The night sky continues sprouting to life overhead, more twinkling stars emerging from their shadowed realm. A spray of unimaginably distant suns guides my run with their ancient light, feet bearing me unerringly towards the orange waypoint signaling the orbital shuttle's landing spot, a thousand meters away. Fishhook, one of the more recognizable mountains in the range that girds the forest's western edge.

  I dash across a ravine, unconcerned with Box's tangent. There's a 'Hellhound' waiting for me, and while I promised Box that I wouldn't do anything stupid like jumping off a mountain again, there's a noticeable urgency to my steps. In fact, I'm moving fast enough that I barely notice when my limbs stop taking bites out of the landscape.

  I flick the box away with an annoyed hand, my attention focused on the growing slope. I want to know everything there is to know about the Hellhound - the glorious thing flying through the sky.

  "That's not the same, Box," I grumble, dashing towards a promising ridgeline ascending Fishhook's lower slopes. "Those are just... words."

  Box's barb fails to find purchase. Yes, I love the words in the Memory Shrine. I love the worlds they describe, worlds I'll never know. They're our link to the past, our reason for pushing forward to the future.

  What they aren't, is something that can fly. I want to touch the Hellhound. I want to see every part of it. Humans made this encapsulation of my dreams, and it is less than eight hundred meters away. My hands and limbs claw at the surrounding rock to propel me upwards even quicker.

  A warning pulse of calm shoots through my veins, dampening my enthusiasm, and I reluctantly slow down.

  "What, Box?"

  "...we have a plan?"

  "Why are we stealing this molecular forge thing anyways?" I ask while digging through the pack for Dirt's brushcloak. The surrounding terrain is still fertile enough that it should blend in better than the stonecloak, and it also has the thermal camouflage.

  I start draping the crinkly fabric over my body.

  "Why do we have to deal with-"

  A footstep snaps dry scrub like a gunshot. My eyes dart up, meeting the helmet-hidden gaze of a Corporate Marauder caught mid-stride not three steps away, pulse rifle hung loosely across the front of his chest. His hands are busy adjusting the armor around his groin, but slowly fall still. Neither of us moves, caught in an instant of shocked surprise.

  He reaches for his pulse rifle but my kukri is already flickering in flashing arcs. He falls silently, bleeding from five different wounds, his fingers falling away from the weapon he barely had time to grasp.

  "What's 'plan b?'" I ask shakily, still staring at his unmoving form. It was so sudden.

  A surge of adrenaline blasts through me out of nowhere, speed and action scorching their wildfire demands across my body. I move up the mountain, alternating dashes with limb-assisted leaps. Pulse fire starts raining hissing death among the scrub and rocks, along with other, odder attacks. I dash away from one threat circle, leaving behind a woven basket that exudes a palpable sense of menace, then tumble out of the way of another, this one filled with acidic fumes that warp everything they touch into screaming pink goo. My rifle CRACKS periodically, and I see shapes slipping across the slope in closing angles on my headlong rush.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  I decide to follow Box's advice and speed up. The orange blob of the waypoint is quickly growing closer, but the intensity of the threat circles is growing proportionately as well. I can't avoid all of them.

  The impact against my chest armor makes me gasp, but I keep moving. I should be able to find some cover after I get past this line of rock. I vault it in a limb-propelled spring.

  Halfway through the air, I pass through a disconcerting moment of dissolution. It's like I'm nothing, that the space I exist in has no room for the concept of 'me,' and then I pass to the other side of whatever that impossible space was, sudden light stabbing in at my eyes.

  Glowing lights, almost as bright as noonday sun, shine down on a bustling set of low white tents stretching out in a neat row, organic-looking structures of some kind of gray and purple stone clustered near one end. The Hellhound is looming opposite the strange buildings on three sturdy legs, a ramp leading down from its side. A stream of armored Corporate Marauders are moving in and out of it, carrying large transparent containers that glow with a sharp blue light into the craft and emerging with pallets of shimmering metal bars that go into one of the buildings. Others are traveling between the tents and the structures, most with armor off, looking just like normal human beings in weird black clothes. All around us rises a dome of twisting gray smears of color, like someone painted nothing into existence and used it to enclose the gathering.

  My feet touch the ground and every head turns my direction. There are a lot of them.

  This is probably not good.

  An avalanche of threat zones pop into existence around me, and I try to plot a course through the blazing glow.

  The gaps between my rifle shots briefly grow longer, but it seems my new defensive ability kept me mostly safe from the cloud of howling tentacles that I couldn't quite dash out of in time. Escaping unscathed was out of the question, but I'm not too badly hurt. I'm not sure what to do now, though.

  A red outline settles over the small pyramid of glowing containers as I continue dodging, my rifle limb firing back periodically. A broad arc of ground to the side of the pile turns bright orange. It's about fifty meters away from my current position, and encompasses most of the tents.

  I gulp. There's a roiling mess of Corporate Marauders charging at me with various weapons, while others take up firing positions all across the base. More threat zones zip in, pulse blasts and non-causal death zones overlapping each other in their haste for my life.

  Tendrils of freezing fire fall away from my left leg, my kukri slashing out at nearby Marauders bringing their quantum blades to bear. I dash again, passing into one of the tents. Luckily, no one is in it, just a collection of cots and what I assume are personal belongings. A quick slice opens up the other side, and I sprint out. Gibbering horrors of interlaced fingers and toes dripping venomous slime rend it to tattered shreds just behind my heels. I roll out of the way of a Marauder leaping at me from behind another tent, then dash again.

  I'm almost to the bright orange arc. Ten meters to go. Suddenly, the Marauders harrying my steps fall away in a dead sprint, leaving me running alone. Before I can start wondering why, a rash of threat zones blankets my area, a crowd of smiling eyeless faces five meters above the ground staring down as their lipless mouths begin opening impossibly wide. Dirty brown light builds in the depths of their unseen throats, and the threat zones brighten.

  I push myself forward in a surge of speed, ignoring the directive. What was it Box said earlier? Energy jacks are for the compulsively suicidal and the desperate?

  I lock my eyes on the pile of glowing containers I don't even know the name of. Crimson menace builds around me like a bonfire, and I come to a halt, panting wildly. This is it.

  Oh. That's right. Box called them reality sinks.

  A sudden orange-

  -blink.

  Ten incandescent beams sear out of the silently howling mouths, meeting at a point just above my head. They gather into a pinprick hole of darkness no bigger than the width of one of my hairs that manages to feel as vast as the night sky. It pulses once, a strobe of unreal illumination, and then a shrieking lance of onyx barbs smashes away from me and into the reality sinks. Black coils crawl over the pile, eating their way into the azure glow in hairline fractures. A sound fills the air, a thin, piercing wail that grows and grows and grows until it's the only thing that exists.

  Abruptly, it stops. The following silence is perfect, the universe itself caught like a fly in amber. There is no motion. There is no thought. We are in the space between seconds, an impossible crystal pane that has no dimension.

  The pile of reality sinks slides somewhere else, leaving behind a gap, an absence. Something should be there, but it isn't.

  Then something is.