That time with my family ended as suddenly as it had begun, when after a a month I'd unexpectedly been drawn in again to this other sides Valkyria ether-reality instead of my side of reality. I'd left preparations besides intstructions, for my whole family instead of just my immediate family.

It would have to do, all I could do was spend all the time I had there for them and with them.

There was an awareness I had of some not so skeptical shit, thoughts that were easier and harder to keep up with. Chiefly, awaking where I had from a sleeping position falling into a river had given me the perspective, but only after I stopped to think about how I'd somehow survived being dumped in yet another world and realities river.

No powers, no abilities, skills, attributes, states, aspects or traits. Nothing, not even material space, or any of the items I'd been wearing on my body and made it to the alternate universe - if it was indeed that - with.

It might be an alternate universe, but I was not unwilling to consider that the door I'd been headed through or Kostya's works had done more than alter time and reality, and that this could be a trial for entering the tower I'd assumed led to the void.

I didn't know if it was a trial to enter the tower, so a one-off yet again, or if I would have to live whole lives then die them just to be fighting Kostya in the moments between such moves with a return to the place and time I was at for a move at a time between lives. All I had known was that had been no illusion, that world more like mine than not.

All the people the same, which suggested lives and deaths were the major connection between them. That total concurrence likely meant it was supposed to remain that way, those deaths and births, unions or disunions in each never apart. It wasn't in me to think of it like a possible branch in reality, that was not in me to do or consider.

Place in time would connect those who could alter it,

The only concession I could make there was that perhaps our bodies went to this universe and our spirits another at the point I came to.

It didn't even feel right to say conclusively it was a point in time, time might not the factor or mechanism by which that 'save-point' had in essence been created, the factor could be anything else when I had nothing of a hypothesis to conclude it as being caused by.

Rather, those factors to me were more likely to seem as if the power Kostya had used immense energy behind to use were the factors, except that the unparalleled spellform I saw had been completely interrupted.

In my reality or universe, hadn't there been an ether-reality I went to first? Then there was the movement to a time more than two decades before others arrived, into an ether-world.

If looked at from the outside, one could saw I had been involved in a time-loop from which my life could never escape the paradoxical movements, because if I did not experience the movement through time as I had then I'd never have been able to alter time.

There could be no going back and preventing myself from doing it, but if there was it would mean from my perspective I could find myself in a different reality, likely never remembering what I had done since I never would have done it. My perspective would change so totally it would seem like I lost it.

There was no effecting time that way so directly or distantly, movements through it indirectly and proximally had effects at the points you changed it that could irrevocably alter reality. If you went back too far you didn't grow younger physically, but mentally you did as well, there was no retaining the perspective of the future.

Going to the future meant losing the perspectives you would have had and missed living in the world, those around would keep learning and growing, but their experiences would be more deeply part of them than you could account for across dramatic expanses of time. A few moments or months meant little, a few millenium and you'd be permanently outdated.

Going to the past, you didn't just lose your future to the perspective of others, you lost all the knowledge of and from the future.

If you went more than a small ways into the future, you became archaic. You became Arcane.

Moving your bodies time back meant your physical mind return to youthful, but mental experiences of logical and emotional types returned at a rate in excess of just new experiences. There were more threats than benefits gained by seeking to regain youth. Children rely on others and can't provide for themselves like adults.

Rebirth had been different in that my body had been remade if no different physically in that ether-world, but it was not a change I'd lost, ever since then I'd noticed time differently.

Time held less sway on the minds in particular, or even the bodies from that ether-world, which was the lesser part of why I was sure I wasn't affected by the changes.

When I'd used it first a few times on myself I could only realize I had done it by introspection, not realization or any actuation of power I noticed through visible perception, the truth was when I'd moved through time even a little it had never been remembered at all. I noticed my quantum energy depleted, after countless attempts in which I tried and nothing seemed to happen.

It didn't seem like a long and constant process, just an intention and then very little power used, but all at once there was no quantum energy. The first time anyway, the next time after a brief attempt in doubt I noticed it used less energy, but trying to use more power and energy together had done the deed.

I'd had to write a letter to myself I'd done it in order to even remember what I did by my own perspective, else I ran out of energy without results and never understood what just was not meant to be obvious.

It was easier to try and prevent going into the future, when you wanted to go backwards, the detectable forces actually began by slowing the progression of time around you from moving forwards - the 'sensible' wake of the motions of time beginning to turn back on itself was hardly easy to call sensible - but that was too little power involved. Slowing time.

Slowing time was the same force as moving backwards through it, at a lower power.

It could be useful inside or out.

Accelerating time was the same force moving forwards, that was more obvious to understand because time move forwards by perspective for all naturally, but its actuation was far less obtainable than slowing time.

Why, one might wonder, would it be harder to move forwards then through time when that should naturally be easier since time was already doing so? It was the path of least resistance, and conservation of energy-mass, at work together with objects in motion staying in their motions. Things were going that way already.

Well it was simple to answer, the same forces that were trying to move you forwards into the future, they obviously pushed towards the future and yet were pulling at the past.

It's called drafting in racing, when the vehicle behind is robbing momentum from the vehicle ahead, the medium of air that both share that close in movement the largest connecting factor they share even more than their relative speed. No air, and the second most important factor wouldn't even matter, said speed.

