+Local date and time unknown.

Near Al Jubail, Saudi Arabia, Earth 63-19, Demilitarized Treaty Zone.

Warden Nico Zimmer, Wardens Organization.+

No matter how many times it happened, I'd never stop being caught off-guard by just how quickly situations could fall apart from "milk run", to "the sky is literally on fire; fucking run!"

The sky was indeed on fire as I sprinted like a mad dog, hands and knees in some places, through suffocating walls of smoke and the burning ruins of what used to be a twenty-first-century Earth oil refinery. I dimly recalled the briefing mentioning a "Kingdom of Saddle Arabia", but that didn't sound quite right.

That last hit I'd taken had burned out my armored duster's enchantments completely, along with half the coat itself. Its charred remains clung to my armored body as I slid into cover behind a fallen stone pillar. My comms crackled, heavy with distortion from, well, everything. 

Somewhere to the north, far but not far enough away, the biggest Void Tear I'd ever seen was rapidly growing even further out of control; bad enough that our intel was so wrong that we'd practically teleported directly into a seething swarm of Void Spawn, but we'd still nearly gotten the situation under control before everything else went to shit.

A scintillating beam of cerulean energy momentarily cut through the churning hell of black smoke above; a howling scream filled the air seconds later, as the soundwave of the weapon reached me.

Fucking Universal Union.

Never mind that we were trying to save this whole universe of information-age primitives, the damn Combine Empire had apparently elected to make this particular spot of the multiverse their next conquest. I still wasn't sure about the scope of what was happening outside my little slice of personal hell, but the last transmission from Warden Tactical Oversight had suggested that our eternally aggravating allies were jumping in with a whole fleet.

Whether the orbitals were aflame with capital ships trading fire or not, the situation was now completely beyond salvage. Wardens might be the best in the multiverse at putting down Void Incursions, but even we had never been stupid enough to give it a shot in the middle of a full-blown war.

Our only goal now was to make it out alive.

As Interrogator-Rank Warden Maya's voice came through the tinny speaker in my helmet, I thanked whatever gods were listening that someone else had survived the absolute horror show of the last ten minutes.

{This is … Interrogator Vargas, if anyone's still alive, respond.}

{Maya? Thank god you made it out. Where you at?}

It took a second for her breathless reply to come, and I watched the swirling inferno above from the armored safety of my climate-controlled combat armor. Climate conditioning enchantments, none shall ever mock your utility again.

{Nico? That you, kid?}

{Yes ma'am. Still alive for now.}

{Good,} she breathed. {The whole mission's gone to shit, can anyone get an uplink to Warden Command? We need to drop some heavy ordnance on that rift before it gets any bigger and we have to burn the world – can't exactly do an evacuation with the synth-fuckers inva-}

A new voice suddenly interrupted.

{We may have contact in a few more moments, hold on.} 

{Elric?} Maya chuckled in exhausted disbelief, {that you?}

The metallic, oddly childlike voice replied with a determined tone.

{It's me, Maya. I have five of the Federation Agents with me, two more casualties and one walking wounded. We fought free of the Combine ambush and are pushing out of the facility on the west side, towards the sea. Should get clear comms in a few minutes.}

The west side … I tried to remember the facility maps we studied before the operation, before it all turned into a mangled forest of burning steel, black smoke, and prowling monsters. If I was right, there should be a port facility touching the sea, with great concrete piers extending a fair ways away from the burning white drums and the drooping spiderwebs of slagged metal pipes.

Of course, I had no idea where the hells I was, and I was pretty sure the ionized radiation from the Combine particle beams had scrambled my sensor systems to uselessness. Shockingly enough, I'd never considered getting gear rated for enemies that could shoot back; that was the one mercy about fighting Void Spawn.

{We can link up with you on the docks, try to wait for extract there …} I started, {but I've got swirling smoke on every side and my sensors are fried. I'm somewhere in the south, by the inner drums, but that's the best I've got.}

Maya cut in, protective as ever. {Does your emergency beacon still have charge?}

{Uh … yeah, it does.}

{Flip it on and keep your head down, I'm coming to you, kid. Alphonse – start moving the 'Feddies to the docks and leave without us if you can, we'll catch up.}

{You're insane if you think I'm going to leave you behi-}

I was already moving to a more defensible position, beacon on, as she talked over Interrogator Elric's sputtered protests. 

