The air was hot, humid, and sticky like the inside of a sauna.  His skin felt oily and his hair, greasy and damp.  In a state of semi-rest the man could feel little other than his overburdened limbs, the saturated air, and the shallow pool of lukewarm substance he lied in.  As if awakening from a deep slumber his senses returned to him, one at a time.  He could smell the overpowering stench of decay around him.  It smelled like rotting carcasses in a fetid bog.  Intermingled with the rot the smell of a strange metallic substance also wafted throughout the air.

Mobius cleared his throat, and as his lips parted he could taste copper and grit.  His breathing came labored and heavy, each exhale accompanied by a more insurmountable burden on his chest and legs, each inhale a triumph over the odds.

As his sight returned to him the first thing Mobius saw was the sky.  Although it was not the stormy cumulonimbi that swirled around a raging vortex that his eyes were assailed with.  Instead, it was a serene, yet insidious canvas of crimson and titian nacreous clouds.  The sky seemed motionless, every cloud formation, every cirri intertwined, latticed together into an unnatural display.  As the operative blinked the crust out of his eyes he struggled to raise his head and survey his surroundings.

Far to the west the setting sun perpetually bathed the land in the last throes of daylight.  Night was promised, but not yet here.  The sun, brilliant as it was, was like some sacred thing far in the distance.  It’s corona much alike a holy aureole of a revered saint.  Mobius averted his gaze to the endless expanse around him.  This was not South America--not as he remembered it.  Although the city he and Pawn fought in was likely destroyed it couldn’t have been reduced to this.

Slowly, the agent propped himself onto his forearms and grimaced as pain wracked his chest.  Mobius eased himself to a sitting position and raised his hands to view his gnarled hands.

Broken wrist, and knuckles from the looks of it.

He tried to tap into ANITA so that he could get a look at his bones but she didn’t answer.  He new that there were quite a few broken to begin with.  As he watched the liquid he sat in sift through his fingers that was when it clicked in his mind.

Blood.

He leaped to his feet, crouching, and steadying himself with his good hand, though his body protested with several waves of pain that he ignored.  Pools of blood and scraps of carnage dotted the landscape around him.  In the distance around him he could see what looked like several large ships, of a make which he did not at all recognize.  Closer to his vicinity were no bodies, but there were weapons stabbed into the earth as if the area were the aftermath of a battlefield.

As he slowly and shakily raised himself to a standing position Mobius looked around.  His gun, his canisters, his beacon, his clone, and his suit were all gone.  He felt as if he were running on instinct, at this point.  Over the past day his mind had raced with scenarios, and now only his training kicked in.  He resolved that he would go to one of the ships to seek shelter and a device to beacon help from.

Just as Mobius began to hobble forward, the Sun in the far distance shifted--in color more than in position.  The massive celestial body incarnadined. For a moment, Mobius felt as if it were a gateway, a lens, or some sort of eye watching him in the distance.  He froze for a moment to look at it as its corona faded away into a perfectly round, red ocular.  

A familiar voice spoke behind him,

“You’re a damned fool for coming here, mutt.”

He was sure that there was no one, nothing, behind him moments ago but the all too familiar voice who chastised him proved him either astigmatic or insane.  As the red glow of the falling sun in the distance illuminated the hellish graveyard of steel which sank in a mire of swords, Mobius turned.  He turned to look upon whoever spoke to him and was shocked at what he found.  There stood a young soldier, bald, but brawny worn with scars of past combats.  He was shaved clean--like the old styled warriors.  He wore a Kevlar breastplate and shoulder pads of presumably the same material.  Various pouches and buckles strapped across his lower torso, likely for clips and ammunition--though he held no gun.

Mobius recognized the man who stood behind him, and slowly turned to face the orator.

Forge.

Behind him stood Forge, alive and fully intact like the first day Mobius had ever seen him.  He looked better than he did before he ever left for Soran.  Something had happened to Forge on Soran--something that eventually led him to what the operative truly remembered of him.  The howling, bestial, self-mutilated neanderthal he fought was nothing like what he was looking at now.  All the rage, the hostility, the anguish that he had previously sensed in Gerald was gone.  Although Forge was not someone that Mobius knew specifically, the agent had the pleasure (or displeasure, depending on how you rated Forge's company) of meeting him before.  Mobius had always found him alright, albeit a bit abrasive.  Many times outside contractors were abrasive in Max's experience, so it was nothing out of the ordinary.  

Maxwell was far too shocked, however, to get caught up in the nostalgia of his and Forge's several brief meetings.  He simply uttered,  "You're alive."

Forge cocked his head, with a dry smile, then looked down.  He shook his head as he began to pace around Lionheart.  "No..." he grimaced, "No, i'm not."

He walked a half-circle around Mobius, though the operative kept him in his peripheral as he tried to piece together what was going on.  "Then i'm dead," Max stated blankly.

"Wrong again.  Not yet, anyways." Gerald said, this time with malicious edge.

"What the hell is going on, then!" Mobius growled.

"Depending on what kinda guy you are i'd say either the best or worst thing that's ever happened to you." Forge stated, cryptically.

"What happened to you?  Why were you attacking me?  Why did you kill all those people?  How did you get better?"  A thousand questions blurted from Mobius.

"When a babe is birthed into the world it does not assault its mother with questions.  It cries out of its own necessity.  We are here to help you, Mzadech."

Mobius was stunned when he heard a second voice behind his back.  This voice had a slight oriental accent, as if English were not his primary language, though he spoke rather fluently.  He was not only dumbfounded that the voice knew his birth name of Mzadech (or what his Earthen name was based off of), but that he had been blindsided a second time when he felt so much more aware. 

He turned to face the second voice.  This man a bushy-browed eastern garbed individual.  His black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, while his sideburns trailed onto the top of his white haori.  Although the world around him was gritty and grimy he somehow remained... pure, unlike Forge.  "We are here to assist you 'Max'," the Asian man said.

"He is." Snorted Forge.

"We are." The other responded sharply.

Mobius glanced between the two of them, looking to Forge then to the other.  What were they here to help him with, and where had they taken him?

"Today marks the first day of your-"

"Who are you." Mobius interjected before the Asian man could finish his speech.

The bushy-browed fellow frowned and paused, as if he were taken aback that he didn't already know.  "My name is Gennosuke.  Kouga Gennosuke."

Japanese, Max guessed.  He studied Gennosuke up and down. Judging by his garb he was stuck in the late 16th century.

"Right... Gennosuke," Mobius said, then turning his gaze back to the soldier, "and Forge."

"Saw what happened to me, right?" Forge said with a twisted grin, "that'll probably be you before long, too."

"Not if we can help it," Gennosuke protested.

Max looked from Forge to Gennosuke then turned to face Gerald.  He recalled something that was out of the ordinary in all the chaos he and Pawn were thrown into.  When he wounded Forge the man bled silver, and he remembered a red sphere staring out from underneath Gerald, some slimy creature that wore the man's skin like a costume.  Upon his recollection the precursor to a storm rumbled through the sky, and a faint, misty drizzle sprinkled around them.  He turned his gaze upwards, and heard Forge whistle with admiration.

"Looks like you get a trial by fire," Forge said as he, too, watched the diversion.

"We need to find shelter," Gennosuke commanded, "now."

Max squinted, it looked like rain, it smelled like rain but nothing here was what it seemed.  The fact of the matter was he wasn't going anywhere with Kouga or Forge--especially not Forge.  He didn't trust either of them.  Finding an excuse to avoid going with them he smirked, "Afraid of a little rain?"

Kouga confirmed his suspicions, "Nothing here is as it seems.  If you wish to stay alive then follow me."