Of course that phenomenon made time seem to drag on differently, but it was likewise easier to prevent going into the past, and I'd remembered those easier but could not make it as far forwards by half. A minute was the most, forward, but three backwards.

Timelessness had been natural to a very minor extent, increased to the lesser extent by quantum later in the ether-world I was reborn into, but I had naturally reinforced that timelessness in the time I'd had it. Inside me time had increased to speed me up, and outside me it decreased to slow all else down, but the first aspect was physical and the second was mental.

Physical or cellular hyper-excitation, in a state of mental hypo-relaxation.

It was all important information for me to consider for many reasons.

I'd realized I was being moved back through time by feel. Ether-reality, my ass.

Time was not effected as it should be. Without any quantum esper power or energy at all, I should have felt slow as a snail and the world should have likewise seemed to speed up, but neither happened. There should have been a slowing of perception in general.

There wasn't.

The river I'd been dumped in hands and feet first, from where I'd been sleeping on my belly in bed, it had revealed my dilemma of powerlessness and decreased attributes right away. This situation I was in, I'd foreseen little of my family in the vision just before the difficulty I percieved in my future had increased.

That had not revealed itself to seem like I went to another reality, though I had foreseen an ancient statured city scattered wide amidst an awful tropical forrest, the two jungles I'd seen as merged into one far worse type were where I expected most of my own difficulties.

The problem there was time and place, when and where. If things followed the flow of the other reality I would not just find another ether reality, or the game-likened 'tutorial' or 'sandbox' version and introductory stage, but the later ether world where the mental and emotional factors of other humanoids as well as resource volumes and types were more realistic.

There had been no foresight that it was another reality, but it explained several things, chiefly why people I had seen as comrades were distant and as if unknown to me. They were not those I was meant to see as companions in this universe, family and lovers were the same both ways but not always friends, and even lovers could be different when like in my case one had no children.

There were strange consistent and inconsistent factors to notice, ones that didn't sit well with my heart even if they were true.

But there would be other things that were different - in all the right ways to make an easier start, like non-sensical item drops from enemies - the early days would be easier here but the later ones were going to be harder.

If enemies dropped items and people didn't widely learn to scavenge and collect and make use of all realistically, they would be ill-prepared for when the worlds met, whereas in my reality the opposite had been true and the early struggles taught people they would have to learn to provide and survive for themselves.

That was a lot of skills vital to life they'd be missing out on, for no more reason than animals and creatures or beings had material-space besides inventories they could access and use. The material-space was not theirs - though dragons and hominids often had their own that was - there was an enchantment of impossible alchemic material-space upon most lifeforms.

It functioned like the proverbial drop-table indexes of the games of yore, or for those who didn't have an idea about archetypal drops versus the regional types and had only ever experienced realistical drops, it was like a lottery you drew and ended up with a reward based on 'luck'.

But random-number-generation wasn't exactly a clean way to ascribe how the results were determined.

Need or want, they meant nothing, although time and place still meant everything no differently. The 'numbers' were always changing in such games, always rolling even until the moment you killed something, no matter how they were set to move the numbers were not honest if an enemy had a number attatched to it upon its being spawned or respawned.

I.e. you could in theory eventually gain a sense of the precise timing that a beings spawn had by killing it enough. You could learn whether the numbers were a constant, you could learn whether they were restarted from a starting point or whether the being respawned with the 'clock' reset so to speak by which the numbers were moved, except the more randomized they were by more factors the less you could exploit them in practice.

This was no simple game to exploit any sort of rng.

There was no spawn points or respawn technically, unless you considered parents spawn points for every being that wasn't a foreign humanoid Arcane coming here, or respawn points the rebirth that we alone had access to.

I didn't know or want to find out if I had access to such, a respawn, my sense leaned towards no when my body had always seemed to be my avatar.

I'd pulled up the status-screen I had once more, glad to have some fresh outside perspective from playing games again, otherwise I'd never have had the notion to try and do such. Everything was burned to ashes in a way, everything even in the physical and mental skills pages under the tabs of the same attribute panels, but there was that third type of attributes..

Weal-Attributes.

Basic:

Luck - enhances worldly results and material gains, of chance.

Chance; possibility, subject to failure.

Fortune - multiplies worldly harvests and material gains, of wage.

Wage; profitability, subject to change.

Dynamic:

Faith - blesses ethereally efforts and spiritual growths, of knowledge.

(3)Knowledge; subjectability, subject to state.

[ Cunning - C-Type ]

(2)Knowledge; variability, subject to state.

[ Bemusing - B-Type ]

(1)Knowledge; invariability, subject to none.

[ Aweing - A-Type ]

I'd never developed any of these before I lost any interest in my status-screen. I'd lost it altogether the same as anyone by the time the worlds mixed, and gauging potentials had been different later. I remembered that princess in the dungeon of division two-hundred thirteen mentioning at least some of these, luck and faith.

I didn't know how people gauged them, but it was easy to start guessing and making sense into knowledge, from where this new sort of confusion I found could come knowledge as well. This knowledge was abysmal, awful, so horrid I laughed. I was not quite reduced to nothing, that was true and good. Faith I understood as the most treasured and undervalued right away.

I wouldn't mock that.

But I was mocking the idea of trying to increase terrible survival odds based on luck and fortune, luck was risks and overrated while fortune was at least associated with efforts and results, but neither were close to the given of faith. Who needed to see that to know it? Faith would keep you up and moving when all love and hope and peace were gone.

