[Location: Sector 7 - The Burning City] [Time: Life #1. Drop + 00:04:12]
The pod slammed into the asphalt, shattering the street. The explosive bolts blew the doors clean off.
"Move! Move! Move!" Silas screamed, kicking a rookie out of the pod.
I stumbled out into the ash-choked air.
It was nothing like the simulator. The simulator didn't capture the smell of burning hair and melted plasti-crete. It didn't capture the deafening, bone-rattling roar of plasma artillery tearing buildings in half.
The sky wasn't blue; it was choked with black smoke and the sleek, jagged silhouettes of Algorithm Harvester ships.
"Contact front!" someone screamed.
A red beam of concentrated light swept across the street. The soldier running next to me—a kid whose name I didn't even know—was instantly vaporized from the waist up. His legs took two more steps before collapsing into the rubble.
I froze.
The rifle slipped in my hands. I couldn't breathe. The sheer, overwhelming scale of the violence short-circuited my brain.
"Caelum! Get your ass in cover!" Silas grabbed me by the shoulder plate and violently shoved me behind a ruined hover-car. "Shoot back, kid! Shoot back!"
I nodded dumbly. I raised my rifle over the hood of the car. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn't align the sights.
Across the street, the smoke parted.
It was an Algorithm Stalker-Unit. It looked like a metallic praying mantis, standing twelve feet tall, its chassis gleaming with dark oil and blood. Its optical sensors snapped toward me.
Target acquired, a mechanical screech echoed in the air.
It lunged. It covered fifty feet in a fraction of a second.
I pulled the trigger. The pulse-round sparked harmlessly off its heavily armored carapace.
It was too fast. I didn't even have time to scream.
The Stalker's scythe-like appendage thrust forward. It punched through the reinforced plating of the hover-car, through my tactical vest, and straight through my chest.
The blade erupted from my back, pinning me to the asphalt.
The pain wasn't immediate. At first, it was just a shocking, breathless cold. I looked down at the jagged black metal protruding from my sternum. Blood poured out of my mouth, staining the inside of my visor.
Silas was screaming my name, firing her revolver point-blank at the machine, but her voice sounded like it was underwater.
My vision tunneled. The world turned grey.
I'm dead, I realized, a bizarre sense of peace washing over me. I really died.
Then, my left arm caught fire.
The Ouroboros Drive activated. The silver plating turned a blinding, radioactive blue. The mechanical gears screamed like a dying animal.
[BIOLOGICAL CESSATION DETECTED. TEMPORAL SINGULARITY ENGAGED.]
The pain I felt from the impalement was nothing compared to the drive. It felt like a white-hot lightning bolt was shot directly up my spinal cord and into my brain.
My consciousness was violently ripped from my body.
I was falling backward into a tunnel of screaming light. I saw the battle happening in reverse—the Stalker leaping backward, the dead soldier reforming from ash, the drop pod shooting back up into the sky.
The data of my death—the pain, the fear, the smell of blood—was forcefully burned into the synapses of my past brain.
I slammed back into my body with the force of a freight train.
I gasped, my eyes flying open.
The red jump-light bathed the interior of the drop pod in the color of blood.
I was strapped into the crash seat, hyperventilating. I was wearing standard infantry armor, clutching a pulse-rifle.
"Drop in three!" Silas roared. "Two! One!"
The floor dropped out from beneath us.
We plummeted into hell. Again.