Blake set a timer for fifty-five minutes in his suit as his people walked out of the meeting room in Crirada. Quickly the Many transporter and Simona made their way to the rooms given to them for the duration and Blake got down to business.

“Pack up everything you need to take with you that can be taken in time. I will fetch my sensor skitter and have it board with you. I want you, the Many, our stuff, and that Arlette woman on board with at least twenty minutes to spare. I’m going to fake a run north, to make it look like the Eterian leaders are running away to Kutrad, then we’ll turn towards the west and come down on them from their northern side. I trust that you can handle the loading process yourself?”

“You may rely on me, my Lord,” Simona replied in her standard enthusiastic and confident manner.

However, Blake caught a hint of reluctance in her that she quickly hid behind her normal demeanor. “Is something wrong?” he asked his minion.

“Of course not!” came the reply.

Blake didn’t buy it. “Simona, you’re one of my top subordinates. It’s important that we keep a clear channel of communication between us, so don’t hide your reservations from me, especially not now when they might matter.”

“It... it is of no importance, my Lord.”

“Stop it. Today is a busy day, so just say it and we can move on.”

“...it feels wrong to allow that woman aboard the Flying Toaster, my Lord,” she finally admitted, glancing away and avoiding looking his way. “The ship is Otharian. She does not belong there. Her presence will sully it.”

Now Blake understood. He should have realized it on his own. A dislike and distrust of outsiders ran through most every Otharian, but Simona was easily the most fervent of his subordinates. He didn’t blame her, after what she’d been through as a child growing up near the Eterian border and living through raids and abuse of the Eterians. The Flying Toaster was special. It was something that only he, and by extension Otharia, could do. He should have realized that others would view it as hallowed ground of sorts and that they wouldn’t want to share. He even shared those feelings a little, like a man overly protective of his new sports car, he wasn’t willing to let just anybody ride. Still, it was too late for objections in this case.

“I understand your misgivings, but it’s too late for them this time,” he informed her. “We need her for part of the plan.”

“Do you truly believe that her ruse will help?” Simona asked skeptically.

“Ehhhh, probably not that much, but it’s worth it even if it just makes our odds two percent better, wouldn’t you agree? It’s not like it really costs us anything more than mild inconvenience.” Blake didn’t mention that certain other residents of his fortress also desired that the Arlette woman be kept out of harm’s way and had been very annoying about it. “You don’t have to be a gracious host. Just let her aboard and then kick her out when the fighting is over.”

Simona bowed. “As you wish, my Lord.”

Blake cut the transmission with a quick wave to Agrits and walked out. Quickly he headed back towards his personal chambers, but a familiar face poked through the exit before he could leave the House of Manys.

“Oh hey, are you done already?” she asked. “I was hoping to talk to my friend if I could.”

“You’re too late. She’s already off doing whatever she needs to do.”

“Oh...” came the disappointed reply.

“Don’t worry, she’ll be up in the zeppelin the whole time. Nothing is going to happen to her,” Blake said before Sofie starting getting all nervous and badgering him about something.

“I know, I know,” she said with a scowl.

Blake made to move past her and she placed a hand on his metal-clad arm as he passed. “Blake, thank you for doing this. I know you didn’t want to help the Eterians any more than absolutely necessary so I appreciate you going out of your way to do this for me.”

“I’m not doing this for you,” Blake shot back. “Though it does make my days less annoying when you aren’t harping on and on about it all the time, so I guess I’m doing it just a little for you.”

“Then why are you helping them at all? You never seem to care if they live or die.”

Blake’s face scrunched up with indignation behind his mask as he thought about the dozens of battles waged between his forces and that woman, and how they always ended in frustration. “Because I’m stubborn, I guess. Just packing up and running would be tantamount to losing, and I refuse to lose. Not to her. I get pissed just thinking about it. Also, thanks for basically calling me an evil heartless bastard. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself.”

“Well, maybe if you-”

Blake tuned out Sofie’s outraged rebuttal and continued into the fortress proper. The hallways stood largely empty, even more so than usual. Today was a weekend day of sorts, so few people would be around, though Blake knew that Leo was almost definitely in his office, the workaholic maniac that he was.

Finally back in his own chambers, he delicately placed himself into his “command chair”, as he liked to refer to it in his mind, and activated the console in front of him. The setup in many ways mimicked the battle station that followed him around everywhere, only with even more devices sticking out from every angle. One feature, for example, was a setup that resembled the flight stick he’d purchased back on Earth to play flight simulators on his PC. He’d chosen this interface to steer the Flying Toaster because it was the one he was most familiar with, and as the creator and pilot of the craft, his experience was really the only thing that mattered.

He’d need that in a moment, but for now, he needed to retrieve his sensor array for loading onto the ship. Calling up the skitter, he ordered it to proceed from the “blighted area”, as the locals called it, to the loading area within the citadel grounds. There, through the overhead viewpoint of a nearby flitter, he watched as it joined Simona, his Many transporter, and several small boxes of supplies in the lift.

With the click of a mouse, he began the final transfer of data from the bot. The transfer would take some time, so he leaned back and let out a yawn, content to wait while Simona handled the boarding. He checked his timer. Forty-five minutes.

Blake wondered to himself if involving his forces in the Ubran invasion had been a good idea. He’d done it for his own reasons, namely to study the aftereffects of the massive Severed event in the hopes of finding a key to returning to Earth. He’d hoped the obvious extra-dimensionality of the occurrence meant that there would be ample data to collect and harness for his purposes. He’d been wrong.

Blake had originally not known what to look for, so he’d decided to harvest everything he could and sort it out later. Using technology he’d copied from the bunker, Blake’s sensor skitter had collected reams of information of all kinds. However, after many hours of careful study, what data he could figure out suggested that he’d been looking at it all wrong. He’d thought that Earth, Scyria, and the tentacle realm were all just three layers in a dimensional cake, and if he could figure out how to detect these different layers, he would have one vital link to Earth. Now, he’d come to realize that his assumption was likely very incorrect. For all he knew, Earth and Scyria were like two separate and distinct onions, and the tentacle realm was merely another layer on the Scyrian onion. He’d found nothing that suggested a way home. He didn’t want to think about the ramifications of that right now, or ever.

The lift was nearing the Flying Toaster a second time, this trip featuring one woman and a bunch of illusions made to look like all the important people still in the city. Blake found it strange that the illusions showed up on camera, given how speech translation did not work through machines. Were the images some sort of hard light constructs? What about the projections of the Manys? Maybe he’d look into that one day when he was bored and had free time. He chuckled. When was the last time he’d had something resembling free time?

Thirty-seven minutes.

With the full allotment of passengers now aboard the airship, Blake decided to do one last systems check of the payload resting in the “bot bay”, as he liked to call it. Within the long chamber towards the rear of the gondola hung eighteen massive bombs, the product of several days of non-stop collaboration between him and the bioorganic terror known as Pari Clansnarl.

Each bomb stood a good five feet wide and eight feet long. He’d hung them lengthwise, with a modified clamp clutching the flat sides on the left and right, using the same equipment he normally used to deploy skitters from the ship. He’d found neither the time nor the desire to heavily rework the machinery in that compartment, so the clamps still hung from the same long cables that he would normally unspool to lower the skitters before releasing them. Since all he had to do was open the bay doors and release the clamps, keeping the rest of the setup as it normally was wouldn’t matter either way.

The bombs themselves packed quite a wallop, and he held a fair amount of pride in them. They contained a certain mechanism that, once armed, would cause the whole thing to go up in a massive explosion upon a sudden decelerating impact. They also looked like giant barrels, the kind that Donkey Kong would have thrown, because Pari had refused to use a proper metal bomb casing, instead insisting that the bombs be giant candles. Given the sheer insanity of trying to acquire several tons of wax, he’d done his best to talk some sense into her, and wooden barrels lined with wax were the best he had been able to manage. They looked stupid in his eyes, but what did he care in the end? They went boom and they did it well, and that was what really mattered.

It took several minutes to run the checks, but in the end, all of the bombs returned the proper response codes. He armed them and turned back to the airship controls. The timer ticked down to just under thirty minutes, and so he grabbed the flight stick and began to rotate the craft north before setting the thrust at twenty-five percent and sending the Flying Toaster on its way.

The process took a little over a minute. When flying in the normal mode, the Flying Toaster steered much as he imagined the Titanic steered back in the day: slow and cumbersome. The video delay didn’t help either. He took solace in the fact that there were no icebergs in the sky.

There was another mode, one where the massive metal machine could soar through the sky with speed and surprising grace. Sadly, the energy required to power that level of thrust from both the main propellers and the multitude of smaller fine-control propellers meant it could only run that way for fifteen or twenty minutes before the cantacrenyx crystals would run low on power, leaving the Flying Toaster adrift in the skies until they could recharge enough to resume powered flight. Outside of testing, he’d only used that mode once, when he’d first sent the zeppelin to Crirada and realized that the city was in danger of falling before he even showed up to rescue it.

beep

The final data upload had finished. With little else to do other than wait, he decided to check it out. Pulling up the telemetry, he glanced over it for a few minutes, finding little remarkable about it. He found the most interesting aspect of the days upon days of data to be the slow decay of various forms of radiation that he’d never heard of before, like the remnants of an eldritch nuke. The strange modulating frequencies of the radiation had always puzzled him, though it remained a curiosity at best. There was little to take from the readings that would point him towards anything constructive.

BEEPBEEPBEEP

An alarm from the system pulled Blake back to the present and he looked up to find his beloved airship swerving back and forth in the air as it barely avoided a pair of incoming boulders, each the size of a large yacht. Blake had not expected the Ubran artillery to be able to reach the height of his ship, so this caught him by surprise, as did the fact that one of the boulders seemed to be made entirely of ice.

Ever since that monster woman had somehow knocked down one of his flitters with a well-placed throw, he’d added in predictive avoidance routines to all his flying contraptions. Using the cameras on the bottom of the ship, the system looked for anything over a certain size heading in its direction, calculated the velocity of the object, activated “emergency mode”, and did its best to steer out of the path of the incoming danger.

beep

The system worked rather well. It was able to both react faster to the object and, using the multiple angles of the cameras, better predict the object’s flight path than he would be able to. Adding in the delay in the video feed, and Blake had no choice but to rely on the system. Other than adjusting the altitude controls to set the ship ascending out of reach of the rocks, he had to trust the avoidance system to keep his beloved Flying Toaster from an untimely end.

