“Hey Cleo!”
“You’re an idiot, Leroy,” Cleo shot back at the leaping idiot as he arrived.
Leroy looked like he’d grown up deep in hillbilly territory, the product of multiple generations of ‘keeping it in the family’. That said, he was at least a joyful idiot. “Ha ha, you still mad at , Cleo? I promise I be better this ti. I got a tomahawk to hit with when I’m leaping.”
“Hello, Leroy, I’m Squad Leader Fred.”
“A talking truck! You Jinn sure are crazy!”
“My form factor is a Rover, Leroy.”
“And look at that! Two Titans! You guys sure are big!”
Ajax fixed a firm look on his brother. “You can’t punch this one.”
Leroy had already moved on to Hector. “Why we got a Xian? One of you killed my dream mama, you know. We ain’t gonna be friends. No way no how, mister.”
Nestor growled a reply beneath his breath that everyone for ten feet could hear without trying. “Great, now I’m jealous of a Xian.”
Oblivious of the context, Leroy smiled up at Nestor. “Don’t worry, Titan guy, I like you!”
Cleo pointed at Hector. “Now you understand what I was talking about, don’t you?”
“I get it, Cleo,” he replied.
“Well, all of you have reported to duty on the muster date, so you can’t back out now.” Fred rose up on his suspension. “There is a bit of a good news slash bad news situation going on. Since Misfit Squad is fully assembled and has been assigned a high tentative combat score, we’re being moved to the front of the queue. We’ll be part of the initial wave entering Eden. Huzzah and all that shit. Seriously, though, we will be at the front of the action.
“Keep your heads about you and don’t get killed. Also try not to get lost. There is no System on Eden to help us et back up. I guarantee you this task force will turn into a monuntal cluster fuck in the aftermath of the first battle. You get separated, you probably serve out the rest of the deploynt with so other squad. And we’re all misfits, folks. No other squad knows what to do with people like us, so there is a good chance we get screwed over pretty good. We stick together and good things will happen. Probably. Who knows?
“Anyway, don’t get hyped up yet. The first rule of any army is ‘hurry up and wait’. Right now we need to hurry up and get to our new staging location, where we will then wait for a couple hours for the Sage of Transit to open a path to Eden.”
So they moved through crowds to a new staging area. Hector marched between the Titans while the Arahants rode on top of Fred. It took them an hour to navigate to their destination due to the press of bodies. There they found themselves faced with an intimidating Arahant who carried a sword on his back that weighed on the world in a fashion Hector found vaguely threatening even with it sheathed.
“A Sage of swords,” Cleo muttered once the powerful Sage was done growling at them that they were expected to kill as many monsters as possible, that the future of humanity depended on their actions that very day. It was an utterly deranged rant and Hector had the impression that the man was utterly obsessed with slicing apart living creatures.
Ajax grunted and squatted to get eye level with Hector. “Have you ever been around a Sage?”
“I spent so ti with Conflagration,” he said.
A huge eyebrow quirked upwards. “That’s a big na. I’ve heard he’s insane.”
Hector laughed. “He definitely has a disturbing fascination with burning things.”
Ajax looked thoughtful. “Titans rarely achieve insights outside of material properties. Things like hardness, mass, and viscosity. Well, viscosity is actually pretty rare. Grandma had that one.”
“She was a master chemist,” Nestor rumbled. “May her spirit rest in peace.”
“Was she lost in the fall of Aes?”
Ajax unconsciously reached for his sling of tal threads and squeezed it hard. “Not in the fall, no. She saw to it that and Nestor got to safety. Then she returned for the very first wave of the Reconquest. Never ca back.”
“After I get back from Eden, I’m going to advance to level six and join the Reconquest.” Faced with an upcoming battle, Hector felt a peace descend upon him. He believed in his strength. No longer was he the normal man who desperately sought help to save his planet. He was capable of so much more now.
Beyond the self-confidence, though, being part of a cause greater than himself grounded Hector as he hadn’t been since his partnership with Evelyn ended. Saving Earth had been profoundly aningful. Having saved an entire world, past tense, made everything he did afterwards feel hollow and selfish. Charging into battle in defense of Eden was an action that actually mattered. Even if he faced significant danger on the battlefield, he finally felt righteous in his actions.