{Stay behind if you want, but get those bluecoats out of here, even if you have to throw them into orbit yourself. The last thing we need is an international incident where those fucks blame us for getting their idiots killed.}

I hopped a waist-high pipe at a run and approached a V-shaped piece of broken concrete, nestling into it and aiming outwards into the darkness, the weight of my hand cannon a comforting reassurance that I could probably put down one of those tri-legged monsters the Combine considered 'foot drones' before it killed me.

{I'm hunkered down as best as I can, Maya. I've got some flares in my bag of holding, somewhere. Should I risk popping one?}

A long pause followed and as nothing came out of the smoke to disembowel or disintegrate me, I had a few precious scraps of time to sink into my worst habit – overthinking. The Combine's motives didn't bear thinking about; they conquered and assimilated. That's just what they were and what they did. In a way, it was refreshingly honest – they were almost incapable of guile or subterfuge, unless an outside agent was doing it on their behalf.

So, the synth-fuckers scout this twenty-first-century Earth, show up with a fleet and … what? They start their invasion like any other when … ah. Maya was an Evocation mage of terrifying natural power, conjuring firestorms or raw aetheric energy outright was child's play to her. She'd also brought enough blasting gel and dust crystals to level a medium-sized town. That was what saved us in the first moments of utter disorientation as seemingly everything around us was black, moving, and alive.

Of course, elemental detonations on a scale so large they might be considered localized terraforming would light up every sensor on the Combine fleet. With adaptation and creativity not their strong suit, it wasn't a surprise that they'd have thrown a few heavy kill-teams at the anomaly and waited to see what happened next.

By the time they realized that they were firing on Wardens trying to force shut a Void Tear of disturbing size, it was already too late.

I damn near leapt out of my skin when something heavy hit the ground beside me and slapped a fist into my side. Maya was on her feet and towering over me in moments, already taking me by the shoulder and moving out.

"C'mon Nico, don't freeze up on me now."

"Hey, fuck you. I'm not freezing up."

She chuckled darkly under her sleek, full-face visor of opaque gold. "Sure, kid. Now make yourself useful and watch the left; my systems are barely good enough to see where the hells we're going."

Maya Vargas was a giant of a woman, six-foot-two without the combat armor and as large in personality as she was in body. Her elaborate tribal robes swirled around the matte black of her armor, dust crystals and runes in the hardy fabric glowing softly against the smoke, dirt, and powdered rock that assailed us like tiny razors.

This would be hard for even Combine synthetic troops to fight in, so we moved as fast as we dared, darting from cover to cover and never straying in open areas for too long. Through it all, what felt like hours and miles of sweaty, tense progress but was really minutes and tens of feet, she had her hand on my back, making sure I was keeping pace and on my feet.

Her voice was muffled by the helmet as she asked, "how much magic you figure you have left to burn?"

The filtered air was stale and tasted of copper as I replied through dry lips, "three more pre-loaded spells, then I'm down to unstructured casting with barely anything left. That accelerated time bubble took almost half of everything I had to give."

For emphasis, I waved my left hand at her, meaningfully showing the holographic blue display that flickered over armored, rune-engraved gauntlet. Three out of twelve blue spheres still glowing: thank you, handy user-interface feature.

She clicked her tongue. "Not what I'd have hoped for, but I'm running on fumes, too. Some of my dust-crystal weave got burnt out," she huffed. "That shit cost as much as a small dropship."

"Synth-fuckers," I muttered in commiseration.

"Synth-fuckers," she agreed, just a tad bit more cheerful.

We ran between the burning husks of two collapsed oil drums and slowly approached the open field on the other side. On the one hand, we could dimly see where Alphonse should be; huge grey piers extended into the water from a relatively intact port. On the other hand, it was nearly a mile away, over completely open ground.

I turned to Maya, intending to speak, b̵u̴t̷–̴

T̴̤͠w̶͈͌ị̴̊s̶̠̆t̴͍́i̷̙͘n̷̫̐g̸̯̒…̵̗̑ ̵̤͂

B̵̼̈̅r̶̯͕̽̀i̵̛̗ģ̷̰̏̄h̸͉̃ţ̴͕͘͝ ̷̨̞̈́l̸̥̎͝î̸̧̩͒g̴̹̓h̸͇̋̓ț̸͙̍͊…̷̭̚͝

The world snapped back into place, and I grabbed Maya's arm in an iron grip, the oil drums before us now, still burning.

She recognized what happened just a second slower than I did. The False Death ritual was a tremendously versatile and powerful piece of Chronomancy – a literal lifesaver, sending your consciousness backwards through time if you happened to die while under its effects.

