Apocalypse Spire

Hey everyone! I've got two more chapters of Discount Dan coming this week.

In the meantime, I whipped up three chapters this weekend for a new series. Currently, I'm in talks about potentially selling the rights to the Rogue Dungeon series to a Big Trad Publisher -- which means books on bookshelves and all that jazz. The catch is, they want a brand new project that they get an All Rights Deal on. These are the first three chapters for a Regressor/Tower Climber inspired modern Cultivation series. I guess my question for those willing to give it a look, is:

• Is it a compelling opening?

• Would you read more if more existed?
  
  Chapter One – Killing Blow

They were dead. All of them. Everyone I’d ever known. Ever loved. Ever even remotely cared about. Gone and long buried in shallow graves—and those were the lucky ones. Most lay on the floors below, their bodies left to rot away. That or devoured by the Essence corrupted creatures spawned by the spiral.

I was the only one left.

The creature loomed before me, a monstrous being built of heavy muscle and leathery gray flesh. Nabiru the Hollow Herald, Regent of the Ashuryn, and the forerunner to our world. The doom of our planet. A black crown sat on his head, framed between a pair of curling horns and perched on long white hair, pulled back into an intricate braid. A pair of leather wings protruded from his back and wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak.

The monster wore dull black plate mail, crafted from obsidian stone, etched with magma orange runes of power, and festooned with trophies from past kills. He had a necklace of human ears draped around his neck, and the preserved heads of Cultivators dangling from the belt at his waist. Some of those heads belonged to my friends. Rynar, a cocky smile still tattooed across his simian face. Bryce, one of his eyes missing. And Yuki. She looked almost as beautiful in death as she had in life.

They were gone now, but this bastard wasn’t long for this world.

Not if I could finish the job.

And I hadn’t come this far, sacrificed this much, to stop now.

Plus, I was so close I could taste it. Blood was in the air.

The Hearld’s armor was dented and battered, and bleeding gashes crisscrossed every inch of exposed skin and half of his face was a mass of ruined flesh. He moved lethargically under the weight of my Graviton Anchor technique, heavily favoring his left leg. One arm dangled limply at his side and with the weight of world bearing down on him, Nabiru barely even had the strength to heft the enormous sword in his good hand. The tip dragged across the floor as he moved, leaving a huge furrow in its wake.

“Killing me won’t stop the invasion,” the demon said, his voice guttural, inhuman, and absolutely certain. “I am just one forerunner. One of hundreds. More will come. And when they do, they will finish the work I’ve begun here. What my forces did to New York? To Moscow, Seoul, London, Syndy, Tokyo, Beijing? It was only a shadow of what they will do to the rest of your pitiful world.

“All you needed to do was kneel. Subjugation is a small price to pay for survival. But now that option is gone. When the Grand Regents arrive, they will grind the remainder of your cities to dust and wipe every trace of humanity from the world. Your species will be a footnote in history of our glorious conquest.”

I offered him a feral smile. “Yeah, I expect so,” I said, nodding along, “but you won’t be around to see it and that’s got to be good enough for now.” I paused, eyes narrowing to slits. “How does it feel, knowing you’re about to be killed by a footnote?” I asked.

A dark look flashed across his face, but I didn’t give him a chance to answer.

I slapped my palms together and activated the Essence churning in my core. Power surged through my body and rolled down my arms, as I summoned an enormous hammer forged of time and reinforced by the Earth’s gravitational field. The head was almost comically oversized, but it felt as light as a feather in my grip. The light bent and distorted around the hammer and the weapon caused the ground to groan and crack from the weight of its presence.

I breathed in, focusing my will, then exhaled, releasing a trickle of Essence that coalesced into a shimmering white crown that floated above my head like an angel’s halo. This time the entire room groaned, cracks spiderwebbing across the stone floor as Heavy is the Crown amplified the force of gravity ten-fold in a thirty-foot radius all around me. It was a testament to Nabiru’s strength that he managed to remain standing at all.

I quickly cast Inverse Pulse on myself and the force pressing down on me like the hand of God, disappeared in an instant. Without a second’s hesitation, I launched forward like an arrow, moving with such blinding speed and force that no ordinary human could've followed my movements.

