The commando held onto the bulkhead with only a minimum amount of effort, still trying not to break anything even though everything was broken.
That wasn’t a figure of speech. The Contact Light had been in bad shape when he’d found it, and the fight he’d engaged in with countless monsters with to retake it hadn’t exactly improved that state. Providence and the Worms made it even worse. To be honest, he was a little surprised it’d taken off at all. That it’d made it through the black hole or the wormhole or whatever the shipboard AI had called it was nothing less than miraculous.
So here he was, with a great whacking hole in the bridge’s front window, the cold vacuum of space trying to yank everything not nailed down into the void with varied success, and he was wondering what cheese tasted like.
He wasn’t honestly concerned with the damage. He certainly wasn’t worried for his own health. Two thousand two hundred ninety stacks of Bustling Fungus generated a regenerative field big enough to encompass the entirety of the Contact Light, and nine hundred forty eight stacks of Tougher Times meant there was…
…Well, he wasn’t very good at math, but it caused a parabolic percentage decrease for damage cancellation, so it was close enough to zero that it didn’t really matter.
He still felt a little bad, leaving Petrichor IV in its brand-new state of mostly on fire. It’d started out as sheer survival, sure, but after the first week, it didn’t really feel like it anymore. Mostly because he had about fifteen stacks of Dio’s Best Friend at that point, and under the unlikely circumstance he died he would’ve had to have been killed another fourteen times.
It’d been three months before he felt comfortable trying to take Providence on. The fight, if it could’ve been called that, lasted about four seconds, and he found himself with his own ship.
Albeit a very damaged ship, a fact he was reminded of as the bulkhead he’d been holding onto abruptly disconnected from the ship. The vacuum clutched at the antlers jutting from his space helmet, and he tumbled through air before finding himself in the void. He expended every single stack of Hopoo Feathers he had to no effect. Double jumps were supposed to send you upward, and up didn’t exist in space.
He wasn’t that concerned. Death stopped being interesting ten thousand lives ago.
Tumbling through space in apathetic helplessness, the commando was surprised to see a planet in view. A familiar set of continents, but covered in green and blue.
His heart skipped an supersonic beat, barely perceptible to even him. Earth had been brown and gray for decades, an uninhabitable wasteland of radiation and pollution. It definitely wasn’t the lush ocean world he was hurtling towards.
Which reminded him, he was in fact completely out of control. He didn’t have any of his double jumps left, and his jetpack was basically useless since he was already on fire from re-entry, so he elected to just wait to land. The boots he never bothered to learn the actual name to made it so he couldn’t be hurt by a fall, so he crossed his legs and started twiddling his thumbs as he waited to hit the ground.
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He passed through the lower layers of the atmosphere, plummeting like a grumpy meteorite through increasingly fluffy clouds until he hit the ground with an entirely anticlimactic thud. He was almost upset at how little of a crater there was, but he was curious to see what kind of Earth he’d landed on.
Sitting up, he brushed the dirt and dust and rocks off and got to his feet. Part of him wished he’d kept that radar dish from forever ago, the one that led him to valuables. So many valuables.
He got distracted for a moment, thinking about unlimited credit funds, before remembering where he was. With a shake of his head, he started walking in a random direction.
It was an uneventful walk. He’d landed in the middle of a forest full of an impressive number of trip hazards, also known as roots, which meant he had to keep an eye on his step. A small pack of wolves tried to attack him, which was refreshingly normal. You could only fight thirty-meter stone giants so many times before it became ordinary. Wolves were new, in an old way.
As he walked, he tried to start skipping, a skill which he thoroughly lacked. He couldn’t remember how people were supposed to walk when they weren’t fighting. Three months did a lot to a person, especially when those three months were nonstop combat with no time to stop for sleep or lunch.
It didn’t help that those three months looped.
He shook the bad thoughts away as he came to an ornate set of iron gates. It’d started snowing at some point, which he found a bit strange, but his Earth - for he had no doubt left at this point that this one wasn’t his - perpetually snowed ash, so actual snowflakes were a pleasant change of pace.
Naturally, he waltzed right through the open gates. Quite literally, as he still wasn’t sure whether walking was a common thing to do here.
Past the gates was a well-manicured garden of snow-capped hedges trimmed in curvy shapes and animals, along with a bevy of very dead roses. Above it all loomed a castle.
The commando almost applauded. It was a really nice castle. Good vibe.
He easily jumped over the stable, along with both the flights of wide stone steps, and ended up right in front of the gold-trimmed doors. Spinning for extra shazam, he raised one mutated, armored hand and knocked on the door.
A great deal of nothing occurred for several seconds, during which he considered jumping/jetpacking/climbing up to one of the bridges and politely breaking in. Before he could commit such an uninteresting crime, however, the door was thrown open.
A humanoid creature stood before him in a bathrobe. It had a pair of ram’s horns, a face not incomparable to a buffalo sucking on a lemon, and a thick layer of brown fur covering its entire body. It seemed just as surprised to see him as he was to see it, and it lashed out with a heavy paw laden with vicious claws.
The blow glanced off the commando’s armor before he could react, not leaving a scratch. The humanoid had just enough time to look confused before one thousand six hundred and nine stacks of Razorwire triggered, sending about twice that number in barbed knives at the humanoid.
A fine red mist floated into the castle’s front hall.
The commando found himself notably less alarmed than he’d hoped.