I searched my memory with a clinical sort-of detachment; the adrenaline was flowing properly now, a river of cold logic filling me with a strange calm. Ah. On the right-hand side, near the three-story office building, five hundred feet away. Combine unit of unknown class, but enough firepower to blast through my armor like tissue paper – I hadn't even realised I was dead until I snapped back.

I spoke over the comms, not trusting my voice to escape the Combines' noise sensors, even under the howling roar of the fire and the wind.

{Contacts front, right side past the oil drums, up in the office building. Third floor, maybe roof.}

Maya nodded sharply and I imagined the sort-of lethal glint her eyes got whenever something killed me and snapped me back. I always liked to joke about being the Wardens' best "Voidling Punching Bag", but she only ever cuffed me upside the head for that level of gallows humor. Sue me, I was a comedy genius.

Sickly witchfire formed in her gloved hand, pale and hot enough to immediately conjure heat-shimmer in the air. A small warning indicator in my heads-up display flashed temperature alerts and I dismissed it with an errant eye-twitch.

{Point them out, I'll fry them.}

{I'm not sure how much juice I have left…} I started, but she talked over me.

{You've done enough, keep your head down and shoot for opportunity targets with your hole-puncher if you can, but stay safe. Casters without enough magic reserves to keep slinging spells are just casualties waiting to happen.}

I didn't like her logic; a part of me snarled and bristled at being dismissed like that, but this shit was no joke. Whatever that Combine synth was, it killed me without even an energy buildup's worth of warning.

The only comment I offered was a {be careful}, as I followed her meekly, staying down and trying to use the torn-open oil drum for cover as best as I could.

We reached the edge at a fast walk, Maya holding the lead. She pulled a small signal mirror from her hip-slung bag of holding and angled it around the side, keeping her hand as safe as possible, given the circumstances. Signal mirrors were low-tech fit only for signaling passing rescuers if all else failed, but Maya had always been a creative person.

{Got him.} She muttered, flicking the fingers of her free hand out like she was shaking hands with the air. The runes and dust on her robes ignited with blinding light and I had to look away as the world became white fire.

By the time it was safe to look, the whole building had melted to a one-story puddle of slag, and a fifty-foot circle around it had been burned to glass. Maya was as smug as usual. She mimed blowing smoke off a finger gun as I walked past.

This time I saw the danger before it could shoot – muzzle flashes, in the charred ruins at the office building's torn base. The runes on my gauntlet burned with cold blue light as I triggered a pre-loaded barrier spell, as quickly as I could manage.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

In the very last instant after it manifested, a hail of rapid-fire metal darts shattered themselves against the swirling wall of blue hexagrams that split us from the Combine. Maya reacted almost as fast; sharply swinging her hands together and then raising them like a choir conductor, robes swirling.

The temperature plunged and a half-mile of fires died instantly. Hoarfrost swallowed the ground and my armor screamed temperature warnings again as a feet-thick wall of ice formed before us from the air itself. Before my shield could even be broken by Combine fire, we were suddenly surrounded by a U-shaped glacier, almost as tall as some of the oil drums around us. 

Evocation was a school of magic about the control of energy; people focused on the fireballs and the plasma, but not many remembered that you could lower the energy of an environment, instead; flash-freezing battlefields and people.

Dust crystals on top of that was just cheating, I thought, as Maya pulled the last few white rocks from her bandolier, crushed them in her hand, then punched forward. The air screamed and the glacier rumbled with the sharp, high noise of ice grinding.

I didn't need to see the other side to know that she'd just launched hundreds of foot-long shards from the wall's face at lethal velocities; each infused with enough supernatural cold to shatter armor like glass.

{Can you get that shield up again?}

{One more pre-load left!}

She slapped me on the shoulder, turning to face the docks behind us.

{Bit less than a mile to run; put up your shield and we'll make it in one go.}

It was times like this that I felt fortunate that Maya had clubbed the stupidity out of my younger self when he'd wanted to buy a wizard's staff, instead pointing him to an Arcanotech Casting Gauntlet, the pinnacle of modern magical equipment. Among its many user-friendly features, the device could store magical energy in pre-programmable circuits, allowing for the pre-battle preparation of spells that could be cast immediately and effortlessly on command.

A wall of cold blue shimmered into life behind us, and I spun on my heels to turn.

