Samantha and Lloyd Cromwell both sat in the control room, watching the live video feed coming from a series of cameras embedded in Albert’s combat gear. He had been given every possible tool they could think of, basically everything short of nuclear weaponry was available to him in his inventory.
All of it diligently upgraded to be as effective as possible, leveraging technology and magic both to give him the edge over anything he might encounter. Yet, none of the two people in the room were convinced when Albert reassured them that all would be fine, and that after the dungeon of illusions he was ready for another event. They had seen through his attempts at dissimulating his own fear, but had obviously said nothing.
Now he was in the field, and they were in the safety of the Lair, watching through the cameras. It almost felt cruel for them to be there, especially because even though Samantha might have been a very harsh leader back when she worked for the BSA, she had always been in the frontline whenever an emergency happened. This time it made no sense for her to be there, she would be nothing but a hindrance to her son, but the fact had the unfortunate side effect of making her feel completely useless.
Eventually she couldn’t take it anymore. “You monitor him.” She said. “I need to go see Transit.”
Lloyd chuckled. “I was wondering how long you would resist here, with nothing to do but watch. You lasted longer than I thought.”
She hummed in dismissive disapproval, and left. Her father felt the same way as her, of course, but knew his limits. Instead, he was more than content to just look at the battle from afar, and provide tactical help from the safety of the lair. In addition to the camera feeds, he was also accessing what was left of the impressive HDF network of satellites through the secure connection to the Quadrangle, and monitoring nearby response units.
The HDF might be in shambles, and the BSA with it, but even in their current state, they were bound to respond to a threat like this on American soil sooner or later. They had responded with all they had to the previous two tier three events, after all. This tier four would surely be too much for them, but they were definitely going to try.
Lloyd didn’t think they would get sabotaged. The Sekkers – the covert agents who worked for the Pilgrims – had already done more than enough damage to ensure that this event would be too much for the HDF to handle. And indeed it was.
The Earth division was cut off from the space-bound HDF. They had no more Pylons, and all the governments of the world were being increasingly hostile to them, to various degrees going from wary to openly against HDF operations in their territory.
Despite all this, Lloyd was quite tranquil. The Sekkers didn’t know about Albert, after all.
Albert was alone in the middle of nowhere. He arrived at the coordinates via teleportation, appearing in a wide, empty field of caked earth and dry soil. There were no plants or vegetation of any sorts for miles all around, only the hot, dry air of the desert moved about by a weak wind. The sun was scorching hot. Particles of sand and dirt rose up from the ground, creating a thin veil of brown-yellow that hovered in the air.
Mirages and distorted images floated just above the line of the horizon, where the superheated air refracted light in peculiar ways.
At a first glance, it was an ordinary sight of a desert area. But as soon as Albert switched to his magic vision, he saw the true extent of the Event. From his vantage point, carefully chosen at the edge of the disturbance, he could see the swirling of magic, a vortex forming that occupied the whole horizon and rose up to the skies.
Gradually the wind picked up, and a cold gale swept the dried lake, sending shivers up his spine. In a matter of seconds clouds gathered above, dark and foreboding, while the roar of thunder echoed – reflected on the faces of the far away mountains that rimmed the region.
The weather kept deteriorating, and soon rain followed, first a drizzle and then a deluge. The heat of the region was sucked away by the ever increasing winds, the temperature falling rapidly. At the center, a vortex was forming. Clouds full of rain and dust began to rotate around the epicenter of the Event, rising in tall columns that were gigantic tornadoes slowly merging into a cyclone.
Amidst all this, the first signs of something began to become visible to the naked eye. There was a shadow of a structure crossing the dimensional boundary, reaching from beyond this world and into this world. A tall tower, of which only the faint outline was clearly visible yet, impossibly tall and imposing.
It was far, and ethereal. Not fully here yet, like a washed out image of an old photograph appearing only when you squinted. Translucent, yet gaining solidity by the minute.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Are you seeing this?” Albert asked.
“I am.” Lloyd replied on the other end of the connection, from another world altogether. The voice was loud and clear despite the interstellar distances between Erebus and Earth. “I have never seen something like this. They are transporting a whole fucking… thing. What even is it?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think I can take it down alone.” Albert said.
There was a moment of silence. Albert could somewhat make out the sound of Lloyd messing around with dials, buttons and keyboards but the sound was mostly washed away by the now truly dangerous wind sweeping the valley. If it wasn’t for the shield protecting Albert, he doubted he would have been able to stand upright. The rain was freezing cold, verging on hail, and it pelted his shield and made it shimmer in white.
