I wish I could say that my being transported to another world involved getting hit by a truck.

That's the cliche, right? You're just walking down the street, minding your own business, and bam, you get run over by Truck-Kun, the god of Isekai adventures. Unfortunately, it seems that since I'm not Japanese, and not a manga or anime character, that trope isn't allowed. Neither was God killing me on accident and getting reincarnated on another world with cheat-like superpowers by way of apology. Seriously, either of those would be a whole lot less embarrassing than saying that I was on the toilet and had just finished taking a dump when I got yanked into another world. Story of my life, right there: I try to go to the bathroom, and either someone knocks on my front door, calls my phone, or yeets me through time and space to another world. Admittedly, that last one was new.

But before we get to my unexpected trip, I suppose it would be best to give you an idea of what was going on with my life before I got yanked through a cosmic sphincter. Okay, so here goes. The year was 2020, and shit was not going great. Around mid-April, I lost my job as a Customer Service Representative (CSR) with a Durable Medical Equipment (DME) provider, probably the best job I'd had since getting out of college. What does that mean? Well, for you guys who don't know, that meant that I worked for a company that provided everything from hospital beds to wheelchairs, from oxygen concentrators to nebulizers, and from CPAP machines to non-invasive home ventilators. It sounds dull, but the money was good, the benefits were great, and the job was steady. Now, in addition to having to deal with the general public as the CSR title implies, that job also entailed contacting doctor's offices for the documentation that a patient's insurance required before they'd cover it, processing orders, calling patients to schedule appointments for setups, and resolving held sales (Basically, accounts where due to some error or another, the insurance wasn't covering the equipment we'd provided). At the office I worked, we had three CSRs, including myself, Janet, who was the lead CSR, and Diane, who was the senior CSR with more experience than either of us or both together. I'd only been on this particular job for about three years, and only at this branch for about a year and a half due to having been added to the office due to a merger with another company. A branch covering the region we managed normally only had two CSRs, but I worked hard, got along well enough with my fellow CSRs, the delivery drivers, the account executive, the health specialist, and the manager, and due to a serious backlog left by prior management and the fact that I was familiar with all of the work that came over from the other DME provider I'd come from, our manager Jack was able to convince corporate to keep me on. I'd found my stride at the job, and at the start of 2020, we were meeting quotas and making major headway on Held Sales. Believe me, there was a lot of that: The current branch manager was relatively new, and his predecessor had left a mountain of crap to be dealt with. In the year and a half since I was transferred over, I did my part and helped cut through the nightmarish pile of crap we had to resolve. Near the start of 2020, we were turning the corner, and if the future didn't look bright, it was at least less dim than it was the year before. 2020 was shaping up to be a pretty decent year.

And then the virus hit, followed by the quarantine and the subsequent lockdown.

Since my job made me an essential worker, for about a month I was working under lockdown conditions. Then the call came from corporate: Things were getting tight, so every branch was to put one CSR and one driver on a 90-day temporary layoff. We were exempt from the driver since our senior-most driver had retired a month before, but one CSR had to go on the chopping block. They couldn't give the ax to the lead CSR, naturally, and they couldn't do it to the senior CSR either, since she had more experience in the field than the two other CSRs put together. So, that left yours truly to get the ax. My manager tried to fight it, especially since I'd done a stellar performance in my job, but the command had come from the men at the top, and the manager of our branch could not override it. I decided to be philosophical about it: I'd be able to take unemployment, and they promised to maintain my health benefits for the next 90 days, so things could always be a great deal worse than they are. I wore a mask, engaged in social distancing, disinfected anything that I brought home, washed my hands with soap and water, etc. I played video games, looked up stuff online, tried to exercise and eat healthy since I had pretty much nothing else to do with my time, and just did my best to wait things out.

Three months later, my boss called me and gave me some bad news: Since the pandemic was still ongoing with no sign of stopping, corporate had decided that all temp workers and furloughed employees (including myself) were permanently let go. I was sad about that. The work I did could be challenging and frustrating at times, but it had been a good place to work with good people. Now, due to circumstances beyond my control, I was officially unemployed with no health care to speak of. My boss said he'd call me if something changed, and that he'd be happy to have me back once things returned to normal. Current circumstances being what they were, that wasn't going to be any time soon.