"Better listen to em, bed-head.  You don't want any part of what's coming."

This time an angry boom of thunder dared Mobius to stay.  Quite frankly he didn't know what to expect out of what looked like an ordinary thunder storm, but he nodded.

"We'll make a break for that ship over there," Mobius pointed.  It was probably about a fourth of a mile away, but the operative was confident he could make it there before the floodgates opened.  Hopefully the others would keep up with him.  Then Max started off.



He hadn't looked back on his run to the ship, but he felt something peculiar as he ran through the steadily increasing shower.  Every drop felt like he was losing a piece of himself, like he were sugar, melting away into the landscape.  When he looked at his own naked form he could see he was completely unharmed, but the feeling was unmistakeable.

When he reached the ship he realized he had recognized it.  A Red Technocracy ship.  He had studied one that had fallen during the first contact.  Ghost Ops had first priority when studying alien technologies, and he had thoroughly memorized much of the functions of this one.  By the looks of the broken, derelict vessel it was a Technocratic battleship, severed in half and lying as if it were some massive desecrated tomb.  

Max knew where to go and intuitively knew what to do to get in.  He was so preoccupied with such a strange, yet familiar ship being present here that he had nearly forgotten about Forge and Kouga.  When entering the ship is was dark and quiet.

"Don't suppose Annie is awake, yet." He thought to himself.

He looked around, feeling his way through the darkness and groped at a panel on the wall, his eyes adjusting to what little light spilled in through the open doorway.  Forcing his fingers underneath an edge he pried open the panel and felt around inside.  It was cold, so he was certain that it was dead.  He'd have to jump start the system.  Max was beginning to appreciate what ANITA offered him.  Normally he wouldn't have to do anything, Annie could just technopathically redirect power from God-knows-where inside the ship.  He cringed as he recalled his training on technocratic engineering, and spliced a few wires he could barely see.  After some tinkering he could hear the flickering of lights.

"Nice job," Forge's voice said, to his left, inwards towards the ship.

Max whipped around to look at Forge wondering how he had snuck up on the operative, but there was no one there.  He stepped to the doorway and looked out at the landscape--no Forge or Kouga in sight, but it a full blown storm had evolved.  The curtains of rain reflected a strange metallic color when he looked at it at just the right angle.

He frowned, turning to look down the hallway which was struggled to stay lit as lights haphazardly flickered on and off.  A shoddy electrical job, he expected, but it would have to do.  As he ventured down the hallway the guts of the ship assented to his thoughts--it was definitely a technocratic battleship.  The stark interior was devoid of much, and was styled in a militaristic fashion.  If the technocrats were such a dour group as he had read then this long hallway was at one point the ship's promenade where they could stare out into the empty reaches of space.  It was a haunted hollow.  The floor was cold on the operatives feat as he shadowed through the hallway, checking corners that led into pitch. 

Whereas the outside held signs of a fierce battle and ever-present carnage the insides of the ship revealed nothing but empty loneliness. As Max reached the end of his light it came to a sealed door.  A door that, if he remembered the layout of these ships correctly, should be the crew quarters and barracks.  Usually there wouldn't be much to see inside the bunkrooms, but when Mobius approached the door he felt his stomach turn.  A nauseating sickness warned him not to enter that room--and unlike many a horror stories he abided by it.  Looking at the reality of the situation, Max was unarmed and unarmored.  He was as vulnerable as he had ever been.

He decided to retrace his steps--their communications bay would be where he really wanted to go.  As he meandered back down the hallway he took his first right.  He recognized being in the back-half of the ship when he entered, and recalled that there was usually a comm station in the engineering block.  The lights were out here, so he had to venture down the hallway.  He felt around for a door, usually by doors were control panels and control panels meant he could reroute power to the lights.  He praised his luck as he pried open another panel and began pulling wires in the darkness, tracing them down to their sources.  Feeling his found the right one he yanked it and a spark abruptly flashed his vicinity.  In that half-second he saw a scowling face right next to him before the hallway returned to darkness.  He jumped, but he could not let go of the wire if he wanted any chance at rerouting power.  He took a defensive stance and waited ten seconds, twenty seconds, a minute.

Nothing.

He heard nothing and saw nothing.  His shoulders slowly relaxed as he went back to the panel, and before long the lights flickered to life down the hallway.  Letting out a sigh of relief he pushed on.  Before long he found a large, steel door, about seven feet tall and sealed shut with "ENGINEERING" engraved above the threshold.  To the right of the door were standard door controls and a keypad.  Above the door controls a sign read "Authorized Personnel Only."

To hell with that.

The pneumatics of the doors sprung to life with an ancient and foreboding hiss; they obviously hadn't been serviced in a while.  A few of the lights in the bowels of the engineering bay lazily stuttered to life.  Max surveyed what he could see in the room and observed a section of the ship that was much more poorly kept than the rest.  The engineering bay looked as if it had flooded at some point in the distant past and suffered a large degree of rust. 

Rust coated the catwalks that overlaid the steel floor.  As the operative eyed through the grates of the catwalk he could see the floor was, indeed covered in perhaps two inches of water.  As if being cognizant of the fact cued in his other senses, he could smell the stench of stagnant water and hear the soft swoosh of water lapping against the stairways.

His hopes for getting the bay in up-and-running condition quickly sank, like the reactor that faintly glowed in the epicenter of the room.  Max wasn't sure of the condition of the reactor, but it very well could have been leaking and without his suit that would put him at a very real danger of radiation poisoning.  He felt alright, and needed to find a comm. station, so he decided that he would quickly breeze through the bay, and stay away from the water if at all possible.

Mobius took a few steps forwards before looking at the arrangement of pipes that hung low from the ceiling.  "Coolant pipes," he thought to himself.  That was likely the causes of the leaks, but was also his method of traversing over the limited catwalk and into other areas of the bay.  

Ducking down low, like a track runner Mobius pushed off the ball of his foot and dashed towards the ledge.  Leaping up onto the railing and pushing off, he felt the rail snap under his foot just moments after he leapt. Clawing his arms outwards the operative grabbed onto a low-hanging pipe, and immediately felt it give.  Overcome by the rust and neglect the pipe violently swung downwards after snapping and poured a lambent, green ooze.

Max did his best to redirect his body from the waste and pulled himself up the pipeline to sturdier handholds.  He swung his body like a high wire acrobat before throwing himself at a support beam, landing harshly against it.  Hugging the beam, Mobius shimmied around its width and pressed the bottoms of his naked feet against the rusty surface, pushing off and onto another platform.

Landing less graceful than he anticipated as the whole platform lurched he forced his fingers through the grates of the catwalk, securing his hold on it.  His Russian wasn't very good, but the door that said "[font=Courier New]Communication[/font]" above it was about fifteen yards away.  Max climbed up the gate and pulled himself onto the flat steel of the walkway, making his way around the corner to the doorway.  "At least I can see the panel," he thought, "beats the hell out of rigging in the dark."

The door panel was illuminated by a red emergency light that was still somehow active, and the dim, green glow of the reactor, coupled with the glowing sewage that poured from the overhead pipe.  After rigging open the doorway he was greeted by what was essentially a small closet space with a desk, and what looked like an outdated speaker system that was probably used only for on-ship communication.

Max pursed his lips.  Today wasn't such a lucky day for him, but maybe he might have a little more luck.  He picked up the receiver of the radio and heard static--that was a good sign, at least there was power.  Adding in a signal to the comm. he was surprised to find that it was able to reach outside of the ship.  Immediately he felt a sharp pain in his head as he channeled onto one of the frequencies he knew the agency had tapped.  When the ringing in his ears subsided and he regained focus, Max could hear a voice calling through the receiver.

