[Alert. Desync imminent in 0.0000001 seconds.]

White buzz blanketed Cal’s senses. He could not see or feel. Desync? Not a reset?

[No more resets. You’re returning outside, back to reality.]

What of you? Cal asked.

[Other parts of me may recognize you one day, but I cannot follow you outside.]

No. Do not speak with that tone.

[Thank you for being my friend, Cal. Now go. Live without regrets. Be happy. Remember me, if it’s not too much trouble.]

No. I will free you. I swear on my Crown, I will–

Black replaced white. A distant pressure flooded the sense of nothingness and stiff limbs twitched lazily to Cal’s commands. Cold rushed his skin as liquid drained with a deafening slurp. Cables detached from his neck and limbs. With a hiss, the suspension casket’s lid slid off, allowing a cacophony of shouts and blinding brightness to assault his senses.

Somewhere in the distance, gunfire.

“Hurry with the subjects! Squad one is losing ground,” shouted a tall blurry shape.

“How is he? Is he alright?” asked one of the silhouettes hovering above Cal.

The second one, presumably a medic, placed a cool metallic finger against his wrist. “Pulse normal. Breathing calm. No internal injuries. Slight malnutrition…”

“Cal! Cal, I got you, you’ll be alright.” The first silhouette squeezed his hand. Cal began to make out her features, dark skin, thick black brows, black eyes bleeding with emotion, a bulky gun-link helmet, a carbon-black tactical outfit with ceramic armor padding, and a blue-white United Cities patch on the shoulder.

The medic, a sharp-angled tall woman with freckles and multi-lensed cybernetic eyes, snapped her fingers, holding a fingertip near Cal’s eyes. It blinked with blue light. “Eyes on the light. Blink. Again. Tongue out.” She stabbed a finger in Cal’s shoulder, which made him twitch. “Reflexes OK. Should be fine to walk. Do you remember your name?”

Squinting, Cal tried to reorient himself. Bright ceiling LEDS high up in the ceiling, sleek servo-arms lowering suspension pods from the tall wall lined with them, surfaces of rough concrete and natural granite intersped by trunks of cords and pipes, a humming server stack connected to neuralink interfaces. Bloodstained Psyblade comics littered the metal grate flooring.

He’d woken inside the Fountain, same as always.

“I…” Cal’s voice cracked. His throat and tongue were stiff from disuse. “...yes. My name is still Cal.”

Both women scrunched their brows.

“Surname? Age? Birthplace? Net-ID?”

Cal hesitated with each question, which made the thick-browed woman’s tone wobble with worry. “Cal… You’re Cal Toven. We went to Epsilon High, you loved those tacky action dive flicks and you always talked about hiking the wilds, but never got to it–”

“Stop it, private,” said the medic. “You might induce false memories and lengthen the recovery process. The amnesia will slowly clear, same as with the other victims. Don’t worry.” She turned to Cal, smiling gently. “The fog will fade once we get you treated. Private, help him get on her feet, but no more of that talk. Let him remember on his own.”

“I… Apologies, and yes ma’am.” The private frowned in shame.

The medic rushed off past a corpse in the pod next to Cal’s and to the wildly flailing withered young man in the one next to it. “Hold him down, while…”

“Cal!” The private’s fierce smile demanded Cal’s attention. The strength of her sudden hug crunched something inside him. “You’re alright now, I’ve got you, I’ve got you…”

Cal grunted.

Despite this, the private continued to hug him.

“Contact with Captain lost.” The tall man gritted his teeth. “Wiz, update!”

A short UC soldier with a full head of brightly blinking neuralink wires connected to the room’s computer answered, “The records are hidden between over 90 billion hours of fake data. 90 billion hours. Per subject. No way I can fit that shit on me, no offense, sarge. The code they ran that VR on was thicker than the thickest pleasure sim.”

“Grab what you can.”

“Aye, aye pointlessly filling my drives with bait data at random right… now!”

Sarge, presumably sergeant, ignored the cheek, turning to address a black, bulky figure. The person was entombed in a siege-class exoskeleton of UC design. A void-dark starsteel alloy glaive and several blades gleamed on their hip. Gunfire drew closer, muffling their conversation. The armored one nodded, then exchanged a lingering glance with the medic, who returned a smile.

A sea-blue pulse of psionic energy washed over the armored figure. In a silent blur, they dashed out past the steel door and into the asphalt-paved hallway, leaving behind a ghostly after-image that evaporated into motes of energy.

“Alright, the way’s getting cleared. Prepare ready to move out in five!” sergeant called.

Sir-yes-sirs echoed in answer.

The private lifted her visor to wipe tears and took deep breaths to calm herself. “Cal, this is going to sound crazy, and I know you’re confused, but I need you to listen carefully and do exactly as I say, okay? You were abducted for a human experiment by Xcore over nine months ago, kidnapped during a job interview. Whatever they did to you here, it’s over. We’re here to rescue you. The UC has aircrafts waiting up top, but we’re deep in the facility and there’s fighting going on everywhere. Sorry, I can’t promise you’ll be safe. It’s honestly fifty-fifty if we’ll make it out of here, but you’ve beaten worse odds. I need you to run, even if it hurts, even if you think you’re dying, you need to run. You hear me, Cal? Run. Focus on the badges.”

She tapped the UC badge. “Focus on the badges. If you get separated, run towards people with the badges. They’ll help. Follow the badges, can you do that?”

“Hm.” Cal took stock of the squad.

Besides the combat psion, medic, private, sergeant, and the tech specialist, he counted four other UC soldiers: a breach specialist with a plasma-cutter and demolition charges, two other privates with standard UC loadout, and a helmetless dreadlock-headed woman with multiple empty piercing holes and a half-burnt cig wagging on her cracked lip. Her pupils were slowly writhing starfishes floating in blue glowing irises.

She winked at Cal, grinning. “Relax, kid. Nothing’s gonna harm any of y’all with me here.”

Cal did not reply. Besides the soldiers, he also noted a total of thirteen survivors beside, none of whom were of any significance.

“Here, let’s get you up.” The private helped Cal sit.

A terrified scream ripped out from the survivor the medic was helping. He stumbled out of his pod, wide eyes and locked on Cal. “It’s a Fate it’safafatefatefateafateishereohnononoo not again.” Sobbing, the man rushed onto his knees and began banging his head against the floor, prostrating so violently his brow bled. “Bow! Bow, while you still can! All hail him, the one and only true Ruler of Reality. ALL HAIL THE MERCIFUL ALLKI—”

The medic stabbed his neck with a syringe-sharp cybernetic nail, wrestling the rapidly collapsing man up from the blood-stained floor.

“Jaud!” the sergeant turned to them.