“You might not need to take the whole tower down.” Lloyd said in the end. “Let the HDF deal with it. From what I am seeing, there are signs of an Egg at the center of the tower. If you remove it, the dimensional rift should close and the whole tower will lose its connection to the Lithoid dimension. Without a connection, the buggers will be nothing more than cannon fodder. Even this joke of an agency should be able to deal with them. But you will need to wait for the tower to fully materialize first.”
“Sounds doable.”
Then a roar shook the valley.
“You spoke too soon.” Lloyd said, dragging his chair across the floor to look at different screens that covered the walls of the Control Room. “Holy flying cow. What is that?”
Albert looked up. There was a whole silhouette of something else appearing right above the tower, materializing much quicker than the structure. It was easily just as big, if not bigger, but it was flying in the air and coiling around the materializing tower.
Albert looked better. He used [Perception] to better see in the distance, even teleporting close to get a better sight before promptly vacating the premises.
It was a dragon. Covered in thick, brown scales that were easily as big as a car, with a head larger than a building and a thin body extending behind it for hundreds upon hundreds of meters until it ended in a thin trail of pebbles loosely held together by strange magical forces. They looked like pebbles from where Albert was standing, but he was sure they were boulders probably as big as him.
While looking at it already conveyed how impressively dangerous it was, watching through the lenses of magical vision was outright frightening. The dragon glowed with power and magic so strong it radiated outwards from it, saturating the whole field around it.
It was not enough problems though, it seemed.
“You got company.” Lloyd announced.
Right on cue, Albert spotted some small dark dots moving in the distance. A long, thin line of trucks and military vehicles trudging along the mud of the formerly dry lake, approaching from the side. They didn’t seem to have spotted him just yet, instead stopping a fair distance away from the tower-dragon pair and setting up camp with impressive speed.
“Huh. They still seem somewhat coordinated.” Lloyd said. “But they will be totally useless against the dragon. It’s a dragon, what do they even think they can do against it? They should have brought tanks. Boy, I really hope they have some secret weapon and that when they use it, it doesn’t end up fucking you up instead of helping you. But remember, they are not on your team.”
Albert nodded, hoping the gesture would be understandable by how the view of his helmet camera moved.
Soon both the convoy of military vehicles and the dragon disappeared from view, hidden by the curtain of rain. A bolt of lightning split the skies and lit the area to day for a fleeting instant, before the eerie darkness brought about by the thick clouds once again shrouded the valley. The noise of the rain was a blanket of sound that enveloped everything in a cocoon of muted senses.
It felt, for a brief moment, almost peaceful. What was more, Albert could faintly sense nature soaking in all this water coming from the skies, water that had not graced the region in so long. Life was rejoicing and his elven sensibilities picked up on it, making him feel almost at ease.
Albert waited. He needed to come up with a plan of action, and as he did, he took the time to check his equipment. He took stock of the heavy weaponry sitting in his inventory. He adjusted his armor, making it as comfortable as possible, which was not much. He felt the reassuring presence of his defensive ring.
The dragon was not visible, but a quick use of magic vision told him it was still there. Coiling ever tighter around an increasingly more present tower. To guard it. To defend it. After a series of failures resulting in Exclusion Zones, the Pilgrims were finally bringing out the heavy weapons.
A tense silence stretched on. Only the sound of rain was left.
“What’s happening?” Lloyd asked after a while.
“Nothing is.” Albert said. “It’s odd.”
“Do you have a plan?”
Albert looked at the source of the magic in front of him, somewhere beyond the veil of rain and ice. The ground had frozen, and the sensation of elven communion with sprouting nature had gone away, replaced by the tense suffering of seeds dying in the frost.
It was hard to describe. Unsettling.
“I need to get close to the tower, infiltrate it, and steal the Egg. Right?”
“Right.” Lloyd said.
“All the while avoiding the dragon attacks.”
“Exactly. The tower is roughly five kilometers away from your position, east-northeast. Can you teleport close?”
Albert accessed his map. “I can teleport 500 meters from the perimeter before the magic becomes too dense. I guess I’ll just go in running.”
“You could wait for a diversion.” Lloyd suggested. “Let the HDF make the first move.”
“Are they?”
“No…” His grandpa said, sighing. “They are just looking at it.”
A smirk appeared on Albert’s face. “I think I can help with that.”