And that would be, for sure, the end result if one of those boulders were to hit the zeppelin. It would have punched through the side of his ship with startling ease. Structural integrity was not the Flying Toaster’s strong suit.

Once the airship had gained enough altitude that Blake didn’t have to worry about it gaining an unwanted hole, he checked the timer again: twenty minutes. Good enough, he supposed. He reoriented the ship to point towards the western camp, cut the engines down to ten percent, and leaned back with a sigh.

beep

The soft, subtle sound graced his ears once more, only this time he actually noticed it. This was not the full-on whooping klaxon of an upcoming battle with that damnable woman, nor the more insistent beeps the system usually made for various alarms and emergencies such as his prized airship having to dodge giant boulders. Puzzled, he pulled up the console’s menu to figure out the source of the sound and found a soft yellow dot blinking in the lower right. Clicking on it, he brought up a submenu and noticed the dot now blinking on something labeled “Bugs?”.

Now he remembered. Long ago, while working on his airborne surveillance network, he’d written a background script designed to analyze the various feeds coming in from his vast array of skitters and flitters and look for things that seemed wrong. The script had been very useful in the formative phase of the project, helping him weed out issues with the functionality of his systems, but once he’d deemed the systems basically complete, he’d downgraded the script so that the notifications wouldn’t bother him much, with a subtle beep once every five minutes should it find anything noteworthy. He’d left it running the entire time because, as every programmer knows, strange edge case bugs sometimes had a bad habit of popping up years or even decades down the line.

Still, Blake had not been expecting such a notification. It had been months since the script had last found anything noteworthy; so long, in fact, that he’d forgotten it was still running.

Well, he still had fourteen minutes to kill so he clicked into the program. Seven messages popped up. He glanced at the first.

Flitter 287: Object detected traveling outside set normative velocity bounds (avg 309 mph). Possible tracking calibration issue?

“Huh?” Blake gasped in puzzlement. He hadn’t known what to expect, but this surely wasn’t it. Hadn’t he solved this error within the first two days? He looked at the next one.

Flitter 254: Object detected traveling outside set normative velocity bounds (avg 322 mph). Possible tracking calibration issue?

“What?” he mumbled to himself. Were his flitters breaking down all of a sudden? Was there a design flaw he’d missed that wouldn’t rear its ugly head until enough wear and tear had built up on the hardware? He looked at the next message.

“Possible tracking cal... are they all the same?” he wondered aloud as he scrolled down. They were.

Something wasn’t right. Seven flitters, all with the same bug out of nowhere? Blake had seen enough bugs in his life to know that stuff like this didn’t appear randomly. Checking the timestamps, he found a worrying trend: each occurrence was a few minutes after the previous one.

With a frown, Blake brought up a map of Otharia with his skitter and flitter deployments overlaid on top. With a few quick instructions, he isolated the flitter overlay and brought up the individual flitter identification numbers before removing all but the seven flitters listed in the reports.

Seven circles, each showing the respective flitter’s coverage area, remained. A sinking feeling formed in Blake’s gut as he realized that the circles together formed a rough, diagonal line oriented northwest-southeast. And if he ordered them in the chronological order of the timestamps...

beep

Two more messages popped up. Hurrying, he checked the flitter ids and found, as he expected, that the next two flitters continued the line southeast. Given the diameter of each flitter’s observational area and the speed it was traveling through those areas, the object had to be moving at three—or perhaps four—hundred miles per hour. And if he extended the direction further... it was headed right for Wroetin.

Panic began to set in as he brought up the visual feed of the next flitter in the sequence as fast as his hands could move. His eyes scoured the forested landscape in front of him, looking for anything amiss. Then he saw it, something rocketing through the trees at a blinding pace. Pausing the feed for a moment, he zoomed in on the entity, then rewound it several seconds until he found a frame where the trees didn’t entirely block his view.

His blood ran cold as he zoomed in more. The foliage still blocked most of it, and the resolution was appallingly low, but in the gap between trees he could still make out one very familiar giant black crystal sword.

She’d gotten through.

“Oh, fuck.”

Blake had always worried that the one person he never seemed to be able to kill would give up on assaulting Crirada and head for him instead. But several issues made being ready for such an event harder to deal with than he’d wanted. He had a system to detect the woman by face, body type, height, etc., one which had proven highly reliable through the winter months. But sadly, the system required a special, more complicated flitter, of which he had very few relative to the total flitter fleet because they needed several cantacrenyx crystals of just the right size and shape to power the extra systems while still being able to fly indefinitely. These crystals had proven very hard to come by recently, capping his output far below where he desired it.

Given such a hardware shortage, Blake had decided to concentrate his system on two areas. The first was, obviously, Crirada and the surrounding area. The other area was the Eterian border. It made perfect sense. Thanks to the leviathans that lurked beneath the waves, he didn’t need to worry about somebody crossing the seas to either side of the border. There was no other way anybody could get into the country but through the border.

And yet here she was, racing through the heartland of Otharia without a single peep from his detection system. Judging by her speed and location, she would arrive in...

He did some quick mental math.

...eleven minutes.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck-”

Heart pounding in his chest, Blake reset the timer to ten minutes and triggered the emergency alarms in the north, the west, and the center of the city, signaling the population of Wroetin to escape to the south and east of the city and beyond. His ears soon picked up the harrowing wail of the sirens outside, their screech only adding to his growing panic.

He knew his warning to the populace came far too late, but he needed as many people out of the way as he could manage for what was about to come. A demon was coming for his head, and he had less than fourteen minutes to turn everything between him and her that he could into a killing field swarming with skitters. The fewer people to gum up the works, the better.

Feverishly, Blake brought up a readout of all the skitters and other various units nearby, his heart sinking as he went down the list. It was shorter than he’d hoped. There was no helping it, the situation was as it was. He couldn’t give himself more units—creating a single skitter took far longer than the time he had—but he could, at least, give himself more time to come up with a way to use what he had available.

Hundreds of cantacrenyx crystals of different sizes could be found inside Blake’s armor, all connected to their respective circuits, all with important jobs that kept his suit running. All, that is, except one crystal the size of his thumb, embedded in his chest plate with just a few fractions of an inch between it and his flesh. With a thought, Blake removed that thin seal, pressing the crystal into his chest just outside his heart, and entered Hyper Mode.

The world slowed to a crawl. Hyper Mode wasn’t good for everything, but one thing it excelled at was giving him more time to think. And so, he thought.

One by one, he considered his options, came up with plans, and evaluated them based on estimates of their effectiveness based on past experience, how well they meshed with his available resources, and if he even had the time to set them up before that damnable woman arrived. Finally, he settled on a strategy that satisfied all his conditions better than anything else he could come up with. It wasn’t the most radical plan, but it would do.

First, he needed to round up every skitter in the area and order them to relocate to an area outside and atop the city wall to the northwest, directly between him and her current position. His experience combating her all these days and nights told him that she would most likely try to use her momentum to blast right through rather than take a detour. He needed to use that directness of hers against her if he wanted to emerge victorious.

Unfortunately, the skitters close enough to make it to the upcoming battle in time were a mixed bag at best. The vast majority of them were old models designed back in the beginning of his reign for occupying the country instead of taking down a superpowered woman. They lacked the size, specs, and firepower of the later base model skitters. On the other hand, he did have a handful of larger, more powerful robots—relics of his war with the Otharian army during his initial conquest—tucked away in a storage room.

In total, he had substantially more skitters than he normally did at Crirada, but their average capability paled in comparison to that of their more modern counterparts. Blake would have to make especially good use of the few special skitters to balance out that discrepancy. That, and the two aces up his sleeve, which-

Blake felt something was off, a subtle pressure on his left side, rocking him ever so slowly that it had taken him hours in Hyper Mode to even realize it was happening. That was one of the downsides to the trance-like state. It was so easy to tunnel into a problem and lose awareness of the outside world.

Pulling himself back down to real-time speed, Blake turned around to find a frightened Sofie standing beside him.

“Blake!” she hollered over the howling din of the sirens.

“What are you doing here, you dumb-ass?!” Blake hollered back.

“What’s happening?!”

“That woman is coming! Now get out of here while you still can! We have-” He checked his timer. “-nine-and-a-half minutes!”

“But what about Crirada!” she replied, worry written across her face.

“They’re on their own!”

“But-”

“THERE’S NO TIME! GO!”

As if to punctuate the urgency of the moment, Blake liquefied the floor beneath him and fell through several solid feet of tucrenyx, leaving a panicking Sofie behind, before emerging from the ceiling into a passageway below. As he landed, he liquefied the passageway’s floor and sank into that as well. He normally would never consider such a drastic method of movement but he needed to get down to the bottom of his fortress with as much time left as he could manage. Taking a direct path down, while uncomfortable and mildly dangerous, would be far faster than navigating the labyrinthine hallways of his fortress.

Finally, with eight minutes and twelve seconds left to go, Blake landed in the closest thing his home had to a basement. There sat his final aces: two absolutely gigantic cantacrenyx crystals, bigger than any others he’d ever seen. The pair had originally been a trio, but Blake was using the smallest of them to power the Flying Toaster. The remaining two put that smaller one to shame, with the largest coming in at over twelve feet tall and nearly twenty-six feet long.

Blake had been holding onto these last two, waiting for projects that would require massive levels of power. In part because the war had stolen so much of his time, he’d yet to find anything worthy of their juice. But that just meant, luckily for him, that they were still available for this very moment.

Four lengths of tucrenyx emerged from the top of the chamber and connected, two each, to the crystals to form two separate circuits. More metal melted down to form a spiral staircase, which he immediately ascended. As he climbed, he focused on three tasks at once, multitasking as best he could. First, he tunneled out the space above him, letting the spiral staircase extend up into the rest of the fortress as he climbed. Second, he ran as many connections as he could from the smaller crystal to other normal-sized crystals embedded in the fortress, the many crystals which powered all the basic functionality of the place like the powered doors. Third, as he went, he grew one gigantic crystallized tucrenyx line from the basement up through the fortress along his route.