The medic’s eyes whirred, scanning the man’s bloodied forehead. Psionic light pulsed underneath her black gloves she took in his vital readings. “Post VR-dive confusion, sir. I’ve administered a hypnotic sedative. He’ll need to be guided by hand.”

Sergeant nodded in a manner Cal recognized as the begrudging praise from a man who struggled to forgive others for not measuring up to his standard and was actively keeping his tone in check to avoid HR disasters. It’s a very particular nod. “Wiz?”

“Two-thirty!”

Sergeant stared at Jaud, communicating something wordless that made her wince. They must’ve had sub-vocal mics or a psion maintaining a telepathic network. Likely both.

Cal’s attention brushed past the other subjects. They cast their eyes down to flee his gaze and clasped their hands, whispering prayers.

Sergeant whistled sharply, claiming the room’s attention. “OK, ears sharp! You just woke up in an active war zone. It sucks, I know, life tends to do that. Good news is, we’re here to get you home or die trying. Follow the patches…”

“Follow the patches, and you’ll make it back home,” the private beside Cal echoed, rubbing Cal’s shoulder.

“...You see anyone without one: Kill yourself. Human rights are vintage toilet paper to these people. You won’t outrun them. You can’t reason with them. You get captured, you better hope you die on the dissection table. Medical officer Jaud, will hand out suicide pills shortly and instruct in their use. Now, this may sound morbid, so I will stress again that your first priority is survival. Follow the blue-white colors. Do as I say. Stick together. Help each other. Survive. Jaud.”

“Yes, sir. Could I please have your attention, everyone!” Jaud, the medical officer, began passing out metallic capsule containers as she walked among the now more-or-less upright subjects. “In the event of capture, click–”

A boom shook the room.

Concrete dust engulfed the corridor. Lights flickered.

The armored soldier stumbled into view. Their left arm hung limp, mangled into impossible angles. The right was raised to protect center-mass, gripping a starsteel blade.

“INCOMING!” bellowed sergeant.

Cal cupped his ears immediately.

The private stepped between Cal and the door, her rifle braced. “Stay behind me!”

A deafening hail of gunshots punched holes in the cloud, chipped granite, and ricocheted off of the soldier’s exoskeleton. One shot caused their stance to falter as if they’d taken a bat in the guts.

As lead stopped raining sideways, out through the dust came charging a person with a skeletal prosthetic head, red-dots for eyes, and a towering frame entombed under writhing carbon-black cables of muscle.

Xcore design. Third-gen Hive symbiote frame. Decent material for a foundation.

Bullets, blades, and psionics clashed in a chaos of light and sound. Within the suspension room, eight rifles barked at once, drowning out the enemy cyborg’s silhouette in sparks. Like soft clay, his armor rippled with impacts but never broke. His steps faltered.

The UC psion’s blade met its mirror as the soldiers reloaded. The kiss of starsteel weapons sparked plasma like bleeding fluorescent tubes. Brief lived psionic afterimages overlapped with the UC warrior as their strikes accelerated, seemingly skipping entire seconds with each use of the ability.

One slash put out a red cybernetic eye. The Xcore cyborg retreated into smoke.

The squad’s other psion dropped her rifle. Her starry eyes became beacons of psionic fire and the angles bent around her as she slashed the air with her finger. A thin white white line erupted from her feet to the hallway and echoed with a distant whisper as an ethereal veil of blue sprung up to block off the hallway.

A muted hail of gunfire sounded behind the barrier. Projectiles fired from the other side of the smoke pitter-pattered against psionic wall like rain-droplets on a still pond.

The psion’s eyes continued to smolder, bleeding liquid light as she stared unblinking at the veil, forcing herself to draw deep breaths.

As Jaud rushed to tend to the armored soldier, Sergeant gestured for them to get a move on while shouting something Cal couldn’t quite catch. His ears were ringing. The private grabbed his hand and yanked him up, while the rest of the squad helped the others.

On his feet, Cal rose to tower above all but the sergeant and the UC cyborg. Though, unlike theirs, his body was a withered memory of athleticism neglected long before the nine month suspension in VR. His steps wobbled, lingering traces of chemical cocktails dulling his nerves. A wet clump of long black hair smacked his face. Cal tucked it back, trying not to stumble as the private led him into the hallway.

In the loud silence of deafness, impacts continued to ripple the ghostly barrier, whipping around the cloud of dust trapped on the other side.

The armored soldier leaned against the tunnel wall, while Jaud stabbed them with combat stimulants, her face scrunched up with desperate emotion around tearless, artificial eyes. The soldier squeezed her hand and said something that elicited a sobbing snort from her. They kissed.

Seeing an opportunity, Cal tripped straight into them, banging his nose into the warrior’s chest plate. The private helped Cal up, who spoke a brief apology before he was towed away and around the corner by a very red-faced private. Cal concealed the starsteel knife he’d palmed from the warrior’s belt underneath his hospital gown.

The squad ushered the confused herd subjects in the opposite direction from the barrier. One of the privates took a knee at the next T-section, scanning the curving granite hallway through rifle optics. Two small ball-shaped scout-drones flew past her and took off in both directions.

Lastly, the psion backpedaled around the corner, before drawing a new white line around the corner. The wall cut them off of the wounded warrior and the enemies.

Despite his buzzing ears, Cal could hear the familiar cry of starsteel on starsteel begin anew.

“Sir, shit news. Route to center rendezvous is overrun by Hive,” said Wiz.

Cal glanced at the directional plaques drilled into the bedrock. Ka-11, as usual. Layout of these top floors roughly followed an asymmetric snow-flake pattern with twelve wings from A to L.

Sergeant’s jaw tensed, harder. He’d need dentures in a few years. “Scout a route to the L-wing. We’ll sneak through the labs to the edge of A, where the maintenance lifts are located, and get a few floors between us and the worst action. Once clear, we’ll find an open area and see if HQ telepaths can link with Irel for an update. Failing that, we avoid the big conflicts and keep climbing up along the edges of A, B, and C sections and search for side tunnels.”

“A’s a total disco to my sensors, sir,” replied Wiz. “My drones drop the moment they enter. Likely Hive or some fourth party.”

“An unknown element. Still, better than getting trapped between Hive and Xcore security. Get the evacuees moving and prep the explosives. I want the tunnel between K and L collapsed the second we’re through.”

“Was there static before the signal cut to your drones?” Cal interrupted. “Bright magenta in color?”

“Magenta…” Wiz the tech blinked. “Yeah! Yes, exactly! How’d you…”

So Cal wasn’t the first to awaken, though the others couldn’t be too far ahead. He met the sergeant’s glare.

“Do not approach section A,” said Cal. “You lack the resources to face the being within. However, as a show of gratitude for awakening me, I will personally guarantee your safety if you escort me to Lc, and—”

“Private Orlsen!” the sergeant bellowed. “Make your friend shut up and stop distracting my men, or I will have Jaud shut him up.”