Thankfully, I wasn't going to starve or lose my apartment: Between the CARES Act Unemployment Supplement, the $1600 Stimulus Check, and my income tax refund, I'd managed to get my bills and debts paid, and got a tidy nest egg put together that was sufficient to keep me going for a while, even if I suddenly stopped receiving unemployment for some reason. As long as I wasn't stupid, I'd get by until either the pandemic ended or I could get a new, better job.

Still, it wouldn't do to sit idle for too long. No health insurance meant that anything from a bad tooth to a broken bone could destroy my finances relatively easily. I started looking into jobs in my area that paid the amount that I'd been making previously. Sadly, given the ongoing pandemic, the job market was still pretty garbage in my area. Most jobs that paid what I was previously making, I wasn't qualified for. The places I was qualified to work for weren't hiring due to budget and staffing cuts or weren't able to match my previous salary. Well, it was to be expected: If a company that provides oxygen, nebulizers, and non-invasive home ventilators is struggling to keep afloat during a pandemic, you knew shit was bad all over. Hell, before the layoff the branch I worked at was being flooded with orders since people would go see their doctor thinking that since they had trouble breathing, it must be the virus. Instead, they learned that they had COPD or asthma, and had to be put on oxygen or a nebulizer. Before leaving, I'd had to brief the lead CSR on all the orders I had in the works and what needed to be done to handle them, and it had taken over an hour. We were swamped with work when corporate had decided to drop me, and according to the manager, they were still busy three months later.

Sadly, that's corporate decision-making in a nutshell. People who paint in broad strokes make gigantic mistakes. It's easier to decide to just fire two people in every branch in the country than it is to individually evaluate every branch in the company to see whether employees could be let go without productivity taking a hit.

I couldn't take a job just flipping burgers, though, since that wouldn't be enough to pay my bills, and if something happened and that company tanked, I'd be back on unemployment, and getting less money than before. I'd been living paycheck to paycheck for a long time, and while I was glad to have some money socked away for a rainy day, I had no illusions about how quickly that money could vanish if I didn't play my cards right. So, I'd need to be ready to rejoin the workforce once the pandemic was over, no matter however long that took. Unfortunately, current predictions were saying that was probably going to be all year long.

So, there I sat, all broken-hearted...

Anyway, I'd finished looking over the poor results of my latest job search on my smartphone as I'd taken care of business, and prepared to hoist my pants up and get up. The phone wasn't really needed all that much, but I'd had to have it for my job, and while I'd considered trading it in for a cheaper flip-phone or something, I hadn't quite talked myself into it. DME can break down, and being "on-call" to service equipment for a week every two to three months had meant I had to be available by phone at all times, and I'd needed the GPS function to find the address quickly and easily. It wasn't as complicated as it sounds, since 90% of the time, it was just going in and swapping out the busted unit for a new one, or taking care of the occasional after-hours or weekend hospital discharge. I was able to write off the bill as a business expense for 2019, but unless whatever new job I got required a smartphone, it wasn't really necessary for my everyday life. I could probably save myself quite a bit of money in the long run by trading my phone in, but I kept making up excuses for why I should keep it. Maybe I was still holding out hope that I'd get my old job back and getting a less expensive phone would mean that'd I'd fully given up on that.

Regardless, I needed to go to the grocery store and get some supplies. I knew a relatively small supermarket in town that didn't get crowded, and I could get everything I needed and get out within half an hour. Then, I'd have a relaxing afternoon and evening of gaming. One good thing about the quarantine was that pretty much every game currently available for digital release had gone on sale at one point or another over the last four months, and I'd had more than enough money to be able to fill out my library with excellent games, and even with all the spare time, I'd barely made a dent in my new acquisitions. Anyway, I'd reached down to grab my pants...

And then reality went sideways. At least, that's one way I can describe it. One minute, everything was fine, the next, the world seemed to rotate 90 degrees on an axis centered on my head. Then it shifted again... and again. It's not an easy experience to put into words. Imagine you've got a sock, you stick your hand in and pull it inside out, then swing it around for a bit, then put it right side out and swing it around some more. Now do that for an hour. Now imagine that sometimes the universe is the sock, and sometimes that sock is you, and other times both you and the universe are the sock at the same time. That's what getting sucked through a cosmic space hole and getting crapped out on another world in a completely different universe feels like. If that doesn't make sense to you, just be glad you didn't experience it for yourself. I'm not sure how much of it I was conscious for. Maybe all of it. Maybe none of it. Maybe I just dreamed about it. It doesn't matter. The point is, I was dropped pants down and ass hanging out for all the universe to see someplace I'd never been with no idea how I'd gotten there or how I might get back home, completely unconscious.