When Blake had first discovered his powers, he’d determined after experimentation that the limit of his ability’s range was about forty-five feet. After months of practice, experience, and training, that limit was now... forty-five feet. However, altering metal at a distance had been a difficult and slow process when he’d first started. Now, while metal thirty feet away didn’t flow like water the same way it did near him, it responded to his will dozens of times faster than at the beginning. The same held true for metal that he couldn’t see. Many days of experience creating and maintaining mental images in his mind helped him alter even parts of his fortress with forty feet of tucrenyx in between.

The drastic improvement in his techniques was crucial now, allowing him to set up these circuits within the time he had to work with. It was a shame that he couldn’t affect more than a forty-five-foot radius around him at once, rather than the entire fortress. Given the lack of time, he wasn’t going to be able to prepare more than a small section of his home. Still, it was far better than nothing. He would just have to make do with what he could accomplish before she arrived.

Heavy clangs rang through the fortress as Blake made his way higher and higher, moving as quickly as a half-paralyzed man in a heavy metal suit could go. His mind strained as he pushed it farther than he’d ever pushed it before. He struggled to keep a dozen distinct images and thoughts in his head at once as he built and modified the web of tucrenyx channels connecting the various crystals within range to the smaller of the two down in the basement, while simultaneously growing the thick channel from the larger of the giant crystals all the way up through the fortress, all while extending the staircase and trying not to trip as he went up it. His head pounded and he could feel a massive headache coming on, but he powered through it with a combination of adrenaline and fear.

Blake ended his efforts halfway up the fortress on the fourth floor, as he emerged from the makeshift stairway into the offices of the Ministry of Agriculture. This particular level of the fortress consisted almost entirely of administrative departments, with the office of each Minister featuring its own large balcony. Fricis Upeslacis’s office happened to be the one that pointed in the right direction for Blake’s needs, so that was where he decided to make his stand.

While he knew it unlikely, Blake hoped that he could win the upcoming fight before any violence came to his location. He could already imagine the old farmer chewing him out for ruining all of his department’s paperwork. The old coot hated paperwork; it had been hard enough getting him to fill it out the first time. Getting him to do it all again would be a tremendous pain. He’d take that pain over a sword to the neck if it came to that, however. These offices were the best location for his hastily conceived strategy, grumpy elders be damned.

Blake checked the timer as he stepped out onto the balcony: one minute and fifty-three seconds remained. A cacophony of panic and terror pounded his eardrums as soon as he opened the doors to the outside world. Bedlam reigned on the streets below as tens of thousands of people pushed and ran and fought to get away from the sirens as quickly as possible. Such pandemonium choked every road and alley he could see, and Blake felt a moment of sympathy for those who got caught and trampled in the chaos, but he consoled himself with the thought that at least everybody seemed to be heading in the right direction.

Turning around, he focused on the wall above him, the grey luster gleaming in the mid-morning light. Much of the metal above him began to push outward, extruding from the fortress’s exterior and forming a large tube. The tube grew and elongated, reaching outward from the fortress towards the northwestern wall. Blake wrapped a tight spiral of power-conducting tucrenyx along the inside of the tube as it moved along, finally stopping as the tube reached a length of thirty-five feet and a diameter of three feet. Quickly, he formed a large system of gears and motors around the base of the tube and connected several strands of power circuitry to it before separating the tube’s base from the rest of the fortress wall. The tube’s front end dipped as the whole thing tilted downward. Gears spun wildly before catching and stopping it from tilting any lower. Finally, he connected the huge power line he’d drawn up through the fortress from the biggest basement-dwelling crystal to the tube and grinned.

The second, and largest, hypersonic cannon ever created lacked even a shred of elegance or sophistication, more resembling a giant straw poking out of his castle than anything that resembled a weapon, but what a weapon it was. By his estimates, it could launch a slug heavier than your average car and three times the size of the previous cannon’s munitions at speeds that Blake wasn’t even sure of, and with the gigantic subterranean crystal powering it, this version of the cannon wouldn’t need to charge for precious seconds each time before firing.

The cannon’s angle of fire was limited to a small arc of the city, and it would very likely break down after a single shot like the previous one did, but that was what Blake was here for. He could fix it up and load it with a new shell in a matter of seconds.

Of course, the speed, power, and range of the gun didn’t matter if it couldn’t hit anything. Though he’d gotten lucky several times in important situations, Blake was not an especially good shot. But in this case, he didn’t have to be. He connected one final line, hooking the cannon up to the server. Long ago, Blake had implemented a system for his sniper bots, allowing them to coordinate with other information sources like flitters to properly aim at targets their sensors might not be able to detect clearly enough at long range. It was a huge reason his snipers had been so effective. Without the system, the first hypersonic cannon’s only shot would surely have missed, firing all the way from the citadel to beyond the outer wall as it had.

With a few quick tweaks, Blake entered the cannon into the system, properly setting its orientation. The gun barrel moved left and right, up and down as it went through a series of short calibration tests before it became fully integrated. As the tests finished, Blake caught movement in the office and his trusty battlestation came galloping onto the balcony. Unable to follow him through the floors or up the thin spiral staircase, the skitter had been racing through the hallways of the fortress for minutes, trying to catch up, only to barely arrive in time.

“Took you long enough,” he grumbled as he deployed it, making sure he could see both the screens and the city without having to turn.

The timer read negative twelve seconds and counting. She would be showing up at any moment now. Of course, this was all based on an extrapolation of his estimate of her velocity. That was why he’d given himself a minute less than his original calculation, just to be safe.

Now he just had to find her, a much more simple task now, thanks to the large open fields of farmland outside the capital versus the wooded area before. Flipping through the feeds of the few remaining flitters on her assumed trajectory, Blake found her within seconds. The woman was still a few miles out, but closing fast. He marked her as the one and only target with a single click and watched as every component of his hastily assembled defense turned as one towards their new adversary, her location data being fed through the targeting system from the flitters above. Blake let out a satisfied hum. Finding a single person in a sea of people, based on body shape, height, face, and equipment was difficult and required high-spec equipment. Tracking a pre-marked target, on the other hand, was easy as pie. One could almost say the system as a whole had been built for just that sort of thing.

Less than a minute later, the woman was just two miles from the city walls, her body hurtling towards his fortress at the center with reckless abandon. The sound of gears turning above and behind him brought a wicked smile to Blake’s face as the cannon adjusted to its target’s position. He melded the soles of his armored feet to the balcony below, bracing his legs, spine, and neck with extra support as metal flowed from the fortress wall into the gun barrel and solidified into a perfectly balanced three-foot-wide, seven-foot-long solid shell. Then, almost as an afterthought, he secured his battlestation to the floor as well. It was time to say hello.

Blake felt the power surge before anything else. It was like a pulse traveling along his spine and up into his brain, so powerfully euphoric that he almost forgot where he was and what he was doing. For that tiniest of a fraction of a second, nothing mattered. He was on top of the world.

Then that world exploded, almost literally.

A shockwave unlike any he’d ever felt slammed into his suit, pressing him back like the giant invisible hand of a god. Had he not fused his suit with the floor below, he knew without a doubt that the blast would have flung him back into the offices behind him. Then, the air reversed, rushing back in to fill the void created by the pressure wave.

Blake never took his eyes off the woman on the screen. What he saw made him want to cackle. One moment she’d been racing toward his city. The next moment, everything below her shoulders disappeared. The small remainder spun wildly as it tumbled backward through the air, her arms flailing wildly about, though Blake noted that she still kept her grip on that massive sword.

The pained screech of metal against metal pulled Blake from his revelry as the cannon, or what was left of it, began to collapse. Quickly, he stabilized the weapon, repairing the multitude of stress fractures along the barrel, reforming the twisted gears, rewiring the broken spiral inside which generated the incredible thrust. The process took him almost as long as the cannon’s initial creation, but he had to be sure he didn’t miss a single flaw or the next time it fired it might actually explode on him.

The woman’s body reformed as he worked, and she redoubled her efforts. The small army of antique skitters came at her from the front and both sides, but they proved to be far less effective than Blake had hoped. The woman spun and danced and hacked away at the robot force, a whirling dervish of endless movement and violence. The smaller caliber rounds seemed to have no real effect upon her, and every time she swung her blade, three skitters fell to the ground in pieces. They wouldn’t hold her long like this.

Blake ordered the skitters to retreat back towards the wall, where the more advanced units atop the wall would be able to provide support. They dutifully fell back, though that just meant she advanced as well. That was alright, because Blake’s cannon was finally whole once more.

A second pulse of raw power coursed up from the basement, through the fortress, and into the cannon, sending tingles through Blake’s body and soul. The weapon erupted once more, nearly bursting into pieces from the sheer strain of its own power.

Unfortunately for Blake, this time the woman jumped up at the last moment as she went to slice down onto a nearby skitter. The shell shot right through her former position, embedding itself into the ground behind her with enough force to shatter a small mountain. Earth sprayed everywhere as the ground exploded into the air where the oversized bullet struck.

Though technically a miss, the shot still disrupted the woman’s movements, the shockwave of its passing and the blast that followed as it cratered into the ground sent her flying, buying him precious seconds. He concentrated on reforming the newly destroyed cannon for a third shot. This absurd gun was his best chance now. It was obvious that the old skitters didn’t stand much of a chance on their own. They were just too weak, designed to fight far less powerful foes. He still had a bit of hope for the variety of heavy-duty robots up on the wall. They probably wouldn’t be able to stop her, but they could at least slow her down. That was all he needed.

His battle plan was, in every way that really mattered, essentially the same as it had always been: lock the woman down and destroy the head in any way possible. It was what had worked up until now, and he saw no reason why it wouldn’t work again. The hypersonic cannon was his best bet. All he had to do was hit her upper half and that would be that. There were no Ubran soldiers here to retrieve her body and weapon before he could. This time, he’d blow her brains out and lock her in solid tucrenyx for the rest of eternity.

She was back among the skitters again, and every second his unit count dropped precipitously. The high caliber gatling and machine gun skitters, old yet powerful, opened fire while several massive heavy skitters entered the fray. The woman had faced similar opponents back in Crirada, especially in the heavy and gatling varieties, but these differed in significant ways. While all these battle skitters were cruder, they were also just... more. That was the reason he’d never sent these models to Crirada: they just didn’t fit into his zeppelin’s bot bay. Still, their large size and old systems didn’t mean they couldn’t hold their own.

The heavy skitters towered over the battlefield, twice as tall and wide as those she’d fought in the past, their armor three times as thick as their newer counterparts. Their array of fifteen-foot-long chainsaws were effectively reaper’s scythes, cutting through flesh and bone like a thresher harvesting autumn wheat. What they lacked in speed they made up for in imperviousness.