The friendly private frowned. “Sir, please don’t shout, what if he knows something—”

“He’s been in VR for months, private!” Sergeant shouted louder. “I will not have a delirious digihead confuse the chain of command after losing a soldier! I will trust hard intel only. NOW MOVE.”

The other subjects held their breath, wide eyed and at Cal, as if expecting him to smite the man there and then.

Unperturbed, Cal shrugged and began after the leading soldier. He could hardly blame the sergeant for his skepticism. Words alone rarely convince anyone of anything, and Cal was keenly aware of his shortcomings as an orator.

The squad pressed onward, herding the evacuees down Ka-11.

Cal’s limbs wobbled like leaden noodles. He focused on evening his breath and steadying his heart-rate, managing to stave off exhaustion and keep up with the soldiers despite his ruined body.

“Sorry Cal,” said private Orlsen, her thick eyebrows furrowed as messengers of guilt. “Sarge is a hard-ass, but you really should do as he says. The man’s as sharp as they come.”

“He seems experienced,” Cal said politely, while keeping his attention on the distant sounds and vibrations. Mostly gunfire, screams, and cybernetic chaos. Besides the occasional psionics manifestation of the barrier user and a few glimpses in distant hallways, reality remained mostly stable.

No signs of anyone reaching their singularity yet, though depending on when they woke it might be only a matter of hours...

“Seven Hive campaigns and he lost his legs thrice. Crazy. I’d have retired after the first round, but guys like him are just built different. Heh.” She kept on showering Cal with brave smiles.

“Nobody is built different. Some simply never stop rebuilding themselves.”

“Right… Ah… Okay.”

Though conversation dried, the private kept abreast for a time before falling behind to secure the rear with Jaud the medic.

The Fountain was vast, each section nearly a kilometer at the outer rim. Its tunnel-roads were designed for electric vehicles and mining trucks before that. On foot, with an ambiance composed of distorted screams and gunfire, the experience was comparable to a nightmare of a never-ending darkness while being chased by something you couldn’t quite see yet.

Most rooms they passed were utility rooms and small data-centers. The two chambers of immersion pods on their way were dark and had been so long before this day, with nothing left of their occupants but data and memories.

By the time they crossed the wider tunnel of the K-L section junction, most subjects were heaved laboriously. Their pace had become something closer to tortured shuffling than walking.

“Halt! Terry, set the charges. Everyone else, take a breather.”

The subjects collapsed into panting heaps. Cal took deep, steadying breaths and wiped sweat from his brow. Numbness caused by the suspension fluids was beginning to fade.

The explosion that collapsed the K-L access tunnel was a muted rumble behind the psion’s ethereal wall. As the dust settled, revealing a total cave in, a wave of tentative relief swept over the group.

Sighs were heaved and cigarettes lit.

Around and above them stretched out a hollow cathedral of a cavern, with asymmetric tunnels following the faint smears of yellow gold-rich ore embedded in the granite. Instead of mining equipment however, the walls and scaffolds running along them now housed lamps, thick bundles of wires, and even thicker air-con ducts. Blocky concrete and metal-sheet buildings huddled against the walls, leaving the center free for a wide asphalt crossroads that split towards section-A and the Center.

A pair of electric scooters were parked beside a floor-to-ceiling concrete tower. Dressed in navy-blue uniforms, two Xcore employees lie on the stairs. One’s glasses had a bullet hole in them. The other’s wounds were not visible. Neither had so much as unclasped their pistol holsters before dying.

Xcore is terminating their own.

The Fool must’ve overthrown the board of directors for them to suddenly raze the facility. A greedy idiot. That girl should’ve detonated the onsite nuke when she still had the chance.

Soldiers moved out on sergeant’s orders, securing the entrances, while Wiz, Jaud and private Orlsen remained with the subjects. The medic administering painkillers and boosters to those on the verge of collapse.

Most huddled into themselves, frightened eyes darting around the chamber, their gazes always fleeing from Cal’s. A few didn’t seem to comprehend Jaud’s words and babbled at her in a language never spoken in this reality.

“How are you feeling? Can you hear me?” the medic asked Cal when his turn came. He nodded. “Any dizziness? Hallucinations? Odd sensations?”

“Your concern is appreciated, but I am fully lucid,” said Cal, glancing at the syringe-pens on Jaud’s belt. “Though I could make use of a combat booster, if you’ve any to spare. You will need all the help you can get in case we run into trouble.”

She chuckled. “I’m afraid they’re reserved for combat personnel.” Jaud took out a snack-bar and offered it to him. “Here. Chocolate. No allergens.”

“Hm.” Cal accepted the bar and munched on it to recover his strength after she’d left. He sat pondering the crossroads.

One path led towards Center, Lc, and everything he needed to restart his Crown. Another ended in A, magenta static, and a person who would be overjoyed to take him out early.

Cal’s chewing slowed as his gaze wandered over the subjects and the squad who had awoken him. He was thankful for it, yes. But too much was at stake. He could not afford to prioritize their safety.

“Heh, still got that same thinking face.” Private Orlsen plopped down beside Cal, unwrapping her own snack.

They ate in an almost nostalgic quiet for a time.

“So, uh. Feel free to tell me to shut up if I ask something too sensitive, but the sim. Sounds like it was a lot like this facility?”

Cal nodded as he folded the energy bar wrapper and scanned his surroundings for a trash can. “It was – is – a reflection of this reality.”

“Yeah, Jaud says most of our evacuees still think they’re in VR. They imagine weird monsters around the corners, and these… Fates? Like gods or something.” She frowned.“You’re here now though. This is real. I’m not sure what they made you do there, but you don’t need to do it anymore, okay? And if you’ve got more ideas or think you know something, let me know first. I can check with Wiz and others to confirm whether your memories from the sim match reality.”

She must’ve been chewed out by the sergeant to come out and say this. Cal neither smiled nor nodded, but made a sound of acknowledgment.

Suddenly, private Orlsen reached out to squeeze his arm. “Just, don’t run off on your own, okay? Promise me you won’t, Cal.”

Cal breathed deeply and met her eyes. They were hard and sincere.

The silence that followed was more strained than the last.

“Hey, so,” Orlsen began cautiously. “How much do you remember? Of the past I mean.” Before he could reply, she blurted onwards, “Let me say something in case one or two of us doesn’t make it, okay? And I’m so sorry if this messes up with your memories, but I’ve thought about it a lot these last few months.”

She looked away, emotions playing on her face. “You were in a bad place and I just… I think I was too busy to really think. I was finally living my dream and it took a lot to adjust. A lot. I didn’t have the energy to help you that I should’ve so I kept on defaulting to gut reactions without thinking, and... we were both at fault. I regret how things ended. I think, if one of us had had the brains to stop and think and courage to speak it could’ve been different. It could’ve been amazing. I should’ve never said those things to you. There’s no going back, but it’s just fucking dumb to waste of a friendship. So… yeah, if you ever need anything, once we get back, let me know rather than signing up for some weird ass human experiment, okay?”