The world could go with all in it, and yet faith put in the right place wouldn't just keep you alive forever, it would conquer all those trials you couldn't overcome on your own without it.

But this faith attribute was not at all a representation of my own, I knew it was not my faith in God or Jesus that was measured, so I could only suspect it was valued based on how much love and justice besides peace and hope I shared along in the grace and balance of humanoid-kinds.

In a way all of these attributes were one, as I understood them, what these attributes did was essentally take faith and break it down towards more passive luck and active fortune. Split it into an earthly and heavenly side, luck adding chances and fortune wages. Luck was will - or just like it. Fortune was work - and definitely more than a little connected. Wages are earned.

Will and work together made faith, but they were like the foundation and roof of a building, where faith was the whole and greater.

Faith in unknowns; we will mock the person in a raincoat when the the sun is out, until it rains, like we will mock others for believing things we have not known or become aware of. But don't we also have to have faith that the things we are taught will be true?

Before we ever start learning, faith is already natural. It is there before we even know the difference between confusion and knowledge. We're all able to have faith in given things we observe routinely, things we are often conscious of but seldom need to be made aware of. The sun will rise and fall, seasons come and go in with more of times passage than the lone day, things will be the same overall and general yet change.

We'll live and breathe, stand and work, cultivate development and direct involvement, all until we die we'll do this faithful to ourselves if nothing else. That lowest selfish faith will still guide towards selfless sharing of our self and the world more often than not. The average person will not want to see those they love in peril. The more selfless will not want to see those they care for all, any, even discomforted.

The selfish won't want to see themself bothered by either, not even lending a little time besides anything they've had to work to gain, but their faith that they can make up for what they'll view as the selfishness of others taking from them will still serve all justly.

Those too selfless to care for themselves are sinful, too greedy for selflessness, too proud in their humility. The world and people in it need them to survive and prosper, but they cut themselves off from it beyond realistic thresholds.

Everyone knows the sins of the selfish, but while the selfish know their virtues, the selfless are blind to them. There is always a balance to be mindful of. It might be good to help others in need, but it wasn't good or righteous to throw away everything and let yourself or your family starve.

Anyone selfish enough they'd let a selfless person do such, or any selfless enough they'd let a selfish person do such, there was a reason both were doomed to die. Neither was enough alone to live on.

Virtuous intents could become sins, as easily as sinful ones could become virtues.

But that might makes right line was ever bullshit. I knew nothing was going to be like that here presently, and even though I would have to face that lie for awhile, I wasn't going to tell myself that there was anything right about having to be that way to survive. This wasn't life. It wasn't even any sort of combat zone.

It was a god-damn free-for-all.

Not long after barely surviving getting out if this rough and murky brackish blackwater river, deep in one of the smaller dark hearts of a forrest with a canopy so high it should've never been so shadowed if not for the flora and fauna top to bottom, I barely had scraped myself against the flow of the river to grip exposed roots hardy enough to support my sudden grip.

I'd torn plenty of such root systems free in my struggles along the way, this was not just a wet season but one in what looked like the midst of a heavy torrential downpour, while noon in the day it was so dark with clouds there was no real way to have seen the moment I went into the murky and already blackwater that had carried me along like a mere flotation device.

The moment I'd had a grip of a trees roots, it had still taken a lot of effort to pull my feet away from the streaming water though I'd been closer to the shallows of the shore. My ankles had been just beyond a low area where the water was forcing itself down and back up, besides running along the surface, and ricocheting forces away from a stump that sat just beyond my toes reach.

The way that all made the water pull at me, I was being dragged back out away from the shore towards the deeper center of the river, besides pulled downstream and away from the roots I was struggling to pull myself not just towards the shore but the surface of the river for a breath.

As if by will, after a few moments the water had calmed along with me, just as I decided I had to take my chances there or else maybe never get the opportunity to breach water again into the air.

Both pulling up and towards this goal, I presently surfaced and my chest had reached the shore, but oddly the rivers flow had seemed to stall neutral for a moment.

I hadn't wasted it - but I did wonder - what the hell had completely diverted the river for a moment? What stalled a river? I was up on the shore, just thinking how whatever the force was it had felt gengle, when I pulled my left foot last out of the shifting river tide I felt with said foot and saw change again about the same time.

It had not been going downriver, at all.

It had been going upriver.

The nearby ocean and winds were surging up over and contesting with this river in territorial dispute, and when I looked back out towards the open ocean not even a mile on and visible by its own ever rolling tide, my eyes weren't there long on the ocean more detectable by smell than sight as the wind and tide surges shifted together, before the river attracted them once more.

It seemed that the lightning wanted to surge too just then, for more than a dozen seconds it seemed chain lightning was going to weave together a net across the whole sky, but completely abandoned the idea halfway through as the air decided it was having none of that. Spurned, bolts began falling like rain, humbled by the air this lightning crashed with pride broken yet not content to vain efforts in any endeavor as the air.

Wrath would become the path, if pride was to be denied.

Fire jumped in moments after, flaring up against water and feeding upon air where lightning had failed, and as if this was a sign of lightning and fire taking their sides together, the air and water started their own alliance in defense of these hostile actions.

The fire fed on air while the rain fought to try and staunch it, but the heat from this fire would only accelerate what was happening overhead to prepare the energy for lightning strikes in the first place, friction between molecules as the forces of air and temeperature were contending, creating static energy that eventually superceded some threshold.

