You cautiously crack open your eyes, momentarily blinded by the sudden intensity of the light. The thin, opaque material of your facemask does little to diminish the sunlight. Waking like this is a jarring transition, given that mere moments ago you were standing inside an old, decrepit home, on a singularly cloudy, cool, overcast day - hardly a scorcher like this.

Taking in your surroundings, the bizarre terrain makes you feel more like you've been shunted to Mars than anywhere else. You start checking off theorized destinations one by one in your mind. Barren badlands stretch endlessly ahead of you, open plains consisting of clay-tainted dirt interrupted only periodically by rocky outcrops or rolling hills. Large rings and peculiar circles of discolored dirt and sand dot the otherwise landscape, as though the lans itself caught a pox. With that strange scenery alone in mind, you might conclude that the vortex spat you out somewhere in the Red Desert or perhaps atop the Ust-Yurt, but the more you look at the skyline, the less likely that explanation seems to you. The horizon feels... Closer than it should be, perhaps. The very sky itself is sickly shades of green and purple, and you spot no sign of a sun in the sky despite the intense dry heat and radiant light bearing down on you.

I wasn't sliced to atoms when I entered the vortex, and I've been transported to an evidently human-habitable locale - wherever that locale might be. My survival gear hasn't kicked in and no alarms are blaring. I have been dragged here alone, and there are no signs of my unit or other life, intelligent or unintelligent. All signs point to a Class-E scenario, but which one exactly?

Could this still be a place on Earth?

You take a quick audit of your person, casually shaking the leftover nervousness typically associated with diving into a hell portal out of your arms and legs, and then you set about to checking your equipment's integrity. Your head is well covered in an airtight cowl, completed by your signature durable, yet thin and Plexiglas-like mask, which covers your face. The mask serves to obscure and protect your appearance, even while permitting you to see and breathe through it easily. The cowl is tightly sealed to the black bodysuit that covers you from neck to toe. The combo acts as clothing and a survival garment all at once, exorbitant and graded for use as a spacesuit - complete with integrated oxygen supply and environmental controls. You have been wearing similar suits during your training and daily life alike for years now, so you're quite used to it. It helps that the designer team made sure the suits were remarkably comfortable, if a tad tight.

Your bodysuit is almost entirely obscured by a hilarious number of pouches, bandoleers, not to mention your huge, camper-sized backpack, and various integrated weapon systems. You're responsible for carrying 40 kilograms of combat payload and 10 kilograms of survival payload, corresponding to your combat role within the unit. Not fortunate - the support personnel all got split away, assuming they didn't just die spontaneously with their entry into the vortex. Regardless, everyone came prepared with some combination of the combat and survival payloads just in case, and even if you might be strapped for camping gear you also feel much safer all alone like this when you're loaded to the brim with ultraviolence instead. All in all... It hurts to carry 50 kilos of anything, no matter how well distributed the weight is.

I'm feeling a bit torn between hoping something will try to jump me and give me an excuse to hit it with ten kilograms of lead, and a bit uneasy that something may very well do it.

The integrated weapon systems are mercifully much lighter than the backpack or pouches full of guns, explosives, and rations, given that they are your back-up plan, a kind of first and last resort, and you will likely never be rid of them. Nearly every part of your anatomy is matched with a concealed, retractable, or otherwise safely stowed blade of some kind. Much of your training went into learning a huge variety of weapons and their use, owing to your own unique role in the unit.

You also wear thick-soled, hard-toed, self-draining, all-terrain combat boots, truly the stuff of dreams, along with some electrically insulated gloves made out of a similar durable material to the rest of your suit - just in case. They seriously had no idea what would come next after the transport, so you might actually be a bit over-prepared for the jaunt in some ways.

The only other thing of note on your person is your wrist watch-navigator, popularly called a "navi." The side dial glows a gentle red to confirm that there is no connection to home base, unfortunately. That sad fact renders at least part of this operation a catastrophic failure right from the start, but that isn't your problem at this point. The navi's screen flashes with the words "MANUAL ORIENTATION, ENTER PATTERN." You don't know enough about where you are yet to feel it data - or if this world even corresponds to the presumptive map yet - but if you can actually get the navi working it should dramatically improve your chances of survival, and possibly finding all the others, if they're alive too.