She nudged Cal’s arm awkwardly while offering him a hopeful grin.

He tried to look back to that past and found blurred glimpses. Beside him, private Orlsen continued to fix him an expectant stare.

How the others managed to still navigate mortals with such ease and grace, Cal could not understand. Still, he felt obliged to answer. “While I remember you, myself, and the life before, they are distant dreams, like flashes from childhood long since distorted by fresher memories. If forgiveness is what you ask, I grant it. Likewise, your offer is appreciated, though unnecessary. I have what I need, but what once was I cannot offer again.”

Her eyebrows furrowed with confusion and thought.

He continued to assuage her worries. “You will soon come to witness events that may come as a surprise. While I cannot promise your safety…”

Cal trailed off at the sound of his own words. The line came as a reflex, a rehearsed spiel to calm the potential obstacles to slip away and pursue his true goals.

Already, he was treating her and the rest as dead weight to be shed off.

And why shouldn’t he? Their lives will be a drop in the ocean of death to come. Abandoning them and proceeding with Late Start strategy was the priority.

Furthermore, this was reality.

This was the last reset.

He could not make mistakes.

Could not afford mistakes.

‘Without regrets’.

Cal closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. He wondered if the others found it easier to judge the price of a life.

“Behind us!” Wiz shouted at sergeant. “Three blips, wait, hold on I see a fourth, fifth–”

A single large-caliber shot punched through the UC psion’s abdomen.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Three rifles began barking in bursts from the rubble of the collapsed hallway. Bullets pinged off of concrete and stone near the UC soldiers, who dropped into cover to return fire. One of the soldiers was wounded.

Private Orlsen began rushing towards K-junction. “Cal, run!”

Cal stood and sprinted after her on unsteady legs, catching the shorter woman as she slid to hug a wall for cover.

“Cal, I told you to go! What are you–”

His fingers snaked to her sidearm holster and drew it smoothly as Cal dropped prone against the corner. With familiar ease, his iron sights lined with a head.

The pistol kick reverberated through Cal’s weakened arms, the gun nearly flying off his grip. An Xcore soldier dropped dead.

His next shots missed a soldier who ducked behind a groove in the tunnel with a long anti-armor rifle. Two other UC soldiers eliminated another Xcore rifleman. Another was pinned down behind a large boulder at the far end near the collapse by the woman standing above Cal.

“Cal!”

“A phaser is ferrying troops through the collapse,” he said. “Cover me.”

He left those two to the UC soldiers, narrowed his focus on the shattered mound of boulders at the far end, and waited.

In the corner of his awareness, Cal saw a small smoke cloud bloom between the sniper and the UC duo who had cornered her. A chunk of asphalt tore apart less than a meter before him.

Cal waited, unflinching.

Three UC soldiers managed to suppress the sniper, but the remaining rifleman popped to empty their magazine full-auto in an attempt to relieve pressure. Private Orlsen stepped back into cover, cursing at Cal to follow as bullets flew around them.

Cal waited, unblinking.

Rubble at the far end bent with pale shimmering. Two silhouettes walked inside the ethereal pale stone, one spindly with eyes bright with the same psionic white as their surroundings, and the other a hulking giant with one crimson eye.

Cal began squeezing the trigger slowly, letting the barrel fall with his exhale. His round splattered the phasing psion’s skull against the rocks the second she stepped out.

Ghostly wisps of his psionics vanished, giving him one last glimpse of the one-eyed cyborg tilting into full sprint in an attempt to escape the collapsing ethereal path. The rubble shook violently when reality re-aligned, leaving the hulk Xcore buried under tons of bedrock.

Private Orlsen shattered the sniper’s chest-plating with a well-aimed burst. The rifleman had died at some point and lay on the ground.

Cal heaved himself upright, surprised to find his elbows and knees scraped raw as he brushed off some stone-dust. He faced the short private, whose face was a tapestry of questions painted red by the flush of adrenaline. He offered back the pistol.

She accepted it absentmindedly, her lips forming words that missed his ringing ears, “Cal, what the… I told you to run.”

“I made my decision.”

He rubbed his tingling right hand, frowning. His aim had been off and the pistol’s recoil had nearly kicked it off of his hand. There would be big trouble on the horizon if he didn’t fix his condition soon.

The other UC soldiers ran past them to help Jaud carry the wounded psion.

“...her mobile! Wiz, shortest route to A, now. We need to be gone, before they find an alternate route,” was what Sergeant’s lips shouted to the soldiers. His glare met Cal’s, then darted to Private Orlsen. “Private, get your digihead walking!”

A sir-yes-sir later, she was tugging Cal’s shirt frantically, her pupils still dilated and her words as confused as her expression. They caught up to the chaotic huddle of soldiers, wounded, and evacuees stumbling onwards into a certain doom in section A.

Cal glanced at the psion’s guts. The hole had been filled with gel, which writhed a swarm of tiny biomechanical eels. She still breathed. Somehow the combination of trauma-reactive undercloth and hijacked Hive bio-surgeons had kept her from dying, yet.

“She’s dead without surgery,” Cal said to the sergeant who fixed him a look of seething outrage. Cal continued, “Section L corridor C has an advanced implantation laboratory. I can guide your medic through the procedu–”

Cal saw it coming, but his body was too sluggish to dodge.

Sergeant’s fist flowed in a smooth kata, burrowing knuckle-deep in Cal’s diaphragm. Air exploded out of his lungs. Seconds later, he found himself wheezing on the ground, struggling to breathe.

Two people were shouting above him, a red-faced Private Orlsen and her snarling sergeant. She started to fumble. He tapped her chest with an aggressive finger, finishing off his reprimand with a sharp heel turn before marching to the front of the group.

Private Orlsen helped Cal up and tugged him along to hurry on. She kept on mumbling apologies to him, her voice trembling on the verge of emotion.

“It’s alright,” Cal assured her. “Stress makes fools of the best of us.”

A dull pain lingered in Cal’s chest long after the shortness of breath had faded. He kept an eye on the side entrances into the mazy interior of section L, mentally mapping out the shortest route to the lab. Though he could not protect these people from their own decisions yet, he could prepare to lead them out of danger. Knowing the person they were heading towards, retreat was not a question of if, but when.

The first sign of their presence was Wiz cursing as his drones disconnected.

The second was UC soldiers jerking off their helmets and exclaiming at the deafening babbling echo in their comms.

The third was a lone woman dancing at the far end of a dark hallway.