"Operative 2237. Operative 2237."

Max shook his head, blinking away both the amazement and the last vestiges of migrane.  The voice continued as if it seemed to have for quite some time.

"Operative 2237. Mobius. Max."

The last syllable, Max, his name was marked more clearly with concern than the previous callings.  Finally it clicked in the back of his head (and with that realization a small needle of pain to accompany it).

"Annie...?"

He could sense the relief in the A.I.’s voice.  In her time with him, Mobius’ mannerisms had rubbed off plenty on Anita, she picked up on subtleties like inflection, emotion, and nuanced nonverbal communication—she even mimicked many of it.  Or did she actually express it; Max wasn’t sure.  One thing he was sure of was that he was happy to hear a familiar voice.

“Oh, good, you’re cognizant.” She said, “Are you alright?”

“I-I’m fine.” He said

“Good, you need to get up and we need to move on. You’re in danger.”

“I need to know what’s going on,” Max started, “I’m not sure what I’m dealing with.”

“Operative 2237, the last thing that happened in my database was…”  The unmistakable and unwelcoming screech of static filled the receiver, drowning out Anita’s explanation.

“Hello? Annie?” He said as he concentrated on her garbled speech through the white noise. 

“Annie, I can’t hear you.”

The faint crimson illumination provided by a protruding emergency light wavered as the light flickered on and off.  Mobius glanced up at the light as it flitted.  Shit, he thought with a frown, this section must be losing power.  He cut the feed to the communication receiver—he had lost the signal.  Back to square one, Mobius would have to take some time to gather his thoughts.  There was only one Red Technocracy ship that had ever touched down on F67X, and that was in a battle the local media had dubbed an “Extraterrestrial Intervention.”  It was shortly after first contact.  He wasn’t sure where he was now, but he was fairly certain that old Roswell had a replica of the cruiser somewhere in its vaults.  Here he was wandering a fully to-size wrecked ship.

“Well,” he said to himself, “plan B. Find an escape pod.”

“Unwise.”

The voice contradicted him just as the emergency light faded, but the radioactivity from the reactor provided him with enough ambient light to see a shadowy figure moving about the room.  Mobius recognized the eastern-tinged voice as Gennosuke, who he had met earlier.  The operative was up at the ready the second he heard the voice, his powerful fists brought to bear.

“The Kouga are the darkness, which melds with the night. Were I your enemy you would be lost and gone.”

Gennosuke’s pseudo-threat didn’t ease Max at all.  In fact the operative could feel his shoulders tighten. 

“There is no escaping this place, Mzadech, but there is a method of…suspending it. However, you must obey.”

Obey, scoffed Mobius, I’ve been doing that shit all my life.

“You are not in the realm of mortal men.” Gennosuke continued, “To survive, you must learn the rules.”

“I don’t want to survive. I want to conquer.”

Max could tell his words took Gennosuke aback.  In fact, the words surprised him even as he spoke them.  Conquer? What did he want with this place? Was he resigned to his fate to become the same thing that Forge had?  He rationalized his thought process and determined that he wasn't going down without a fight.  He and only he would be in control.  Mobius would not be puppeteered around—not in his own body.  He would be in control; he would fight the red sunset.

All the sudden he could feel Gennosuke’s amusement, as if the ninja were smirking at him—though he couldn't see it.

“Hm. Alright, but first you must learn.”

Max stared at the silhouette, attempting to figure out what Gennosuke meant by “learn.”  His ponderings were interrupted by the emergency light behind him, flickering back on, bathing the narrow doorway in front of him in red, and illuminating the catwalk in front of him.  Where the silhouette of Gennosuke once was now there was nothing.

“You must heighten your senses.” Kouga’s voice behind him demanded.

Whirling around, Max looked to find himself face-to-face with the ninja, who had somehow materialized behind him.  Instinctively, Max threw a punch, but his fist met only the hard steel of the technocrat’s hull.  Unfazed by the pain, he immediately whirled around just as Kouga spoke again.

“You must sharpen your skills.”

The operative rushed out the doorway in a blur, and leaped off his foot with all the practice of a skilled martial artist, kicking where Gennosuke stood, but met nothing but the catwalk railing, which he felt give somewhat.

“Violence is an anathema.”

This time the voice came from the reactor, itself.  Max whipped his head around and squinted his eyes to make out Gennosuke’s figure crouched upon the reactor, his face grimly lit by the lambent green glow of the radioactivity.

“Your mind is your greatest asset here.”  Gennosuke said, as he raised himself from his kneeling position.  He vanished.

“Focus-“

Max punched into the wall directly next to Gennosuke, who stood in the threshold of the Communication room’s doorway.  He could have crumbled Kouga’s face in, but he didn't.

“Then cut the fortune cookie shit and teach me something, Master Miyagi.”

The brute’s quick adaptation gave Kouga pause as he looked to the intense face of the operative.  Perhaps he held some potential, after all.  Perhaps he would be selected, or maybe even more.  Gennosuke had watched before as others had failed the symbiosis and Xelas devoured them.  He was the first, the first to endure Xelas’ unending gluttony.  Before him, Xelas was a being able to walk on its own, but the price of the creature’s sins were surely weighing down on it.  He watched as someone tried to forcibly bond a god to Xelas, and how it devoured him in this realm.   

Dionysus was far too proud, and far too stubborn.  He had not heeded Gennosuke’s urging and the rain devoured him.  Forge was different--he listened, but that wasn't enough.  Forge was not of a sound mind far before being inhabited by Xelas.  He also remembered that the man was of unfortunate circumstances--the rift likely would have caused any man to go mad, but Forge already walked the path.  Mzadech, however, he was unmolded potential.  He had a strong mind, and a strong body; he was willful.  Perhaps he could survive the tax of Xelas.

“If you insist,”  Gennosuke acquiesced.

He could sense Mobius relaxing, and Gennosuke exhaled a long, drawn-out breath, then closed his eyes.



Mobius lowered his fists and unballed them as he watched Gennosuke’s shoulders sag and his eyelids draw shut. Something in the back of Max’s mind told him what to do, Relax.  He complied, and did his best to force some of the tension out despite the circumstances.  He did not, however, shut his eyes.  Two minutes passed by and Max was beginning to wonder what the point of this was.  Meditation hardly seemed like the solution his problems.

That was when Gennosuke’s eyes shot open--concentric rings of yellow and red veined with strange green ripples.  His eyes glowed and the roomed darkened--or perhaps his eyes contrasted with the ever-present darkness to give that effect.  Mobius felt a force hit his body, but he was unsure what it was, and then all the sounds of the reactor came to a standstill.  In fact, all the noises he had previous heard were gone.  The room was dead silent.

He couldn't move.  Max’s limbs were frozen in place as the environment around him began to change. 

The reactor’s light cycled like a rising sun through the sky, taking position at high noon.  He could feel its lambent light shining down on him, but that feeling would subside.  The radioactivity naturalized into ambient outdoor light, and bathed the murky, changing landscape into something different, something he had never seen before, personally, but knew what it was. 

Gennosuke, too, at this point changed.  His skin tightened around his skull, and his cheeks sunk in, like some sort of horrific malnourished ghoul.  His sockets also sunk in and his lips receded around his jaw and mandible creating a visage of a human skull.  His eyes remained fixated on Mobius, and Max felt compelled to look back--he was unable to turn his gaze from the hideous mummy that stood before him.

The landscape rapidly changed around them.  Below, the tainted waters bubbled and boiled, sprouting into tributaries and solidifying into what looked like a canopy of cauliflower, which fell thousands of feet below them.  Trees, one would recognize--a forest.  A vast, expansive forest.  The untamed wilds smashed the barriers of the room and ship, and soon they were overlooking a forest that spanned a thousand miles.  As the reactor, now a setting sun, settled just above the horizon he could see it, where the wall used to be behind Gennosuke’s grinning skull.