Yes, my luck is that terrible sometimes. I'm genuinely shocked that I didn't land in the universe of hentai tentacles just so that my life could reach peak shittiness.

Honestly, the universe doing something like this to me was unfair: As a mildly overweight American male in his late 30s, I didn't fit the profile for sudden isekai-fication. I was in decent enough health for my age, and during my last physical a year ago, the doctor didn't find any major health problems other than the fact that I could afford to lose some weight, and that I might want to cut down on the salty foods since my blood pressure had gone up a bit. I'd noted some hair-loss in the last few years, but given that my grandfather had gone bald before he'd turned twenty-five, I'd known I was living on borrowed time in that regard. Gramps had been married several times despite going bald, so I wasn't that concerned about that. Still, I suppose that with my rotten luck, it would end up being me who won that proverbial golden ticket now instead of when I was 18-25. While most teenagers or college students would think of this as a chance to collect a harem of cute elf girls or something, I was old enough, realistic enough, and self-aware enough to understand that if I was ever sucked into another world, a harem wasn't going to happen unless I gained a really specific set of superpowers and decided to abandon all morals and ethics. That's probably for the best, given that I don't like people all that much. Hilarious, I know, for someone whose job involved interacting with other people daily. Then again, anyone who has ever worked customer service in any industry for any length of time probably hates people with a burning passion and has an incredibly low opinion of human intelligence in general.

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About half an hour earlier, in another world...

"Alright, Princess, tell me what you see."

Getzel rolled her eyes, thankful that her armor hid her expressions from her trainer's sight. Everyone in the Order received a nickname, and Getzel's had come from the fact that she'd been born from a household that was better than most and was distantly related to one of the old royal bloodlines of the old world. That, combined with her good looks and more delicate mannerisms, had given her that rather embarrassing nickname. Striding around in a three-yard tall suit of empowered black armor and being called "Princess" was humiliating on a level she'd never imagined possible. She'd half expected someone to prank her by painting her armor pink and put ribbons and a hennin on it while her back was turned. Hopefully, once she'd made a few achievements in the order, she'd get something a bit more respectable. Admittedly, that was unlikely, since those nicknames tended to be based on personality traits, rather than accomplishments. Case in point, her trainer's nickname was "Bittertongue", and anyone who spoke with her for more than five minutes understood why. The name had stuck so well that no one Getzel had met within the Order seemed to remember what Bittertongue's real name was.

The Guild of Arcanists had sensed a tear in the fabric of reality that indicated either a mystical anomaly or an unregistered portal and had asked the Order of the Rookery to investigate it. Getzel and her mentor had been less than a day's ride away from the spot. They'd approached the location on foot since Getzel's golem-steed wouldn't be ready until her training was fully completed, and Bittetongue's was being repaired due to complications during a patrol she'd completed just before taking on her new apprentice. Bittertongue had not discussed the details, but it would be at least another month before it was fully repaired. Still, empowered armor allowed the wearer to easily move at speeds the fastest flesh and blood horse would struggle to match, so they'd had little trouble reaching the site of the anomaly. They'd been surprised to discover a crudely formed tunnel dug into the side of a mountain, leading to a door. And behind the door...

Getzel looked around the room, still heavy with the greenish, purplish mists that spoke of Old World corruption, and said, "Fairly straightforward, Bittertongue. These guys tried to open a portal to the Old World. They had the misfortune of succeeding and had no protective gear. When it opened, the difference in air pressure caused Old World air to flood the room. Everyone died after their first breath." She blinked a few times, trying to get her eyes to adjust to the color of the air around her. It shouldn't be possible for something to be both purple and green at the same time, and technically, it wasn't. Getzel had been told by one of the tutors her father had hired that the "color" of the Old World was some kind of trick that the mind played on itself, as our eyes actually couldn't perceive the true color of the corruption that had rotted the Old World to the core. Purple and green mixed as one was the best that the mortal mind could do to comprehend "The Colour That Should Not Be", as wizards sometimes referred to it. Rumor had it that if one stared into it for too long, it could drive you mad. Most expeditions into the Old World never lasted more than a day, so there was a very real possibility that was true. If Getzel knew one thing for certain, it was that it made her eyes sting just looking at it.