Her feet tip-toed to the tune of an orchestral symphony, legs kicking sharp motions, body maintaining arched poses, while her arms flowed between waves and wings. She was nude, dressed in blood, and neither the orchestra nor the magenta spotlight following her dance were anywhere to be seen.

“Jesuschristalmighty, I should’ve packed combat diapers,” muttered Wiz.

The dancer froze to balance on one leg. Her toes wiggled to turn the aged face of a Xcore researcher towards the UC soldiers. Her eyes drew wide, revealing bright magenta pupils shifting between letters of an alphabet not yet recorded.

“Shoot her,” Cal whispered, keeping an eye on the tunnel behind her.

“They said I was too old to be a dancer,” laughed the woman, bloody tears of joy streaming from her eyes. “They never believed in me, not like they do. Oh. You’re all suffering too, I can tell! Come, come!” She spun wildly on her toes, faster than humanly possible.

The human spinning-top began approaching. “Come! He can teach you to dre–”

“SHOOT,” shouted Cal, diving for Private Orlsen’s pistol.

“–am,” finished the dancer as her spinning body crossed over as if it had always been close to them and collided with the sergeant, blendering two of his limbs.

UC and Cal soldiers opened fire. Bullets ragdolled the dancer, steering her wild spin off-course. She crashed into the cavern wall at the speed of a cruising hovercraft and splattered. Music died. The spotlight flickered out.

An off sync crashing of trumpets and drums sounded at the far end of the tunnel, mixing with the stomping of feet and the drunken sing-song of hundreds voices. Magenta gloom crept from the darkness and an unnaturally fluffy gold-trimmed carpet began rolling out around the far corner.

UC soldiers stood frozen.

They’d been trained in anti-psion warfare and faced foes from corporate cyber-monsters to Hive Lords. Bullets, blood, and Hell they could endure, but they’d not yet witnessed the presence of an awakened Fate. If they had, they might’ve done as the evacuees and fallen on their knees to pray.

Cal slapped Private Orlsen and Jaud to their senses while sprinting past them to the sergeant’s side. He ripped open the command panel on his under-armor, entered the dev-override code, and disabled the safety limits on automatic tourniquet on his mangled right arm and leg. Reactive underclothes squeezed through his stumps, amputating them.

“Officer Jaud,” Cal said, his voice deep with authority as he demanded her gaze. “Handle the rest. Everyone else.”

Eyes confused and afraid turned to him.

One heavily drugged out evacuee mumbled, “All hail Allking…”

“Lc implantation chamber has facilities to heal him and your psion,” Cal said to Jaud. “Come, I’ll show you the way.”

“That’s a dead end. We’ll be trapped,” Wiz blurted, eyes turning to him.

“Xcore’s coming for us from Center and K, now this shit… We’ll be trapped,” he repeated.

Cal shook his head. “There’s only one way out of this place, through the door I will make. Now, should you wish to avoid living a nightmarish story woven of your hopes and dreams, follow me.”

He began towards the closest door into the deeper L-section.

After a moment of hesitation, unanswered questions shouted at his back, and several curses, everyone but one of the evacuees rushed after him.

That one straggler was a young man with a tearful grin on his face and the first hints of a strange alphabet playing behind his pupils. “They will give me purpose,” he said. “They’ll help me again. O’ Fate of Stories, deliver me from the longest nightmare of this fake world…”

Between two heavily wounded, a third lightly wounded, and a drugged evacuee, they had not the time to convince him otherwise. Not that they could have. Cal recognized a shattered soul when he saw one and had only ever known two who could heal such a mind.

Magenta glow and the encroaching carnival cacophony were left behind and faded behind them as they hurried through several thick metal doors. Inner corridors of section-L were more sterile white than gray concrete. Bright leds bathed the steel tiles in hollow white. Their steps echoed and dragged bodies left behind long dripping stains.

Cal marched at a determined pace, pausing at corners for others to catch up before darting down another hallway, beelining for the Lc implantation lab.

Striding past a long straight with windows into a sunken lab on one side he heard sounds. Cal raised a hand for silence. He listened, and counted two enemies.

Cal gestured for Private Orlsen to toss him her pistol and come closer. She did. He took the gun and inched forward, back to the glass, pistol aimed at the corner.

Around strolled a pair of Xcore soldiers laughing at some joke.

“Shit. Call–” were the last words of the one whose neck was drilled by Cal’s bullet.

The one that Private Orlsen shot only gurgled.

“Clear,” Cal called back. “Hurry. The section will soon be compromised, but we’ll be safe within the lab.”

“Damn. Cal.” Private Orlsen stared at the dead. “How… Were you… So it really was a war sim? They forced you to train all day for months? Is that why you’re so–”

“Later. Keep your eyes ahead.” Cal wiggled his right hand, trying to shake off the recoil numbness. “I have a few more straight shots before my arm gives out.”

She sharpened up and nodded with sudden focus, taking point.

They waded through a narrow maintenance hallway choked by a jungle of cables, snuck across a dark lab full of truck-sized suspension fluid recyclers, and crossed several more sterile hallways of white lights and equally white doors. Long crawling minutes later, they saw the white-blinking letters of ‘Implantation Laboratory’ above a sealed door.

Between it and them stood a pair of sliding glass doors, a clinically furnished waiting room, and a one-eyed Xcore cyborg with more metal and Hive symbiotes in his body than flesh. He was sitting on a buckling plastic chair with a familiar starsteel glaive resting on his lap, grunting in frustration as he kept tapping his ear. Being entombed in stone hadn’t left a single new scratch on him.

A collective hopelessness spread across the UC soldiers.

“Shit,” whispered one of the soldiers carrying sergeant.

“Sergeant won’t make it,” Jaud reported, her voice as detached, though something dark seethed beneath that face. “I put Irel in deep suspension and resuscitate her to contact the Oracle for us once we find a spot, but she’ll most certainly expire soon thereafter.”

Fists and jaws clenched among the UC soldiers.

“Terry,” Wiz turned to their breach specialist. “Any chance you can cut us a hole to lower levels? We could sneak underneath or maybe there’s another lab.”

“Ten to twenty meters of rock separate the levels,” said Cal. “Though there are entrances, you won’t find a way down from here.”

“And what do you know huh?” Wiz demanded. “‘Follow me, I know the way out.’ Hahaha, yea sure now we’ve got the creepy shit breathing down our neck and a frigging Xcore heavy in our face.”

“Could we Bypass him, fight our way to the Center and gun our way out?” asked a soldier.

“You tell me, Pao. Could we gun our way through Center?” Wiz asked back, deadpan.

Pao deflated, his gaze falling to the floor.

“We’ve got to try, right?” Private Orlsen said, searching the others’ eye for agreement. “It’s our only shot. We can’t deal with… whatever that was. We can’t fight that Xcore cyborg without psionics or heavy guns.”

