Crowds of refugees hurried through the great shimmering gate that stood in Times Square, one of twenty-seven constructed around the world. In the distance, the hordes of creatures made of flame and darkness left barren, ashen land behind them as they approached one of the final fortresses of humanity. This same picture could be seen in Kyoto, London, Dubai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, Paris, Berlin, Moscow… the list went on. Wherever a nation managed to scrabble together the resources to construct one of the dimensional gates and outlast the initial waves, the last of humanity desperately scrambled through the gates, taking what resources and technology they could into the new world.

Several miles away, sitting upon the twisted barrel of a ruined tank, a young woman with blonde hair and green eyes, her features marred by scars beyond number, watched the approaching horde. A sword, of all things, was sheathed across her back, and her armor was made up of ceramic plate made to shed the fiery blows of the creatures approaching.

There was no despair in her eyes, only resignation and a faint desire to see things end. Hers were the eyes of one who had seen too much, experienced too much to continue to live but was unwilling to fall dead with her back turned to her enemies.

Four men sat on the edges of the tank, smoking their last cigars as they cleaned their own weapons, an eclectic mix of melee weapons that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Renaissance Faire. Guns, cannons, bombs, and even lasers had proved useless against the invaders. Only melee weapons and special techniques wielded by the very few with the talent had ever had any effect, and even most of those had fallen in the twenty-nine years since the disaster began.

“Looks like the scientists were right. As soon as they opened the gates, the Smears figured out what was going on. The chameleon fields and life energy dampeners don’t do shit anymore,” The youngest of the men, looking to be in his early thirties said, spitting saliva turned black by the chewing tobacco under his tongue into the lifeless dust beside his foot.

‘Smears’ was one of the many names given to the invaders, though the official term was Outsiders, due to their origins. Wherever they passed, the rules of reality were overwritten with the rules of another dimension, corrupting everything that survived their passing, eventually turning the few survivors into more of their kind. The black and red ‘smears’ that first appeared on the skin of those corrupted were where the name came from.

“I wonder how long it will take the sheep to figure out that they were probably better off committing suicide than going along with Plan B?” A man with nearly identical features, save that his hair was white as bone, said from the other side of the tank, a yellow-toothed grin splitting his features. His eyes glinted with sadistic joy and hate that he directed at those escaping through the gates.

“Given how much you hate the ‘sheep’, I’m surprised you volunteered. I would have thought you would want to go around killing the herders once they arrived in the new world,” The third man, sitting on the rear end of the tank and sipping from a bottle of bourbon said, his lips twisted into a faint imitation of a smile that was matched by the empty nihilism in his black eyes.

“I ain’t young enough to bother. I’m almost ninety years old, and even with the enhancements and my cultivation, I’ll only last a few more years before cancer takes me,” The oldest of them spat, irritation causing him to put his hand on the haft of the giant axe clipped to the back of his armor.

“You two are peas in a pod. Enough hate to kill a world between you,” The last man, a middle-aged man with sunburned leathery skin, yellow eyes, and vaguely Asian features said, caressing the hilt of one of his twin katanas with his right hand.

Though they were bickering with one another, the four men’s true attention was focused on the woman, who was younger than them all but had suffered more than all of them combined. Beneath her armor were the scars of a decade of experiments in human modification, her organs were rotting within her from forced exposure to enhancement serums, and her cultivation was only barely keeping her body from just giving out on her.

Like all of those who had been a part of Plan A (as opposed to the gates created for Plan B), they were only barely alive. The discovery that those who practiced cultivation – as limited as it was in Earth’s chi-starved environment – could damage the enemy by channeling their chi through their weapons had resulted in a rabid hunt for those with the potential, who were immediately trained and ‘enhanced’ as far as modern science could do so.

Unfortunately, none of the researchers involved with Plan A were interested in ethics or humane treatment of their test subjects, so most of them had died in one way or another over the past few years. Those that were still alive were living with a countdown toward an inevitably agonizing death as their body cannibalized itself to gain even one more second of continuing existence.

“Things won’t go the way the ‘herders’ think they will,” She said lifelessly. For most people, it would have been difficult to think much less speak with the agony she felt for every moment she continued to breathe. Her lungs were continually breaking down only to be repaired a moment later as the nanomachines and her cultivation repaired them. She frequently lost the ability to breathe, and the sensation of drowning in her own body fluids had become all-too-familiar to her over the past few years.

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“Why’d you think that?” The oldest of their group asked curiously, his eyes glinting as he found something he might find amusing.

“I left a legacy with the children at that dojo. They won’t be able to use it until they pass through, but it will be a disaster for the herders down the road,” She said, a faint twitch of her lips showing her attempt at a smile.

