For the first time in six years, the sun actually touched the Black-Ice Barrens.
With Tsar Nikolai dead and the subterranean Firebird engine completely destroyed, the unnatural, localized blizzard that had perpetually blanketed the Northern Sector finally broke. The thick, oppressive grey clouds parted, allowing pale, fragile rays of morning sunlight to illuminate the massive, jagged crater where the Citadel of the Unbreaking Man had once stood.
Amani stood at the edge of the crater, the bitter wind whipping the heavy hem of his Soviet winter coat.
"It looks smaller in the daylight," Mariya Oktyabrskaya said, stepping up beside him.
The widow had wiped the dark engine grease from her pale face. Without the constant, looming threat of the Tsar, the heavy, defensive tension she carried in her shoulders had finally somewhat relaxed. She looked out over the miles of pristine, sunlit snow, toward the deep ice-canyons in the east where Viktor the Wolf had led the five thousand civilian survivors.
"It's over, Mariya," Amani said softly. "The Armada is gone. The Empire's grip on the Tundra is broken."
"Broken, yes. But not erased," Mariya corrected, turning her cold indigo eyes toward him. "We have five thousand starving people hiding in the ice, a completely ruined infrastructure, and a power vacuum that every Bratva warlord from here to Moscow will try to fill. The war against the Tsar is over, Fate Changer. The war to rebuild Russia starts today."
Amani nodded slowly. He understood perfectly. "You aren't coming with us to the Chaos Lands."
"I am a daughter of the Motherland," Mariya said, her voice filled with quiet, unshakeable pride. "My husband died dreaming of a free Tundra. I have to stay to make sure his ghost gets to see it. But I am not sending you across the ocean empty-handed."
Mariya gestured toward the far ridge. Resting silently on the snow, entirely untouched by the Citadel's collapse, was a sleek, aerodynamic vessel heavily painted in matte black. It didn't look like the blocky, heavily armored drop ships of the Vanguard. It was shaped like a massive, metallic arrowhead.
"A Giza Void-Clipper," Mariya explained, walking him toward the ship where the rest of the Swahili Pack was already gathering. "It was the Tsar's personal stealth transport. It uses advanced atmospheric repulsors and a localized radar-dampening field. It can cross the Pacific Ocean in four hours, and the Empire's orbital satellites won't see anything but a flock of birds."
Chacha was already loading their scavenged supplies into the heavy cargo bay, his massive, golden-fused chest easily handling the heavy crates. Sia was leaning against the boarding ramp, looking exhausted but deeply relieved, her Staff of Life strapped securely to her back. Upepo was walking around the sleek black hull, whistling in genuine appreciation of the Giza engineering.
Amani turned to Mariya. He reached out and gripped her hand in a firm, warrior's handshake.
"You saved my life, widow," Amani said, the violet rings in his eyes pulsing with profound gratitude. "The Swahili Pack owes you a debt."
"You dropped a mountain on the man who enslaved my country," Mariya replied, a genuine, rare smile finally breaking across her face. "Consider the debt paid in full. Give the Americans hell, Fate Changer."
Amani returned the smile, turned, and walked up the boarding ramp.
The Pacific Crossing
The Void-Clipper flew completely soundlessly, a black ghost tearing through the stratosphere at Mach 3.
Inside the spacious, heavily insulated cabin, the Swahili Pack finally had a moment to breathe. Sia was fast asleep on a leather bench, completely dead to the world as her body desperately tried to replenish her magical reserves. Chacha was sitting cross-legged on the floor, meticulously polishing the heavy head of his Cryo-Hammer, entirely unbothered by the jagged ridge of golden bone protruding from his open shirt.
In the sleek cockpit, Amani sat in the pilot's seat, the automated navigation systems handling the high-speed flight. Upepo sat in the co-pilot's chair, carefully unwrapping the bloody, makeshift splint on his right arm.
"How does it feel?" Amani asked, glancing over.
Upepo flexed his fingers. To his absolute shock, the shattered radius bone wasn't grinding anymore. The deep, purple bruising had faded to a dull yellow. "It's tight, but the bone is completely set. How is that even possible? I shattered it yesterday."
Amani reached into his heavy coat and pulled out the Gold Fragment.
The jagged crystal pulsed with a warm, ambient golden light, illuminating the dark cockpit. "The Fragment of Body," Amani murmured. "It doesn't just grant invulnerability if you embed it in your flesh. Just having it near us is constantly radiating regenerative energy. It's aggressively accelerating our natural cellular repair. My ribs are already fully healed."
Upepo stared at the glowing stone, his kinetic blue eyes wide with awe. "We have the Fragment of Soul, the Fragment of Mind, and now the Fragment of Body. Just one left."
Amani pulled out the ancient brass compass. The needle was locked firmly in place, pointing directly toward the digital horizon on the ship's monitors.
"The Fragment of Heart," Amani said, his expression darkening as he looked out the windshield at the vast, blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean far below. "The Core. The Gatekeeper warned us about the American sector. He called it the Hyper-Reality World."
"What does that even mean?" Upepo asked, leaning back in his chair. "Japan was a reality controlled by ink and memory. Germany was trapped in a mechanical time-loop. Russia was frozen in acoustic entropy. What is America's glitch?"
"Unstable biomes and corrupted liberty," Amani recited the Gatekeeper's exact words, a deep sense of unease settling in his gut. "Total anarchy."
The automated Giza proximity alarms suddenly blared to life, flashing a harsh, strobing red across the cockpit.
"Warning. Approaching Sector Four Boundary: The United States of America," the ship's synthesized voice announced calmly. "Atmospheric anomalies detected. Reality-fabric instability at ninety-eight percent. Proceed with extreme caution."
