Here’s how the story starts: Nathan was eating his work-provided lunch on the lawn when the building imploded and a girl invoked a secret never shared.

There’s a few codicils that he would probably add here. When most people have a lunch that work provides, it’s not an amazing sandwich on fresh-out-of-the-oven sourdough with a side of fresh tropical fruits. That’s because most people don’t work for a resort on a tropical island, catering to the representatives of rogue states and billionaires; but in defense of being employed by people he despised, he’d point out that most people don’t get paid eight figures at all. And being paid that sum to do a good enough IT job that nobody knew he existed was very much what he’d always dreamed of.

That took him about three hours a day. He spent the other five napping, eating amazing food, securely leaking compromising details about his employer and their clientele to public interest journalists, working out to burn off the amazing food he’d eaten, and playing video games. Completely normal hobbies, right? Which is why he knew exactly what to call the thing that strode out of the implosion, covered in dust and bits of food.

“Get in the interdimensional mech, nerd,” she yelled at him from the cockpit of, as Nathan recognized immediately, a twelve-foot war machine. Her bodysuit was electric blue with circuit patterns covering it that were highlighted in shifting teal and turquoise, and her purple-and-pink hair was up in a ponytail that was escaping her helmet—a style that she would abandon before too long, certainly by the time they met next in a short lifetime. “There’s no time to explain!”

“I have a sandwich,” he pointed out politely, because that seemed to him like the most relevant thing to say at the time.

“Rainbow farticorn.” She deployed the nonsensical phrase as though it were a trump card. “Move!”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Nathan’s astonishment was plain on his face, but it didn’t slow him down as he shot to his feet. Sandwich still in hand, chair falling forgotten behind him, he sprinted towards the mech as the girl began waving her hands in mystical patterns.

He knew they were mystical patterns because her hands left glowing traceries of the same teal-and-turquoise that accented her bodysuit. Also, they were blatantly arcane runes, and he knew that because he recognized them from the commissioned art for a web serial he’d read.

Plus, during the time it took him to cross the grass, she’d ripped open a hole in reality. It was savagely red and was dripping flaming blood onto the grass, and he could hear the screaming of what seemed like a million lost souls wailing from it. The rift itself looked vaguely sluglike, he noted as he climbed the handholds on the mech’s side as fast as he could, and there was an exploded corpse under it—not one that was blown up by an explosive, but one that had been disassembled like an exploded diagram of an old white man.

“Is that Henry Kissinger?” Nathan asked loudly as he finished climbing up to cockpit level, where he could see a faint shimmering distortion in front of the mech’s pilot.

“Oh, yeah.” The girl reached through the distortion, which disappeared as she did so, and grabbed his wrist. Hauling with far more strength than her frame should have had, she pulled him up to sit next to her. “It’s always Kissinger for some reason. I think it’s because—”

“Nah, I don’t need to know.” He grinned as he looked down, buckling himself into the obvious five-point harness that the bucket seat came with after glancing at her to see how she had it rigged. “Valid and endorsed.”

“I’m Natasha, by the way. Thanks for not dawdling.”

“You said the magic words,” he replied dryly, clicking the last buckle into place. “If you can’t explain, what can you tell me?”

“Not can’t, just no time.” The mech lurched into motion as she kept gesticulating, the rift starting to feel more solid, more real. “Three things. Death isn’t permanent but it still sucks, and doing awesome things makes you more awesome.”

“What’s the third?”

“You’re getting dropped into the scrum qualifiers for a mecha-tournament death game. Megaman your way through as far as you can, good luck!”

And as the explosion from a rupturing underground gas line propelled Natasha’s mech through the portal, Nathan fell through the universe.