The gatling skitters were a similar story. More than one and a half times the size of their Criradan variation, they sported four twelve-foot-long gatling cannons capable of spewing out larger caliber bullets than their newer variation and doing so at a faster rate. The largest issue he had with these skitters was simply that they ran out of ammunition far too quickly, which, all things considered, was a fairly good issue to have.

The woman leaped to the side, moving with incredible speed and grace through the mass of skitters as she stayed one step ahead of the fire from the wall. Blake grimaced as the rounds from his machine gun and gatling skitters tore through the crowd of basic skitters around her. He’d never bothered to update the programming on these as he’d done for his newer models.

Suddenly the woman pivoted and hurled herself at the nearest heavy skitter, ducking under a sweep of a chainsaw. Her sword flashed out, faster than Blake’s eyes could pick up on the screen, and the oversized skitter toppled forward as each of its front legs collapsed into two separate pieces.

Blake gaped. Hadn’t she gotten her blade stuck in the legs of the newer, smaller heavy skitters? This model’s legs were far thicker, and yet she’d cleaved through these like they were made of butter! Was she even stronger now than before? That had to be it. Nothing else made sense.

Not only was she stronger, but she was also faster. Before he could even blink, she was already speeding beneath the second heavy skitter, her weapon lashing out this way and that before she turned and made a beeline for the last remaining heavy skitter while the second one collapsed onto its rear, missing its back two legs. She just wasn’t fair.

Blake clicked his tongue in distaste. Worthless they were, the lot of them. But one thing that wasn’t worthless sat above him, the final bit of damage finally vanishing from the barrel’s interior. It reoriented, pointing out towards the figure who was just finishing wrecking him final heavy skitter.

Another pulse, another boom.

The woman spun towards him, shifting her massive weapon in between her and the cannon and bracing it with the forearm and shoulder of her off hand just as the meteoric shell struck the crystalline sword’s wide, flat side. Both the bullet and the woman went flying from the collision, the woman, in particular, spinning hundreds of feet along the ground and bouncing into the air. Between the titanic force of the bullet and the countless collisions with the ground that followed, her body was in terrible shape; the power of the blow had crushed the bones of her arms into dust, driving the sword into her body and turning much of it into paste as it went—though sadly the head and part of the shoulders survived largely intact—and yet, somehow, the sword remained intact, unscratched even, a detached hand and wrist still clinging to the handle as it twirled through the air.

Blake wanted to throw a fit. What the hell was that thing made out of? Was it literally unbreakable? Where did it come from? And how had she gotten it in the way in time?

A loud ringing reached his ears seconds later. The high-pitched tone sounded like a bell or a chime and could only be the ringing of the sword vibrating with tremendous energy before finally embedding itself point-first into the dirt.

Blake sent what few functioning skitters he had outside the wall scurrying towards the dislodged weapon, but the woman was already back on her feet and zipping after it faster than any robot could hope to move. Blake cursed. If she hadn’t blocked that shot, he was sure it would have ended her. He turned his primary focus back to prepping another shot. That last time she’d just gotten lucky. This time it would work.

The final antique skitters fell to the woman’s blade, and she leaped up onto the wall as Blake hurriedly rebuilt his cannon. Bullets flew towards her from both sides as the machine gun and gatling skitters opened up with everything they could muster, but the terrain had them at a disadvantage. Stuck atop the wall, his robots couldn’t properly flank her and were always in each other’s way. They’d lost as soon as she’d made it to them.

Still, that much firepower should have been enough to take her down; it had done the job many times before. Yet Blake’s opponent seemed like a completely different person than the enemy he’d battled dozens of times already. The old “that woman” had been a formidable foe, possessing strength, speed, and resiliency dozens of times that of a normal human. But now, she zipped about with a quickness he’d never seen before, slipping with ease around supersonic projectiles that would normally have taken her head clean off. She attacked with a power she’d never shown before, her strikes destroying in a single swing what would have taken five or ten blows just a month ago. Her wounds seemed to heal almost instantly, and she fought through them as if they weren’t even affecting her. Only the grimace on her face suggested that she even felt it when a bullet tore through her heart or severed a leg.

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Where was this all coming from? Had she been holding back this whole time? Was she simply trying harder than before? Whatever the reason, Blake knew he needed to end this as soon as possible.

Blake focused his efforts on the cannon, repairing it as quickly as he could while his final skitters fell one by one. Though it took less than a minute to bring the weapon back to full operation, that was enough for the woman to take down all but one of his remaining defenders. Her blade lashed out, neatly slicing off the final gatling skitter’s front right leg and lower right cannon as Blake fired one more shot.

A pulse of unfathomable power ran through the fortress and the woman pivoted towards him, swinging her giant knife up from behind her back and down in a large overhead arc, placing it right into the hurtling projectile’s path. Blade edge met man-sized, hypersonic bullet head-on with an earsplitting screech.

The blade won. Backed by the full power of the woman’s prodigious strength, the absurdly sharp edge cut the hurtling projectile in twain right down the middle. That didn’t mean the woman got off unscathed, of course; there was just too much force behind the shot for that. The collision sent her reeling and the two halves of the bullet did the rest, slamming into her shoulders and driving her through the guardrail on the outer edge of the wall and back out of the city. The shockwave of their passing was so great that the nearby three-legged gatling skitter, still mostly operational, tumbled off the wall and landed upside down, thoroughly destroying both of its upper cannons at it hit the ground. Though still technically operational with one last working cannon, he knew he wouldn’t be able to count on it for anything more today. All his skitters had failed miserably.

A litany of profanity poured from Blake’s mouth. How had she managed to do that?! It was like she’d known the shot was coming!

A terrible thought crossed his mind: what if she had known it was coming? The pulse! Blake could feel and see the energy flowing through tucrenyx circuits when in Hyper Mode but only in Hyper Mode, and yet he’d felt the overwhelming power as it flowed into the cannon just before every shot even while normal. From the way she’d blocked the third shot and countered the fourth, Blake could only conclude that he was not the only person who could feel the powerful surge. Which meant... he’d been tipping his pitches from the beginning.

His best chances had been the first, and maybe second, shot. Now that she knew when they were coming, she could dodge or block or whatever she needed to do whenever she felt the warning sign. That meant that his chances of winning with his giant new toy were now slim to none, especially since that last shot had, by her actions, missed her head.

As if to drive the point home, the woman appeared once more, jumping up through the fresh hole in the wall, good as new. Dropping down to the ground, she took off running towards the fortress, and towards him.

Blake let the cannon melt away; there wasn’t enough time now to repair it again before she arrived. Instead, he unfastened his suit from the balcony floor and drew some metal and several crystals from the wall behind him, forming them into a large shotgun in his left hand. Moving his battlestation to his left, he stepped forward to make himself as noticeable as possible. He had another trick up his sleeve, but he needed her to see him for it to work.

Seconds later, the woman neared the outer wall of his fortress, her speed once again up to several hundred miles per hour. Blake could see her looking right at him, and he prayed that she would do what he expected given her tendency towards confronting things straight on. She did, launching herself right towards him instead of merely jumping the wall or breaking through a gate and entering the fortress from the ground.

A knowing smirk formed behind his mask. While the woman seemed far more powerful than he could ever remember, he took solace that she still had the same predictable behaviors. He watched, almost serenely, as she soared in his direction, her body twisting, readying herself for a mighty horizontal swing.

Blake leveled his shotgun at the incoming woman’s head and activated Hyper Mode once more. Everything slowed to a crawl, and Blake could see everything with startling clarity. He could see the woman’s body starting to uncoil, her massive blade beginning its fatal arc towards him. He could see the snarl of rage on the woman’s lips, and the boiling hatred in her gaze. Well, it was time to do something about that.

Hyper Mode provided few worthwhile bonuses in combat, especially close combat. While his mind revved up to about six hundred times that of real-time, nothing else did. He couldn’t grow tucrenyx any faster nor move his body quicker. He couldn’t even quickly look around with his just eyes, and god forbid he try to walk or do any other sort of complex physical movement. But what it did do was allow him a moment for analysis and contemplation, and, in rare cases like this very moment, allowed him to time something juuuuuuuuust right.

Tweaking his aim just slightly upward, he fired, feeling the recoil press against his mechanical arm and up into his shoulder. He watched as, in slow motion, the tightly-packed shot exited the muzzle and spread out, forming a swarm of metal death a bit more than a foot in diameter. He rejoiced as said swarm and the woman’s head flew into one another, the multitude of metallic spheres turning her skull into a fine mist and finally, finally, beheading her. It was over, just in the nick of time.

The woman’s sword was already mid-swing when his blast struck true. The blow sent her her body tumbling, but Blake realized with dismay that the blade was still headed towards his side. He willed his body to lean away as best he could, but like everything else, it moved like it was stuck in wet cement. Sadly, there was no avoiding what was to come.

The blade bit into the armor on his left side by his kidney, the edge burrowing into the metal like it wasn’t even there. A hot spike of burning pain coursed through his body as the blade cut a gash several inches deep into his torso, slicing into the muscle and more. For the first time in his life, he dropped out of Hyper Mode due to something other than his own free will. The world sped up in a flash as he fell to the balcony floor, and the next thing he knew, the decapitated body of that damnable woman crashed through his battlestation and careened into Minister Upeslacis’s office, leaving a trail of wreckage in its wake.

Through sheer willpower, Blake fought down the howl of pain threatening to emerge, focusing instead on shunting metal from his armor into the gap to plug the hole in his side as best he could. It was far from the perfect solution, but a year with this body had taught him that he was strangely hardy compared to his Earth self. If he could just slow the bleeding now, the wound would probably heal in a few days or weeks. It was how he’d survived his prior injuries, which would surely have killed him back on Earth; just losing his arm should have led to him bleeding to death.

He’d be fine. Well, not fine, but functional. Hopefully. For now, he’d just ride the adrenaline to keep the pain down to a dull inferno until he could better deal with it. Right now, he had more important things to deal with, like taking his adversary’s body and sealing it away forever before she could resurrect some hours from now.

But first, he needed to stand up. Sealing away the crystal in his chest plate so he wouldn’t slide back into Hyper Mode on accident mid stumble, he slowly worked his way back to his feet, his side protesting every movement. Finally vertical once more, he turned around.