With a warcry, I leapt into the air and brought my hammer swinging around in a vicious arc aimed directly at Nabiru’s head. Despite the crushing power of both Graviton Anchor and Heavy is the Crown, he moved more quickly than I would’ve expected, bringing his blade up in a high counter that knocked the incoming blow aside. I’d fought and killed legions of lesser Ashuryn, but the Hollow Herald was a forced to be reckoned with.

Even weakened and wounded.

Nabiru was also uniquely suited to handle the worst of my techniques. Although he wasn’t known for his speed, his strength and endurance were unrivalled, and from the intel we’d gathered prior to the raid, I knew he had several Warden-based body reinforcement techniques of his own.

His eyes erupted with fiery red light and the runes on his armor ignited as a terrible halo of shimmering heat built in the air around him. The sweat slicking my face evaporated and the power of his aura threaten to cook me inside my own plate armor.

Countless Cultivator’s had died to learn Nabiru’s secrets, and thanks to their sacrifice, I’d come prepared.

Although my Cultivation Path offered little by way of resistance to fire, I activated one of the sacred treasurers hanging around my neck. With just a hair-thin trickle of Essence, the Ashlock Pendant burst to life and the terrible heat abated. Not gone but lessened. Yuki had given me the strange pendant, looted from the corpse of a lesser an Ashuryn warband leader in Manila.

I snarled as I thought of her and a pain of barely constrained grief washed through me.

Maybe I couldn’t make things right, but I could make Nabiru pay.

The Herald slammed a foot down with earth-rending force and pillars of molten rock erupted from the ground all around me, folding inward like curling fingers. A cage, meant to burn me alive. He’d have to do better than that, though. I cycled Essence, and more power churned within my core and surged through my channels, as I triggered a Warden technique called Time Sync. I felt the world shift and tilt on its edge as my body began to vibrate and I slipped slightly out of phase with the world around me.

My form blurred becoming intangible as I straddled the boundaries between the present, the past, and the future. As a creature out of time, at least for a few brief moments, nothing could harm me. Nothing could stop me. I phased through the curling columns of molten earth, then snapped back into sync as I drove my free hand forward and into Nabiru’s side. Less than a heartbeat before the blow landed, I cycled Essence through my arm and activated Black Spiral Palm.

Although it was an open hand strike, it landed with the force of a wrecking ball injecting a powerful burst of gravitational force that ignored the monster’s armor before detonating within him.

Nabiru grunted in pain as a miniature black hole formed inside his chest cavity, shredding soft tissue and obliterating vital organs without mercy. He stumbled back and coughed up a gout of fetid black blood. I danced to the right, still on the offensive, and launched an Entropy Lance which slammed into his armor and immediately went to work, chewing through the obsidian plates as though it were made of tissue paper.

The forerunner reeled from the combination of strikes, but he still had a little fight left in him. He swung his sword around and launched a furious counter assault, hacking, slashing, and thrusting with the grace of a master swordsmen and the brutal power of a deep earth titan.

I fell back into defense posture and activated Timeworn Eyes.

Although my main Affinity leaned toward Gravitational Essence, time and gravity were inexorably intertwined. Mass is time’s anchor. It was something Einstein had instinctively understood and maybe if I’d been a better student, I would’ve realized that particular insight much sooner. Instead, it had taken the better part of thirty years to unlock, but once I’d made the connection, it had opened up an entirely new range of possibilities.

My eyes drifted out of focus as the future flashed before me.

Not the far future—just a scant few seconds. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but in a fight, knowing where your enemy would be, where they would strike, was a power that could turn the tide of battlefields.

Even on my best day, I couldn’t dream of going toe to toe with Nabiru in a battle of raw strength, so instead I matched him with foreknowledge and superior speed. I ducked and sidestepped each maneuver, twisting out of the way of his strikes, waiting patiently for my moment to attack.

And then it came.

Nabiru reeled back and brought his sword crashing down in a powerful overhand strike meant to split me from head to groin. I feinted left, then bolted right and turned the blade aside with my hammer. He wasn’t prepared for the abrupt shift, and my counter assault knocked him off balance.