{Let's go.}

We ran through the sand, the frost, and the swirling smoke like our lives depended on it. She'd left her comms on accidentally and I could hear her ragged breathing. It matched mine; neither of us could survive a standup gunfight in the open for long, and we both knew it. Our only hope was to get to Alphonse in time.

A little thought niggled me as I saw my companion completely disregard any notion of covering her back to run faster. The sheer trust Maya had in my skills, that my shield wouldn't fail and get her shot in the back, was a little humbling.

I dared a glance back.

The lumpy, unnatural shapes of Combine Foot Synths were dark blobs at the wall's edge, picking through the unnatural construct awkwardly, the magical conjuration downright lethal in its cold. Several shattered into powder as they brushed against the wall with feet or arms.

I turned back and kept running.

He'd only had minutes to do so, but Alphonse had turned the port into a small fortress with his matter manipulation. Buildings, cars, and shipping containers were scattered like broken toys as tall berms of raised earth replaced them. The Foundation troopers had chipped in, too. A violet bubble covered the port, a disgusting sensation of cold washing over me as I ran through the tactical-scale energy shield they'd set up inside.

We ran through a ground-level opening in the wall, which swiftly closed behind us, and we finally walked to an exhausted stop, sweating like pigs and breathing like drowned rats. I wanted to pull my helmet off more than anything, but the air was basically poison and powder at this point. I'd have to be sealed up all the way till extraction.

It took me a second to register Interrogator-Rank Warden Alphonse Elric, which was a little funny given his huge size. I'd never caught the story on what drove him to the Wardens or what his 'condition' was, but the poor bastard was stuck inside seven feet of baroque medieval armor, enchanted to the gills with glowing golden script to keep it competitive with modern materials.

His voice was younger than his size suggested, and carried an ethereal hollow quality to it like he was speaking from far away.

"Are you all alright?"

"We're fine, Al. How's the exfil – we've got synths right on our asses and Void Spawn not far behind them." 

Maya waved off his help and composed herself as best she could, looking over the shield generator and the triaged wounded beside it. Five surviving Federation troopers held a loose formation around them, hardlight rifles raised to the tops of the earthen walls and helmeted faces stoic with anticipation.

Their trembling hands betrayed them, though. This was a clusterfuck of historic proportions, and I think all of us had a looming sense of disaster, like this wasn't the worst today had to throw at us.

One of the Feddies stood up, distinguished from the rank and file by the metal facsimile of an officer's cap built into his helmet. Between that and the dull golden rank pins on his gorget, Sergeant Picard was immediately recognizable as the man in charge.

Earlier, my impression of the man was a bald, patrician asshole; sneering at our trio and as much as demanding that we "keep the collateral damage to a bare minimum, even if it requires greater personal risk".

Right now, I wanted to kiss the arrogant bastard for having the foresight to bring along a spec-ops-grade tactical shield generator. The Combine had integrated light artillery at the platoon scale, and I was certain that without the glowing purple sphere above us, we'd have already been plastered flat by anti-matter munitions.

His posture was of a man trying to hold himself together in the face of a death sentence and my heart sank before he even spoke.

"Wardens, there are bad news and worse news: the orbital war is hot enough that shuttle or teleporter extraction is a non-starter, and we are picking up massive tachyon signatures among the enemy fleet. The Combine are teleporting down army-scale reinforcements."

Maya and Alphonse shared a momentary glance. I knew what it meant.

Inter-universal travel was an expensive and difficult endeavor. To do so on one's own required the magical power of a Netherese Archmage, the scientific genius of a one-man space program, or a whole civilization's collective resources and brainpower. Natural-born Planeswalkers existed, sure, and this utility made them valuable commodities, but they were rare.

For the average universal inhabitant that could afford to do so, their only hope for independent dimensional travel was a relatively common ritual spell, requiring a week's worth of prep time and hours of sustained casting. Neither convenient nor efficient.

Wardens though, we had a certain advantage.

Maya absentmindedly ran a gloved hand along the silver dagger badge on her collar. 

A Warden's badge was one of the most technologically advanced and highly enchanted pieces of equipment in the multiverse; there were starships that cost less. To make a lot of math short, it did the heavy lifting behind dimensional jumping, requiring mere minutes of work on the part of the user. If it wasn't soul-bound to the operator, we'd likely have targets on our backs everywhere we went. Hells, in some places Wardens still did.

Unlike these Feddie ground-pounders, we weren't stuck here to die. At least, we probably weren't. Bluecoats or not, the thought of dumping them made my stomach turn unpleasantly. Since neither Maya nor Alphonse gave voice to what we were all thinking, it was clear they weren't exactly thrilled with the situation, either.

