Transmission detected from Communications Operator Miriam Pereia. Will User Adam Westfield receive?

"Hey, Miriam."

"Finally!" Miriam said. He watched her through the viewport. She forced her chair forward, her stomach almost hitting the worn tabletop, "You took so long I suspected you croaked."

"Thanks for having faith. It's not like we're the only people you can hold a decent conversation with or anything."

"Ah, shut it, civvie." Miriam rolled her eyes, her hands behind her head as she leaned into the moth-eaten reclining chair. Yet, the ghost of a smile flickered on her dumpy features. She flicked her fringe away, cleared her throat and leaned forward. "I suppose I should thank you for linking me up to Saliel."

"Saliel?"

"The name of the satellite linked to the beacon in front of you. Satellites are how we keep track of everything that happens in our colonies, or on the battlefield, in this instance. I borrowed her power to track you through the MOB. The old missus has chugged along after all these years. The tech-heads finally built something that lasts!"

"Why is there a lump on your head?"

"Because I slammed my head against the desk. But I don't care one bit! You don't get it because you're not an Operator, but when you activated that beacon, it felt like someone ground up raw sweetfood powder and fed it straight into my core!"

Miriam trailed off, panting and with a delirious, wild smile that inched uncomfortably close to the occupants of a speed den he once sold goods to. The camera feed in ADOSCH possessed such high definition he thought for a fraction of a second that Miriam's head might burst through the virtual window and bite off his scalp.

"Good for you, Miriam." Adam said. He gestured to his left. "You wanna talk to Lucy?"

Miriam's good mood vanished. She sighed and took a large sip from her mug.

"Oh, her. If I must." She pressed her finger on a nearby holographic screen and waited.

Lucy tapped the side of her head. "Receiving. Can you hear me, Operator Pereia?"

"Yes, unfortunately. You're loud and clear. Still in one piece, I take it?"

"Oh yes! We've had quite the adventure in the outside world, the Chosen and I. Why, the surroundings of the signal beacon were infused with corruption, but he managed to push through and purify it all!" Lucy puffed up her chest. There was a smug grin on her features.

"Really now. Adam? Mind filling me in."

"She's right. That's where we found the beacon." Adam said, "The locals call it a redspot. Climbing down here was like squirming through a tunnel of meat. Fucking disgusting."

"Oi, Adam. Look at me." Miriam snapped her fingers. She leaned on her elbows, squinting, "You're not pulling a rotten, right Adam?"

"He is not lying, thank you very much, Operator Pereia! How rude." Lucy interjected, "You'll see for yourself once Saliel captures the topology of the surrounding area."

"My my, someone studied up at the Academy." Miriam said, "Remember what I said. I don't buy you're the Chosen, Adam, and I won't until you bring me another War Maiden. Now debrief me so I can start sorting through all this raw data."

Adam and Lucy debriefed Miriam on their situation, while Penny busied herself with a notebook and Lucy's tablet in the corner. Miriam flicked open a holographic screen that translated their speech into raw text. It pleased Adam to see she, despite her quips, was taking her job seriously. They filled her in, beginning from the time she fell out of their range to their trip here.

"Demon Box, eh?" Miriam said. "That's new, not that I have access to anything beyond this irradiated rothole. It checks out with the little research I've done on the red. The substance is close to our plasma."

"Impossible!" Lucy cried. She stamped her foot and glowered. An aura of mystic yellow stressed her indignation, "There is no way that foul corruption could be reminiscent of Her gift!"

"Structure wise, I mean. Calm down, Novice. Geez, your type is always like this." Miriam said, with a huff. "Anyway, you've both encountered it. Neither gas, nor liquid, nor solid. It can transmute into those three forms, seemingly at random, yet as if guided like an unknown will. There's a logic to its madness. None of us have studied it enough to be sure."

Adam rubbed his forehead. He never was good with sciency bullcrap. He slept through most of those classes in high school. "And how is this relevant to the box?"

"The corruption festers if sealed inside a container for too long. It becomes denser, more effective, more violent when injected. The gigantic monsters wandering outside my bunker are a result of that. They're more resilient than any ordinary wraith." Miriam continued, "Adam, just blow up the boxes. The longer you leave them in there, the worse it'll get."