The damnable woman’s body stood, braced against the far wall of the office, crimson smoke solidifying atop her neck into a new head.

“You have to be shitting me,” Blake muttered in disbelief, a cold sweat breaking out all over his body. This wasn’t how things were supposed to work!

As quick as he could manage, he leveled his shotgun at his foe and fired, but it was too late. Her crystal sword interposed itself between the two of them, letting out a dull ring as the shot bounced off it.

“Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, then...” Blake uttered, stepping into the office. If even complete destruction of the brain didn’t stop her, then it was time to try everything in the book, no matter how much it cost him. He triggered a circuit in the wall behind her, one of the hundreds he’d wired on his way up. A jolt of power flowed into the wall from the smaller of the two crystals below his keep, and the crystal inside the wall exploded without warning, destroying the wall. Shrapnel ripped into the woman from the back, staggering her just as a second crystal ruptured beneath her sent her tumbling across the office. He fired another shot, which struck her left leg, blowing it apart. “...welcome to my playground.”

No area in the world contained more cantacrenyx crystals than Blake’s fortress. He used them for everything, from moving sliding doors to powering lights to flushing toilets. Every wall, every floor, every ceiling had a crystal somewhere inside it—often more than one—and Blake had rigged every single crystal within forty-five feet, from the ground floor up to the floor they stood in, to explode on command. He’d created his own personal minefield, one that it pained him to use—rupturing cantacrenyx crystals always felt like an incredible waste—but he had little choice in the matter now.

Blood-red smoke rushed in to replace the woman’s destroyed leg as she dove to the side and out into the greater Agricultural Ministry offices. Blake triggered the door motor as he tumbled through, the subsequent detonation sending her flying out of control into a series of filing cabinets.

The last thing Blake wanted was to lose sight of his opponent, so he followed her through the now-ruined doorway, but she was far faster than he. Already on her feet, she grabbed the dented filing cabinet behind her and flung it towards Blake with startling speed. Unable to dodge in time, all he could do was liquefy the metal heading his way and let it wash over him while stacks of forms and other documents bounced off his armor.

Unfortunately, the metal splattering all over his helmet and upper chest meant he couldn’t see. He jumped back, firing blindly as he willed the top foot of the floor around him to liquefy. His efforts were rewarded as the sound of a splash and a surprised growl graced his ears, and he hurriedly re-solidified the floor. As his vision cleared, he found the woman’s legs embedded in the metal up to her shins.

Blake fired his shotgun and this time his aim was true, her head bursting into tiny bits of flesh and bone, but to his utter dismay, fresh strands of crimson smoke were already materializing to return her to full health. He blanched at the sight as he cursed this absurd situation. How was he supposed to kill the unkillable? It didn’t matter how many times he won against her. His resources were finite. As long as she kept getting back up, she’d come out on top in the end. It was so unfair it made him want to scream.

The microsecond his shotgun had finished recharging, Blake fired again, but it was already too late; that cursed sword was already in the way. The sword was just as unfair as the woman herself. He couldn’t break it, he couldn’t stop it, and he couldn’t have it. No matter what he did, no matter how he punished her body or took her life, her hands maintained a death grip on the weapon’s handle.

With a snarl of rage and the piercing screech of overstressed metal, the woman ripped her legs free from the floor and charged. Blake jumped to his left, liquefying the top foot of the entire floor of the room this time minus the spot where he stood. However, instead of tumbling into the liquid metal, this time she drove her feet into the floor with such force that the fluid floor pushed back.

Blake could change the softness/liquidity of metals anywhere from solid to the approximate viscosity of water. In nearly all cases, Blake went all the way to water. It allowed for the fastest flow of metal as he built stuff and gave the least resistance in the few times he used it as a trap like this. But even the least resistance was still some resistance. Blake had seen videos on the internet of things like cars driving on water and the like; all it took was for an object to strike the water hard and fast enough that it could get sufficient resistance. He’d just never expected to see a person do it.

That lack of expectation proved costly. Caught unprepared, Blake jumped back again but, after just a few feet, found himself with his back against a wall. The crystal blade whipped through his previous position, slicing neatly through his shotgun and rendering it into scrap. Blake set off every crystal within their vicinity, blowing apart the nearby walls and sending the two of them flying apart. The ceiling above them groaned as more and more load-bearing walls fell.

As the woman came to a stop across the office and climbed to her feet, Blake took a split second to repair his armor and ponder new strategies. It seemed that turning the floor into a watery swamp wouldn’t work anymore.

He wanted to sigh. It would have been so nice if he could have just willed metal spikes to shoot into her from all around, but his powers didn’t work that way, as much as he wanted them to. Liquefied metal didn’t have the strength to pierce anything. It had to be solid, and even if he tried to make a solid tip, the liquid behind it would just squirt out from the counter-force. Things would be so much easier if he could just go all Terminator 2 on her, but sadly, that was not to be.

But if he couldn’t attack her directly with his powers, how else could he slow her down? And even if he could slow her down, what was he supposed to do to take her out for good? Just destroying her head wouldn’t cut it anymore. He needed something more drastic.

A memory came of him from his old college days, a snippet of a lecture from a material science class, and he realized that he’d been going about this the wrong way. He didn’t need to create swamps and pools of liquid metal to stop her, he needed the opposite. He needed a puddle.

As the woman made to charge at him again, Blake altered the makeup of the floor all around her, liquefying just a small layer of the tucrenyx, less than a tenth of an inch. The woman’s foot, rather than driving her forward, slipped out from beneath her and sent her falling to the floor in a sudden, uncoordinated heap. Frustration growing, she tried to push herself up with her hands but found it nearly impossible to keep a stable footing.

Blake snickered at the sight. Yes, this would work nicely. As long as he could maintain the thin layer of liquid metal beneath her, he’d be able to keep her from nearing him ever again. It didn’t matter how strong you were if you couldn’t leverage that strength to do anything.

But this didn’t solve the larger issue. Sure, she wasn’t able to reach him right now, but what was he supposed to do, just stand there forever and hold her until the end of time? Another soft groan from above brought an idea to his mind, but he hesitated. It would be powerful, yes, but wouldn’t it also be too dangerous? Was it worth the risk to his life? He wasn’t sure.

With another snarl, the woman stabbed her sword down into the floor, embedding it solidly and giving her something to use for leverage. Seeing this, Blake’s hesitation vanished. As dangerous as what he was about to try would be, it couldn’t be more deadly than her.

Reaching out with his mind, Blake stretched his ability to the full extent of its range and cut out the metal from the three floors above in the shape of a cylinder, separating the area above their heads from the rest of the fortress and the structural support provided. Then, taking a deep breath, he ruptured the crystals on every remaining wall within his reach, both on the fourth floor and all the higher floors. Blasts of metal slammed into him as the explosions rocked the offices, knocking him onto his back just in time to give him a perfect view of the ceiling closing in as Blake dropped over forty tons of tucrenyx onto the both of them.

With a crash that could surely be heard for miles, the first floor of plummeting tucrenyx slammed into the floor below, shaking the entire fortress and crushing everything underneath it. Everything, that is, except Blake. As the ceiling grew closer, he liquefied the area above him, making it as soft as he could. He would have loved to just create a hole instead, but he wasn’t sure he could make one large enough in the split second he had. Failing to make a big enough hole ran the risk of straight-up killing him, so instead, he just turned it into liquid.

Liquid metal was still metal, however, and remained just as heavy. His armor groaned as the metal crashed over him like a dull gray wave, threatening to crush him under its pressure. He could feel the armor of his chest plate buckle inward under the sudden and he scrambled to reinforce it in time.

Then the second floor slammed down, and then the third, each impact sending shocks through his whole body and causing the gash in his side to flare up with agony.

As soon as the third and final floor fell, Blake got to work, using his powers to extract himself from the rubble. He turned to look at the scene as he began to repair his damaged armor. The sight of his beloved home’s state made him grimace.

The discs of the floors above rested atop the fourth floor like three pancakes stacked on a plate. Each one leaned slightly askew thanks to the wealth of furniture and other items which had been crushed beneath them. Between the mess in front of him and the damage done by his earlier fight, it looked like his fortress had been a part of a war zone for years and then been struck by a massive earthquake.

The fourth floor still held, a testament to the quality of his design and craftsmanship. It was good that it had; his body ached all over from the other impacts. Though metal was in the way, his hand instinctively pressed lightly against the gash in his side. He knew he was tough, tougher than nearly everybody, but he couldn’t keep this up too much longer. Unlike his enemy, his body had a limit to how much punishment it would take in one day.

The rubble shifted.

“For fuck’s sake...” Blake muttered to himself as the entire mass slowly rose off the ground. He ducked down and peered into the gap.

There the woman was, whole and un-flattened. She was bent over one knee, her left arm up by her bowed head as she pushed against the thick slab of metal pressing down on her back and neck. Her right arm was down by the floor, its hand still gripping her sword which had been pushed so far into the floor that a mere two or three inches were all that stuck out.

The woman looked over at him, her eyes filled with bottomless malice, and Blake shuddered. He stood up and focused, this time reaching down with his mind instead of up. Just like how, moments ago, he’d cut out huge circular chunks of the floors above them, this time he cut out circles from the floor he stood on and the one below it so that the entire mass of rubble in front of him would drop. Then, once again, he blew every wall beneath those floors to smithereens.

The metal in front of his feet fell away as the entire mass of metal dropped two stories from the fourth floor to the second before slamming into the second story floor. Blake imagined in the calamitous din that he heard the sounds of flesh and bones being mashed into a mass of unrecognizable bloody pulp, but he knew he couldn’t get his hopes up. Extruding a set of stairs from the edge where the floor used to be, he began to make his way down after the tons of collapsed fortress but halted as he heard the telltale groan of tucrenyx under too much stress. It was a good thing he did, as the second level’s floor gave out under the eighty or more tons of metal and sent the entire mess falling even further down to the ground floor.

Quickly, he descended, jumping down the last ten feet or so and landing atop the massive pile of rubble. The room he stood atop was the main entrance hall of the fortress, a long, wide room with multiple large doorways leading to the area outside. While the floors of the other levels were only two or three feet thick, the floor of the ground level was many times that. All that rested beneath it was ground and the one crystal bunker deep below. This floor would hold.