The chamber itself was dimly lit, the only source being the white light of the glowing open portal in the center of the room. The walls were roughly carved, indicating that someone had used a tunneling spell to make this chamber. Whoever had made this place had cared more for function than looks. There were torch sconces in the walls, although the torches were absent. The room itself was also rather sparse, with no visible furniture. Admittedly, the air from the Old World would have rotted anything made of wood within a day, including the torches and furniture. Now, the only real decorations the room had were the portal, its power supply, and the remains of the ones who'd opened said portal. The dozen or so bodies had been mummified by their exposure to the toxic air coming from the portal, but the looks of shock, horror, and agony were still etched upon their features.

"Not immediately after their first breath," Bittertongue stated, using a recording relic to take images of the room for her report. "A single breath of the air from the Old World will be fatal... eventually. It probably took about fifteen, twenty minutes before they all finally died."

Getzel shuddered, then felt her face flush in embarrassment as the motion set her armor to trembling as well. The tall, imposing, black armor would replicate the movements of the person wearing it, and the mannerisms of a young woman who was only five foot two in heels and likewise fairly thin could look a little silly when mirrored by a nine-foot-tall suit of armor. "I don't understand why, though. Everyone knows that the Blighted Hellscape will kill anyone who steps into it without protection. Even the air is toxic. Why were all of these guys just standing around in normal clothing when they opened the portal?"

Bittertongue stated, bluntly, "Because they're idiots who thought it was all fake."

Getzel, surprised, asked, "What?"

"I didn't stutter," Bittertongue replied, having completed her recording of the room, and had begun studying the portal and its power supply.

"No, I mean-" Getzel began, then cleared her throat and asked, "Could you please explain that better? I don't understand how that's possible."

As Bittertongue continued her examination, she replied, "Fine. I'll give you a quick history lesson. Back before the Final War, a bunch of people left the Aurum and Auric empires because they were smart enough to see that war was inevitable, it was going to be mutually destructive, and it was all going to be for nothing. You remember that much, right?"

Resisting the urge to roll her eyes again, Getzel said, "Of course. Everybody knows that. A lot of the best and brightest of both empires made up those expatriates."

"And their families," Bittertongue added, running her armored hands along the cable connecting the portal to its power supply. "Sadly, their family members weren't always as smart as the one who led them into their self-imposed exile to Norgum. Worse, the Aurum and Auric empires were pretty good at propaganda and indoctrination, good enough that most people were blind to the lies and hypocrisy both empires were built on. While the expatriates might have been smart enough to see through the bullshit of their respective kingdoms, their children sometimes thought that their parents were traitors, fools, or sheep, being misled into abandoning their homes. I can't imagine what they thought the endgame of such a scheme would be, but then, I'm not an idiot." She paused, tracing her fingers over a steel bracket that secured the power conduit to the wall before continuing. "Even after the Final War hit, they still believed in the lies of their homeland, instead of the proof of their own eyes. Between the war and the Final Exodus, a few kids tried to go back home, and once the Blighted Hellscape had their way with them, the... things that they'd become had tried to come back. Afterward, the High Council established a military cordon along the border. They didn't realize back then what was going on, and just assumed that a group of kids had thought that they could turn a quick profit by looting the ruins of the two empires. So, the Expeditionary Guild was formed to search for anything worth keeping, and more importantly, to bring back documented evidence that both empires were absolutely, irrevocably destroyed, and death awaited anyone who tried to go in without protection. Unfortunately, more than a few idiots thought that this was just further proof of some grand conspiracy against the Aurum and Auric empires, even though both no longer existed."

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"But... I don't understand," Getzel interrupted, "How could they... why would they? They thought that, what, the war, and subsequent rush to gather the remaining people of the world was some kind of scheme? That the massive logistical efforts being made were being done for no other reason than to deceive people? That the rapidly toxifying air and water, along with the all of the images taken of the Blighted Hellscape were, what, fake?"