Increasing temperatures and adding heavier gases in the air, that was going to create a bigger war, and these sides were only beginning to start their acts of attrition.

Air tried to flee from fire, only to be chased away, and while water slowed it the air allowed it to spread everywhere there was fuel. There is a lot of fuel in a forrest, obviously, but an over saturated jungle in the middle of a hurricane doesn't burn easily. Besides being choked with vegetation and moisture, at worst only small areas would burn.

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Except it did not all strike in the jungle, where it would have been choked and drowned easily except for the occasional dry patch of dead trees it had lit up, but an area out of sight. It was not so far away I could not hear and feel crashing in the ground, not the type associated with thunder at all, but rumblings beneath the ground as if it had awoken some huge force or being in the ground itself.

In all the light of that lightning and with all this occuring so fast, I'd seen the contents of the river which had been floating like me rise up, at least for the seconds that so much had. Not just the plentiful green and dead leaves, twigs and branches, not those typical clutters. Fish, amphibians, small mammals and birds, moderate sized reptiles and monkeys, even a few apes and large fish and crocodiles, but there were dead huge victims claimed too.

Hippopotami, dinosaur looking ocean-gavial, an adolescent gargantula, a dead shark I hoped was an adult and hoped was not native to the river but the ocean, and even an adult terrasque laying down halfway into the river and snatching up what came along dead. It didn't seemed concerned with anything else but eating, but I'd thought it was an island before the lightning had lit all up.

I wished it hadn't moved when I could see it, but at least I wasn't on the menu even as an appetizer, anything that big would burn more calories trying to eat and consume you than you were worth.

And at least I had a pretty good idea how completely unideal it was to be in a jungle, naked, especially this jungle in particular.

Thoughts of time, and my last experiences with my family I'd lost in my universe, looking across my experienced then had given me some insight into what I should expect here. I'd just figure out what that was too slow. It wouldn't be soon that I'd realized something else was wrong in this place for me, just not long either.

I was right about one thing in looking at what I thought of as a war between the elements - there was a war going on - but the elemental forces were only along for the ride.

This was the work of magic.

Nothing close to humanoid was wielding it.

The forces were titan.

I couldn't let myself observe them long, but it was then it seeing them my madness returned to save me.

I giggled like a child.

That was about the time huge cargo platforms resembling trains much more than planes barreling through the sky revealed themselves, right after the lightning streams lights were gone, flashing lights from the aerial vehicles pulsed in their consistent frequencies and took their place.

Those small and softer lights were well hidden by the thunderhead of clouds all too high besides low over me. Lightning from higher above persisted everywhere, brighter and more broadly it shone distant and close, yet it was chaotic and flashy where the flashes of the vehicles lighting were constants.

They only were drowned out most of the time, but it was their gradual movement most that caught my eye, and kept my vision on yet more things moving above. Below was not nearly better, nor at my level at the sparsely vegetated mid-ridge between the river and nearby hillside. There was movement everywhere.

But the first of those immense things I noticed dwarfed the terrasque, I saw just after it, right about the time I was thinking how it was at least unfazed.

It wasn't - unfazed - it gobbled choice fats but didn't gorge. When it started up and over the hillside, the gouging it left as it scored through the hills crest with its lower shell had become a new swampy ares with a washout from the top of the outcropping of rock that served like the heart of this hill.

Even as I quickly looked away, I could still see the reflection of it in the short stream the terrasque had left for nature to slowly correct as years refilled that torn earth with sediment and debris - the nearby river would aid in that as would any vegetation killed by the not so minor environmental change - which left me with a way to indirectly observe it.

The ocean pulled at the river a lot more violently when the tidal forces of mostly water took their turn at the tugging, more violent and abrupt, and I knew I would have died to it were I still in the river by that point. Not even a minute by normal standards had passed, for me time seemed to drag as I was physically calm but mentally not close to that state, then it was.

The huge earthen turtle I hadn't noticed as it looked like a vast island off the coast snapped.

In its jaws, a stream of serpentine lightning, both of these beings worthy of being called dragon by their size and reptilian visages. Neither had wings, yet the lightning serpent had struck from the sky, but the terrestrial turtle had gone from grounded to quite shocked with the prize it had.

I can only say their sounding immediately worsened what happened after, and it was much worse to percieve than the earthquakes and skyquakes caused.

I started to move then, sure that now at least certainly the worst was over.

This was a place to die. There was no glory here to be had, nor survival, only death ruled this place alongside chaos. That combination benefitted death and chaos, their working together, one fueling the other so they could never be exhausted or defeated.

The serpent had not lasted long, but it had screamed the worse for it, startling the sky itself to seemingly erupt and crash down all around everything.

The air-pressure changed to a point that the comparison was not as good to say it felt like being under an ocean of weight, not in water, not in any liquid.

It was like another planets atmosphere all at once, forget quakings and deafening sounds, the sky itself seemed to fall. It literally felt like it had crashed down on us, still invisibly, yet the feeling made it feel all too real.

The turtles screams of pain were not long above the water, but at least they had not been so devestating then, the earths quaking had been profound but they'd been more broadly shaking.

Things took a worse turn overall, quickly.

The turtle had dove, then it and the serpent screamed together, just after they were submerged in the ocean. I'd been sprinting inland, already having a fairly good idea what might happen, but praying and wishing to be wrong while I planned to be right anyway. I wanted to doubt, but I couldn't afford to, so I could only listen.