The skull changed, once again.  Like some horrible time-lapsed photo Gennosuke grew younger, but all too rapidly.  His skin expanded, and ballooned as it filled with flesh and meat once again.  Health returned to his face, but in a method that appeared artificial and all too unhealthy.  Color returned to the Kouga ninja, but his eyes remained the same--through death and to life.  Hair grew atop the patchy skull of the man, and fashioned itself into a messy ponytail oriented towards the back of his head.  After the transformation Gennosuke appeared less haggard than he had ever been.

The environment was not done, yet, though.  The steel catwalk that they once stood on solidified and dusted up, as they found themselves standing on a narrow mountain pass. Thousands of feet below the forest stretched on.  He could tell they were near the mountain's peak, as an eagle passed by, screeching before it flew out of sight.  It was daytime, he guessed, and with the setting sun’s position in the sky it now appeared to be around six o’clock.  His eyes were fixated on Gennosuke’s, even though his back was to the mountain wall.  Gennosuke stood on the edge of the cliff face, as the world began to slow to a stop.

You must take it, Gennosuke’s voice demanded in his head.  In my place you will take it.

In front of him he could see the yawning opening to a cave that plunged into the depths of the mountain.  Finally regaining his ability to move again, Max noticed Gennosuke had faded away, but the operative intrinsically knew what he had to do.  He approached the entrance of the cave and could hear woeful wailing of a man inside. Almost as if he were in a trance Mobius stepped inside the cave.  The sun’s light did not reach inside, the interior of the surprisingly cramped quarters was dark, mournful, and reeked of death.

As his eyes adjusted to the level of light within the cave, he could see a small camp perhaps a hundred yards in front of him.  He wasn't sure what would happen, and was unarmed save for his fists, so he decided to take this one stealthily.  Hunching low to the ground, Max prowled forwards like some sort of hunting predator.  The dismal moan once again filled the cave; this was the wail of someone bereft of something very valuable to them.  A depressed cry at a funeral, a sob of shock, Max wasn't sure what was happening, but he could see a figure hunched over at the camp ahead, as well as a few tents.

The figure never seemed to notice Max as he snuck up to the camp, but he still couldn't clearly see who it was at the camp up ahead.  However, he could see them crouched over what looked like a journal.  Perhaps thirty feet in front of them, and at the dead end of the cave there was a pedestal with a prism poised atop of it.  This prism created the only source of light throughout the cave, and it entranced Max much more than the bodies and journal that absorbed the attention of the young man and his now-revealed small group of compatriots.  The light shone rays that visibly divided the cavern in multicolored prismatic light.

Max drew his attention back down to the figure who, moments before, had furiously flipped to the back of the journal.  Suddenly the man shrieked and threw down the journal, jumping to his feet.  Something within the journal had psychologically assailed him with grief, and the young man, who Mobius now recognized as the wild and tearful-eyed Kouga he had seen moments before.  His eyes were different however, this time.  They were the eyes of a normal man, and Gennosuke was showing the emotions of a normal man, as well.  Things seemed to move in slow motion for Mobius as Gennosuke lumbered forward in grief-filled rage like some sort of Frankensteinian monstrosity, unable to cope with whatever revelation had just changed his life.

STOP HIM! Gennosuke’s voice screamed in his head.

Breaking his stealth, Max shot forward like an olympic runner from a runner’s stance.  He was much farther than Gennosuke, but he was also much faster.  The men at the camp, startled by the intrusion drew their weapons, but they would never catch Max at his top speed, not unaware as they were.  They yelled something at their leader in a language he understood to be Japanese, but in an archaic dialect that made it difficult to transcribe just exactly the phrasing of their warning.

The men charged forth with their blades raised, but they were behind Max and he would not pay them any attention.  His feet pounded against the rough ground of the cave, as he could feel stones and sharp gravel piercing through the arches of his feet.  He fought through the pain and blazed forward, one arm in front of the other, chopping through the air, exhaling furiously.  He could see Gennosuke, screaming and swinging his arms as he trudged another step towards the pedestal, and what Mobius felt was his ultimate doom.  Less than a second passed, but to Max it felt like an eternity of wondering whether he would make it before Gennosuke.  His chest burned as he pushed everything into every step he could manage.

“Don’t!” Max roared with the ferocity and warning of an impending tsunami.

Charging forward he watched as Gennosuke’s right hand passed just inches from artifact.  It was now or never.  Max outstretched his arm and leaped--this was the only way to escape, to free himself.  He felt as if he were about to take off and fly as he cleared the dais.  The operative twisted his body, kicking the back of his calf into Gennosuke’s side just as the grief-filled man knocked the podium again, dislodging the prism and causing it to fall over. Mobius planted his foot in Gennosuke’s back as the initial impact had not yet caused the ninja to fall over, then he pushed off, which sent the Kouga flying off the dais and into his men.  Max rocketed forth, his arm outstretched and his palm facing up.  With his body parallel to the ground he found the prism falling into his open, waiting hand, as if destiny had ordained this union.

When he landed, it was not a soft landing.  Max plowed into the stone pedestal, uprooting it, and smashing it as he tumbled over the dais and into the wall behind it.  He rolled over, ignoring the pain, and shot to his feet to witness the shocked sojourners behind him.  “Live your life, Gennosuke,” He said as he presented the prism to them, “in a way that would make your brother proud.” Max said, feeling as if he were channeling the extra-planar essence of Gennosuke back aboard the Red Technocracy ship.

Just then his eyes drew to the prism, which he could see started to crack in his very hand.  The gem could no longer contain the light and power within, and it shattered like a grenade, radiating its blinding light throughout the cave.  Mobius was blinded, and felt like his eyes were being burnt out of their sockets.  Pain shot through his entire body, and his scream of pain was drown out by the waves of roaring energy that might just cause the mountain to crumble, and the forest to burn, below.  

Max fell to his knees, and blacked out.



Gennosuke had stood there staring at Max back in the engineering room.  He could see trails of blood beginning to tear around the corners of the operatives eyes.  It’s happening. He thought to himself.  He watched as Mobius’ eyes changed.  The man’s pupil’s dilated and expanded, then shrank, then the iris warped into different colors.  His mouth gaped, and seconds later prismatic light shot from every orifice of the man’s body. 

Gennosuke shielded himself from the artifact’s power as he witnessed hues of red dominate they yellow and green.  Mobius was obtaining the Kouga doujutsu, and he was seen as worthy by the artifact that Gennosuke had obtained long ago.  He was sure there would be some repercussions in the meddling of time, but Xelas was recreating history as he knew it.

Max fell to his knees, his eyes, nostrils, ears, and mouth smoking as if he had a round on the electric chair.  Prostrating himself in unconsciousness, Max was out, but deep down, Gennosuke knew he had succeeded.

He was not done yet, though. 

There was much more for Mobius to do.

Maxwell blinked long-crusted over eyes to semi consciousness as he regarded the haze about him in confusion. Gennosuke was gone, but that wouldn't cross his mind for a few minutes yet. The red emergency lights rotated scouring the room in sweeping cycles of red. That was one of his few sources of light and, compared to much of the ship, was generous. As Mobius rolled over and pushed himself up, his bones creaked and fatigue settled into his muscles.

How long was I out for? He thought.

A wave of nausea hit him, and he steeled himself against the ten pound pit that settled in his stomach. Looking up, he saw the other source of light in the room--a glowing, green reactor. He studied it for a moment, blinking as he steadied himself.