The rubble, on the other hand, would surely not. Blake was under no illusions now; the woman would revive, even after all of this. That was why he immediately acted, extending his ability over as much of the giant mess as possible and pulling it inward around her location while leaving out the assorted other materials like ruined furniture and even cantacrenyx crystals. The metal responded to his will and flowed into a giant sphere of solid tucrenyx over fifty meters in diameter before hardening into fifty feet of solid, unblemished, incredibly strong metal without a single imperfection, pocket, or weak point to be found anywhere inside and one freakishly persistent superpowered woman in the very center.

Blake melded the bottom of the sphere with the floor for stability and took a step back and worked to catch his breath. There wasn’t much he could do now but wait, and pray, and hope.

He didn’t wait long. Only moments later, he felt a tremor run beneath his feet. The sphere trembled, like an egg about to hatch. Then Blake heard the low groan of tucrenyx under strain and a small crack appeared running vertically along the outside of the sphere, a tiny hairline fracture. He sealed it up, but the crack reformed, larger and wider this time. Blake resealed it again, but this time it wouldn’t hold. With the cringe-inducing high-pitched screech of metal being torn apart, the crack grew and grew as the sphere was slowly forced open from the inside out.

Blake peered into the divide and paled at the sight. The woman stood, wedged inside the crack as thick smoke poured from her mouth and whirled around her and the sword still in her hand. Her arms flexed with ever-increasing strength as she forced the sphere apart faster and faster while letting out a roar of pure rage as she noticed him. Her muscles pulsed with power as she prepared to give one final push.

Blake liquefied the metal around her and sealed the sphere back up. How stupid of him. The biggest lesson he’d learned so far in this fight was that he needed to deprive her of solid materials she could use to leverage her seemingly bottomless strength, and then he’d gone and sealed her in a purely solid chunk of metal. Of course that wasn’t going to work.

This time, he treated it like the egg it appeared to be, liquefying all the metal inside the sphere other than a shell about a foot thick. Maybe this would finally hold her. There was little way she would be able to get solid purchase while floating around in there. Hell, maybe she would just drown.

A sudden shockwave pulsed outward from the sphere as it seemed to inflate for a moment, the shell crying out in high-pitched agony as it threatened to explode from a sudden pressure. Several small cracks formed, leaking liquid tucrenyx, and Blake hurriedly repaired them.

What was she doing? How was she creating such a concussive force while trapped in the liquid? There was nothing in there for her to hit except herself. Was she seriously pulling some Hulk-ass shit and clapping so hard that fifty tons of metal couldn’t withstand it?

A second shockwave, even stronger than the first, flared out, creating several dozen fissures this time. Blake sealed them back up, but already he was working his brain, trying to come up with another solution. It seemed obvious that not even this would hold against the monster within.

He didn’t have time to come up with anything. Just moments after the second shockwave, a third and far more powerful shockwave slammed out from the sphere, rupturing it in hundreds of places everywhere Blake could see. The sphere jerked up and forward, then back and away, and then burst open just to the right of him as the woman came hurtling out, sword first, just feet away. Before he could even react, she lashed out, her blade slicing a long diagonal cut up his right side as she flew by.

Blake was at his wit’s end. He couldn’t fight, yet he couldn’t run. His only hope was to somehow kill the unkillable, but that was manifestly impossible. What was left?

The woman skidded to a stop thirty feet away and turned back towards him, ready to take the battle to its conclusion, when suddenly the sound of cannon fire rang out. A hail of large bullets struck her on her left side, puncturing large holes in her chest and blasting her head to smithereens. Blake froze, befuddled by the sudden twist, following the bullets back to a doorway to his right that led outside. There, on the other side of a bullet-riddled door sat the final gatling skitter.

Blake couldn’t believe it. He’d been too busy to turn off the targeting system after the woman had made it past his defense lines, so even with only one working cannon and two-and-a-half working legs, his faithful creation had crawled its way back to the fortress from the city wall, intent on carrying out its mission to the bitter end. The thought brought a tear to his eye.

It was a shame that it wouldn’t matter. The woman’s head was already healed, not even a second after being splattered all over the floor. She rounded on the machine and shot towards in the blink of an eye, swerving under and around the skitter’s fire. She was just too fast now, and it too slow.

Slithering beneath the cannon, the woman took her sword in both hands and thrust it upwards into the guts of the machine. With a loud grunt, she heaved the skitter in his direction.

The skitter’s body crashed through the wall and barreled towards him, the woman not far behind. Blake threw himself to the side, just barely avoiding the skitter’s last intact cannon as it swept by. In a panic, he triggered every remaining crystal within his range on the ground floor. He got lucky as several crystals happened to be in the floor just under and in front of her. The blasts threw her back, peppering her with sprays of shrapnel and sending her tumbling once more towards the far end of the chamber. Working quickly, he extruded a makeshift wall across the entrance hall, a temporary barrier between them.

Blake needed time. Time to think, time to plan, time to come up with some way to stop this damned woman once and for all. But to get that time, he needed firepower. Firepower he didn’t have. The embedded crystals were a speed bump to her at best, their original function having nothing to do with violence. They were largely used up already, anyway. He could make himself another shotgun, but that wasn’t strong or fast enough on its own. He needed something to utterly destroy her, over and over and over again until she finally stopped reviving or he came up with something better.

One option was obvious, but just as obviously worthless: the two crystals below them. Given a little time, he would likely be able to rig up a system so the larger crystal overloaded the smaller crystal and ruptured it. The problem was that, while it might kill that woman, it would definitely kill him. Given his experience with the power of explosive cantacrenyx overloads and how their yields grew as the crystal size grew, the smaller crystal’s burst would likely be enough to take out not just the entire fortress, but likely most of the city as well. He didn’t even want to think of what could happen if the larger of the two somehow ruptured, though such an event would take a massive amount of energy that not even every other crystal in the city combined could generate. So, that was out.

But what else was there? There was nothing else around for him to use! All he had was his fortress, his suit, and the remains of one gatling skitter. Then, an idea came to him. It wasn’t the best idea in the world, but it was definitely an idea, and that was more than he could ask for at the moment.

Running over to the skitter’s wreckage, he examined the cannon that had nearly clubbed him into next week a moment ago and found it completely intact. The woman had focused her attention on the skitter’s body, meaning that the large, twelve-foot-long gun remained essentially undamaged. Severing it from the rest of the machine, he grew a set of handles from the back, hefted it off the ground, and leveled it at the newly formed wall. Between his enhanced physique and the assistance of his armor, he could lift the massive weapon, but it wasn’t easy so he grew a mount from the floor and secured the gun to it.

A long metallic cable, thicker than a fire hose, sprouted from the floor beneath him and attached itself to the gun’s central motor and energy conduit. Blake could feel the power of the largest cantacrenyx crystal in the world thrumming through the cable, lending the weapon power and speed it had never been able to boast before. More tucrenyx flowed up the bridge created by the cable, feeding into the barrels as they began to spin.

The now-familiar high-pitched screech of crystal on metal graced Blake’s ears as his foe burst through his makeshift wall sword first, only to be greeted by a deafening roar as Blake opened fire with the most overclocked gatling gun ever made. Fist-size holes bloomed across the woman’s body, from her legs to her torso to her head, as he pumped her full of metal and sent her reeling backward.

Yes, this could work.

Blake pushed his adversary back into the wall behind her, quickly reinforcing the wall with foot after foot of extra thickness to withstand the cannon’s punishment. There had to be a limit to her abilities, surely. Nothing was truly infinite, after all. If he could just keep her constantly repairing herself, she wouldn’t be able to do anything else and either she’d finally die or he’d have time to come up with a better plan. The crystal beneath could power this cannon for weeks without running out of juice, and he had literally an entire fortress of ammunition with which to send her way. The hardest part of the whole thing was dealing with the recoil and keeping the gun trained on her, which he was managing well with the assistance of the mounting. It wasn’t like every round went straight through her head, but a good eighty percent of them hit somewhere on her body and with so many rounds heading her way every second, that was more than enough. He could do this.

Large, thick plumes of crimson smoke continuously formed around the woman, filling in the gaps in her flesh as fast as they appeared. Blake fed more power into the cannon, doubling the firing speed to overwhelm her, but the plumes of smoke kept pace, growing more numerous and thicker as time went on. Cursing under his breath, Blake kicked the gun up another few notches, creating a veritable stream of supersonic metal.

Blake was starting to strain a little. Drawing in countless pounds of tucrenyx from the fortress around him up into the gun’s whirling chambers and transforming that metal into properly-shaped bullets on the fly, especially at that speed, was no easy task.

The smoke billowed all around her now as round after round hammered into her, pounding her over and over against the wall behind her. Soon it thickened again, coalescing into a hazy cloud that encompassed her entire body. Her right arm, its hand still holding her sword in a death grip even though it sometimes was more hole than arm, twitched.

“God damn it!” Blake howled at the sight. Metal flowed up from the floor by her side and engulfed the sword before solidifying around it and locking it in place. He pushed the cannon’s fire rate even further. “Just fucking DIE ALREADY!”

But the woman refused. The arm twitched again, and again, and again, each time stronger than the last. The sounds of crystal against metal grew with every tug until, and with one final mighty pull, she ripped the sword free and dragged it between her bullet-riddled body and the cannon, holding it vertically with the handle at the top to effectively block her from his attacks. The sword let out an endless series of high-pitched peals as bullet after bullet slammed into it, forcing the sword backward and sandwiching the woman between it and the wall behind her, but Blake had already lost the advantage. His blood ran cold as the voluminous scarlet cloud was suddenly sucked into the space behind the blade so quickly that he thought he heard a popping sound echo from her position.

The sword rose slightly and the woman took a step forward, pushing against the stream of hurtling metal. Blake immediately liquefied the floor beneath her with a ten-foot radius around her position, robbing her feet of purchase and sending her sliding back. Blake hoped that the woman would try to strafe away from his fire. He was sure the slippery floor and the force of his attack, combined with the woman’s base no longer oriented in direct opposition to him, would result in her being knocked to the ground. Then he could get back to turning her into swiss cheese.

The woman, however, had no intention of anything of the sort. Her legs pumped back and forth with superhuman vigor, driving her feet against the liquefied floor faster and faster. Each step pushed against the melted tucrenyx with greater speed and force than the last, each impact gaining more and more traction until her feet moved so quickly and powerfully that when they struck, even the liquefied metal’s low friction couldn’t keep her from acquiring leverage.