The smell of burning oil had just reached my nose, the titans submerged, the river was being emptied quickly, the terrasque had crested another similar if larger hill on its path away, and the smoke of fire from the swampy area that came into sight on the path the terrasque and I ran finally came into sight.

It all flipped again.

The river surged back with a mix of waters that contested mixing, lightning struck the same area with far more explosive results, the screaming was more intense local earthquakes resonating with the turtle, the serpents death throes and scream drew blood from most orifices as it floored me to slip down the other side of the hill.

The river sounded just like the ocean, surging like a wave instead of rushing.

The sky felt and sounded like the earth, heavy and solid.

The earth moved and felt like as it vibrated and loosened, even the rocks beneath me crumbled, and the feel of earth becoming like air as weightless as it seemed to become was the most unnerving.

The rain had already stung, but between the increased localized air-pressure and the now more localized shaking of the rain itself as it fell due to the turtles deeper sounding, the rain was actually penetrating for a few moments - the moments just after it sounded but not exactly as they seemed to be heard - until the sound of both were quieted.

Subsequent groans of the turtle became more quiet, but that low pained groan had went on in the distance as if for minutes, all the while immense flashes of light had been cast up from out of the nearby grey-blue waters as if a blue suns light shone up from within them.

They were gone in seconds, that had been the serpents final act along with its last sound, but the turtles feast had not exactly calmed the earth after.

I'd run on and on, never intending to stop heading for inland and higher ground, then on crossing the tributary coming down a particularly higher gorge running towards the type of ground I was looking revealed more.

The river was burning, but even this tributary had a stream of increasingly thicker burning oil the closer you were to it, but the high water volume was not exactly pushing the oil out and away. The oil was stuck in the river, but not limited to its surface about the time the first tidal wave started.

The oil would quickly be pushed into the jungle, where the fire finally found purchases, and those first few clearings of burned trees spread from earlier fires created room for the new fires to breathe better. They had better fuel, that would burn hotter, and it was still gushing and pouring up from somewhere. Then, the jungle started to burn.

As I wondered what next, certain this was it, madness came again as I looked to the sky.

I couldn't go up too far, the smoke was choking the higher I went, but staying low I was exposed to plenty of that besides encroaching tidal waves and the immense blankets of rolling and smothering heat from the fire. The heat felt like it was going to kill me before the toxic fumes of the smoke could, which was more natural in deaths due to fires outside.

If you were going to die in a fire, it was quicker inside where lack of oxygen and plentiful toxins would make quick work, but outside you could breathe and it was slow. Here with so much moisture contending with the fire, burning oil spreading everywhere and saturating all to burn more, a death to fire qould be excruciating.

But not more painful than surviving it and living to deal with plenty of deep burns all over you. There was plenty of water to put yourself out, but little of it deep enough to do so where I was, and that would mean subjecting oneself to burning elsewhere to try and put flame out where it currently burned.

How do you put out fire when you can't drop and roll?

I could only think of one answer, the solution to all problems, the golden pass to undo any failure and snatch success from the enemies mouth. Outrun that trouble you can't outfight. Only the idiots would have swam for the turtle, those beautiful bastards were those types who'd be enraptured by any devil calling itself god, the same way they'd think they were doing the work of god trying to kill it.

Leave fools unto their folly. Don't try to discourage them, lest they think themselves wise, and think you are trying to mislead them.

Anyone who thinks you have to be more sane to face behemoths like that and fight them, nope, it's just stupidity.

Even the insane had sense enough to run from that, take me as witness, slogging through a burning river with my ankles burned and my thighs blackened with soot to clamber up on the first steppe of a low mountain. Still running away when the fire and water was no longer a threat, having nothing to treat my wounds and knowing they were at least burned sterile.

I'd have taken off my pants to put my socks and shoes inside, even if I'd had them in the situation I had been in burning as I ran through the waters, at least to use again later and serve as bandages for my wounds. But I had come naked, at least I did not have to worry about foreign materials burned into my skin. Infections; More of a hazard than the fire, afterwards, and so any minimal protection would have meant nothing.

It was good to have arrived naked, stopping to pull off clothes would have been bad, there was no way that many would have survived what I just had. The impulse to run while burning, instead of climb away from it for immediate relief, that was the hardest thing I'd ever had to do. A lone, or some loose trees, they would very well have preserved me short-term.

At a certain point it had been going too far above and beyond, up high there had been too little threats to need to keep moving as I had, but there was too much risk in being near all that smoke and potential to have to fall out of a burning tree or be forced to jump later as another one fell your way while burning.

Smoke inhalation, being chased by heat and smoke of fire, besides chased by oil upwards spreading the flames everywhere.. I wasn't going to let myself risk weakening more long-term by being clogged up with carbon gases, it was better to struggle along and push ahead through the minute of scattered oil before it thickened.

Those things I had noticed that made it worse after was what I saw in the sky when I'd looked up wondering what was next, countless parachutes and flares, as well there was more than one luminescent gas scattering off into the dark noon-sky where larger things were falling. Even the vehicles and their heavy-duty chutes were not falling straight, more than one jeep and most light vehicle landed on their sides.

The clearing I made it to an hour after I touched down, I spent over an hour in, gathering all into one cluster. It didn't take me long to figure this for what it was, or utilize those vehicles towards their centralized inclination. I'd stacked all approximal cargoes into the larger vehicles, or chained them to drag quickly to that fixed area.