"Exactly," came Bittertongue's immediate reply. At Getzel's shocked posture, the veteran knight gave a humorless chuckle and said, "You underestimate the true depths that stupidity can reach. There's no limit to how far people can delude themselves into thinking that bad ideas are good and good ideas are bad. Those fools had grown up hearing so much propaganda that they believed it was the absolute truth. Anything that contradicted it was a lie. No matter how much people tried to convince them of what was truth and what was a lie, it was impossible to change their minds." After a pause, she added, "There's no cure for stupidity save death. They lacked the ability, or the intelligence, to see past all the bullshit that the empires were spewing every day before the Final War. But once the cordon was established and the Council took steps to prevent anyone from committing 'suicide through stupidity', these Unbelievers, as they came to be called, decided to just bide their time, and when the right moment came, they'd just open up a portal back home and lead their respective Empires to conquer the New World and 'liberate' their fellow countrymen from the terrible tyranny of the High Council." Her sarcasm at that last sentence was so so thick that it could easily be heard even through the armor's voice modulator.

"Wait..." Getzel said, that last part jogging her memory. "I heard about something like that. Back in the early years of colonization, a group of radicals took over one of the portals used by the Expeditionary Guild to explore the ruins of the Old World. They ended up releasing a huge amount of toxic air into the middle of Cradle, killing themselves and dozens of other people before it was contained and stopped." After a moment, she added, "But I thought it was some kind of terrorist attack in protest to the outcome of the last High Council election."

"Sounds a lot nicer than a bunch of idiots getting themselves and everyone around them killed because they were just that divorced from reality, doesn't it? Of course, the other 'Unbelievers' decided that this was all lies and deception as well, so they remained hidden and waited. Sadly, if there is one thing idiots can do well, it's breed. They passed down their bad ideas to their children, and only maybe half of them were smart enough to tell the good from the bad. Thus, stupidity and bad ideas were passed down through the generations as a treasured family heirloom. Regrettably, you'll see a few more scenes like this on the frontier: Cradle and the more settled regions have plenty of ways to find these idiots before their stupidity becomes terminal, but most of the time here on the frontier, all we can do is clean up the mess they've made," the elder knight concluded. After a moment, she put a hand against the portal. The armored gauntlet briefly radiated a blue light as it pulled data from the open gateway. "Hilariously, this portal was set to go straight to the heart of the Aurum Empire." She gave another humorless chuckle at that.

It took Getzel a moment to get the joke. "But, more than half of these guys are clearly of Auric descent..."

Even in their mummified state, many of the corpses around them had the caramel skin and white-blonde hair denoting Auric heritage. A small handful had the darker skin and red hair common in Aurum lineages, and a couple had the combination of features indicating intermarriage between the two bloodlines, something that would relegate them to sub-human status in either empire. There was even a half-elf among their number, whose pointed ears would have spelled immediate execution in the Aurum empire or just extreme prejudice and mistreatment in the Auric empire. There were even a couple of people whose heritage was neither Auric nor Arum, bizarrely enough. If these poor fools had successfully arrived in the Aurum empire, rather than the hellish realm it had become, most of them would have been either killed, imprisoned, or enslaved. The rest who were of Aurum descent would have been considered second- or third-class citizens at best since they weren't born in the Aurum Empire proper and had no family registry. They'd never have been granted the right to own property, hold government office, vote, or even serve in the military as anything other than lowest ranked cannon fodder. The most they'd likely be allowed to do was unskilled manual labor. They'd have only been a single step above slaves in the empire they'd sought to return to.

After a few minutes of silent examination of the power unit, Bittertongue stated, "After six hundred years, a lot of information was lost, including what the old empires considered as a citizen, or even as a human being. They didn't know just how serious 'racial purity' was in the Auric and Aurum empires. It has been centuries since the Exodus, and all these guys had was descriptions that had been passed down from parent to child for generations, and were filtered through propaganda and nostalgia. They weren't told about the racism, about how their empires grew by bloody, merciless conquest and kept their bloodlines 'pure' through genocide, ethnic cleansing, and inquisitions. They weren't told about the millions of innocent people that were slaughtered to pave the way to their 'utopia'. They weren't told about how entire nations were enslaved and worked to death to build the 'wonders' of the great empires. They weren't told about how the two empires would, if unchecked, have conquered the world and purged it of everything and everyone who failed to meet their 'ideal'. They weren't told of that until after their parents had filled their heads with lies, and by then, they just believed the truth was lies and propaganda instead."

"You're... surprisingly well-versed on the topic," Getzel noted.

After a few seconds, Bittertonue said, "Right. You haven't seen me out of armor. Let's just say I've been around long enough to see this stupidity repeated over and over again."

