the Ravagers! Say, do you think this species is edible? Looks pretty tender."
The bizarre-looking Ravagers broke into another round of shouts and laughter, apparently seriously discussing what the little boy might taste like.
Peter instinctively