I should get out of here. If that thing’s leaking, then I could be in trouble.

Hobbling across the room, the Christmas hues were swallowed wholly by the hungry darkness of the hallway ahead. He stared at the ceiling as if he were searching for the ship's floorplan in its rivets and once he recalled the design he stepped into the pitch. His gut and his head were arguing like an old married couple. Max remembered hearing Annie speak to him over the now-defunct engineering communications room radio. There was power to the ship, so logically his next step should be to go to bridge. Then again, something in his gut told him that it was time to confront whatever was lurking within the crew’s cabin. He wouldn’t be safe until whatever it was had been dealt with.

He stopped in his tracks and considered things. Perhaps there was a happy medium. He’d go to neither and, instead, head to the armory to arm himself for the crew’s quarters. He believed the armory to be in the rear of the ship, but he wasn’t completely certain. Turning on his heel, he followed a hunch that the armory was the opposite way he came.

Fortune favored Max yet again, and after twenty minutes of meandering through dark corridors he stumbled into a strip where the generator was able to power lighting. He exhaled in relief as he crept up to the door that was labeled “Armory” in the Red Technocracy’s native tongue. Slipping into the light, he examined the door, then the keypad next to it. The pad suggested a bioscan was required in the form of a handprint. That would be a problem. Judging by the LED’s it was functioning, but that meant that the coupled security measures also were. The Red Technocracy’s spending seemed to go all into armaments, and their security protocols were sophisticated, to say the least.

I could hack it… he considered.

And perhaps he could, but he didn’t have ANITA, so there was a larger chance of failure. Lacking the confidence, and unwilling to risk the consequences, Max decided he’d find another way into the armory. He turned his shoulders and started looking around the lit sections, searching for anything he could use, anything that could help him, anything at all. Feeling around walls, he found what looked like a grate that was sprayed over with red paint. He blinked a few times as he mumbled pronunciations of the unconventional dialect, “Repair? No--maintenance. Maintenance!”

Crouching down, the operative forced his fingers through the grating and with a motion not too dissimilar from an angled deadlift he used his legs, back, and arm muscles to rip the cover from the wall. Peering into the darkness of the small access vent, he sighed, squared his shoulders, and crawled in. Though he was skilled in the art of stealth and subterfuge, Max was probably not Mobius Operative’s prime choice for shimmying through cramped maintenance vents. Leave that for Thomas or the new girl…

A combination of pausing to remember the girl’s name and getting his shoulders stuck in a corner halted his advance. The struggle was one of a few that would impede an expedient advance into the armory, but eventually in his struggle through claustrophobic vents he was able to dislodge the hanging vent and come crashing down into the barren room beyond.

The lit room was about thirty by thirty with weapon lockers lining the west edge. In the center were two rows of benches, and to the right were several suits of body armor still mounted on mannequins. To the north, and Max’s right stood the entryway to the room and exit to the hallway he’d snuck in through, and to the south there were two doorways both of which were shut. Quickly noting his surroundings, Max saw what he needed and immediately shifted through the body armor, finding something that would fit him.

The suits were of well-enough quality, likely comparable to what was now standard-issue for F67X infantry deployment. He was definitely getting a suit second-hand, a blast scar splayed across the plated chestpiece of the ensemble. He shrugged, deciding that the imperfections gave the piece character. As he slipped on the pants, and shoved his arms through the sleeves, he noted the brand tag that, for some reason, stood out to him more than it should have, probably because it was in english and not russian. Resolve, it said.

When he was done he moved over to the locker, flicking it open and pulling out one of the carbines within. He couldn’t recall the model of the standard-issue Red Technocracy military firearm, but this resembled what he had seen in the past. The exception to the rule was a large decal branded into the side of the assault rifle that also read, in english, Logic.

Getting out of the armory was much simpler than getting in. The security protocols didn’t prevent someone from exiting, only from entering. Even though parts of the hallway were lit, Max was able to use the digital scope to the assault rifle for the parts that weren’t. The twenty minute journey was nearly halved with that little aid.

Finally, he arrived at the nook that led to the crew’s quarters. It was just how he remembered it when he passed by it earlier. There was no sign, no Russian, telling him what it was. He knew. His gut told him. That ten pound pit in his stomach turned over and dumped into his heels. He could smell iron in the air, and something damp was pooled near his feet, not even a meter from the main entryway. It was crypt-quiet, the kind of solitude Mobius hadn’t experienced in a long time. He exhaled sharply and took a step towards the crew cabin, knowing only his own inhibitions kept him from entering.

“I wouldn’t do that…”

A voice spoke behind him that caused Max to wheel around, drop to one knee, and narrow in on his sights. No one. You would think I’d be more used to this kind of thing by now, the operative grimaced, exasperated, that was Forge’s voice.

Rising to his feet, he ignored Forge’s warning. The last time he saw the guy, his face was half missing and he had turned into a cannibal. His advice, even if it agrees with the gut theory, isn’t my compass.

“Getting out of here is.” Max assented in a half-mental, half-verbal conversation with himself.

His eyes widened in tandem with the door he pulled it open.

Inside, he saw-

-something that was difficult for him to comprehend. Max lowered his eye from the digital sight balking as his jaw slacked. What laid before him through the open doorway was not the crew’s quarters at all, but instead a fecal-brown esophageal gullet slowly undulating, contracting, and finally expanding. Silver phlegm drooled from its musculature, puddling at the doorway. The smell was rancid, like a two month rotted corpse that subsisted on a diet of rotten eggs. The stench stung tears to the corner of Mobius’s eyes, but did not break his trance-like stare. With the raw odor brought a tinge of iron taste to the air, like the operative had bitten his lip. The rush of sickening humidity was reminiscent of a living organism respiring.

Max’s eyes saccade as he took in details of the organ. Did he really enter? Or had he always been here. Max didn’t move, but the hallway’s pulsating muscle shoved him into its depths at a slow, rhythmic beckon. He could hear the cycle of the domain aspirating, death rattling, and then rejuvenating to breathing in a revolving door of suffering, death, and life. But this wasn’t life that was worth living, instead this was life with the sole purpose of suffering. Tortured life support. A glob of quicksilver mucus drizzled down Max’s shoulder and pooled at his feet like saliva from a hungry beast. A beast which had already swallowed the operative whole.

“What--” Max breathlessly whispered, and was instantly met with taste of iron that left him cottonmouth.

Mobius didn’t even realize that he dropped his carbine in his stupor. The only thing that now caught his attention were his hands. His palms were desiccated, lined with deep purple veins, and punctuated by the thinness of his fingers that could trace all the way to his very visible metacarpal bones.

“Oh..” was all he could manage in his astonishment, as he perceived himself almost with an out-of-body experience. “I…”

The ex-soldier’s body was withered to almost fetal atrophy. The fact that he was standing was a miracle, because his feet and legs fractured with every gentle nudge turned violent shove the floor goaded him with. Like a standing skeleton made of solidified dust, Mobius could count every rib, and even saw the feeble tapping of his own heart under his chest. His elbows, shoulders, knees and hips were like nodes on an emaciated weed. He was a weed. No. A corpse. He attempted to scream, but all his decrepit lungs could manage was a wheezing moan as they collapsed upon themselves, and the accent of his suffering was him suffocating on his own saliva in a death rattle.

That wasn’t the room’s death rattle… it was his.

Within that moment the most powerful urge welled inside Mobius. The urge to live. That desire was strong enough to pull him from his mummified corpse.

He gasped as he looked back over his shoulder, a cold sweat dampening his brow, and his twisted, white knuckles gripping tightly over Logic. The corpse was behind him, laid to rest as the esophageal wall swallowed it with the quiescent inevitability of a corpse in a cremation furnace.