It wasn’t much, but in a war between mortal deities, even a small misstep could be as good as a death sentence.

I cycled Gravity and Time Essence and activated one of my most frightening but costly abilities, Fall of Ages. A ring of iridescent power rippled outward in a ring and time lurched and slowed, locking the battlefield in a frozen statis field. The effect would only last for a handful of seconds, but that would be more than enough time to do what needed doing. 

I drove a rapid flurry of Black Spiral Palm strikes into his chest and stomach, unleashing dozens of miniature black holes all at once that ripped through his insides like an industrial strength woodchipper. Then, as my core began to dim and dwindle, my Essence nearly exhausted, I attacked with my hammer.

I brought it screaming around, smashing the blunt face into his good leg, shattering his kneecap. The hammer whirled in my hands like a living thing as I dealt another blow to each of his arms, demolishing plate armor and bone with ever strike. Then, with the few seconds of frozen time I had left, I delivered a barrage of fury-fuel hammer strikes to his chest and ribs, pulping whatever was left of his vitals.

When Fall of Ages finally lapsed and time rushed to catch up with us, Nabiru dropped to his knees, alive but barely. Streams of blood leaked from his mouth, nose, and eyes.

It almost looked like he was crying, though I knew the Ashuryn never cried.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Harold croaked, the sound raspy and wet. “We will still win. We always win. The Ashuryn Imperium is inevitable.” He bared his teeth in a snarl. “Do it!”

“With pleasure,” I growled, raising the hammer high one final time then driving it directly into the side of his head. I used the last of my failing power to trigger Endless Momentum, increasing the force of the blow a hundred times over. A reverberating crack echoed off the high ceilings and his head exploded, chips of bone and black blood splattering across the floor as Nabiru toppled to one side.

He was dead before his body ever hit the floor.

Chapter Two – The End of Everything

For a long moment, I just stood there, panting and shaking as I stared at Nabiru’s mangled corpse.

I’d spent the past fifty years preparing for this fight.

And now, just like that, it was over. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting to feel.

Elated? Relieved? Satisfied?

Any of those.

Instead, I just felt tired. Exhausted to my soul.

I’d done it, reached the top of the Prime Spire. I’d finally killed the creature responsible for the death of millions. Or billions, even. Yet I found I felt strangely empty. Hollow. The irony of killing the Hollow Herald and feeling nothing inside was not lost on me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. As I looked down at the heads of my friends, still strapped to Nabiru’s belt, I realized that the cost of this victory no longer seemed worth it.

I’d won the war but lost everything I’d ever fought for.

For everyone I’d ever fought for.

The thought fled as a wave of Essence swirled out of Nabiru’s corpse and flooded into me in a torrent, threatening to overwhelm my channels and rupture my core. I focused, controlling my breath as I fell into one of the most powerful cultivation techniques I’d learned, the Gravebinder’s Knot. I filtered the inrush of Essence, sending it spinning outward through my channels in elaborate patterns before cycling it bit by bit in my core. I folded the energy in on itself, compacting it down, tighter and tighter, through sheer force of will.

After a few minutes the pressure on my channels lessened to a manageable level. It would take weeks or even months to fully process and refine this power, pushing me closer to another stage of advancement, but that could wait.

Right now, I was focused on something behind Nabiru’s corpse.

With his death, a hidden chamber in the domed ceiling had slide open and a burning red crystal, nearly as large as I was, descended like an angel from on high.

Although I’d never seen anything quite like it, I instinctively knew what I was looking at: a Crystalline Terraforming Core.

There were fifty Terraforming Spirals in total—thirty-five Ancillary Spirals, fourteen Command Spirals, and one larger than all the rest combined. The Nexus Spiral.

This Spiral.

The last of the Ancillary Spirals had fallen years ago, perhaps even a decade or more, but no strike team had ever found a Terraforming Core. Those lesser spirals were like broadcasting towers, boosting the signal, but not responsible for it. They blanketed Earth with Essence, transforming our world into a habitable realm for the Ashuryn. But this… This was the source of that transformation. Essence seeped from the core like a leaky sieve, so much that it threatened to crush me beneath the might of its aura.

It would likely take me ten lifetimes to process the power in that core, if I could at all.