A Jinn copter landed near them and disgorged a group of individuals. Hector stretched forth his ntal sense and identified the man in the center of the action as a level ten Arahant. In physical appearance, the guy didn’t look like anything special. He could easily be confused for an accountant or a librarian. Yet clearly he was not so mundane in status as looks would suggest.
The phantom-like illusory energy present as ambient energy in the world around the man shifted, sliding into a new configuration without any active effort. It was like watching water follow the path of least resistance. This was true power on display, passively impacting the natural order simply by being present.
“That’s the Sage of Transit,” Ajax told him. “He is the single greatest supporter of the Aes Reconquest. There isn’t a Titan alive who wouldn’t lay down their life for his.”
Hector nodded. “Transit… I take it he is the one getting us to Eden?”
“Yeah. He can open a path to anywhere in the multiverse with a single portal.”
The conversation with Transit ended and the organizers of the task force began issuing orders. The Sage of Swords marched directly up to their squad and eyed the Titans and Hector. “I am choosing this squad to enter with . When the gate opens, we rush through it and establish the landing zone for those who follow. Be ready to put down any monsters that survive my initial strike.”
Other squads were chosen by the other leaders of the task force and everyone was moved forward to form a line. Hector found himself standing before Rover Fred with Ajax and Nestor to one side, all of them directly behind the Sage of Swords. That gave him a front row seat to the work Transit did.
In spite of his inferior ntal sense, Hector could understand the basics of what was being done. He’d have to be blind and dense to not grasp the imnsely potent working taking place. The world grew thin in a flat plane, illusory energy falling into the shape of a rounded doorway. The pressure emanating from Transit bent the surroundings to his will before he even spent a smidgen of his own energy.
Then Transit summoned his externality, which took a shape not much different from the hyper sphere of Hector’s transit sphere. There were so slight differences. The primary one being that instead of its interior space presenting as a three-dinsional sphere, it was more of a cylinder with one side flattened into a floor. The construct was obviously a bridge that would stretch from the forming gate and through primordial chaos to elsewhere.
The Sage’s domain activated, violently punching through the gate and into the waiting interior of the bridge externality. The savage act welded together their current universe, the bridge, and another universe at its far end. Transit stood aside as the view stabilized. Through so Sage trickery, the distance between near end and far end of the gate managed to be only a few inches long even though it crossed a vast gulf of the primordial.
The cut-rate level six Sage of Swords charged through the gate as he drew his blade.
Misfit Squad followed close behind. Hector’s enhanced body kept up with the long strides of the Titans. They passed through the short tunnel to erge into a scene out of nightmare. Half the sky was occluded by storm clouds of inky black miasma, while the exposed sky shone noon-day bright. Within the darkness glowed an angry red tear in space that seed far deeper than any rift Hector had ever seen.
Strangely disconcerting, there were ibexes everywhere. Wild European mountain goats.
The goats began to bleat and charged at them from all directions. The Sage of Swords swung his weapon, issuing a guttural rage-filled growl, and the world grew heavy. Hector didn’t have his focus on his ntal sense to see the flow of energies, but he could not miss the visual display. A phantom blade shot out from the arc of the swing.
That attack went a hundred ters, slicing apart dozens of ibexes before them. The impacted monsters collapsed into black goo. Their peers did not hesitate for a mont to continue their attack. The bleating beasts charged forward, crazy goat eyes looking demonic, curving horns positioned to strike the arriving humans.
Ajax didn’t hesitate a single mont. He pulled a stone from a pouch, placed it in his sling, spun and released the projectile. That stone exploded through a goat. Ajax had another rock flying in just a couple heartbeats.
Nestor hefted his digging bar like a spear as he ran forward. He seized the first goat to reach him with one imnse hand and spun to throw the monster like a shot put. Then he stabbed his digging bar into another beast, withdrawing it from a mutilated corpse a mont later.
Just behind Hector, Fred fired plasma rifle rounds at a trendous rate.
In the midst of the chaos, Hector lashed out with his force cables.
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