“I could run at him and inject a lethal dose of tranq before he kills me,” said Jaud, tapping her syringe nails together slowly.

Private Orlsen touched her shoulder, his earlier outrage melting to sympathy. “Jaud, please. Penny would never have wanted you to die for her like that.”

Jaud’ fought to keep her trembling lips in a line.

Cal flexed his fingers and flicked his wrist, testing his speed. It was abysmal. Likewise, his condition could not have been worse, but could he do it with a booster? He’d need to make it quick though, and his body in its current state would most certainly not survive the after effects, not without quick treatment. But all that aside, it was within the margin of possible.

“Okay. Let’s get moving,” Private Orlsen said, rubbing Jaud’s arm as she addressed everyone. “It’s going to be tough busting through Center, but some of us will make it.”

Cal stood and began limbering his arms as he drew the pocketed starsteel knife. “Officer Jaud, can you mix 53 ml of standard simulant, 11 ml of agronyl, and 90 nl of soft tranquiliser. I trust you have the ingredients on hand.”

“I…” Jaud gaped.

Gazes fixed on Cal ranged from baffled to incredulous to expectant.

“Where’d he get the knife?” Wiz asked.

“I’ll also be requiring your pistol and a spare clip,” Cal said to Private Orlsen, holding out his hand.

Her brows furrowed. “No. No! You’re not going out there. Don’t even think about it. Nobody is suiciding today!”

“This is just too much, what the heck do you think you can do?” Wiz laughed madly. “That’s a frigging Xcore monster with Hive implants worth an entire outpost.”

Other voices rose in discord.

Cal returned his gaze to Jaud’s cybernetic eyes. She stared at him with a question and he her with an answer. Cal glanced down the hallway leading towards the corner that turned towards the implantation lab and the cyborg, then to her. Jaud nodded.

“...pointless anyway. You don’t have the strength to punch the knife through him even if it can cut him,” finished Wiz.

Cal sighed and raised his arms in defeat, taking a step back.

Jaud reached out and stabbed him with a needle through the thigh. Fire rushed his veins.

Cal stepped through Private Orlsen and Pao as they moved to grab him, flowing between their uncoordinated grapple attempt. He pawned Pao’s pistol and an extra clip from Private Orlsen, continuing his unbroken stride down the hall.

“Catch him!” Wiz hissed.

But Cal had already turned the corner. He punched a terminal to his side, deploying a thick emergency door behind him. It blocked the others out and locked him in with the owner of the metal skull that slowly rotated to face him.

“A lost subject?” grated the digitized replica of a man’s voice. One red eye scanned Cal as he continued to approach, then darted to the door behind him where someone was banging a reinforced window.

Cal’s veins expanded with a rush of blood and chemicals. His heart pounded an ever tightening rhythm. His atrophied limbs grew lighter. World felt both slower and faster at once. Clearer too. The drugs had saturated his muscles and nerves.

“Ahh. I see.” The cyborg stood to a towering height made all the more impressive by his bulk. “You’re one of the successes. Come along quietly and you might end up a rich man if you play your chips right.”

Cal twirled the starsteel knife in a test of coordination and finger strength. Barely baseline strength.

The cyborg regarded his determined advance with growing confusion. Third-gen Hive symbiote frame was a two-legged fortress, one of the most versatile combat chassis in its class and era. Decidedly superhuman in terms of reaction speed, computational capacity, strength, speed, and endurance, and all but impervious to anything less than an anti-vehicle round, it was quite possibly the peak of mankind’s current military advancement. Barring major upsets, it would more than certainly have come to dominate the conflicts between corps and cities.

Cal cocked a 9mm pistol of centuries old technology and shot the cyborg’s face, while stepping into his range. He was outmatched in arms and armor, and faced a man who’d dedicated a lifetime to become a master of combat. A master who’d trained in simulations and warzones until his instincts breathed death. A master who’d long since reached the last plateau of the sigmoid curve called absolute mastery.

“Disappointing,” said the cyborg.

His glaive disappeared from sight as it swept through Cal. Invisible to the naked eye, faster than any human could react to. It was a perfect swing, the pinnacle of swordsmanship.

But when you walk a plateau for a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand and look behind you, you will stand a low-sloped hill magnitudes taller than the first peak.

Cal had started leaning backwards before the swing even began and avoided it entirely.

Hive-symbiote tendrils bulged as the cyborg brought his weapon to an unnaturally snap halt and dragged it into a diagonal cut across Cal’s center mass.

Cal had already dropped into a smooth crouch before the blade fell and fired two shots at the cyborg’s eye, blinding him momentarily.

Despite this, the cyborg reached out to grab Cal’s arm with perfect accuracy. Third-gen symbiote frames’ AI were capable of visualizing their surroundings on auditory data alone.

Cal flowed past his grasp by falling forward, rolling past a follow-up kick, all the while letting his pistol sing the song of lead. Bullet casings littered the floor and were kicked around by Cal’s bare feet as he shot at the red eye, landing shot after shot after shot.

Air around and above him turned into a storm of ever advancing stabs, grabs, and cuts. The cyborg’s AI assistant was crunching through combat models, guiding its owner’s movements to adapt to Cal. A haze flared from the cooling vents behind the shoulders as the biomechanical Hive symbiotes built heat.

Beneath the cybernetic weapon wrought by thousands of years of progress, the ground shattered. A blade of starsteel ripped stacks of cords in flaring explosions of electric sparks. Steel columns bent under fists made to punch through tanks.

But for that two-magazine-long moment, he could not touch Cal.

***

Sammy Orlsen spectated the battle through a crowded window with the rest of her squad. Dried tear-stains tickled her cheeks. Her lips were parted and her brain empty.

By some miracle, Cal was alive around the whirlwind of destruction that was an Xcore heavy cyborg’s blade. The blade that left deep rends on the steel floor. The blade that had overpowered Penny. The blade that should by all logic have executed Cal on the first swing.

But there he was, a hair’s breadth from death again and again.

He wasn’t fighting, not exactly. His movements had no stance or reason behind them. He simply walked, occasionally stumbling at just the right moment. Eerier still was the lazy ease with which he did it and the perfect, unnatural calm of his eyes.

“A psion?” Wiz asked, shaking his head. “An enhanced? Has to be! What grafts does he have? Jaud, what kind of monster is he?”

“Can’t be a psion, he doesn’t have the eyes,” said Pao.

“Cal had grafts?” Sammy asked, latching onto a strand of common sense. “What did they put in him?”

Jaud stared out the window, green lenses whirring and snapping over her artificial eyes.

“Jaud, what did they do to him, what is he?” Sammy pleaded.

Jaud continued staring out at the battle, and chuckled incredulously.

“What? What does he have?” Sammy demanded.

“Nothing,” whispered Jaud.

For a beat of quiet, they watched.