This was a treasure worthy of the most powerful Cultivators and yet…

Like the body crumbled on the floor before me, I just couldn’t muster any desire to care.

What was the point of Ascending further if I had to do it alone?

I’d never wanted power for power’s sake. I’d wanted it to end Nabiru and the rest of the Ashuryn warbands who’d desecrated my world. But now that was over.

There was nothing left.

I had no desire to spend an eternity in isolation, fighting a hopeless war for a dead planet and an extinct people.

Still, I felt a strange pull from the Crystalline Core. It burned with an energy signature that resonated deeply within me. I squinted, examining the object in closer detail.

Its magic was foreign, yet oddly familiar.

Time, I realized with an abrupt start. That was what I was feeling, locked deep within.

I had no idea what the crystal was or how it worked, but I could clearly sense a powerful component of Spatial Essence woven into the fabric of the construct. And undergirding it all was Time.

The more I mulled it over, the more that made sense.

The Terraformer Spirals were designed to warp reality—to merge ours with another. One governed by fundamentally different laws that made no sense in our own world. But the one law that held true across every reality was Time. All worlds, all realities, were governed by that unshakeable framework. Yet I’d learned from ample personal experience that time didn’t pass the same in every world.

Under normal circumstances, it always moved in a liner fashion, but not always at the same rate.

Although the specific mechanics of time dilation and acceleration weren’t well understood by modern scientists, every Rift Raider had experienced it. The dungeons spawned by the Spirals often moved at slower speeds, weeks or months passing on some of those worlds while only days passed on ours. The reverse was also true. I’d once spent a week on a distant world, only to find that I’d been absent for nearly two months.

That had been a particularly nasty shock.

Against my better judgment, but driven onward by curiosity, I crept forward and pressed the flat of my hand against the suspended core, extending my perception into the stone.

The resonance grew stronger, and after only a few seconds of examination I could feel the pulse of a time matrix within. The core wasn’t just flooding our world with Essence, making it habitable for the Ashuryn, it was also syncing our time with theirs.

Was this core the key to all of it?

The lynch pin that anchored our world to so many others?

My gut said yes.

And that… Well, that changed things. For any other Cultivator, the core would simply be a treasure of immense power and nothing more.

I wasn’t any other Cultivator, though. I was the Twofold Sage of Gravity and Time and with this much power, maybe there was a way to fix things.

Well, maybe not fix things—that was beyond even the scope of the core. But maybe it could give us a second chance.

With a rough plan forming in my mind and my palm still pressed against the core, I began to draw some of its immense energy inward, cycling it through my channels and filling the now empty void inside my core.

As the primal Essence of the universe seared through my channels like molten magma, I hesitantly began the cycling pattern for my most powerful and costly ability, Temporal Loop. While Timeworn Eyes allowed me to peer into the past or see a short distance into the future, Temporal Loop let me to make minor alterations to the past. To rewind time. The future could not be manipulated in the same way—probabilistic uncertainty prevented such direct intervention in what might be. The past, however?

The past was certain. Set in stone. That rigidity is also what made it oddly malleable.

I could only move backward through the stream of time by about thirty seconds and even that much change pushed against the edges of my capabilities. With access to a virtually unlimited power source like this, though? Who knew what was possible. Even with the crystal, I couldn’t stop the Ashuryn invasion, but maybe I could go back far enough to warn people. To prepare our world for its inevitable doom.

If I’d known then, what I knew now, how different things might’ve turned out.

There was every chance that attempting to do this would kill me, but so what?

Either it would work, or I would be dead. Both seemed like acceptable prospects, given my current circumstances.

Throwing caution to the wind, I began to cycle, siphoning more and more of the crystal’s vast reservoir of power into my body. It was a torrent too great to contain in a limited mortal vessel, so I didn’t try to hold it. Instead, I became a conduit, redirecting the surge of Essence into my Temporal Loop technique.

The great unseen gears that governed reality seemed to slip, grind, and shudder as the world slowed around me, and began to haltingly reverse course. A wave of pain crashed into me like a hammer blow as a spectral image of Nabiru gained his feet. I watched—a ghost stranded outside of time and space—as he danced and battled against a version of me from the not-too-distant past.