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"The world's best prepared suicide mission," they called it. That's not too far off of the truth, but I'm here, and I'm breathing. Time to stop gawking at myself and get moving so I can keep things that way.

You take a deep breath, bracing for the journey, and take your first step in this brave new world. Clunk.

The ground begins to rumble immediately, like an earthquake. Scattering rocks and tumbling pebbles break the utter silence of the strange place.

With such limited intel, there is only so much you can do to respond to the sudden change - carefully, you start placing to the left, trying to avoid any more heavy footfalls. This effort has mixed success, given the extra 50 kg of payload hung around your body mucking things up.

Your first hint as to the source of the rumbling comes when part of the ground ahead implodes, one giant discolored sand ring torn away from the clay-like soil. It happens again, and again, the badland suddenly pockmarked with hole after hole, chasm after chasm. You quickly ascertain the pattern: color ring bad, make hole.

You look down and realize belatedly that you're standing atop such a ring, not too far from the edge.

You dash madly out of the circle, throwing yourself sideways as you reach the rim. The ground collapses behind you even as you tumble along, rolling once over your protruding bag before it catches the soil and stops your slide.

You launch to your feet, your hands already grabbing for hiking tools before you get yourself upright. Your left hand grabs the butt of your survival shotgun and draws it from its holster in the backpack, a short-barreled pistol grip model designed with an auto-loader, perfect for one-handed operation. With a "click," a bayonet deploys from the gun, turning your shotty into a very explosive hiking spike. Your right hand casually extracts your dedicated trekking pole and deploys it at the same time- a multi-purpose stainless steel rod with a spiked tip of its own. With both together you should be able to stop your descent, no matter if you end up tumbling in one of these strange holes.

Before you can form a slightly more coherent plan than going for a bout of extreme hiking, black and grey flashes in your peripheral vision. Your right arm twists almost autonomously to intercept. The length of the trekking pole whips along at your sudden and violent movement, the tip flexing behind you like a sabre.

You brace as the tip of the trekking pole spears deep into something heavy. The rest of your body and mind catches up to the sudden violence, and you turn to see that your trekking pole embedded deep in the palette of some manner of massive, chittering rodent. You don't recognize it off the top of your head, and you doubt you're going to be able to dig up a comparator in the glossary before it dies - your quick reaction time caught its open mouth mid-leap, and the rodent is still flailing on the pike. The critter growls, a strange barking noise almost like that of a dog, but the flailing makes the tip of the trekking pole slip deeper, and the rodent quickly begins to whine helplessly instead.

You take in more details. The creature - two entire feet long, and quite rotund - writhes helplessly on the length of the trekking pole, finally lodged in its mouth and perhaps even through that to its brain. Its fur, a mix of grey and black, is scored and pocked with scars and hairless patches. The rodent is practically eyeless, and its features would remind you most of a mole or an oversized hamster, were it not for the creature's sharp incisors and its barbed, bullwhip-like tail. As the tail whips at the ground by your feet you recoil, holding the speared rodent further from your body. The creature's weight is staggering - you're forced to hard brace on your back foot just to keep yourself upright. Even as you look it over, the rodent's helpless thrashing slows, but you quickly realize the situation is far from ideal to dissect it in detail. A quick look around and can see that might not have time to peel the dying critter off your trekking pole to inspect it. In fact, you might not be able to salvage the pole at all...

More are coming. Many, many more.

Milky-white eyes and mangy scalps poke over the rim of the hole in the ground that you just flung yourself away from moments ago. You retreat carefully, trying to shake the speared wolf-mole off your trekking pole, to little avail. Worse still, as you score out the changing surroundings, you see that these massive, predatory moles are emerging from all of the holes. Hundreds of them at least, perhaps thousands. Some look even larger and meaner than the ones pouring out onto the surface near you.

No, definitely not Earth.

Unable to shake the trekking pole free, you make the snap decision to chuck the impromptu mole kebab away as hard as you can. The dead critter tumbles into the hole, the impact taking some of the moles climbing up with it. You turn away in full, breaking into a full sprint, both hands gripping your survival shotgun.

You try hard to ignore the sound of the blind, chittering stampede following you not far behind.