An elf? Maybe a dwarf? Getzel couldn't be sure. It was true that dwarves can live for centuries, and elves for countless millennia, but there weren't that many of either in the Order of the Rookery, as far as she'd heard. Dwarves tended to be very social and outgoing, so they didn't fit well for the extended isolation that came with being a Raven Knight. They tended to work as maintenance staff for the knights' armor and weaponry if anything. Elves might have made a better fit, but most tended to prefer more intellectual pursuits than the rough and tumble lifestyle one found on the frontier. Still, if Bittertongue was of dwarven or elven blood, it might explain why she was so well-versed on the subject... and why she had such a bitter disposition. Getzel had never met an elf or dwarf more than a century old who wasn't more than a little cynical, and the older they got the more cynical they became. If Bittertongue was old enough to have seen dozens of situations like these, it would certainly sour her opinion of people like them, if not humanity in general. Hell, if she was an elf, she could be old enough to have seen the war and the subsequent exodus firsthand.

If that was the case, why wouldn't she think that these 'Unbelievers' were idiots: She'd lived through the history that they insisted never happened.

Getzel remembered an incident back when she was taking classes at the Grand Academy in Cradle. A student who was an avid First World believer was trying to convince the elven teacher that the Old World never existed, that intelligent life had been created by the gods on this world, and that life on this planet was only a few centuries old. The teacher in question was over seven thousand years old and was also a high cleric of Glawros, the god of wisdom. The teacher had calmly listened to the student, and when he was done told the student exactly how old the teacher was, how as an elf he had a perfect recall of literally every event that had happened in his life and how he'd experienced the Exodus firsthand, and then to put the final nail in the coffin, the teacher then performed a miracle to call forth a brief visitation of the entire pantheon to bluntly tell the student that First World belief is wrong, heretical, blasphemous, goes against all the teachings of all of the gods, and is also just outright stupid. The student's reply to the seven thousand-year-old elf and a literal divine revelation from all of the gods in the pantheon telling him he was wrong was "Well, that's just your opinion," and then stated that, since the gods never lie, and the 'gods' that had arrived had said that he was wrong, they were lying and therefore not the gods. The gods had departed with a warning not to set foot in their temples again if he knew what was good for him.

A week later, when the student had tried to go into the local temple for service, he'd spontaneously burst into flames and run screaming into a fountain to extinguish himself. After he'd pulled himself from the fountain, a priestess passing by had tried to heal the injured student, only for the prayer to fail. The priestess then said that Gloriska, goddess of kindness and mercy, had a message for him: "This is what happens when you call the gods liars. You have been declared anathema, and are forever barred from setting foot onto any holy ground until you abandon your heretical ways." The student was expelled a month later due to extremely poor grades, and at that time was still a fervent First Worlder despite all the evidence against him, including the literal word of the gods themselves and subsequent punishment from them. Some idiots, even the gods could not reach.

"Well," the elder knight stated, "we've got a problem."

Getzel, shaking her head and bringing her thoughts back to the situation at hand, asked, "What problem?"

"These idiots might have been bright enough to be able to put together a portal, but they weren't smart enough to make a way to turn it off," came Bittertongue's reply. "If we want to shut it down, we'll have to disconnect the power supply. The real problem is, the generator wasn't designed to be disconnected, and the Magusite being used to power it isn't stable. If we cut the power, it'll cause a feedback effect, and... to put it simply, it'll turn the generator into a bomb. Hell, just removing the Magusite could cause it to blow."

Gulping, Getzel asked, "So, what do we do?"

"Standard procedure," Bittertongue stated, "is that you can throw the generator through the portal, then sever the power. That way, when it blows, it won't be a danger to anyone over here. The problem with that is, we'll have to deal with the fallout of the Corbyn Effect."

Advanced interdimensional magic theory not being her strongest subject, Getzel asked, "And that means what, exactly?"

Carefully removing the power generator from its fastenings to the ground, the veteran knight replied, "Well, if a portal closes when there's something in the middle of it, it causes a space-time disruption." At Getzel's confused posture, she added, "Put simply, there's an... Event, and in the aftermath, something is pulled from somewhere else and put here. The good news is, it's never something from either of the worlds the portal is connected to, so it won't be something from the Old World or the New World. The bad news is, it could be anything from anywhere else. It might be just a random piece of junk from another world. It might be a harmless chunk of stone. Unfortunately, it could also be a gigantic, carnivorous reptile. Or a titanic, nightmarish abomination from 4th or 5th-dimensional space. The last time that happened, we lost three good knights before the thing finally fully collapsed into 3rd dimensional space and died. That's the real danger here: There's no telling what will come out once we close the portal. It could be harmless, or a threat terrible enough to endanger every living thing on the planet."