Still, we–

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, movement at the berm!

I whirled; hand cannon drawn.

Atop the steep rise, rivers of dirt running from its feet, the first of many shambling shapes crested the top. Mainline Combine synths were monstrous fusions of organic flesh and inorganic alloys; not even biomancers could tell where one ended and the other began. Three thick, muscled legs propelled its nearly ten-foot-tall bulk forward. The legs connected under crablike carapace plates to a fully rotating waist and broad chest, that was heavily armored under the same fleshlike tan alloy. Three glowing blue eyes stared down at us from a featurelessly smooth head, as it raised an arm with three integrated gun barrels.

Alphonse clapped his hands together and struck the ground; circular alchemical diagrams suddenly lit up under our feet and shoulder-high stone trenchworks burst from the asphalt and the sand, creating ad-hoc cover.

The Feddies acted like they'd been expecting this; they hurled themselves into cover along the low wall and sent staggered bursts of actinic energy downrange – with no resupply, ammo was a big concern.

I felt the world blur into slow clarity, the flying energy blasts slowing to a crawl, the shambling forms of the Combine drones moving as if underwater. Mental acceleration was cheap enough and simple enough a spell that I could risk casting it on the fly, a mere pulse of magic through my gauntlet enough to have me moving unnaturally fast for a human.

I drew on the lead synth, moments away from firing upon the Federation troopers, adjusted my aim to put the round through the thin gap between chestplate and head, and fired. I didn't see the impact; three more had summited the rise and I turned to put bullets in each, not willing to waste time confirming kills. I needed to make the most of this brief speed boost. 

Like rising from an ice bath, the acceleration dissipated, and four Combine synths had their necks blown out by explosive, high-caliber rounds. Disturbingly vein-like cables tore open, spurting milky fluid, while blue optics sputtered and dimmed.

That didn't stop them.

By the gods, it didn't fucking stop them.

With heads lolling and half their necks blown away, with Federation forces hosing them down with their own rifles, the Combine synths just kept moving. I could physically see their wounds knitting themselves back together and their eyes flaring back to life, even as hardlight bullets carved heated gouges in their armor.

They raised arms containing triple-barreled machine guns that carried armor-penetrating darts as standard. We'd have died then and there, Alphonse's barricades or not, if Maya hadn't saved our lives once again.

I didn't catch her movement, though the destruction she wove was unmistakable; bolts of searing plasma shot out, impacting each synth dead-on, utterly immolating its torso in a furnace of ionized gas.

A spared glance to the side saw her sag somewhat; even she couldn't cast forever, and already more of these things were cresting the rise, each moving with greater speed now that they'd seemingly gotten a handle on our capabilities.

We sheltered behind the barricades as Alphonse alternated between hurling boulders large enough to crush synths flat and reinforcing our cover which was being powederized almost as fast as he could reconstitute it.

The bluecoats sent as much fire downrange as they possibly could, but they hadn't come equipped for anti-armor duty. The hardlight rifle was a good and rugged all-rounder for facing Void Spawn, but its penetrating power left a lot to be desired. Most of the spark-like shots impacted harmlessly against Combine plate as if they were light rain.

My own bullets, a hand-enchanted mix of high explosive, solid slug, and flechette, were only better if I could put them between armor gaps to shred vulnerable internals. As things stood, my latest shot deforming itself against rounded shoulder plate, I wasn't anywhere near accurate enough without boosts to level the playing field.

{I'm running low on magic now, myself.} Maya huffed over the comms. {Anyone got any bright ideas? Teleporting out under fire is gonna get us shredded.}

Alphonse's voice was strained as he tried to do three different tasks at once, Combine munitions deflecting from him in an endless howl of shattered darts and raining sparks. {I'm not sure, anything I raise will get shot through almost immediately if I'm not actively repairing it. I can't get us a blast shield that will last long enough.}

He spared a second's glance to the troopers, fighting for their lives. {I really don't want to leave them, Maya, but I don't think we have a choice.}

{We don't.} Her voice was the kind of anger that went beyond loud and passionate. It was a cold declaration that if we got out of this, she'd find whoever was responsible for this shitshow and roast them, slowly.

Our uneasy firefight continued like that for minutes more; foot synths fell in ones and twos as they were focused fire upon, but most just got back up once our fire shifted. Their regeneration was downright cheating, and I sorely wished that I'd brought Kraken Penetrator rounds or Warpfire Incendiaries. Hells, even conserving my magic would have helped substantially; not that I could have known that at the time.