Blake pushed the gun faster and faster and himself harder and harder, pulling more and more tucrenyx every second up into the gun barrels and forming them into rounds fast enough to keep up with the cannon’s ever-increasing speed. It took everything he had to keep up with the weapon’s insatiable demand while keeping himself upright and the floor beneath his enemy liquefied.

Even the simple task of creating a hole beneath her was too much for him now, as it would mean he’d have to lower his bullet output, and that would only mean demise. She was getting closer. Even with his cannon’s torrential output hammering her from the front, even with the very floor she stood on denying her solid purchase, inch by inch she closed in, her legs practically blurring as they churned.

A small part of his mind noted that he was screaming now, though he could not recall just when he’d begun. Even he could barely hear it over the roar of cannon fire and the calamitous ring of tucrenyx impacting against impervious crystal with tremendous force. It was a scream of defiance, a scream of raw, furious opposition.

This was it. He had no more capacity for surprises, for plans, for stunning stratagems of any sort. His enemy seemed to share his single-minded state. There was nothing left for either of them to do but press onward in their contest of wills.

Blake’s heart pounded in his chest so hard he felt like it was about to explode. His body shook with strain as he fought to keep the cannon aimed forward as it bucked against the mount the force of the cannon and his mind felt like it was about to crumble under the pressure. There was a limit to how much tucrenyx he could process at once and he had hit that limit moments prior. He only had one final option. Once more, Blake brought himself into contact with the crystal in his chest plate and entered Hyper Mode.

The world slowed to a crawl, and Blake could see everything. He could see the barrels of the huge gatling gun rotating ever so slowly. He could see the almost blinding glow of the cantacrenyx power coursing up from the floor, through the power cable, and into the cannon. He could see the tucrenyx surging up around that fire hose-sized cable into the back ends of the barrels to form the large bullets keeping the woman at bay. And he could see how his hated adversary’s front leg paused for a small fraction of a second before she somehow found yet another gear.

Blake watched in horror as the woman’s leg drove downward and backward with a speed and force tens of times greater than anything he’d seen from her before. She launched forward, pushing through the outpouring of metal as if it were nothing more than a stiff breeze. Blake tried his best to turn the cannon and block her path but found it futile. Though he could see what was to come, he couldn’t move his body fast enough to do anything about it. Once she’d taken that first step, it was already too late.

The split second that it took for her to make it to the end of the cannon felt like an eternity in Hyper Mode. He watched, helpless, as she plowed through one round, and then a second, and then she was by the muzzle, the sharp edge of her sword scraping against the side of the barrels as she went.

Blake halted all bullet production and redirected his focus on absorbing as much of the incoming blow as possible. He had only a fraction of a second, but that still amounted to several minutes for him. He concentrated on his helmet and chest plate, making the metal bubble outward and expand as much as he could in the limited time offered to him. The idea was to create a sort of “crumple zone” on his front and back similar to what was used in cars to siphon off as much force as he could, though the painfully slow flow of the tucrenyx limited what he could create.

As the woman closed in, Blake caught a glimpse of her face from around her massive weapon. Her jaw was set and her eyes shone with a singular tenacity, a complete and total refusal to lose written across her face. Part of him couldn’t help but admire that unfathomable resolve that eclipsed even his own. The rest of him found it infuriating.

Minute after minute crept along as Blake continued to puff up his armor as best he could while the woman drew ever closer. The tension ramped up higher and higher as the flat side of the crystalline sword closed in. Three feet. Two feet. One foot. Six inches. By the time the blade sat just an inch away from his chest, Blake felt like the wait for the hit was more agonizing than the blow itself could ever be. Then the heavy, six-foot weapon crashed into his front, fracturing nine or ten of his ribs in multiple places, and he immediately changed his mind.

For the second time in his life, Blake exited Hyper Mode from something other than his own free will. As both time and his own body accelerated simultaneously, it felt to him almost like he didn’t so much fly into the wall behind him as teleport into it. His body cried out in agony as it caromed off the wall behind him and smashed into a second wall before collapsing in a broken heap against the farther wall.

Blake’s head swam from the impact, the pain signals coming from his body bombarding his brain while mixing with a sudden wooziness and nausea. He tried to move but found he couldn’t, his consciousness shaky and tenuous. The nausea spiked and blood and bile surged up his throat and spewed from his mouth. Blake barely managed to disengage his helmet in time before the vomit coated its insides, the sickening liquid instead coating the crumpled chest plate.

He was alive. His skull felt like it was going to burst with every beat of his heart, his rib cage felt like it had been stomped on by an elephant for a week straight, and it hurt to breathe, but he was alive. For now. The manic look in the woman’s eyes as she caught her breath cast doubt on that lasting much longer. Perhaps rupturing the crystals below would be worth it after all. It would certainly be one hell of a way to go, and if he was going to die, he wanted it to be on his terms.

“Stop!” a familiar voice shouted from somewhere out of view to his right before his thoughts could go much further. A fist-sized rock flew through the air towards the woman before falling short and coming to a rest by her feet. “Don’t kill him, you idiot!”

Even in his battered state, Blake couldn’t help but let out a defeated sigh. He’d told Sofie to run away repeatedly. Why couldn’t she just fucking listen to him when he told her to do something? Was it really that hard?

“Honestly, why are you both like this?!” Sofie fumed as she marched towards them, her hands balled into fists and a furious look on her face. “We’re all from Earth, we should be working together, not fighting!”

The woman eyed Sofie warily, the Belgian’s sudden appearance throwing her off. Her massive sword swung around to point at Sofie, who immediately halted mid-step.

“No,” the woman simply replied, resuming her strides towards Blake.

“Wait wait wait! STOP!” Sofie repeated, sprinting forward and skidding to a stop in front of him, her arms outstretched to the sides.

“Move,” the woman warned, her voice hard and uncompromising. “I don’t know who you are, but don’t think I won’t kill you too.”

“Look, I know Blake’s an asshole, but we need him to get home!”

Unspeakable fury flared in the woman’s eyes. “Do you think I’m a fool?” the woman spat. “I’ve spent the last year doing everything I could to return to my children and nobody has done more to stop me from seeing their faces again than him!”

“A mistake! A misunderstanding!” Sofie pleaded.

“I’m done with this. Move aside.”

“But we need-”

“I do not need him!” the woman snarled. “Once I find the Eyes of Pirath, I will use the Empire’s device to go back to where I belong and that is that! You can join me and return as well, or you can die here with him. This is your last chance! Get. out. of. my. way.”

Blake couldn’t help but let out a disbelieving snort, which sent a spike of pain coursing through his chest. He could feel control of his body—or the part of it above the waist, at least—returning to him. His vision had cleared somewhat, as well. “You can’t be serious,” he croaked, incredulous. “That’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard. There’s no way the Ubrans have a way to send you home.”

“What would you know?” the woman pushed back. “I saw it! They can reverse the machine and send people back, as long as I can get the power sources they need!”

“Machine?” The floor in front of him writhed momentarily, forming into a perfect miniature replica of the main chamber in the bunker where he’d first arrived. He’d spent so much time there studying the mechanisms there that he could reproduce it all by memory down to the smallest detail even in his current state. “This machine?”

The woman gazed at his creation and hesitated for a moment, telling Blake everything he needed to know.

“Machines like this can be found all over the world,” he continued. “I’ve spent many days studying the one that brought me here. Did you think I wouldn’t have thought to check something so obvious? It was the first thing I looked into. They cannot send things away, only draw them in. They’re one-way devices.”

“You don’t know that!” the woman objected.

“I do! I know better than anyone else in this primitive-ass world,” Blake countered. “I can tell you exactly what each piece of this thing is, and what it does. See this here?” He pointed to the large slab he’d crashed into when he first arrived. “This is the conduction unit. There’s hundreds of thousands of tiny circuits inside it that interface with the array of twenty-one projectors here-” He pointed at a sphere of cones with rounded points set in a sphere, all pointing towards the slab. “-to open the wormhole or whatever that brought us all here.” His finger moved to the long rows of other equipment leading away from the slab. “Everything else here provides control or power. It builds up a large amount of energy and uses that to break reality for a moment and then it stops. It is not an elevator that can take you back and forth between worlds. It is a pin created to pop a balloon and more power just means a larger, sharper pin. It does not and will not work the way you want it to. All you will accomplish is you’ll bring another unlucky bastard here.”

“But I watched them do it! They showed me and it worked!” she protested, her body language growing antsier by the second.

“They sent somebody to Earth, but not you?” he asked, skeptically.

“They sent a coin-”

“A coin?!” Blake snickered.

“I saw it! They turned it on and I saw the coin vanish!”

“No, you didn’t. You saw an illusion—part of a plan to play on your fears. That coin was never real.”

“He held it in his hand!”

“That’s nothing. Any illusionist worth a damn could do that, right Sofie?”

Sofie stiffened slightly as he called on her suddenly, but she quickly nodded. “He’s right. My friend Arlette could do something that simple without even trying. The coin could even be in somebody else’s hand. Easy.”

Blake could see how Sofie’s statement rocked the woman’s already wavering confidence and pressed on despite the pain each word brought. “Let me guess how this all went down. They take you to their machine, they fake this demonstration, and they say, ‘Oh, if only we had more power, we could send you home!’. Then they tell you that only by conquering the world will they be able to get the power they need to send you back. How convenient for them. That sound about right?”

“No... no, it isn’t like that!” the woman asserted.

“Yes it is, face it!” he forcefully demanded. “You know it’s all fake! You know they can’t send you back! You’ve known it since the beginning! You just can’t admit the truth, because it would mean that you will never see your precious children ever again!”

“Shut up! You’re LYING! You’re all LYING! SHUT UP!” the woman insisted desperately as she stepped forward again, her voice rising to a shout. She held out her sword, its point aimed squarely at his chest, but even with his hazy vision, he could see how it trembled. “YOU’RE JUST TRYING TO TAKE MY ONLY HOPE AWAY FROM ME!”

“I DON’T WANT TO TAKE IT FROM YOU, DAMN IT!” he hollered back. “YOU THINK I WANT TO BE HERE?! YOU THINK I-”

His tirade cut off abruptly as his chest seized up and he let out an agonizing series of coughs, spraying blood across the ground in front of him. He took a few shaky breaths, feeling the cold air move in and out, before looking his adversary squarely in the eye as best he could.