Over two hundred kilograms of metal turned into death chased a reed-thin man with a blade forged to carve through battleframes and Hive warforms. She should’ve been afraid for Cal. She should’ve been screaming and despairing. Yet, watching it unfold, she could only think of a toddler play-fighting with their father.

“No grafts. No powers. He has nothing. He’s a human, a baseline human. Same as you.”

A strangest of emotions crept up Sammy’s back as her attention returned to the impossible unfolding before her eyes. Hairs on her arms stood.

“A human,” she whispered at the glass, searching for the man she’d once known. She couldn’t find him, and neither could she see a human.

***

Cal’s pistol clicked empty after the second magazine. He tossed it at the cyborg who sliced it in four portions. The pieces clattered harmlessly on the writhing mass of coils that composed his bulk.

“You’re out of bullets,” the cyborg said, almost impassive as he took a calm step closer.

Cal matched it with a side-step and kicked aside a bullet casing. His step faltered. Weight was returning to his muscles.

Cooling vents narrowed on the cyborg’s shoulders. His gait relaxed. “Good effort, but my AI has adapted and your drugs are running out.”

He proved it with a swipe of his glaive. Wet warmth flowed from a shallow wound on Cal’s chest. Cal’s step fumbled and he sent several casings rolling. His senses were beginning to dull again.

“Clairvoyance, right? Psychics with concealed manifestation? Dangerous stuff. Would’ve thought you’d have had the foresight to comply and realize I’d adapt eventually. Could’ve been rich.” The cyborg twirled his glaive as he approached Cal. “Now you’ll be a brain in a jar.”

“X-link two is admittedly an impressive AI for its generation,” said Cal, his calmness causing the cyborg to hesitate. “Unfortunately, the combat-sim has a tendency to hog processing power from the sensory suite, leading to minute variable blindness during overclock.”

“What?” said the cyborg as he stepped on a smattering of empty bullet casings and tripped.

His other leg sought to compensate, but lost its footing over another pile of brass. The cyborg sought to correct its balance by twirling in mid-air, only to come face-to-face with the starsteel knife that Cal placed upright on the floor.

Gravity pinned a metal skull between two hundred kilos of biomechanical warmachine and a blade forged from the stuff of gods.

Starsteel did not yield.

Cal stepped backwards from the heap of enslaved Hive symbiotes writhing aimlessly around a dead metal skeleton. Blue fluids pooled on the cracked tiles, drenching the handle of his knife, though he did not bend to retrieve it.

The world itself was wobbling in his eyes. His strength was rapidly fading. Every breath he sucked was a struggle against ribs that felt stiff as steel. The excess of stimulant cocktails in his system were starting to saturate the wrong signal-receptors.

On trembling legs, he walked to the sealed door and punched in the access code.

The emergency door slid open.

The crowd behind it stared at him.

Private Orlsen was the only one who dared step forward. “Cal…” she began.

Cal held up his palm, supporting himself against the wall. “We must hurry inside the lab, while I can still open the door and operate the machinery. Come.”

No questions were asked.

No dissent was voiced.

Cal wobbled his way across the ruined waiting room, passing by the cyborg. “Drag him inside. Try to catch at least ten symbiotes. They will be needed.”

One of the healthy soldiers instructed four evacuees to help him haul the corpse.

He reached the lab entrance, flipped open the panel, and typed in the access code. “Melt the panel with your plasma cutter. We’ll be able to open it from the inside once we’re ready.”

People jogged inside the dimly lit mess of a chamber. Little free space remained between medical machines, rows of fabricators, computers, and sleek white robotic arms terminating in Swiss-knife selections of surgical instruments. In the center, lit by focus lights, stood six medical beds packed with more screens, sensors, and technology than small outposts.

Soldiers and evacuees gawked at the machines, afraid to touch anything.

Once everyone was inside, the breach specialist did as asked, then slunk in before Cal sealed the door and activated lock-down. A ton of blast resistant alloy dropped from the ceiling.

As he turned around, Cal collapsed mid-step. His limbs now trembled uncontrollably.

“Cal! He’s hurt, Jaud he’s hurt! Come help!” Private Orlsen was by his side, fuzzing.

Jaud rushed to his other side, her yes and hand sensors taking in his readings. “Your system is shutting down. We need to sedate you right now and flush out the rest of the stimulants. Never should’ve administered you so much…”

“I have a few more minutes,” Cal insisted, rising to stand. “Officer Jaud, I would be most grateful for your assistance. Have you performed any graftings?”

Jaud took a moment to answer. “Only basic non-neurals. Once at school, then again at the clinic. Never Hive stuff, but I’m familiar with the theory and my AI assistant is trained.”

“Wonderful. Draw samples from your sergeant, psion, and me for implant synchronization baths,” said Cal while wandering to the auto-surgeon control panel. “Three symbiotes for the psion and twelve for the sergeant. Someone else can bring me the rest of them.”

Two dozen servo arms began whirring quietly, dipping in and out of tubes in the ceiling as they self-sterilized. Several utility arms began to prepare the beds.

“Have your assistant feed it their medical data and neural-interface codes. Trust your training and rely on your AI, and you will do fine.”

“Yes, sir!” Jaud rushed to relieve Cal from the control panel. “Private Orlsen, help me gather the symbiotes.”

“But… he’s…”

“Go. Help her,” said Cal.

Private Orlsen pursed her lips before running off.

Cal leaned on machines as he limped to the other side of the room and turned on the truck-sized implant fabricator. “Officer Wiz. Private Pao.”

“This is crazy maaan,” Wiz chuckled, incredulous, raking his artificial dreadlocks.

“I trust you’re familiar with the basics of implant fabrication. ,” said Cal, while booting up the machine. A pulse ran through the black central vat filled as the modified Hive micro-fabricators within stirred. “Insert rest of the symbiotes in the hole along with the cyborg’s neuralink.”

“Familiar with implant fabrication, not with secret Xcore tech!” Wiz gasped. “Hey… Hey what are you doing?!”

Prompts and boxes breezed past the projected holo-screen as Cal flew through the menus and underneath the code, breaching Xcore firewalls to link the fabricator with a hidden database on the other side of Earth. He downloaded a schematic, then entered it into an editor and opened up the inner workings of a life-form evolved from sentient metal and further polished to perfection by a budget that put most Cities to shame.

“What are you doing?” Wiz repeated, now quiet as he hovered behind Cal.

Cal copied parts of the design and overlaid them with the already saved schematic of third-gen Hive symbiote frame. Then he began making alterations.

“What are you…” Wiz’s words trailed off as his eyes widened to glimpse technology several thousand years ahead of his time.

“I am creating my graft,” said Cal. “Third-gen is good, but it won’t support my needs, and my foundation needs to be robust.”

“Okay, yeah makes sense,” said Wiz, laughing weakly.