I pushed harder, drawing in even more energy, and the images vanished as the world whirled and white stars danced across my field of vision.

Back, I commanded, imbuing the word with every shred of raw willpower I could muster. Everything became a blur then, as time retreated even further under the onslaught of cosmic Essence roaring through me. Things shifted around me at an ever-increasing pace and Nabiru’s grand throne room winked out of existence, replaced by half seen glimpses from my past.

For an instant I watched as a version of me sat in a dilapidated bunker looking at strike plans while Rynar and Yuki heatedly discussed the merits of our first raid on the Nexus Spiral. Things were moving so fast that there were no words, only a persistence howl as time slipped. But I didn’t need to hear their words, I’d been in the room and remembered them with the perfect clarity only an advanced Cultivator could ever achieve—just one of the many benefits of my path.

“No, I don’t like it,” Yuki said, a frown tugging at the corners of her lips. “We aren’t ready for this. Even the lowest tier creatures in the Nexus Spiral are a match for almost everyone in our raiding party.” She shook her head. “This is a suicide mission.”

“And?” Rynar asked, the smile never leaving his ape-like face. He was shorter than most humans, standing just under five feet tall. He wore supple leather armor of blues and golds, and fine orange hair covered exposed arms that dangled past his knees. He was a Lomra freedom fighter, form a distant conquered world. “If you ask me, there’s never going to be a better opportunity. And what else do we have to lose? I’m not keen on dying, but the fact that we made it this long is a miracle…”

Then the scene was gone. Whisked away as the world turned and time folded back in on itself.

A blur of images followed, like flipping through the pages of an old analog photo album. Visions of training. Cutting down Essence corrupted monstrosities and exploring a vast span of foreign worlds, divorced from our own. Still shots of meals shared with friends scattered around a campfire, and more of me and Yuki snuggling in bed, her body wrapped around mine. Then those were gone too, replaced by more flashes from the past fifty years.

Back, I commanded.

As the snap shots spun faster and faster, more power surged into me and the pain increased—a raging inferno that filled every fiber of my being. It rampaged through my thoughts and incinerated my bones, unmaking me as it worked. As a powerful Cultivator, I was no stranger to pain. It came with every advancement, Essence reforging the body and soul. This was different, though. I felt my bones turn to ash, my cells wither and die one by one, and the ethereal core inside my chest come undone one layer at a time.

I held on anyway, in to deep to stop now.

As counterintuitive as it seemed, the only way forward was back.

I heard a thunderous crack that momentarily tore me away from fleeting visions of the past and brought me back to the present. A network of hair-fine cracks now ran along the surface of the floating crystal. The core looked increasingly unstable, prismatic light oozing from the fractures and slivers of the core wriggled their way through my reinforced flesh and into my palm. The agony worsened, now the heat of a star imploding on itself as the Essence threatened to burn me from the fabric of existence.

I didn’t care. I braced myself and pushed one final time.

Back.

Existence vibrated and darkness crashed down in an instant, dragging me from consciousness as everything, everywhere vanished all at once.

Chapter Three – Wake Up Call

Something wet splattered against my face jarring me from a restless sleep. I shot up, the dull throbbing headache of a hangover pulsing inside my skull. Except this wasn’t a hangover. I’d been incapable of truly getting drunk for decades. I still drank, obviously—what else was there to do at the end of the world—I just didn’t get drunk. A fine distinction.

I groaned, swung my legs over the edge of a painfully thin mattress, and reached up a trembling hand, touching the wetness plastered across my check and forehead. My fingers came away covered in white, fluffy foam.

Shaving cream?

No. That couldn’t possibly be right.

A cackle of uproarious laughter erupted all around me and I turned, finding the faces of several men who’d been dead longer than I’d been alive. Jackson, Murphy, and Collins.

“That’s what happens when you pass out first at a barracks party,” Jackson said, a wide goofy grin plastered across his face. That stupid smile reminded me of Rynar.

Except Rynar wasn’t here.

“Yeah, Noah,” Murphy said using my first name instead of my last, “that’s like Marine Corps basics 101. Pretty sure they even teach that in bootcamp.”