Each of the larger vehicles had been outfitted with chains, and some winches, but there were only a few particular air-drops of interest. One two-ton truck, a singular on-off road bike, the lone and unique shaped vehicles as well as more than a few formed boxes. As I went, I had more carefully narrowed down what I was doing.

I left the light-vehicles, ignored food or medicine.

Fuel, ammo, and weapons were my targets. Those were more critical for my designs. I did not try to gather everything, mostly because these had not been all of those sky-trains cargo, I was aiming to be moving on as fast as possible. Piss on everything you can't use or take for yourself, that's war, and you never try to minimize sabotage unless obvious efforts would be wasted.

There was no need for stealth when you had speed.

The bulk of the fuel, ammo, weapons, and vehicles that could carry more than a few people with light cargo, they weren't going to be serving me. It was better they served noone. I'd put all the excess ammo crates over the fuel drums, the weapons at the top, all the excess was put on the center of the vehicles mass.

I'd literally parked them all so close together in a circle around the freaking tank that was dropped, that I had to get out of the last jeep through the top hatch. It like the others had ammo inside it, in each I'd grabbed out certain miscellaneous kits in the trunks and consoles, but all the ammo and fuel they were filled with was plentiful enough I wouldn't need to spread out the fireworks.

A single grenade and a spool of electrical wire served as my makeshift detonator, because I wasn't going to load up a weapon then nor try to shoot the oil drums to start the explosion. That wasn't just more time consuming, it might not have worked and just spread vapors everywhere until some friction or spark started.

A grenade left centered and with its pin hooked to wire I'd found, that I'd left primed and hooked to the spool of wire I was going to carefully unwind and hook to the back of the two-ton. This had taken hours to set up, time in which I was constantly ignoring any worry over others arriving, as the first one I'd seen had keeled over from burns and gone deep into shock.

He hadn't even looked at me at all, just the golden light of the smoke that had been choked down to fumes, the light from the gas out of one of the odd signal-grenades which had nearly burned out before he did.

I was about three-hundred meters away from the mass of mayhem I'd constructed and heading towards it, when I looked up and saw two things that turned me around immediately. A man was clambering up into the hatch of the first jeep I'd pulled up the most carefully, the one I'd parked had not been as alligned, and though it had the most room at the doors and the hatch was locked he had gone to the top.

It was a big mistake for both of us.

That had been the jeep I left the spool sitting on, the one connected to a grenade at the heart of my saboteurs efforts, but it was a quake and not the man who shook the spool to tip and roll over the vehicle before falling. It had not pulled the pin free, but when he got in and started driving it away from the mass, the weight of the spool and tension increased on the wire pulling the pin would do my job.

Twenty seconds later, we cranked the engines at the same time, and then a few seconds later we shared one more experience. The ass of the two-ton was picked up a teeny bit by the blast, a bit over nine-hundred feet away, but it was hardly fair to compare it to the jeep being sent catapaulting ass frontwards for a few flips.

I felt the air outside the truck lurch ahead as it resisted, but the whistling wind had tried to pluck me out, if it had only been a strong sensation of a mere moment that never could have ripped even a smaller individual out from my postion and distance from the explosive. It was still an experience I noted, wondering what it had been like for the other, the man probably killed by kinetic energy rather than any shrapnel or heat of the blast.

Shaken to death, in essence, all in a fraction of a second.

The rain had just lessened, but had gone black and sooty in the next minutes I drove. I let the truck coast in neutral slowly down a shallow but long hill with a low gradient, whilst changing. Jungles were no place to be wet too long, so I dried with a towel and put on clothes from a bag I'd found. It was set to my measurements, as far as the suit went, although there were multiple sized underclothes.

The trucks console had a real treat inside.

There was a thermos of blistering hot coffee that was plenty strong, a stout cigar, and a reconstituted powder breakfast that was steaming. Also there was a handgun. Blackened, suppressed, decked out but nobody had fucked up the perfectly good iron-sights with bullshit it didn't need. Glow-sights were great, until someone else saw yours, thanking you for the assisted-suicide you killed yourself with as they pulled their trigger.

There was no crossing the bridge at the bottom in this truck, even if it hadn't been burning.

I put the truck in first gear to cross the stream, sweeping the truck out wide to the right in order to cross diagonally, as putting the truck straight in a slope that curved down towards and away from the muddy body of water would be foolish. That would subject less tires to have traction when trying to go back uphill, and though the vehicle would seem to lean more dangerously, there were no obstructions to upend it and the opposing grade wasn't bad.

It was almost still too much, the truck was heavy and loaded besides, but it had plenty of power and clearance besides superb tires for any terrain. It was built for worse than I was ever going to put it through, and even if i had never been in any sort of military or around such a vehicle, I had spent some minor time off-roading on dirt-bikes as a kid.

It wasn't too different, if the variables were insanely and drastically increased along with the major differences, the truck skidded and had slid as it bucked itself jerking along up the hill. I didn't know whether that was more rough on the gears as I thought or the transmission, but the gears were still grinding after a little clattering, and I still had every forwards gear.

I'd be thinking of burning much of the rest, truck and a lot of else, just a full week later. There was a single bridge heading inland more from lower lying lands outward, but the area was naturally swampy everywhere around the bridge for every mile in sight of a nearby mountains clearing, I saw as I passed that way towards it.