Getzel, after a moment, asked, "Any other options?"

"Not really," Bittertongue answered as she continued her work. "The Magusite is already fairly unstable. It might go fully critical in an hour, or a year from now. Until then, it would keep this portal open, and risk something other than just the air from the Blighted Hellscape getting in. The blast from a chunk of Magusite this size with this purity will be pretty spectacular, but with the closest settlement being at least forty miles away, the only thing it would kill is anyone here in the chamber. Our armor might protect us from the blast, but the subsequent cave-in would kill us both." She paused, looking around the room, then continued, "The risk of the corruption from the other side coming in a lot greater. We're lucky nothing has stumbled upon the other side of this portal yet, but luck won't keep us safe forever. So, while I work on this, toss those corpses through the portal." At Getzel's shocked posture, Bittertongue clicked her tongue, then replied, "If they were buried, there's a chance that they might corrupt the ground around them. There's a greater chance that they might eventually rise from their graves as something with a craving for mortal flesh. The procedure is to burn them if possible, or just toss them through to the other side otherwise... and with the toxic air in here, we can't light a fire. I'm not going to poison the clean air outside just we can ash these idiots. Once the generator blows, they'll be cremated anyway, so it all ends up the same. Hop to it."

Getzel, with obvious disdain, went to work. One advantage from the magically empowered armor the two knights wore was greatly enhanced strength, but that would have hardly been needed for the remains of the 'Unbelievers' she began gathering: The air of the Old World had turned the bodies of these poor souls into dried out, brittle mummies. Even without the armor, the petite knight could easily have carried one in each hand and not have broken a sweat. She was still thankful for the armor, since its airtight seals kept the deadly air well away from her, as well as keeping her from having to feel the corpses she was carrying.

It didn't take long for either knight to finish their respective chores. By the time the last corpse had been tossed unceremoniously into the portal, Bittertongue had finished freeing the power source from the ground, as well as removing the brackets that secured the conduit connecting the portal and the generator.

"Now, rookie, I want you to move over to the door and be ready to open it as soon as I cut the conduit," Bittertongue instructed. "We'll have maybe a minute before the Event starts, and it begins pulling everything nearby into it. If either of us gets sucked in, our armor won't protect us from what happens next. Not even the gods can save you if you get caught up in this thing." She paused, cleared her throat, then added, "The suction effect is just the prelude, though. After a few minutes, there'll be a pause, and that'll be our sign to take cover. When the event hits the finale, there's no telling how big the bang is going to be. Then, we'll find out what we need to deal with." Noting Getzel's nervous posture, the veteran knight added, "Don't worry, Princess. You've got the easy job: Open the door, get out, run until the suction stops, then take cover. I'm the one who starts right next to the portal, and believe me, if there were any other knights here, I'd let them take that spot in a heartbeat. Take your position, and be ready to run."

Nodding, Getzel took her position, and placed her hands against the heavy stone door sealing the chamber, and readied to open it. Once she was sure she was ready, she said, "Ready."

Without a word, Bittertongue tossed the generator into the portal, and with a single, smooth motion, extended a blade from her armor's gauntlet, then severed the conduit as she turned and broke into a dead run. Getzel threw the door aside with little effort and began running up the corridor connecting the chamber to the outside world. The corridor had only been about thirty feet long when they'd entered, but now looked and felt like it was a thousand times that length. Before she was even halfway through the corridor, she felt a terrible suction trying to pull her back. She nearly lost her step, before she felt Bittertongue's armored hand slam into her back, knocking her back into step. A few seconds more, and they were back outside, the trees outside the man-made cave bending towards the vacuum that seemed like it was trying to suck in the entire world.

The two kept running, their armor granting the pair speed enough to cover over a mile a minute. The trees passed in a blur as they hit top speed, but Getzel could see that even the thickest trees were bending in the direction of the tunnel they'd exited. The suction from the event seemed to be getting stronger by the second. She heard Bittertongue beside her mutter something like "This is taking too damned long," but wasn't sure what the veteran knight meant. Was this taking longer than normal? Was that bad?

Then, suddenly, the wind stopped, and the world went quiet. A terrible, horrible quiet.