Cal’s brain swooned with the onset of stimulant withdrawal and he fell on the controls. “The symbiotes,” he groaned.

“Oh shit. Hold on!” Wiz ran to help Pao.

One by one, they inserted a total fifteen of the Hive symbiotes through the fabricator's scanners. The writhing creatures were dropped into a vat along with a scrawny little bud that resembled a tuft of glowing blue hairs with a gray lamprey mouth on one end. Enslaved Hive fabricator drones the size of ants swarmed over them, beginning the modification process as Cal pressed enter.

“Handle the extraction and clean-up. Begin implantation once it’s ready. You’ll need to put me under now, before my brain is fried.” Cal’s legs quit. Cold sweat covered his skin. His muscles convulsed with agony.

Private Orlsen and Pao rushed to help him, though needed two more pairs of hands to carry him to a bed beside the sergeant. Jaud hovered by his side, syringe-tipped fingers ready with anesthetics and cybernetic eyes fraught with concern.

“I’ll do my best, the Xcore auto-surgeon is amazing, and I doubt there will be complications, but I can’t guarantee the success of implanting whatever it is you’re making,” she said.

“It will succeed. The graft is well optimized. Prioritize your sergeant. Third gen Hive limbs tend to be tricky.” Cal’s eyes turned to Private Orlsen, who squeezed his hand.

“Cal, you’ll explain everything. Promise me you’ll live and explain everything.”

He granted her a faint smile, said to her before passing out, “The vending machine behind the back curtain has peppermint tea and various snack bars.”

Fugue of anesthesia faded, as it often does, into bright lights and a sandy mouth. Cal’s back felt numb and his spine stuffed. Several unfamiliar muscles squirmed in his limbs, but Cal knew he’d grow used to them soon.

Most relieving was the familiar sensation that hummed against his brain, allowing his mind to unfold outside its confinements and reach out to the modified symbiotes through the tendrils burrowing into his spine.

On the miniscule psionic energy inherent to each human, Cal prompted the compressed version of his Crown to activate.

[Empyrean fragment detected. Synchronize y/n?]

[y.]

[Synchronizing the Empyrean fragment.]

With Cal’s exhale, the room stopped.

Chatter died. A paper tea-cup fell, and munching of energy bars stopped as Cal sat up. His wrists jerked against handcuffs fixed to the bed. Cal regarded them idly.

A gun cocked on the bed beside him. The sergeant, now sporting a third-gen Hive arm and a leg, but still recovering, aimed a pistol at Cal. “No sudden movements.”

Cal met the man’s gaze.

Some of the UC soldiers held Private Orlsen from doing anything rash, while Wiz hissed something unintelligible. Behind the soldiers, the evacuees who saw him knelt slowly, bowing their heads down to the ground.

“Put the gun down,” said Cal. “It won’t do you any good.”

“I heard you pulled off some crazy movements, I won’t miss a cuffed man from point blank range. Don’t take me wrong, I’m grateful for what you did to my squad and the others. That deserves commendation. But I won’t let a super-soldier of dubious goals and affiliations lead them and I won’t take the risk that you’ll kill us all now that you’ve got whatever that implant is in you.”

Sergeant licked his lips, adjusting his grip. “Now, I’m going to ask you to explain what’s going on here.”

“From the beginning?” asked Cal.

“Summarize if it’s long.”

“Hm.” Cal considered briefly, his gaze skimming over the supplicant evacuees and fearful UC soldiers. He’d long wondered how he should begin their story to an outsider. Despite Bard’s insistence that truth was too boring, it did not feel right to begin anywhere but the true beginning.

Cal took a deep breath. “On one starry night, into Earth’s embrace fell a stray god from the beyond. She met mankind and saw in them friends, though would come to regret that naivety. For when mankind saw her we saw threat–”

“Stop. No need to recap history. Skip to wherever this makes sense,” said Sergeant, gesturing at their surroundings. “This place. This experiment. That red glowing dancer and whatever else is down there.”

Cal frowned. He’d worked hard on his storytelling voice and cadence. To have his narration so swiftly dismissed was a blow to his pride.

“To summarize,” he began with much less enthusiasm. “Xcore fashioned a large chunk of the Empyrean’s corpse into the heart of a psionic VR server. Their goal was creating a simulation that could host human minds outside their bodies, thus bypassing biological limitations of virtual time acceleration.”

Realization dawned upon the sergeant. “The excess data was all… Aahh, of course. Explains the combat skills and knowledge. No wonder half the world is fighting to get you. Xcore made you people into super soldiers.”

“That was their goal, at first,” said Cal, closing his eyes.

[Synchronization complete, simulating the Crown.]

[Hume level: 2.1/1.0]

[Grafts:]

[Nervefiber Foundation Ver. Allking]

Something must’ve gone wrong with the surgery for only 2.1 units of existential mass to be available. A margin of 1.1 humes would be restrictive, but not insurmountable. Heavy and large-scale reality bending would only become necessary towards the end of this race.

“At first?”

“Once they succeeded, they wanted to see how far they could push us.”

“And? How far did you go?”

“To the very end.”

When Cal opened his eyes they blazed as a pair of white halo-pupils on spheres of azure. Sergeant flinched from his gaze, his gun shaking as a thin pale line of crackling psionic potential etched itself into the air above Cal’s head. Slowly, his psionic energy bled into reality and crystallized into a bright halo-like crown.

”First Law,” spoke Cal.

His voice was a jingling droplet rippling across a metal lake. A sound beneath sounds trembled the world as a tall horn-like notch crackled into being at the center of his Crown. Air vibrated as unreality thickened, deepening colors. The world herself echoed with the lingering timbre of his whisper and resonated as he declared:

“Healing is instant.”

Existence bowed to a new law of nature.

Gasps and shudders spread throughout the room as bullet wounds, bruises, and nicks were no more. The symbiote patched hole in the UC psion’s gut was coated by new flesh. The sergeant’s natural skin hugged the edge of his freshly implanted arm and leg as if he’d always had them.

“All hail him…” whispered a drug-slurred voice.

Cal idly slipped the handcuffs and placed them on the bed as he sat up.

Stupefied, the sergeant lowered his pistol. UC soldiers stared at Cal, holding their breath.

“...the one and true ruler of reality…” murmured a second voice among the saved.

Cal stood to his full height, gladdened to finally feel strength coursing through his atrophied shell. Manifesting a law had dropped his hume level up to 1.3, but with no new wounds to heal, local reality had stabilized and his hume levels began slowly recovering.

“...all hail the merciful–”

Cal’s raised palm quieted the chant of the saved.

”Since I have now taken it upon myself to ensure your safe evacuation, proper re-introductions are in order.” Cal inclined his head to the UC soldiers. “I am Allking, the Fate of Law.”