The oceans swells had not just backed up the rivers along with the rains, they'd encroached to keep pushing inwards even the week later, and only the first signs of it receding started. The rain was much lighter, yet all the sootier, and that I assumed to mean the fire was as pervasive or more than the surrounding rain clouds. At night it was more visible the more the rain thinned.

They disappeared together behind me from sight, that day, and I chose to take what I could in the bike. It had a trailer, and small as it was, the big bike could pull more weight than eyes gave clear credit to. Two fuel drums and a water drum, three fifty-gallon containers, those still left room for a few rubberized duffel bags and other containers.

Mostly food and medicine, but plenty of ammo, particularly explosives. Other equipment, hardware, tools, supplies and materials, not all of it likely to be useful were swapped from the truck to the bike. I literally scuttled the truck, after blowing the fuel and supplies I had sorted through, the vehicle idled to end up half on and off the bridge I started on.

It landed with its ass jutting out to block the better half of the bridges mouth, but that meant little in truth, I'd only left other small vehicles like four-wheelers and dune-buggies. The buggies would be shit here, they were not outfitted with mud-tires but sand-tires. They could have been more ideal here for roads, clearings, and hills. They weren't equipped to do so.

I'd looked at the tire profiles, and while I was sure there would be proper tires in some of the miscellaneous crates that had dropped, I knew that a bike could fit and navigate places a buggy couldn't. For a lone individual in a jungle setting, a bikes lean and mean profile with higher fuel efficiency were perfect, and that had been before I found two other tire sets.

The more odd were bloated and their treads seemed paddled, so I took them to be for places where the soil was muddy everywhere, and the other set was clearly a set for sand as the larger pattern to them was cupped with minor cleated points extending out even beyond the cups that crossed the tires horizontally. Vertically, cleats ran, interspersed between them.

I was pretty sure I was going to die on my birthday that day.

Beyond the bridge two days later, just as I'd touched the road crossing ahead of the road, not connected to bridge at all by othet than sandy gravel, what I'd sensed squeamishly looked like an intersection by what was built around the area besides an ungodly amush zone became just that for a moment.

I was afraid of other players in my mind for only the smallest moment, remembering old habits I'd had for a short time again besides early in my long life, that fear of being camped that comes only when a faster enemy has somehow gotten ahead of you despite every percieved advanage.

I forgot that there were other potential factors.

It was likely as much of a show as a game all along, and the closing off of my area by swarming trucks and a few near silent and small anti-personnel 'copters, when that happened instead of gunfire I was at least sure there had to be some group running things here with some type of laws and rules.

I wished for the truck just then, anyway I would have had armor around me besides mobility, although I was not at risk I could have put them at risk then.

My right hand was on a loaded breach fed grenade launcher, my eyes on one of the helicopters elevated over a particularly large grouping of vehicles and personnel, and my mind was on the trap setup I'd rigged the bike with. The throttle needed only be pulled back by a section of cord and fastened to a headless nail I'd pinned.

That would send it driving into the opposing sides nearest and largest cluster, where the C4 charge could then be detonated from inside the trailer. I could fake like I lost control of the bike, direct it the one way, blow it when it neared their vehicles and then try to lift the launcher towards the chopper. It wouldn't work if just one was discplined, but I was going to shake up any discipline pretty hard, and if I got the chopper..

Then there'd be time to put distance and a system of shooting and retreating up, I'd have to drop the other aeial menaces before they wisened up and increased elevation fast, since the launcher had a limited range with an atrocious arc it would follow.

They started to yell something and spooked me into action I was not seeking.

The bike went, I stumbled and struggled as if confused by the event, but the ideal chopper seemed to start to move and caught the only projectile fired in this exchange. Not a second later, all went black, and I was surprised to wake up having been dragged off the road but put beside my bike unmolested. I padded myself down to check for movement and injury I wished I had a moment.

I just wondered if I'd been spared whole to die worse, for a moment, when answers came.

"You're too bold for our good. Name's Savanah. Your partner. We were first and furthest so they paired us, but everyone else who survived is already in a group of four, we'll only get that privilege when we make it to the next sector but odds are the two on the other side die. They say that, and it might be true, but that just means that they told the other group we would likely die. I think.

They did say our chances were not bad for what happen next, but I'm not sure if I trust these people."

"Survived - so then we were already part of a game before we knew it?"

She nodded. Savanah might as well be a he though, not that she wasn't an average feminine specimen, but she bore no signs of feminism.

She was in my face without any hesitation or sense of discomfort, but had no air of any type of combatant.

She wasn't the least bothered, she only looked excited to the point that it was no longer plainly written even as she had recently engraved excitation into her soul. It was wearing on her, but somehow she had never been taxed by what now ate at her, she was not able to realize what she had recently become an addict of.

Most of all she didn't care that she was burned badly ankle to mid-thigh and naked, whether I responded or not as she looked everywhere but at me while focused only upon me, and she didn't care at all that we were upwind from where half a hundred men at least and a dozen vehicles were screened out of whatever this operation was.

She was in guard-mode, my sleeping sentinel, an apocalypse angel.

'Not true-love, again? Fuck-off, heart, take this shit more seriously. We can never, ever be far enough away from those things for love again. What about terrestrial-turtle? Huh? How about that sky-serpent, though? The spirit of earth just killed the spirit of lightning, of course you're desperate, but any teenage girl this crazy? Not happening.'