"One assailant summoned a portal and brought forth more monsters." Lucy said.

"I'm not the combat type, miss War Maiden. Find out yourself. Break open the box while aiming a thousand rifles at it. Whatever."

They were getting off track. Time to bring it back.

"Where's the next War Maiden?" Adam asked. "We hooked the beacon up, so now it's your turn."

"Give me time." Miriam said.

"Huh? You can't do it now?"

"It's not that simple." Miriam jerked a thumb to her setup. "Saliel is crusty as a pair of a trainee's underpants. A bunch of its sub-facilities broke again, so I have to wait for them to repair, and the connection is shoddy thanks to the local atmosphere. My mystics—[Clairvoyance] and [Discernment]—need to gather additional data using Saliel as a relay and the beacon as a homing spot. It's not an automatic process."

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"You didn't seem to have a problem with it back at the MOB." Adam accused.

"Likely because she was observing it for so long." Lucy said. "It's true, Chosen. It would help Operator Pereia if we could setup video feeds or trackers, but we don't have that at a moment. We have to just wait."

"At least your manners haven't rotted." Miriam said to Lucy. "Go and secure this area or something. Don't you have a little companion to look after?"

She plugged a wire into the side of her head, then cut the connection.

The group stayed in the cave for the time being. Word about its cleansing wouldn't reach for a good while, given how off-limits redspots were to the Valley populace. Lucy broke out the ADO rations once she setup traps along the tunnel entrance. She boiled bottled water in a pot and dumped three mounds of dried noodles into it.

"Oh, hell yeah!" Adam rubbed his hands together.

"Excited, Chosen?" Lucy said.

"Lucy, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me this week." Adam said. He wiped a spot of drool from his mouth. He forced himself to sit down, cross-legged. The scent alone almost made him cry. This was the exact type of reward he deserved after dealing with hicks and trudging through corruption infested tunnels.

Adam slurped down the first mouthful with the biggest grin. It brought him straight back to his juvie days. After a hard day of classes and exercise, all the guys in the dorm took out the noodles from their stash, mixed them all together in the communal kitchen and added whatever ingredients happened on hand. You weren't an instant ramen connoisseur if you hadn't tried the cheese chip variant.

The ADO's rationing packaging kept the vegetables—slices of cabbage-like greens with red stalks—fresh. There even were slices of sausage and a pickled egg. Coupled with the broth, it set his taste buds alight. Penny looked close to tearing up.

The three of them devoured the noodles and divided up the soup. Dusk fell, then night. Lucy took the first watch. Next was Adam, before looping back to Lucy. None of them were willing to let Penny watch over them as they slept. He caught Lucy give glancing towards the hole in the ceiling before returning to her sleeping bag. His turn was as boring as it had been in basic.

Miriam wasn't done by the morning, despite looking as if she hadn't slept a wink. Time for training with Esther, then. He ate breakfast and put up with Lucy's insistence that he perform warm-up exercises with his [Psychokinesis].

"You're too uptight, Chosen!" Lucy exclaimed. "Copy my breaths. Feel your inner core, the hexagram of stability and resonate it with Her six pillars. Providence and Faith, Justice and Compassion, Prudence and Modesty. Let those values caress the build-up of stress inside of you."

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes and tuned out the religious doohickey. To Lucy's credit, the practical portion of the breathing exercises did help him relax. Eventually, Lucy allowed him to take a seat near the pillar and begin the temporal dilation training program.

The following Mystic Core upgrades have been selected for acquisition:

Increase PRECISION by 1.

Acquire the [Physio-Endure] technique.

Total cost: 180 Stellari. 15 Stellari will remain.

He flew across the kaleidoscope of space-time until his consciousness landed back into that flat-white space. He stumbled for a bit, looked up, and met Esther.

"Welcome back, Adam!" Esther said. She smiled, flicking her red-colored ponytail. "How have you been?"

"Unfun, thanks to this shitty job." Adam said, "Cut the chit-chat. I'm going to be fighting a War Maiden soon."