“Look at me, both of you,” Blake wheezed. Blood dripped from his mouth as he let out another pained hack, his pulverized ribcage screaming bloody murder, and winced. Slowly, the armor encasing his body began melting away, slowly revealing the full state of his wretched self.

First, what was left of his left arm felt the soft chill of the outside air, something it had not experienced in months. Once a full, strong limb, now only a barren stump remained, covered in rough, pasty skin.

Then his chest and torso became exposed, bringing into view the brutal gash through his left side and the shallower but much longer slice up his right side. Though the blood seemed to be stanching, it still seeped slowly from each wound, dyeing the skin and metal a nasty dark crimson. Just as bad, if not worse, was the massive bruise all across his dented ribcage.

Sofie and the woman stared at his disfigured body with varying degrees of unease, but it wasn’t until the metal finally receded from his legs that their eyes went wide. Since that fateful day many months ago, Blake had never shown anybody his legs—not Sofie, not Leo, not even Samanta. Withered away from a year of disuse, they appeared to be little more than desiccated sticks of bone covered in loose, ill-fitting skin. A garish web of blackened veins could be seen winding through the almost translucent tissue. The only splotches of color to be seen were from three puncture wounds caused by tucrenyx shrapnel during the battle, wounds he hadn’t even known were there until now. Barren and underdeveloped, his lower half would have looked comical juxtaposed with his otherwise broad and muscular body if it weren’t so absolutely horrid. But there was nothing to laugh about here, only putrid decay and suffering.

Sofie muttered something to herself and gagged, turning to look elsewhere. Even the monstrous woman by her side, the slayer of thousands who had surely seen a lifetime of blood and gore these last few months, had gone pale.

“Don’t look away. Look. At. Me!” he hissed. “I was a happy, healthy guy before I came here. This is what I am now. This is what this fucking world did to me in just a single fucking year. Do you think this is what I wanted with my life? Do you think it doesn’t kill me every time I wake up and, just for a second, think I’m back in my bedroom with my good life and my friends and my family before I remember the reality of my existence? It hurts! It all hurts so much and it never stops and I just...”

A soft sob escaped his lips, and then another, and then another still. Tears were flowing down his cheeks now, a waterfall that he could no longer contain. His body shook as days and weeks and months of pent-up sorrow wracked his battered form. Slowly, those sobs began to fluctuate and change, melding into a laugh, though one utterly devoid of mirth. It was the laugh of a man who’d finally accepted his lot in life, the laugh of somebody who’d finally come to recognize what was, rather than what he wished there to be.

Tears still falling onto his blood-soaked chest, Blake looked the woman right in the eyes and spoke the words that he’d been unable to say since the day he’d first arrived in this world, the dark truth that he’d been unable to admit even to himself even that very morning. “I talk a big game, you know? About how I’m going to drag this place into civilization no matter what and all that. But the real truth is that if there was a way to go home... I’d already be gone.”

“But Blake, what about the Severed stuff you were investigating?” Sofie asked, dismayed. “Wasn’t there still a chance that could show us the way?”

“Nothing but worthless noise. A dead end.”

“And there’s truly nothing left to try?” Sofie beseeched him, looking for some sign for optimism.

“That was our last chance. There is nothing left.”

“No... please!” the woman implored him, her expression begging him to smile, to joke, to do anything to say he didn’t mean what he said. But he couldn’t.

“There is no way out of this godforsaken place. We’re stuck here, forever,” Blake admitted, his voice soft but filled with abject finality. “I’m sorry. I’m... so sorry.”

The woman swayed on her feet as if ambushed by a sudden and tremendous bout of exhaustion. Her massive pitch-black sword slipped from her hand, falling to the floor with a loud clatter. Her body followed as her legs gave way and she awkwardly slumped to the ground and went still.

Blake understood. While he’d scorned her for her self-delusions, the truth was that he had no right to say anything, for he was just as guilty. He’d known for months now just how unlikely the odds of finding a way home were. The investigation into the Severed event in Crirada had been his last hope, and that hope had slowly evaporated more and more each day. But he’d held on, through a combination of wishful thinking and desperate avoidance. He’d told himself that as long as the odds weren’t zero, there was always a chance for a miracle. He’d refused to think about what it meant for him should that miracle not occur. Even this morning, when he’d looked over the final data transfer and found nothing of use, he’d kept his thoughts in line and refused to reckon with his reality.

It was easier that way. Easier to just pretend, to ignore the blindingly obvious, to stick his head in the sand. He could keep going as long as the embers of hope still smoldered in his heart, even when those hopes were based on false premises. He just had to shove the truth of his situation down into a box somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind and never acknowledge it.

That wasn’t possible anymore. This was the moment when that last ember of hope finally went out. Now there was nothing left to hold off the darkness, and Blake could only weep.

And so he did. He wept for his family. He wept for his friends. He wept for himself and his life, unable to run from the painful knowledge of all that he had lost. He would never be able to see his home again. He would never be able to listen to his favorite music, or eat his favorite food, or just sit on the couch and watch a football game.

Instead, all he had to look forward to was a life of pain and suffering. A life of violence, and fear, and paranoia. A life stuck in a half-broken body. A life he’d have to fuel with spite and bitterness and stubborn anger, because nothing else would get him through the day. A life where-

The sound of two hands colliding echoed through the empty fortress, startling Blake out of the whirlwind of bleakness churning inside him. He looked up to find Sofie wiping tears from her face and eyes.

“Alright! That’s enough of that,” she declared.

With a steady gait, Sofie approached the woman and knelt down beside her, softly saying something to her that Blake couldn’t make out. Blake eyed the crystal blade lying several feet away on the other side of them, but the woman didn’t move. She didn’t blink. She didn’t respond in any way whatsoever, not even when Sofie rested her hand gently on the woman’s shoulder. It was as if she didn’t even know Sofie was there.

With a sad sigh, Sofie stood up and headed his way. The fire of determination burned in her eyes, the same fire that Blake dreaded because it only showed up whenever she made up her mind on something, which was when she became her most insufferable. Striding with purpose, Sofie walked up to his right side and held her hand out, beckoning for him to grab hold. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Go away,” he bitterly grumbled. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with her, not now, not like this.

“Oh, so now the fearsome Lord Ferros, tyrant of Otharia, wants to wallow, does he?” she huffed derisively. “What are you ‘Lord’ of, anyway? Pity parties?”

“What, I’m not allowed to be sad once in a while?” he snarled at her. “I seem to remember you getting choked up when I told you we couldn’t leave.”

“Yeah, for a minute maybe,” she retorted. “But I didn’t have a nation to take care of or a castle to repair, and I definitely wasn’t bleeding out everywhere. And don’t even get me started on those legs of yours. I can’t believe you hid that from me. So come on, on your feet. Let’s get you somewhere not...” She looked around at the ruined walls and wreckage strewn about every surface that remained. “...somewhere not utterly destroyed, at least. You two really tore this place apart. Like, more than half of the Administrative Floor is just gone. That old farmer guy is going to kill you, you know.”

“Don’t remind me,” Blake groaned as he relented to Sofie’s stubborn demands. He used his one good arm to prop himself up while tucrenyx flowed around his legs and lower torso before stopping beneath the lowest cut.

Sofie reached down and, grunting with effort, lifted him onto his feet and wrapped his good arm around her shoulders so he could lean against her. “Oooof,” she grunted. “You’re heavy even without wearing all that metal. Speaking of which, we need to talk later about you not wearing clothes under there.”

“I wear clothes!” he immediately replied. “I just make them myself out of tucrenyx, form it out of ultra-fine metal thread. Normal clothes don’t do so great with the whole liquid metal flowing over your body thing.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, unconvinced.

“I’m serious!”

“No, I believe you,” she said, her tone informing him in no uncertain terms that she did not believe him whatsoever.

Blake took a slow step forward, and then another, and then stopped, his eyes drawn to the closest being he’d ever had in his life to a nemesis. The woman still hadn’t moved an inch, her body so motionless that it didn’t even appear to draw breath. She just stared down at her hands, her eyes unfocused, unresponsive to everything around her, now little more than an empty husk of the powerful, determined, unyielding person he’d known her to be. The only sign that she still lived was the occasional tear that would fall from those unseeing eyes down onto her calloused fingers below.

It would be so easy, Blake thought, eying the motionless figure. Just one shot. Something told him that, were he to strike down her now, she wouldn’t be getting up anymore.

“Blake, no!” Sofie scolded him with a pointed finger shoved right in his face. “Don’t hurt her, don’t kill her, just let her be, alright? You already won. Enough is enough.”

“Who made you the arbiter of my life?” Blake snapped. “She’s dangerous! Do you know how many people she’s killed?”

“And how many people have you killed, Mister Ruthless Overlord? You two want to have a murder contest?” she snapped back. “She’s as much a victim as the rest of us and you know it. Besides, she...” Sofie glanced back with a mournful expression at the forlorn form behind them. “...I don’t think she’s going anywhere for a while. We can deal with her later. Come on, there are more important things to address right now, like fixing up your wounds. And getting food. I’m hungry. Aren’t you hungry?”

“But-”

She tugged him forward, forcing him to either start walking again or fall over. He sighed and gave up. This was a fight he wasn’t going to win.

“You’re so weird sometimes, you know that?” he remarked as they headed out of the room, one slow, small, shuffling step at a time.

“Yeah, well, I just don’t see the value in getting trapped in your own feelings this far down the road. We’ve been here a year now. At some point, you just have to accept reality and move forward, or your past will always hold you back. That’s what Arlette used to say to me when-” Sofie froze in her tracks, eliciting a gasp of pain from Blake as the sudden jerk caused him to stumble. “Blake! The battle! What about the battle?!”

Blake stared back at her in complete incomprehension. Battle? What was she talking about? The battle was over! He’d won! Well, sort of won. He’d survived, and wasn’t that victory in this case? So why did she look so fretful all of a sudden?

The last two properly working brain cells in Blake’s head bumped into each other, and suddenly Blake remembered. Right, that battle. The one that he’d been preparing for. The one for which he’d filled his zeppelin’s bot bay with explosives. He’d forgotten all about that battle. What had he been doing before getting so rudely interrupted? Ah yes, he’d set his beloved airship on a southwest course towards the western Ubran camp, along which it would have just kept going... and going... and...

“...aaaahhhhhhhh, shit! My zeppelin!”