I was in a tiny room with linoleum floors covered in an assortment of crushed beer cans along with more than a few half-full plastic bottles filled with vodka. The walls were bare brick, painted institutional white, and a pair of freestanding war robes hugged the back wall of the room. I was on the bottom bunk of narrow bed and watery morning light streamed in through a smudge-streaked window. Even after fifty years, I’d know this room anywhere.

It was the room I shared with Collins in the Fourteen Area Barracks of Camp Pendleton—one of only three active Marine Corps bases in the world.

“Last night was crazy, dude,” Collins said plopping down on the mattress beside me. “Holleran jumped off the second story onto one of those inflatable bouncy castle things.” He grimaced. “He was wearing a speedo and ended up breaking four toes. Gunny’s gonna be pissed. Corporal Hernandez was already sniffing around asking about it.” Collins grinned. “You also need to take a look in the mirror when you get a chance.”

Jackson erupted in a loud braying laugh at that.

“I think I’m gonna puke,” I muttered, lurching from the edge of the bed and making a beeline for the Jack and Jill bathroom, which connected to another barracks room next door. I made it to the toilet mere seconds before violently vomiting into the porcelain basin. I had no doubt that the puking had something to do with all the alcohol I’d undoubtedly consumed the night before, but this was also more than that.

I’d experienced the effects of time displacement often enough to know it when I felt it.

It was best practice for newly-minted and low tier Cultivators to avoid eating before portal hopping through Dungeon Rifts for exactly this reason. As an S-ranked Cultivator, I hadn’t dealt with portal sickness in ages, but if this was when I thought it was, then I wasn’t an S-ranked Cultivator any more.

I turned my senses inward, searching for even a smallest spark of Essence where my core should be, but wasn’t.

My core was gone, but the breath caught in my throat as I felt something else in its place. A fragment of power, no larger than a than a thumb tack rested inside my chest. It thrummed and burned with latent energy, and I’d spent long enough as a Cultivator to know what it was.

A sliver from the Terraforming Crystal.

How it was here, I had no idea, but there was no denying what I felt.

I tried to activate the Essence stored in the fragment, but it was like trying to smash through a brick wall with my face. After a little more internal searching, the problem became immediately evident. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have a core, I didn’t have Essence channels either. Without those, it was physically impossible to do anything with the power stored inside the shard. My body wasn’t equipped to handle Essence, though that would change as soon as the Spires arrived.

The headache came back with renewed fury, and I doubled over and retched again, before wiping my mouth with the back of one hand.

“Get it all out,” Murphy called from the adjoining room, while the others cackled at my misfortune. I couldn’t be mad at them, though. Just the opposite. I wanted to throw my arms around them. In my past timeline, all three had died within weeks of the Spires arriving. Collins died to Essence poisoning, Jackson had been ripped apart limb from limb by an corrupted beast while we fought to evacuate the residents of San Diego. As for Murphy, his fate had been the worst of the lot.

Instead of dying from an influx of Essence that his body simply couldn’t handle like Collins, he’d been transformed by it. Turned into a mindless abomination of twisted flesh and tearing fangs. He’d killed four men before finally scampering off into the rolling Californian hills.

Once I was finally done, I pushed myself up onto wobbly feet and shambled over to the sink, rinsing my mouth then splashing some cold water on my face before regarding my reflection in the mirror.

I couldn’t help but marvel at what I saw.

Even though I knew the figure looking back was me, it was a more like looking at a ghost. I was a kid. Nineteen and certainly too young to drink—not that a little thing like the law would ever stop a Marine from getting blasted on a Saturday night at the barracks. My skin was smooth, the scar along my chin gone, along with the tiny crow’s feet that had been at the corner of my eyes. Instead of shaggy hair that fell around my face, I had a regulation high and tight without even a trace of salt and pepper at the temples.

My frame was lean, far too thin, and my limbs looked gangly and uncoordinated. I was fit, athletic even, but it looked like I’d dropped a good fifty pounds of muscles.

Something else was also subtly off about my appearance, though, and I grimaced when I finally figured out what was wrong…

I was missing one eyebrow. It was gone, just a smooth expanse of skin where it should be. I didn’t know when exactly this was, but I remembered this night well enough.