The veteran knight shouted, "We've got maybe ten seconds before the Event goes critical!" She pointed at a massive stone nearby, the only thing that looked solid enough to hide behind in the forest. The two knights immediately scrambled over to it, taking shelter. Almost as soon as they did, the world was suddenly filled with a thunderous sound and blinding light.

It was several minutes before either of them could see or hear again. After they came out from behind the boulder, they took a look at the destruction the Event had caused.

The entire mountain was gone. A mountain, nearly ten thousand feet fall... had been erased. There was nothing left but a massive crater, a huge cloud of dust at its center. When the pair of them measured the crater later, they determined it was at least twenty miles wide.

"Gods," Getzel swore under her breath. "You didn't say anything about it being this big."

Bittertongue, her voice awed, said, "I've never even heard of an Event this big before. Usually, it's only about a mile wide at most..." After a moment, her posture turned serious as she steadied herself and said, "Alright, we need to hurry to the epicenter of the event, and find out what came through." At Getzel's shocked reaction from the elder knight's urgent tone, Bittertongue stated, "A nightmarish entity from beyond known time and space came from an event that left a crater a mile wide. This is much, much bigger than that. There's no telling what that Event might have brought. We need to find out what came through, and we need to find it now!"

Getzel jumped to her feet and followed her mentor as the pair made their way towards the center of the crater at all speed. The younger knight considered the possibilities of what they might find there. Given that they couldn't see it from where they were, it couldn't have been that big. Then again, her few weeks on the frontier had taught her that bigger didn't always mean tougher... or that smaller meant weaker. There were plenty of smaller creatures on the frontier that could gut a man in less than a second if they weren't handled properly. She'd thought that Bittertongue had been joking when she'd told her trainee that, and then Getzel had gotten to see what happens when someone messes with a Horned Hare. They might be fluffy, friendly, and adorable, but those horns weren't for show, and they weren't afraid to use them when threatened.

The frontier was not a safe place for people to live, but more than a few of the people who had come from the Old World had come from places where magic was not very advanced, and many of them preferred the rough and dangerous life of the frontier over the confusion and complication of civilization. Of course, many others from Cradle had made mistakes and decided that the potential dangers of the frontier were better than the painful and unpleasant certainties that might await them back home.

Getzel shook her head and put herself back in the situation at hand. They were less than a mile from the center, she guessed, and the dust cloud obscured their vision. She raised a finger to the side of her helm, and toggled extrasensory view, letting her see in what the scholars called the infrared spectrum. She could see the body heat of something in the center. As she and her mentor reached the center, she said, "Whatever it is, it's human-sized and shaped. It doesn't appear to be moving, but it is warm. It's probably still alive."

Bittertongue skidded to a stop, then pressed something on the underside of her gauntlet. A massive burst of air erupted from her armor, clearing the dust away. Getzel, coming to a stop just behind her, triggered the cleaning function on her armor's optics. That blast of wind was new and unexpected. Magic, or some kind of trick the armor had that Getzel hadn't been told about? She'd have to ask about that later. She knew that the armor the Raven Knights used had all kinds of tricks built into it, but thus far her training into its capabilities was limited...

Her train of thought was disrupted when she turned her view back to normal, and she got a clear view of what had been brought in by the Event. It seemed to be human, or at the very least looked very much like a human. Its garb was like nothing she'd seen before. It wore a shirt of dark blue with some kind of design she couldn't immediately make sense of and blue trousers both made of some kind of odd material. Maybe it was something like white-fiber, but dyed blue? She couldn't say. Still, the creature itself was odd: It had the pinkish skin that might otherwise have indicated heritage from the nomads of the Frostscorn mountain range of the Old World, but also the light brown hair that spoke of a lineage of the Harshwater marshes. His face wasn't attractive, but it wasn't unattractive either. It was almost the poster child for unremarkable, lacking any of the common identifiers that spoke to Old World lineage. The one thing she could say for sure was that he was male, as he'd somehow ended up arriving unconscious with his trousers around the ankles.

Bittertongue let out a small chuckle, this time one containing a small trace of humor, and said, "Well, it could be a whole lot worse." Turning to Getzel, she added, "Pull up his trousers and lug him over your shoulder, Princess, and we'll get moving. I'm going to have one hell of a report to write after all of this. It's not every day that a mission changes the geography of the frontier, nevermind finds evidence of another world with humans on it."