Esther pouted and snapped her fingers. Blocks rose out of the white field in waves. They flew around, stacked themselves atop each other, and a torrent of rainbow colors splashed down upon them. When Adam opened his eyes, he saw himself standing in an unknown city. It wasn't anywhere on Earth, nor was it one of those shining, uber-chrome Astraean colonies he sometimes saw in his dreams.

This city was constructed from a series of round domes beneath a purple, starless sky. Devastation had wrecked the place, with its cracked roads, shattered domes and upended trees. The corpses of blocky-looking robots scattered the grounds.

"Where's this?"

"A former battleground, now a mainstay city of Colony Gimer."Esther said, "This is a snapshot frozen in time, back when Her Providence did not reach as far as it should have. We stand amidst its Scourge invasion."

She snapped her fingers. A series of visions flashed through his head. Black pustules shattering the domes. A tentacle squeezing the life of a woman in a one-piece jumpsuit. Fleshy blobs sticking together to form a monster capable of toppling skyscrapers. He clutched his head, reeling.

"Humans…" He muttered out, "Humans lived here?"

"Yes. Remember what I said last time? We're more present around the universe than we initially think. Astraea failed here. The ADO did not arrive soon enough, resulting in mass casualties amongst too many innocent souls. We preserved this memory in our simulations, in order to teach the future generations."

"Shit, I'm fighting the Scourge now?"

"Not yet, Adam. We're talking [Physiokinesis] today. Do you know what that is?"

"A mystic involving exercise?" Adam said.

"Half-correct, and only at a surface level. You understand the basics of [Psychokinesis]. What about [Physiokinesis]? Did Lucy show any of its techniques?"

Adam thought back to the demonstration the Goddess of Astraea performed for him. "Lucy did a bunch of tricks straight out of a kung-fu movie. Disappearing and vanishing, tanking hits, a move like the one finger death punch, sensing things from far away…" Esther goaded him on with a nod and a grin.

"You're getting warmer."

[Psychokinesis] manipulated the position of objects, so [Physiokinesis]…

"It controls every part of the human body."

"That's right. [Physiokinesis] was a mystic developed to assist soldiers in the battlefield. Its main purpose is to act as a focal point for all manner of powerful, physical feats, such as the ones you described, by allowing minute, flexible control of the muscles, nervous system, heart, pain receptors and more. Did you know some organs function by themselves? You don't have control over your heartbeats, for example. [Physiokinesis], at the highest level, switches them back to manual. You can perform tricks like these!"

She jabbed her finger into the nearest wall and broke a thin hole in it. She pulled her finger back out. It was untouched. Not even a fracture on the nail.

"Without mystics, this feat would take years, if not decades, of practice. With plasma, you can expedite the process and go even further beyond. Oh, you still need to exercise first. [Physiokinesis] is nothing without a good physique." Esther said.

She clapped her fingers together. "We'll blast two targets in a single shot by sharpening your PRECISION via [Physio-Dash] practice. Have you executed that technique before?"

Adam nodded.

"Excellent. From this point on, I forbid you from moving without that technique!"

"Say what?"

"And if you don't…" A ray of light shot down from high, landing mere inches from his feet. He looked down. There was a deep, extremely thin hole in the ground, and it smoked.

Esther clasped her hands, beamed like a proud mother, and saw, "Get moving, Adam! Down the street, please!"

He shunted forward, almost tripping over a chunk of concrete. "Can't believe I came in here feeling good for a change!"

"You'll feel dead if you don't dodge in time!"

That was how Adam spent the next hour traversing this deserted city. He shunted down streets. He moved across bridges. Esther lifted him high up and demanded he use the technique to cross the gap between two buildings. He pointed out falling down would splatter him across the pavement. She shoved him off in response.

After what felt like a whole day, she let him take a break.

She let him take a break. He collapsed on the spot, full of sweat. Esther hummed a marching tune he heard Lucy singing a few times in the MOB. She froze on the spot. The surrounding air jerked and fizzed, like static on a bad TV monitor. A crackling sound rose, and when it faded, the red-headed girl was gone.

Esther was shorter now, her hair colored like fresh grass and hanging in pigtails. She inspected her clothes, still a War Maiden's garb but smaller. She sighed.

"I see."

"Who's that?" Adam said.

"Another lost one." Esther said. "You should be more concerned with the absence of the red-haired one."