“I’m going to murder Wheeler,” I growled on impulse.

A renewed round of laughter floated through the door as the memory resurfaced like a half-remembered movie. That SOB had shaved my eyebrow off after I’d passed out. He’d mercifully left me with one intact, but I wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse. With only one eyebrow, my entire face looked lopsided. I grunted and shook away my annoyance. None of that mattered. I wasn’t sure where exactly we were on the timeline, but depending on the details, it was likely that Wheeler would be dead in weeks or months at most.

None of the guys from my original platoon had survived long.

Those first few weeks had been a slaughter.

With water still dripping from my face, I stumbled out of the room and found the others waiting for me. Each one had a fresh beer in hand and had clearly started drinking again, despite the digital clock by my bed flashing 09:15. Even by my standards, that felt early—but in the barracks on a Sunday, it was just business as usual.

“Want one?” Collins asked, holding up a sliver and red can still dripping with beads of condensation.

I ignored the question, my mind already racing.

It had worked.

Somehow, beyond hope or imagination, it had really worked. But now the question was, how much time did I have?

“What day is it?” I asked.

“Sunday,” Murphy answered with a snort. “How long did you think you were out for?”

“No, not the day, the date,” I corrected.

“Uh, let me check,” Murphy replied pulling out a sleek cell phone, which was truly a Relic of the past. Essence corrupted technology and the more complicated, the faster the tech broke down. Even in low-Essence zones far away from the spires, cell phones had been one of the first pieces of tech to fail. “May 11th,” he finished after a second. “Why? You got duty or something.”

“Man that would blow,” Jackson said in between sips from his beer. “Can you imagine how boned you’d be if you showed up late, hungover, and with only one eyebrow for duty? Lieutenant Donahue will have you police calling the entire PX parking lot until your fingers bleed.”

“And the year?” I asked, ignoring the remark. Although I had great recall of the last forty years, everything before the cataclysm was a bit of a haze.

“Holy crap,” Collins said, “just how much did you drink to forget the year? I think you might have brain damage. Guys, I think he might have brain damage. Should we call the Corpsmen or something?”

“Just tell me the damned year,” I barked, a terrible sense of urgency undercutting my words.

“Chill out, dude,” Collins said, shifting uneasily on the bed. “It’s 2042. The same as it’s been all year. What the hell is wrong with you.”

I ran a shaky hand through my short, cropped hair.

Eleven days.

I had eleven days before the spires touched down and the real bloodshed began. It wasn’t much time to prepare—better than nothing, sure, but nowhere near enough to warn anyone with the power to actually stop it. In the timeline I came from, I’d been one of the strongest Cultivators on the planet. Here? I was just a dumb Lance Corporal with all the authority of a lunchroom lady.

No one in my chain of command would listen to me, and even if they did, they weren’t important enough to affect meaningful change. Not in eleven days. I needed to talk to the President or the UN Security Council. What was about to unfold wouldn’t be isolated to American soil. Cities all over the globe would be hit as the spires descended. Cities on every continent, barring Antarctica, would suffer major catastrophic destruction.

But I couldn’t just waltz into the White House and get an appointment with the President of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Right now, I was a nobody.

A nobody with one eyebrow.

They’d probably lock me in the brig or throw me in the drunk tank—and that’s if I was lucky. Even most Mayors or City Council Members would throw me out on my ear if I broke in and started raving about an alien invasion from a parallel dimension, governed not by the laws of physics, but by magic. Without a functioning core, I couldn’t even flash a few techniques to prove I was telling the truth. All I had was my word. That just wouldn’t be enough.

With eleven days, there was simply no way I could prepare the entire world for what was coming.

But I could prepare myself. That had to be the first step. Put on your own oxygen mask, before assisting others. That was just as true for the end of the world as we knew it as it was for an airplane emergency.

My mind shifted to the others—Bryce, Yuki, Rynar. Was there a way I could get in touch with them before the whole world went to Hell, I wondered. As soon as the thought entered my mind, I pushed it away. There would be time for that later. Hell, Rynar wasn’t even on our world yet. Besides, if everything unfolded the way it had the first time around, they’d all be fine. Although fine probably a stretch. They’d survive, though. Something I couldn’t say about the three Marines crowding my room.