“… so that’s why you look like shit. How much of you is left?” The old man asked, looking at her pityingly. For an Earth-born cultivator to create a legacy, no matter how limited it would be, would require the sacrifice of a large portion of their soul. It was amazing she could even sit up and speak, given how bad a shape her soul and body had to be.

“Maybe a sliver? I can barely feel my own pain right now. I probably would have died yesterday if I hadn’t shoved that pacemaker I bought on the black market into my chest,” She replied, her emotions hardly budging.

“… can you fight?” The younger version of the old man asked quietly.

“No. There is nothing left. I’m only here with you because I didn’t want to leave you guys alone,” She said simply.

The Samurai, as he was called by the others sighed deeply, “If you can’t fight… then I’m not going to let them have you.”

His right hand sword thrust between the plates on her back, puncturing her heart from behind. She simply smiled as the last flicker of her life was extinguished, her body sloughing away as the last of the power she was using to maintain herself was lost.

“You couldn’t have waited a little more?” The old man asked, looking a bit angry, though not as angry as one might have anticipated given his obvious feelings for the girl.

“She has already suffered too much. I won’t have her be claimed by the Smears,” The Samurai said flatly.

The Berserker (the old man’s code name) spat again before pulling himself to his feet with a grunt, “I get where you are coming from, Samurai… I just had to say it.”

The Samurai shook his head, as if to say he held no hard feelings.

The Sorcerer, the man with the nihilistic black eyes, looked on the pool of blackening ooze that had once been a companion with a faint aura of sorrow. Of all of them, he had been the most dependent on her to maintain his sanity in a world that had mostly lost it. If it weren’t for her, he would have long ago gone on a rampage to destroy as much as he could before he died.

The Hacker, the younger version of the Berserker, twisted his lips bitterly and spit out his wad and cigar together.

“She probably had the right idea. Wish I thought of it,” He said. To create a legacy was to pass down one’s cultivation and combat techniques, as well as a portion of one’s insights, however meagre, into the nature of the universe. In any other world, cultivators at their level would never have done such a thing, as not one of them was beyond the Gathering phase.

However, given that knowledge of cultivation methods had become completely restricted knowledge almost immediately after Plan B was put into motion, it only made sense to ensure as much of that knowledge got into non-government hands as possible. Especially for people who hated that government as much as they did.

“Well, I guess all we are good for is dying gloriously in battle while the sheeple get fucked over by the herders,” The Berserker said in a tone that was not quite bitter or sarcastic. Given the kind of crap they’d suffered through at the hands of the ‘sheep’ over the years, it was hard for him to care one way or the other about those making their escape.

“It could be worse. We could have been one of the poor fools who agreed to ‘guard the refugees’ and have the pleasure of rotting away while seeing the sheeple figure out they are fucked,” The Sorcerer said grimly.

In truth, there was no need for a rearguard. It wasn’t like there were enough of them left alive after twenty-nine years of one-sided conflict to even hold the creatures off for a few minutes. Those whose symptoms were relatively light (those with weak or moderate talent for cultivation) had been given the dubious ‘honor’ of bodyguarding the herders and the more valuable sheep. Even though their symptoms weren’t as bad as the rearguard’s, they still mostly only had one or two good years left before the agony of their organs going necrotic as their enhanced constitutions and the nanomachines repaired what damage they could drove them mad.

“Well, at least we made sure the Plan A assholes got what was coming to them,” The Hacker said with a cruel laugh.

Just a few days before, they’d quietly raided the base where the Plan A researchers and their files were hidden in preparation for the evacuation and slaughtered them before blowing the entire place up with a mini-nuke the Hacker had stolen from the armory. There was no chance of the destructive serums and enhancement surgeries they had suffered making their way to the new world, as their ‘partners’ in countries around the world had reported success in doing the same.

“You think the brats from the dojo will be able to use her legacy?” The Sorcerer asked the Samurai suddenly.

The Samurai played with the hilt of his katana for a few moments before nodding slowly, “Those kids idolized her. They’ll either take it up themselves or find someone to do so. It sucks for us that we didn’t think to do the same thing, but at least the Witch will leave something behind.”

“Heh, who would have thought the one everyone else thought was the most cold-blooded of our number was the one with the softest heart?” The Berserker said, chuckling.

His grandson shrugged and drew the broad-bladed shortsword he got his name from and smiled lightly, looking like a burden had been lifted from his shoulder. A smile that was somehow joyful and full of endless regret appeared on his face, making him look much younger than his thirty-something years of existence, “Well, we might as well put as many Smears out of their misery as possible. It isn’t like I have anything better to do in the last few minutes of my life.”

The others gave each other similar smiles and walked steadily toward the horde in the distance.