Still, the fight was inexorably turning against us; between the sheer penetrating power of the Combine sabot rounds and the fact that we were slowly being flanked, staying alive was a challenge in and of itself, let alone breaking from combat for a few minutes to cast the Planesjump spell properly.

I was even running out of ammo. 

Well, I had plenty in my bag of holding, but getting it would cause a fatal decline in our volume of outgoing fire, so we were stuck in a shitty situation; die later or die now.

Something had to change and change it did when Sergeant Picard half-ran half-crouched closer to us, fired off a burst to keep a synth from regenerating, and called out over the din of the firefight. "We know you can leave, Wardens. There is no sense in you dying beside us out of circumstance or misplaced loyalty; what can we do to buy you time to withdraw?"

We all hesitated a second, then Alphonse raised another, far sturdier, layer of wall between us and the enemy. For a few moments, we'd have security.

"They'll break that down too quickly for us to extract. We need three minutes, Sergeant."

The man nodded, blue eye lenses disappearing beneath the brim of his cap for a moment. "Very well, prepare a fortified position for yourselves with our wounded, at the foot of the shield. We will hold the barricade and buy you the necessary time."

Alphonse was still for a moment. 

"Thank you, Sergeant Picard."

"Jean, please. And thank you, Interrogator. My men would not have escaped that nest of Void Spawn, or the Combine ambush without you. I am beginning to believe the universe might have it out for us specifically."

As Alphonse clapped his hands together and struck the ground, palms flat, the sergeant returned to the line, barking orders over his men's internal comms to plug the gaps we'd be making. Even as the looming wall before us cracked and fractured under the relentless storm of penetrators ravaging it, I took the opportunity to dig through my bag, retrieving a few spare revolver cylinders that I quickly mag-locked to my waist, and a pair of grenades.

Those, I passed to the man taking my place on the line.

"Red one's fusion, blue's monofilament razor clouds. Rotate the top to arm, press this to activate, and throw at least fifty feet."

He nodded a breathy thanks, accepting my grenades without a word. His rifle's barrel was steaming hot, and when he popped the battery out to switch it, the thin grey wafer was burnt and nearly melted. 

"Nico, move your ass!"

I jolted upright and ran over to Maya, who was waving me into Alphonse's "bunker". Really, it was more like a stone egg, feet thick and half sunk into the earth. It wrapped around the shield generator and the wounded men within, with but the tiniest of holes near the top to let the projector element do it's thing and keep us from being plastered with artillery.

Maya pushed me in first, then followed me. Alphonse brought up the rear, raising a stone door behind him to lock us in, casting the chamber in a shimmering haze of purple colours from the shield generator's emissions. This was probably toxic and radioactive, but my armor would keep me safe enough, at least for three minutes.

The mood was grim, not even Maya had any quips.

The firefight outside was almost entirely muffled, but we could still hear weapons fire through the hole in the roof. Men were dying, right now, so that we could live. That … that wasn't something I'd really dealt with before, as a Warden. Cities and worlds burned sometimes, sure, but those were impersonal, faceless masses. These were men I'd thought sneering pricks, men I'd eaten with, men I had faces and names for.

There was Picard, the bald leader who clearly thought he was a General temporarily occupying the post of Sergeant, with the ridiculous gravitas and dignity he tried to carry himself with. Still, he was a … decent man, I guess.

Ryker, the 2IC, was probably the only one without a stick up his ass. He'd lent me a spare canteen when I'd forgotten to pack a second one and we were just about to head out. No judgement, just helping without a second's thou-

Maya elbowed me.

"Get your head in the game, kid. We're going now."

"I am, screw off."

I unclasped my badge from its magnetic lock on my chest-plate and firmly took it in both hands. A deep breath. Okay. Let's do this.

Planeswalking wasn't like any other form of magic. The raw power, the perfect math needed, barely anyone could do this without weeks of work. Without this device, what I was doing would lead to crippling burnout, at best. At worst? Let's just say I liked my molecules exactly where they were, and in the configuration they were currently in, thank you.

With breathing level, I mentally recited sequences of codes and calculations while slowly feeding the last of my unstructured magic into the device, feeling out its microscopic magically-reactive circuits and pathways as they flickered to life one by one.

