“Nova Tera headquarters.” Lara spies the walled-in facility through her binoculars. “The followup rivals to New Genesis, which makes them a formidable enemy to penetrate.”

“Has anyone done it before?” I ask.

She smirks. “There’s a first time for everything.”

“Great. Of course there never was a successful infiltration.”

“I never said that, there have been dozens of infiltrations. What there hasn’t been is a successful escape. Their design is similar to a prison. Plenty of ways in, not so many out.”

Without anything better to say or do, I simply sulk silently, arms crossed.

“You’re still aren’t out of the woods yet, Richard. I am really itching to pull the trigger on you.” Lara threatens me. She lowers her binoculars, now eyeing me with the intent of a predator.

I really, really, really do not know how to break it to her without her breaking me, so I vouch for silence for at least the time being. My memory is proving to be more and more faulty as the movie progresses, perhaps my nerves are on edge and messing with my head. Offering no information means that I am not giving her reason to find fault in what I say. On second thoughts, however, I do need to offer her up something so that she does not keep true to her threat.

“The antidote is stored in the lab’s vault on the compound, there aren’t as many boots on site there as the other buildings. That much I remember.” Those are details she may have come upon on her own, but it is the least I can give at the moment.

She rubs her chin thoughtfully. “Hmm… Makes sense. Their raid on our lab facility was recent, so they’ll probably inventory acquisitions accordingly. Save me some time and tell me how I make it inside in the first place, I can think of four but all are unclear how effective the results will be.”

I shrug. “I can’t remember exactly how it is you broke in, you changed into something else and you didn’t even have to pull out your gun.”

She does not offer any of her thoughts on the matter, so I distract myself by gazing at the compound. The facility is truly terrifying in appearance, with walls stretching twenty meters into the sky, and giant spikes protruding from the entirety of it to intimidate any attempt at scaling it with gear. A dozen fortified guard towers, perhaps more, add to the wall’s defenses. Stealth is simply not an option, searchlights removing any obscurity of even the evening hours. Even if we somehow miraculously sneak inside and make an escape, another giant facility at the top of the hill houses an airfield. All they have to do is blast us away by sending a drone our way.

“Frankly, it seemed as if you had plot armor, in the movie that is.” I tell Lara, half of it is meant to myself. “I swear, you could go knocking on their front door and make it through somehow.”

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A hint of excitement in her voice. “I like that idea, let’s go ahead and knock on their front door.”

She signals me to ride backseat again, I sigh my frustration for sitting backseat. I grip onto the bike as the engine revs, forcing my butt cheeks to clench from the whiplash.

“What is the plan?” I yell over the cascading desert winds.

“Knocking on their front door!” She responds loudly.

Having taken notice [of a pillar of] a floating dust trail, my heart sinks in horror realizing what it is. It is not only the what that makes it fear worthy, but the sheer enormity of it is truly unbelievable.

“Careful on the right, there’s…” Before I finish my warning, she whips out her pistol and aims it towards the cloud of dust.

“You can’t possibly…” She ignores me again. Bang, bang, bang. The dust trail changes direction, now following us.

“Are you crazy? Now we are a snack on the run!”

She just grins which makes me worry more. “Hold your horses, we’re gonna knock real hard.”

I clench onto the bike even tighter as the ground begins to tremble, taking a peek behind us to see the biggest sandworm yet. An alpha. It roars in frustration at its escaping prey, worry is quickly boiling over to full panic mode.

“I know for a fact this didn’t happen in the movie at all!” I shout in fear.

The compound is just a kilometer away now, I cannot see how it is she plans to infiltrate in this scenario. An alarm bellows and bright yellow lights momentarily blind me as they light up the base, Nova Tera definitely know something’s up. If only they knew what how much. Turrets rise from behind the wall and start firing at us, forcing Lara to engage in serpentine evasive maneuvers. A couple of rockets explode near us, sending us into gut-wrenching swerves to evade them.

“Jump off the bike when I say so!” Lara orders.

I look over the side to see the blurring ground. “I am not jumping off this thing going a hundred!”

She just grunts angrily and before I know what is happening, she grabs me as she jumps off the bike and we begin rolling on the cold hard ground to a back-aching stop. I groan in pain as I straighten my surely deformed back. My body trembles dangerously aggressive as the sandworm flies past us, still chasing the now side-tumbling bike which explodes upon impacting the main gate.

In a stunned state, I am in disbelief that she sacrificed her precious bike like that. My heart skips a few beats as I gape at the rising sandworm, being well over the height of the walls, it slams its massive body against the armored wall. It bellows as it begins to go into a feeding frenzy, following by the noise of human cries of horror.

As usual, Lara leads me by the iron grip into the blasted last place I want to go. Slipping past the worm and frenzied soldiers, we are able to sneak inside with all attention diverted from us. The door knock Lara talked about is like kicking up an anthill, and they are squirming around like ants trying to make sense of what happened to their defenses.

Lara finds a couple of dead guys at the entrance, she unclothes them of their suits and hands one at me. “Quickly, or I feed that worm with your dead corpse.” I gulp, complying swiftly.

With the turrets now no longer busy firing at us, we take advantage of their attention focused on the monstrosity in their midst. A big red light glows across the compound and the siren alerts the personnel on site, the earth shakes in a rhythmic beat as giant footsteps echo from behind two giant doors as a Titan-Mach approaches. An awesome battle ensues for me to marvel at, it is not every day I get to witness this machine in person and this close up. It snaps its two-finger claws as it nears the worm, and my ears drums split from the noise of its wrist guns firing at the worm. These two titans clash for dominance.

“Come on, let’s go!” Lara leads me by the hand, the warmth from her touch snapping me back to reality.

Ducking behind a bunch of steel crates, she focuses on the bunker entrance to the storage facility. “Seems like I am gonna need you to break a leg.” She comments.