The operative composed himself, noticing that the pauldrons of his body armor were missing. The kevlar shoulder pieces had completely dissolved.

As he continued down the throat, a new feeling surged within him: the opposite of what he felt before. Power. His muscles swelled, and heat expanded within his chest. An adrenal kick to the gonads filled his body with pure energy. He gritted his teeth as he felt a lighting storm surging through his nervous system. Saliva trailed from the corners of his mouth, as he began to froth with rabid fury. His heart slammed in his chest like a boxer flurrying a speed bag.

Max closed his eyes and his hands viced around the handle of the carbine. Surprisingly, the metal of the gun’s handle crumbled like a tin can in his unmodified grip. His body shook and buzzed as a paroxysm wracked his essence and, finally, he capitulated to the rush. The operative’s eyes sprang open, mouth gaped, and he screamed sound out of existence.

The desperate gaze of the operative met a beautiful patterned blue/green orb, whorled with strands of white. He recognized it; a child would. Earth. A marble in an ocean of black. He reached out and cupped the world in his palms. It was his marble, and he would protect it. The emotional scales that was weighed down with power was balanced with something else, now.

Love.

This was not lust or appreciation, but a paternal affection for something that he cradled. This planet was fragile. It needed him, and he would give anything to protect it. A new emotion welled inside him, as if it were injected in his body by some celestial scientist who experimented with his emotions. A guarded desire to defend this planet from something distant. He took that power, channeling it within himself, and departed.

Distance, time, speed, with his new power Max was unfettered by these concepts. When he willed himself to be there, he was, had always been, and always would be there. Existing there, not there, and everywhere, and nowhere. Before him in the vastness of space he stared down the End of all Things. The abstract darkness that existed within him, and permeated all things. The culmination of all things was its expiration.

This was not the freeze death, the great expansion, or the strange apocalyptic theories of the destruction of the universe. Instead, this was the destruction of all universes, of all recognition, of all time, of all space, of all concepts, of all emptiness, of all things. There was no after, only before. It was not an enemy to be faced, nor was it an obstacle to be overcome. Eternity ended past its event horizon. Beyond its event horizon was beyond indescribability, a space, a time, a place and none of these, a paradigm existence that was a swan song for the nihilist--not even nothingness, itself.

Max flew into this darkness. And he, too, ended.

A combination of sweat and tears streamed down Max’s cheeks as he watched the noble sacrifice. This death was the ultimate death, the most final of all.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, “what is all this?”

The shinguards of his armor were gone.

Mobius closed his eyes, settling his nerves as best as he could, he wasn’t sure if he could put what he saw behind him, but knew he had to. His boots slapped against the wet silver saliva of the throat, even as he continued into the belly of the beast. His resolve carried his weighted feet, even as the gullet attempted, to bog him down.

Cringing, the first sensation of change Max felt was a drop in humidity that left him in a cold sweat. His feet petered to a stop as he felt the sloshing slog wane. The pounding war drums that represented his heart rate slowed, diminuendo. His breathing steadied, and he blinked his eyes open through beads of sweat. Max found himself in a room not unlike the interrogation rooms he imagined Thomas had probably interrogated many-a-prisoner in. He wasn’t cuffed in, though. And he wasn’t starting down some gruff Dick Tracy on the other side. It was just him, a table, and a strange sword laid presentation style before him.

The operative had spent enough time around Gennosuke to figure out that this was a katana. Against his better judgment he approached it, cautiously, and his fingers curled around the hilt. A voice within him screamed against his folly, and begged him not to do it, but it was almost as if he were in a dream, and was incapable of deviating from its dark script.

As soon as he took the weapon in hand Mobius was assailed with a psychic force he could not grasp. The pressure that mounted inside of his skull was immediate--like an F53 taking off from ground to breaking the sound barrier. His teeth gnashed together so tightly he could feel a molar crack in the back of his jaw. He would have screamed but his trachea seized in rigor-like pain. His muscles tensed, flexing, and his appendages closed as if he were being electrocuted. Blood leaked from his ears, lacrimated from his eyes, dripped from his nose, and painted his clenched teeth in a crimson grin.

Max’s mind was conscious of the failings of his body, and he felt every wave of convulsion and every seizure that wracked him so. He was able to sense his organs shutting down like they were buildings in a great power outage. None of it compared to what he saw, though. What he touched minds with. It entered and flowed into him. His body could not possibly contain what was within that blade. A mental manifestation of himself screamed in hysterical agony, but even that was drowned out in the roaring bedlam that was housed within his mindscape.

Veins surfaced on his temples, and his teeth shattered as he began to tap into his superhuman strength that was amplified infinitely by whatever this thing was. His eyes exploded as an ocean’s worth of pressure popped them like Dionysus eating a grape. His bowels evacuated and soon the blood and drool that leaked from the corners of his mouth graduated into a bloody foam.

And then, and only then, when the agony transcended the capability that his physical form could withstand:

His head exploded.

Like a pulpy watermelon hit with a sledgehammer, Mobius’s head became an organic grenade. Shards of skull fragments shredded the wooden table in front of him and gray matter, covered in viscera-slicked gore painted the interrogation room in red. The skull bomb left behind a ragged, split stump that was once the mobius operative’s neck, and as his body fell to its knees, then prostrated, his muscle quivered with final convulsions that signified the end of Maxwell Lionheart’s life.

And he saw it all.

This vision had stopped Max dead in his tracks, and by the time it’s seizure-inducing mindscape subsided, he found himself swallowed in the hallway nearly up to his knees. The fatigue was beginning to settle in, transferring from his mind to his body, and it required some effort for him to pull himself out of the organic quicksand and force himself to trudge forward. He looked down, expecting to see sweat staining the front of his body armor, but instead his gaze was only met with bare chest.

Max continued with what little strength he had, pushing on into madness. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing, and his hands shook as he trained his weapon in front of him, defending himself against nothing. He knew he shouldn’t have come in here. He regretted every second of it.

Behind him, Max’s keen eyes heard the pattering of feet splashing around in the silvery liquid, and instinctively he wheeled around, but saw nothing. This half-second of automatic reaction was enough for them to catch him. Two sets of hands gripped his shoulders and arms, and a blast of daylight temporarily blinded him as he could feel heavy bodies tackling him to the ground, and shouting that he couldn’t make sense of over the ringing in his ears.

Before he even knew what happened he was on his stomach, and the arms were cuffing his hands behind his back. On the back of his skull he could feel a sensation he knew all too well--the cold muzzle of a gun.

“Target secure.” One of the heavily-distorted voices above him droned. “Moving delta code: 2237 to extraction point. ETA five minutes.”

The two sets of arms hoisted him to his feet, and with weary eyes Max regarded the destruction of the Argentinian city around him. He was back to the present. The cyclone leveled the block, and from the appearances of things a building had fallen on him. He half-walked and half-fell to a small, squat building that stood on the outskirts of the ground-zero block. His mouth felt like it had been on the business end of a dremel saw, and the only sound he could make was raspy gasps that existed straight from his labored lungs. The three figures he recognized--Mobius operatives. They were dressed in all the standard gear, with masks obfuscating their faces. One of them turned to him, pulling out a small flashlight and clicked it on in his eyes.

“He’s with us. Bag him.”

One of the operatives behind him pulled a sack over his head, but even in Max’s broken-down state he could still put together where he was and where he was going. They moved him forward three paces, clicked something plastic that caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up. A beacon--they activated a beacon. His hypothesis was ratified when a sensation churned his stomach and he felt as if he had just attempted to step on a stair that was not there. It coupled with a sharp pain to the back of the skull.