Enumerations were an odd form of magic, highly ordered and relying on set numerical sequences to 'hack' organic brains into the proper headspace to perform difficult spells. I finished the lower order enumerations with two minutes to spare and launched into the higher orders as the device in my hands started to grow warm, pale blue light shining from its heart. Maya and Alphonse's badges joined mine, mixing the room with soft colour and a slowly rising warmth that even my sensors could detect.

As the ritual worked, I began to feel certain … impressions about the multiversal paths and eddies around this earth, sensing which universes and planes were near, which were accessible to the spell, and most importantly, which were safe.

The nearest universe, a tiny thing comprising little more than a few solar systems, gave off a sick feeling of perverted order; wet, corroded, poisoned. That must be the Combine's staging ground. Best avoid that like the plague.

There were others, but few, far too few. I'd normally been spoiled for choice when doing this; jumping was risky, and anything that increased that even by a fraction of a percent was best avoided when plotting a course.

Two perfectly good worlds, Earthlike perhaps, were just barely out of reach. Overstretching was death: not an option.

Another radiated extremes of chaos; churning, rolling, and howling. Even scanning it from here, the place felt predatory. It was almost as if something was looking back at me. Hard pass.

One was, well, I wasn't sure what in the hells was wrong with it. The chronomancer in me felt something like a kinship to the strange dimension, and its seeping, swirling mists. Something about it reminded me of watching rains roll over the mountains when I was little. Whatever it was, it was decidedly abnormal, and in this line of work, that meant death.

Maya spoke just as I considered our final option.

"The last one or nothing, every other choice is certain death."

I couldn't see Alphonse, but he agreed with a positive noise that rattled the inside of the chamber. "Sorry," he whispered. "Sometimes I still forget my size."

The final minute was on us, and the sounds of battle intensified as our badges grew to near-blinding levels of light. Mine was now hot enough to scald skin, though even if I wasn't clad in a hardsuit rated for vacuum war, it still couldn't hurt its wearer.

Then, the boot finally dropped.

Sergeant Picard broke comms silence on our almost-unused shared link, moments before the face of Alphonse's egg cracked and broke under a sudden concentration of fire. 

{Wardens, you need to leave now, they have a–}

He didn't say anything further, but he didn't need to. I could see through the cracks in the wall, the places where whole chunks of stone had fallen out. Something was moving out there, in the suffocating blanket of smoke and fire that was the sky. Even as the ritual ran entirely on automated programs now to finish itself, I strained my eyes without moving my head to see into the dark.

What fresh new horror was this?

A titanic limb swung through the smoke, half visible for just a moment. It set down out of sight deeper in the facility with the weight of an earthquake, knocking down power lines just by proximity. That thing was the size of a building.

Something else moved in the smoke, much higher, and I adjusted my gaze up, heart in my throat; dreadful anticipation washed over me as I searched for any trace of what this thing was. 

That's when I met it eye-to-eye.

A glowing white eye the size of a clock face loomed over the whole facility, nestled deep within slabs of chitin armor like the plates of battleships. Thousands of cables like tree trunks wound through the thin gaps between the thing's plates, and heat radiators bigger than transit busses grew from its hide like whiskers. Well below, smoke curled about the faint hints of titanic legs bigger than skyscrapers.

With a sinking feeling of someone who'd watched too many combat vids for his own good, I recognized what we were looking at. This thousand-foot-tall monster was a Combine Colossus, originally built to meet the Federation's Titan Legions on equal footing, and since upgraded to serve as teleporting planetary siege engines.

"That's a–," Alphonse began.

"I don't care what it is!" Maya snapped, "forty seconds to go, just hold on."

I didn't pay attention to their spat, too transfixed by the sight. Its eye turned away from us, and I got the impression of frigate-sized weapons rotating to face deeper in the facility. What the hells was it doing?

It was only my experience with the void and areas poisoned by it; that hollow coldness that accompanies unexistence and the places it scars that let me notice it. The feeling that had hung over the whole refinery since the moment of our arrival, like an unremarkable background noise, was intensifying, focusing. 

Alphonse noticed it, too. "That thing out there, the … Colossus, I think. It's charging up some sort of void weapon."

I couldn't see her, but I think Maya's eyes bulged in baffled shock. "Is that even pos– no, are they fucking insane?"

I could almost see the edges of what she was getting at, though I'd only heard rumors and speculation about this sort of thing. It was the domain of war criminals and madmen; deliberately induced void breaches in the fabric of the universe, pulling through unreality and spraying it at foes. Not only was this so hideously dangerous that words failed to capture the sheer scale of risk – the spontaneous formation of a void tear was one of the least bad outcomes, but any interaction between multiple different wounds in reality … there was no possible way that would end well.