"Good shot. Everyone was impressed except the ones who were too messed up. If you hadn't shot that helicopter before you could detonate the load, you would have taken out most of two small companies by yourself in two successive motions. Their aircraft were not armed with lethal munitions, just tranquilizing emitters that don't use darts at all.

"They fired fluid into you somehow through the air, using one of those weapon looking platforms set on either side of them. I don't know what it was, any of it, but you went down hard and heavy only a few minutes ago. I had to drag you away from the flames, but you were choking on fumes a little when I got to you.

"The captain I was riding with put his hand on my shoulder and said to ride this thing out on your back. His choice of words were coat-tails, but no matter, that. I bring it up because I'm not as useless as he thinks, I can use a rifle as good as any soldier."

"Without a scope? I only found and I'm not keen on sharing either, they're too much of an asset to lost or be damaged." Her head lowered, and her eyes really went into mine for the first time, but the look on her face was distraught and lost. "I could really benefit our chances to survive with either. I'm not asking for the better magnification here.

"Just for a rifle, or semi-automatic I can use with one."

"When we find more, they're yours. I will gladly hand you the other rifle I have, in a pinch, but I'd prefer if you used a shotgun. There was a lot of shit-shotguns, canister and clip fed numbers, but I kept an over-and-under double-barrel and an even older looking pump-action."

She popped the hatch to the trailer, inspected, an pulled out the weapons whilst naming their models and makes distinctly. "Good brands, both will shoot solid-slugs and magnum-shot, but I can't believe you're leaving me use of the shotguns." She said implicating her gender and smaller stature.

Then she pulled out the other weapons and to my annoyance, made me fall deeper.

"A.. but.. these would be illegal for us normally, because of the suppressors. A jungle-carbine. Are there - there are - clips and magazines. Hard to believe it's a .308, it seems so sleek, but it's more solid than it looks. Is that-?" She tore out the next weapon.

"Ah. An A2, this M16 is my favorite, and it's a polymer coated composite. Why would you have the laser-sight on it? There's an under-barrel M203 system affixed on, and toggle-fire, you shouldn't need to worry about close-range at all. And this one has a sight."

"Hybrid-sighting, it's set up for four-times magnification with night-vision-imaging and thermal four-times magnification. The laser-sight is infra-red, so it can't be seen by the naked eye, just the sight and the goggles packed at the back. I can line up shots through all the smoke-grenades I brought as well, or at night, unseen. The suppressor will minimize sound and flashes of firing."

She already had the same idea by the time I said IR laser-sight, only showing any interest or attention after at smoke-grenades.

"F- fuck." She said, through clenched teeth and brows, eyes too soft for either of our good after. My eyes widened and I turned them quick, before I saw her anymore attracted. Thank goodness she had fallen for the gun.

"You should, uh, keep that one. I'm partial to the variable scope on the carbine, and older weapons. Bolt-actions and shotguns, or a handgun, I can use and take care of. To be honest I've never owned or operated a semi-automatic rifle of any type. I was at a loss with them.

"I mean, do you clean the god-damn clips too? That'll eat through clean cloths, picking them up to refill after use, it's muddy as hell here. Anyway the sights aren't dialed or adjusted, we should find a decent place to test fire and adjust them." She'd beamed over the gun and blushed admiring it, just brushing it, feeling the weight of it and the triggers threshold while safetied.

'Fool, quit being more sexy than the gun, and stop loving it in front of me.'

"Oh. Sorry."

"Oh shit - I didn't say that out loud, did I?" I panicked.

"Yeah. You mean-." She started abruptly, both perplexed and looking as if to admit to a fault.

"What can I say. You're fire, holding fuel, so if you're hotter holding onto that - I guess I have to speak my mind."

"What? I heard you say 'oh shit', but you were mocking me in your head?" She cradled the rifle a little too careful in my opinion, for that russian accent partially, but mostly for being a potentially somehow scorned young teenage girl with a fully-automatic-toggled firearm.

'Please stop thumbing that safety.' I thought, hands not close to any weapon, and heart willing against it beyond my understanding. Girl or not, threats had to be put down, I'd yet to kill any female, but I knew I wasn't beyond that either. One was as dangerous as the other, and for me, I had to be more careful with women.

'Screw it.'

"Well I didn't say you were cute with it or anything. But it is, a little, only the gun is probably more cute than you. At least, you are more sexy than it is." She looked fixated on me, as if resolved, fingers twitching and skin clamming slightly. I was never so sure I was being weighed. It had been a long time since I knew I could be either being hated or loved, but have no idea which way it was leaning towards.

I felt more trapped than at that intersection area before.

"I can't tell if you're alright, but you seem like it." She said, undecided as I felt. Then she loosened up and seemed to joke. Maybe she joked? I could only be skeptic.

"But your choice in pistol, terrible. I'm sorry, but a brick? They belong in a building. A mark twenty-three, huh? What, you know someone in special-forces, or was it from that game?"

"You got me. I'm just another FPS otaku, trying not to start looking at other civilians like zombies, when bam. Here I was."

"You serious?" She inquired with a little interest.

"Totally. I've barely fired weapons, certainly today was the first time I shot to kill. One shot, and I'm up at least twenty, not a bad KBR."

"Yeah.. except you're actually negative, one, since you only killed non-combatants we shouldn't actually count it."