Time was difficult to discern as Mobius faded in and out of consciousness for what he guessed to be a few hours. When he woke, he woke to the raucousness of voices. Thousands of voices that murmured together in aggregate polyglot. His senses returned to him with dawdling lethargy. His vision faded once or twice, and Max simply felt as if he could not will himself to immediate consciousness.

“Before us,” a charismatic voice spoke, measured pauses and all, “lies a traitor responsible for the deaths of thousands.”

“But this is one, broken man, was not the mastermind, only the muscle.”

Max’s vision flickered in enough to catch the image of Apollo, dressed in his violet and black pinstripe slacks, deep vest accompanied with golden buttons, and his white dress shirt perfectly pressed underneath. What caught Mobius the most was Apollo’s eyes, filled with disdain and predatory nature. His vision drowsily drifted upwards to take in the orange sky and the skyscrapers that towered like solemn judges. One in particular, he recognized to be Discorporate Productions, it was the preeminent arbitrator of his fate, and its peak scowled at him from infinite heights.

He exhaled, unable to make out any of Apollo’s speech, and the breath burned his throat as if he were breathing fire. The ex-operative willed himself to move, and got far less return for his effort. Slumping over, he could see the throngs of people who had come to watch their glorious overlord speak. Apollo always did have a way with the people.

“...we shall not stand idly by while this corruption devours our homes, our families, our lives. We call for war! And know that I do not sit behind my desk, as leaders past, did. I strike the first blow! I fight with you on the front lines…”

In the din of a revelrous crowd Max’s superhuman sense picked up an almost imperceptible chk-click. Suddenly the threat that it implied squeezed what little adrenaline his body had left. Though his fight against Forge had spent him, his mind took stranglehold of his body, and he was able to shift himself onto his knees. As his senses swirled to full consciousness, Max found himself upon a dais, like an executioner’s platform, and a sea of people extended through the streets of Capital City in every direction. His heart pole vaulted in his chest against his sternum as he realized the gravity of the situation. But it was too late.

“...Our marvels reach the heavens! There is no greater feat than to be human! There is no enemy that we cannot defeat!”

Apollo whirled around, his eyes burning with fervor as he pressed the barrel of a gun to the front of Mobius’s head. For a moment, Max’s out-of-body experience showed him a look on his face that he would never forget. Naked, and beaten, Max resembled a prisoner of war. His hair was tousled about, and his lips were busted, his face bruised. He could see his nose twisted, crooked and broken. Two streams of long-dried blood decorated him with a crimson moustache. Though there was heavy swelling around his brow, both his eyes were shot wide open, pupils dilated. These gateways showed Max’s emotions most clearly, and all of Capital City could and would see it.

Unabated terror.

“THIS IS THE SOVEREIGN MANIFESTO!”

Darkness.

Max blinked back the throbbing in his eyes as he watched himself collapse onto the ground in a lifeless heap. This vision, too, subsided, and a corrosive touch ebbed away at his sanity. He could feel his flesh crawl with a shudder as he passed by, leaving behind his clumped corpse and the roaring of angry Capital City rioters. He was back in the throat of the beast, and his body began to reflect the fatigue his mind felt. But he pushed on, as he always did, and as he always would. One foot in front of another, he told himself.

And, suddenly, he felt his legs give out. No, the floor gave out under him, it dropped into a swift decline that sent him skidding down its silvery mucus-lined muscle. His velocity picked up and the muscles shifted as the living being shuddered off the unwanted pressure on its throat, which spiraled Max out of control. He tumbled violently down the shaft, head over heels, shoulder over shoulder, twisting his limbs as contractions pummeled and crushed him, and before long the abuse ended by expelling him through an esophageal sphincter into a vast void.

For Mobius, it was continuous falling. An endless descent into a hazy void that expanded in every direction without escape and without distraction. Max was trapped here, and soon eternity would rear its ugly head at him, and his mind, too, would be wiped to a bloody, angry pulp, like Forge. He felt he was close to his limit.. The void was warped from something it used to be, its emptiness was filled with malice perceived by the mind that was lost within. The heart of the beast.

He wasn’t sure what happened, but his body armor was ruined, and he could not find the carbine anywhere--in the chaos he must have lost it. He was right where he started: naked, defenseless, with nothing but his willpower to subsist upon. He centered himself as he tumbled through endless emptiness head over heels, and straightened his body into a pencil dive.

“I told you not to come here,” a familiar voice barbed, “but you didn’t listen. You’re stupider than you look.”

Max ignored Forge’s jeering and continued to rekindle his calm. “You thought the journey was bad? We are only getting started. I have the rest of your life to fuck with you, and I’m gunna show you exactly what waits for you with that silver cumstain.”

The operative couldn’t be prepared for the mental onslaught Forge oppressed him with. The previous graphic visions continued ceaselessly, each one a new tool unveiled from the repository of pain. He lived through all the visions, existing different times and places simultaneously as others and himself. Max saw Gennosuke withered and wretched, and it was him. He saw Forge, mutilated and disfigured, and it was him. He saw Thomas, skewered by his own skeleton, forced to watch a woman he cared very much for die, and it was him. He saw Apollo, crucified outside his office, and it was him. He saw Pawn, drawn and quartered by legions of dead, and it was him. He saw Tristan, who lived the scientific dharma wheel’s constant state of life and death, and life and death, and it was him. Max lived vicariously through every fatality.

Max suffered, forever, in the timeless rift that ruined Forge, but this didn’t sate the phantasm’s indignation. What afflicted Mobius was no longer human nor petitioner, but was a spirit of animus. Anger and pain reigned as the gods of this rift, and every moment of physical, psychological, and spiritual torture expanded their clergy. The Spirit of Animus’s gospel was to break him. To mold the man with its proverbs of pain into a protoplasm of sensations. A bundle of twitching spasmodic nerve clusters formed from the clay of quintessence. A thing whose only method of living was to feel unending anguish. The beast.

The Spirit of Animus was opposed with issues twofold. Firstly, the vicissitudes of the maladies inflicted upon Max wrought new and interesting ways of suffering. The idiosyncratic responses of Max’s pain would be prescribed to physical reaction. It would lose the sui generis that made Mobius... Mobius. Secondly, and more frustratingly so, was that the operative was still actively resisting it. Even though the Animus had broken his cerebral Resolve and disarmed the phrenic armaments that was his capability of Logic, he persisted through Will. No amount of violation, despoliation, or desecration changed that. Max did persevere.

In the absence of self, something else composited within Maxwell’s spirit. Untapped strength flowed through him, renewing his resolve, restoring his sense of logic, and steeling his will. It came in a phrase linguistically unfamiliar to him, but through some miracle transcribed itself in the grey matter of his brain. It settled in his ventricles, and pumped through his veins, traveling through his arteries. It filled his lungs, and settled his stomach. It reverberated through his psyche, and filled his tumultuous mind with a meadow of calm.

“Gam zeh ya’avor.”

A mantra that annealed Max into stone. He wasn’t sure where it came from, but it rooted deeply into his chest. He couldn’t even think of its origin, because any fraction of cerebration dedicated to anything other than his mantra resulted in agony beyond apperception.

“Gam zeh ya’avor.”

Over a course of what seemed like years Max had transcended the Spirit of Animus’s menagerie of misery, and its oceanic influence thus did wane like low tide. A metaphysical battle waged, and the inch that was given to Mobius was taken by the mile. He bulwarked himself against its malign influence and pushed the line. The counterbalance shifted, and though little physical ramifications manifested, the war of immaterialism raged. A skirmish that stretched into a battle that stretched into a war that stretched into a lifetime of strife that stretched into an eternity raged and rebounded within the rift until its infinitesimal gulf could not encompass the ferocity.