As the seconds to escape ticked down and the deadening sensation of a wounded reality intensified, it suddenly occurred to me in a detached sort of way: the Combine were going to try to close the rift by shooting it with a void cannon.

It made perfect sense, for an uncreative, unthinking synth. Void entities and the rifts which spawned them were hideously dangerous, spelling the death sentence of an entire universe if not sealed quickly. The void weapon was the most powerful weapon on their most powerful asset in theatre. Obviously, they should resolve the maximum priority threat with their best tool.

My lips opened a fraction, barely daring to move while the ritual worked.

I barely managed to breathe the first syllables of a warning when everything happened all at once.

Maya vanished in a dissipating shimmer, her afterimage burned into my eyes, even through the polarized visor.

Alphonse did much the same, though I didn't see him.

The void cannon outside fired, reality screaming as a jagged scar tore across the sky, peeling it apart to expose a void without colours or light, something devoid of all that existed in a physical universe. Purest nothing.

Shockwaves from the weapon's firing raced out across the whole of the facility in an instant, tearing free whole oil drums like they were children's toys and scattering concrete buildings to dust.

The "beam" met the expanding void tear and the two touched.

Alphonse's egg was spared, just barely, by being shaped well to resist and rooted in the earth. It wasn't remotely enough, and the compromised sections gave way first, just as my own spell completed and I felt the bone-chilling sensation of disappearing. Stone shrapnel sprayed and I immediately felt a sudden jolt of discomfort, though I couldn't possibly look now to check.

All that was left was to close my eyes and pray to whatever gods were listening as shockwaves of a more immaterial sort washed over me; the void tear was growing so quickly now that I might be swallowed up in moments; I could feel the spell recoiling as if stung.

Just as I vanished entirely and the world beyond my shut eyes ceased to be, I felt the distinct sensation like something had gone horribly wrong. I couldn't sense my destination. I couldn't sense anything.

Gods be good, I was flying blind.

̵I̴t̸ ̴ ̸ ̴w̵a̷s̸ ̴ ̵ ̴h̸a̵r̴d̵ ̸ ̷ ̷t̴o̶ ̶ ̸t̶h̸i̷n̶k̴.̵

̸M̸y̶ ̸ ̵b̸o̷d̶y̴ ̴ ̵w̸a̴s̷ ̵ ̴l̶i̵t̶t̶l̷e̸ ̸ ̶m̴o̴r̷e̷ ̶ ̵t̵h̴a̷n̸ ̴ ̷s̵p̵i̸r̶i̸t̵ ̴ ̵a̵n̵d̸ ̷ ̵p̷a̶r̸t̸i̶c̶l̸e̶s̴,̴ ̷d̷r̵i̶f̵t̸i̵n̵g̶.̴

̸I̸ ̶ ̷p̷r̴a̶y̵e̴d̶ ̸ ̸ ̸t̷o̵ ̸ ̵h̴a̸l̵f̸-̵r̸e̶m̶e̵m̶b̶e̶r̸e̷d̵ ̶ ̵g̴o̴d̸s̸.̵

̵H̵e̴l̵m̵,̷ ̴ ̸ ̵S̸a̷r̵e̸n̴r̴a̶e̴,̷ ̸ ̷s̸o̵m̶e̴b̴o̸d̷y̴,̸ ̷ ̸p̶l̷e̵a̶s̵e̴.̵

̴N̸o̸t̴ ̷ ̵l̶i̸k̶e̴ ̸ ̶t̵h̶i̵s̶.̷

̶T̸h̶e̴n̸ ̶ ̶…̸ ̸ ̸t̴h̵e̶r̴e̸ ̶ ̵w̸a̴s̸ ̵ ̶s̴o̷m̶e̵t̶h̸i̴n̴g̵!̷

̴I̴t̶ ̵ ̷f̴e̶l̷t̶ ̵ ̶f̵a̴m̴i̶l̶i̴a̸r̵.̵

̴I̵t̸ ̸ ̷s̶m̵e̵l̷l̵e̶d̵ ̷ ̷l̶i̴k̵e̵ ̷ ̶r̶a̸i̴n̵.̷

̴I̶ ̴ ̶w̸e̸n̴t̸ ̷t̴o̶w̸a̴r̷d̶s̴ ̷i̸t̴…̴