I knew their fates.

“Denver,” I said. “We need to get to Denver and we need to get their fast.”

“You were right Collins,” Murphy said. “He drank so much he has brain damage.”

“This isn’t a joke,” I said softly. “In eleven days, everything is going to change. Everything. The world is going to end. This barracks? The Marine Corps? None of it matters,” I said, slashing one hand through the air to drive home my point. “If you three want to survive, we need to get to Denver.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jackson asked, the laughter gone, replaced by somber serious looks.

“The Apocalypse,” I said. “I’m talking about the literal Apocalypse.”

“Like from the Bible?” Collins asked.

I groaned and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “No, not like the Bible.”

“But that’s the literal Apocalypse,” he replied.

I’d forgotten just how pedantic these assholes could be when they had a mind to.

“Fine then, not the literal Apocalypse, but this one will be no less terrifying or awful.”

“And you want to stop it?” Jackson asked. “You, Lance Corporal Noah Thacker from the armpit of Oklahoma. aim to stop the Apocalypse?” I could hear the doubt in his voice and it was hard to fault him. I wouldn’t believe me either.

“Stop it?” I said, shaking my head. “No. There’s no stopping it. But I aim to survive it, and I’ll help you survive it too, if you’ll let me.”

“What’s in Denver?” Collins asked.

“Ground zero,” I replied, almost immediately. “That’s where the only major Spiral in North American is going to touch down.” Other than the Nexus Spiral, though I left that out. That one landed in New York, but no one would survive what happened there. Everyone in the city would be dead or changed within days. Denver would be dangerous too, but the closer we got to a significant Essence conduit, the quicker I’d be able to form a core.

“Even if we believed you,” Murphy said.

“—which we don’t,” Jackson added.

“Why in the hell would we want to go to the epic center?” Murphy finished.

I struggled with the question, knowing the more I told them the less they would believe.

“You just have to trust me,” I finally replied weakly. “Going to Denver gives us the best long-term shot at survival. And not just for us. For our world.”

Jackson rolled his eyes and took another slug from his beer. “Yeah, that’s going to be a hard pass from me. I’m have no desire to get busted down for going UA.”

“Sorry, bro,” Murphy said. “That’s a no from me, too. I’ve got duty on Tuesday and a meritorious board on Friday. I’m not missing that even for the end of the world.”

Collins was quiet for a long moment, “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

Jackson stole a sidelong look at Collins. “Wait are you serious?”

Collins just shrugged. “Me and Noah are ride or die. Been that way since Bootcamp. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m not going to let him run off to Denver alone. Someone has to be there for him when the complete and total mental breakdown finally hits.”

Jackson shook his head in disbelief. “Maybe you’re the one with brain damage.”

“Thank you,” I said to Collins and meant it. Even if I could only save one of them, that was one more life that didn’t have to needlessly go to waste. Then I turned and stared at the others, a strange intensity burning in my eyes. “Obviously, I’m not going to convince you two, but promise me one thing. In eleven days, when the Ancillary Spire touches down in San Diego and you get the call to mobilize, don’t go.”

I locked eyes with Murphy, my gaze boring into him.

“And if you go anyway, which you both probably will, stay the hell away from the Ashuryn warbands. Great big guys with gray skin and wings. You’ll know them when you see them. Those things will eat you alive. Instead, you need to kill one of the creatures that appear. Your guns probably won’t work, so use a K-Bar. Or affix bayonets if you need to.

“But kill one then roll around in its blood. Get as much of it on you as you can. It’ll seep into you and burn like acid, but that’s the only way. Then, and this is important, cut it open—gut it just like you would a deer. You’ll find a stone inside. You need to swallow it. That'll help expedite the initial core formation process.”

“Yep, it’s official, he’s lost his mind,” Murphy said.

I ignored the jab. I’d done what I could for them and hopefully it would be enough.

It probably wouldn’t.

I turned to Collins, “Pack a bag. We’re leaving in an hour. And if you have any money lying around, grab that too. In a few weeks, it won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on, but for now we’re going to need it.”