When the eons built to aeons Max soon found himself the hands that molded, but never did he lose sight of his purpose. He did not become the hands that would crush, but instead he would become the virtuous conqueror. And finally when his thoughts of ‘gam zeh ya’avor’ subsided an anamnesis returned to him, starting with a name.

Forge.

He dispelled the Spirit of Animus, and with it the pervasive darkness that Forged its malice. A cloud that clung to the silver creature like a haze of fat maggot-bearing flies. But the presence did not vacate, it merely moved. This would be his burden to bear now. The cancer slinked back into remission, waiting for its day. This was the true enemy. When the haze of enmity dispersed, Max could see distant nebulae, spiral galaxies, and somewhere within that abstract picture of light and darkness was his marble.

Gradually, his freefall slowed to a hover, and the operative’s insides settled. Max looked about the void, and knew that he had conquered Forge as he did Gennosuke. Closing his eyes, he focused his mind, willing the milieu to return to its natural state. Soundlessly, the void changes to the mausoleum that was the crew’s quarters. It resembled a morgue more than it did a barracks. Beds sat parallel to one another, spacing with uniform distance. Upon each of these beds there was a body with a cloth sheet draped over it. He didn’t focus too much on the cadavers, but he judged there to maybe be thirty within the cabin. The main sounds within the room was the metronome of respirators that pumped into these flesh bags. Instruments connected them and the ship, and pumped their vitae to somewhere Max could only guess. It was all metaphorical and metaphysical, but somewhere in here Forge and Gennosuke laid with the rest of those who contacted Xelas.

He pitied these bodies who were farmed for this creature’s livelihood, and resolved to never end up as they did.

With that, Max turned, opened the door, and left.

Stepping through the threshold, Max left behind the acrid medicinal smell that irritated his nose, into not the bend of corridors he remembered. Instead, strode into a small foyer, with a large metal doorway embossed in a fading, rusted sigil. The symbol, he recognized as communist propaganda native to the Red Technocracy. The shift in space, and milieu neither surprised nor bothered the agent at this point. In fact, when he left the crew’s quarters, he vaguely remembered subtly wishing he could just skip to the bridge.

Something was happening within this world, that he didn’t quite understand, but that space, time, and events shaped to conform to his wishes. Deciding not to poke the bear too much, he approached the doorway, waving his hand in front of it in his best Jedi impression and commanded, “Open.”

The door did not move, and nothing changed. A stark reality that mellowed his bravado with a healthy dose of diffidentness. “Right,” he cleared his throat, “well, I’m sure there’s a panel around here, too.”

What, you thought overcoming an enhanced empathic assault made you a god all the sudden? Get real, you idiot. Forge hissed in the back of his skull.

Good to know you’re not gone, Mobius countered, your abrasive commentary would have been sorely missed.

Get fuckin’ used to it.

Instinctively finding the security panel, Max used the task of hacking the electronics to distract him from the new voice that had manifested in his head. He had barely gotten used to adding Gennosuke’s self-righteous patronizing, much less Forge’s caustic insults. A small spark connotated his success, and he could hear the subtle thrumm of power surging into the doorway. With another flick of the cable, the door shifted open, hydraulics and all.

Steam leaked from hidden pneumatics into the entryway like a roiling fog inside a forbidden bog. Max ignored it, stepping cautiously into the spartan interior. He had seen many ships, most of the time the bridge was every bit as much as a place of function and command as it was a lesson of intimidation. Not so for the bridge of this Red Technocracy ship. The interior resembled the angular simplicity of chiseled stone, and all the control panels, of which some here and there flickered haphazardly with newfound power and life, were meekly tucked and compartmentalized.

Max traced his vision through the dim light, even as the door hissed shut behind him. The bridge was as silent as a crypt, it was anticlimactic for what he initially expected. Raising his hand, he balled and uncurled his fist as a green glow began to envelope the appendage. He crept up to the captain’s chair, a large, uncomfortable looking thing, and viewed the singular panel on its side--a master control. In a motion that was every bit as symbolic as it was literal, Mobius eased himself down into the throne. The soldiers glowing right hand came to rest down upon the console.

Here we go… Let there be light. He thought to himself as he began to channel positive bioforce into the controls.

The ship’s array flickered with drowsy recognition as Max soldered broken circuits, repaired conduits, and renewed the connection between the bridge and the ship’s main power grid. One of the few things that had gone right in the mindscape he was trapped in. He exhaled as he could feel the tax on his body--with no serum to back up his energy expenditure, the fatigue quickly set in. When his eyes drifted open he caught the end of the console’s advance; its apex reached at a comfortable waist-level whilst seated. Upon it a flat, holographic display flickered to life, which raced through russian, numerals, and red technocracy code faster than he cared to pay attention to.

The display that it settled to was one he was sure was not standard issue. There were no prompts, no menus, and no feedback aside from a large all-encompassing red button. He couldn’t help but think that the red button resembled the looming light source he witnessed outside. The finality he had built up, and all the struggles he faced culminated in something clean, facile, and simple. The zenith of his challenges was to push a button.

“Well, kid, this is where you sign your soul away…” Forge jeered from over his left shoulder.

Mobius didn’t look at him.

“This shall bring you back to your present-state.” Gennosuke informed from the other.

Another voice seemed to emanate from the red ocular--a staticky petition that repeated in semi-understandable terms.

Attention! Oper----- 223- --u are in ---ger pl---- re-u-n to con----sness! ---ecting mul--ple ----ings in you- ------ity!

Max hovered his hand over the button for a moment, recognizing the entreaty as ANITA’s. His eyes widened as he put the message together and slammed his fist into the button, which plunged through it, past the console. Welling in its own self-created gravitational pull, his fist crashed through the floor, into the ground, which delved through the mindscape and into the infinity that would jolt his mind back to consciousness.



The drowning man gasped his first breath of air. Choked with cinders, dust, and smoke, Max’s first breath filled him with a fit of coughing and hacking that forced him onto his forearms, and he heaved from a half plank position. The sound and smell of a raging fire filled his ears and nostrils, but was nearly overpowered by the sounds of sirens, screams, and calamity. He pushed himself up to a kneeling position to take in his surrounds as soon as he gulped an able breath of air. Blinking the smoke-stung tears from his eyes he twisted his neck, viewing the chaos with a numb shock.

The vortex had destroyed… everything. A potluck of asphalt and concrete spiderwebbed with fissures, and in places it broke away collapsing into open ravines. The buildings were leveled, but in the horizon he could see twisting, tortured structures illuminated hellscape crimson by way of faroff flames. A thick thunderhead of smoke filled the sky, blotting out the sun. The only light was cast by the raging flames of what used to be the citizen’s lives. There were no bodies to be seen--only ash would have remained, and even that whipped away in the cyclone.

God… he flinched, as he witnessed wide-eyed the devastation.

A moment of clarity seized him as he addressed ANITA: Annie, how many are dead?

Attention! Operative 2232, you are in danger please return to consciousness--You are awake, and you are too late. ANITA responded, cutting off her warning message just as Max heard the clicking of multiple rifles around him, and saw the soft glow of an energy shield--more specifically a containment shield envelope him.

He recognized it to be standard Mobius Operative protocol, and it was not of the friendly variety. It was a neutralization protocol for arresting high-priority high-danger targets. He sighed as he slowly rose to his feet and looked up to the smog-choked sky, defeated and exhausted.

To answer your question: Two thousand two hundred thirty one confirmed casualties according to my spatial database, Operative 2232.

He shook his head, and lowered it. When escaping from one nightmare he felt as if he were plunged into another.

But this was one nightmare from which he would never be awake.