Amani and Upepo looked out the windshield.
The horizon was entirely wrong.
Where the blue sky should have met the dark curve of the ocean, there was a massive, violently shifting wall of aggressive, digital static. It looked exactly like a massive television screen suffering from a catastrophic graphical failure. Massive, jagged pixels of neon pink, toxic green, and blinding yellow rapidly flashed and tore across the sky.
The clouds weren't made of water vapor; they were massive, floating holographic projections of heavily armed Giza drones, corporate logos, and smiling, artificially perfect faces whispering heavily distorted slogans of "Freedom" and "Compliance."
"What the hell is that?" Upepo breathed out, his grip tightening on the armrest.
"The glitch," Amani said, gripping the control yoke as the Void-Clipper violently shuddered. "We're crossing the border."
The stealth ship plunged directly into the wall of digital static.
The physical laws of reality instantly, violently broke. Gravity inverted for three terrifying seconds, sending Chacha completely floating off the floor in the cargo bay, before slamming him violently back down. The temperature outside the hull rapidly fluctuated between minus fifty degrees and a blistering two hundred degrees in a matter of seconds.
"Manual override!" Amani shouted, desperately fighting the control yokes as the ship's highly advanced Giza instruments completely short-circuited under the paradoxical laws of the Chaos Lands.
They broke through the static wall and entered American airspace.
The visual assault was completely overwhelming. They were flying over the ruins of the West Coast. Beneath them lay the shattered, flooded remains of a massive metropolis—Neo-San Francisco.
The city was a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk nightmare. Massive, rusted skyscrapers jutted out of the rising ocean water, overgrown with glowing, bioluminescent, toxic-looking flora. Bridging the gap between the ruined towers were massive, blindingly bright neon bridges made entirely of hard-light holograms.
But they didn't have time to admire the terrifying view.
"Incoming!" Upepo screamed, pointing out the right window.
Tearing through the chaotic, neon-lit sky directly toward them was a swarm of heavily armed drones. But they weren't Giza standard issue. They were completely shaped like massive, mechanical bald eagles, forged entirely from highly polished chrome, their metallic talons crackling with superheated red plasma.
"Unidentified vessel, you have aggressively violated the airspace of the Liberty Prime Corporation," a booming, heavily commercialized, overly enthusiastic artificial voice echoed through their radio. "Please prepare to receive your mandatory freedom ordinance!"
The flock of chrome eagles opened fire.
A barrage of red plasma missiles streaked toward the Void-Clipper. Amani violently banked the heavy stealth ship to the left, narrowly dodging the first volley.
"I'm going to crush them!" Amani yelled, his eyes flaring with neon-violet light. He reached out with his left hand, aiming to cast a massive gravity well to ground the drones.
He unleashed the spatial magic.
Nothing happened.
Or rather, the exact opposite happened. Instead of creating a localized pocket of crushing gravity, the hyper-reality glitch of the American sector completely inverted his spell. A massive, localized anti-gravity bubble exploded entirely in the wrong direction, aggressively pushing the Void-Clipper completely off its flight path and directly into the trajectory of the incoming missiles.
"The magic is glitched!" Amani roared in absolute horror. "The physical laws are completely randomized!"
BOOM.
Three red plasma missiles violently struck the rear starboard engine of the Void-Clipper. The massive explosion completely shattered the stealth plating, ripping the entire repulsor engine cleanly off the hull.
The ship violently spun out of control, trailing thick, black smoke and aggressive red fire.
"Brace for impact!" Amani screamed, fighting the dead controls with everything he had as the ground rapidly rushed up to meet them.
The Void-Clipper clipped the massive, rusted suspension cables of the ruined Golden Gate Bridge, violently tearing the wings off the fuselage. The heavy, flaming hull skipped aggressively across the surface of the flooded, toxic bay, sending up massive geysers of polluted water, before finally, violently plowing directly into the side of a half-submerged, overgrown skyscraper.
The impact violently tore the cockpit apart, plunging the world into darkness.
Welcome to the Chaos Lands
Amani slowly opened his eyes, a high-pitched ringing echoing painfully in his ears.
He was hanging completely upside down in the pilot's seat, heavily restrained by the crash harness. The cockpit of the Void-Clipper was completely destroyed, the reinforced windshield shattered into a million tiny diamonds. Heavy, toxic-smelling black smoke filled the cabin, mixed with the sharp scent of burning ozone.
"Upepo?" Amani coughed heavily, rapidly unbuckling his harness and dropping awkwardly to the slanted ceiling of the ruined ship.
"I'm good... I'm good," Upepo groaned, pulling himself out of the debris. His kinetic aura flared weakly, violently shedding the twisted metal that had pinned his legs. "That was the worst landing you've ever executed, bro."
Amani kicked out the remaining glass of the windshield and squeezed through the jagged opening, stepping entirely out onto the wet, rusted floor of the ruined skyscraper they had violently crashed into.
Chacha and Sia were already outside. The giant had literally punched the heavy rear cargo door off its hinges to get the healer out.
"Everyone completely in one piece?" Amani asked, heavily sweeping his gaze over the Swahili Pack.
They were heavily bruised and covered in soot, but the ambient healing of the Gold Fragment in Amani's pocket had already begun heavily soothing their concussions.
"We're alive," Sia coughed, leaning on her staff. "But where exactly are we?"
Amani walked to the edge of the ruined, open-air floor of the skyscraper and looked out over the Chaos Lands.
The hyper-reality of America was completely, utterly terrifying. It was raining heavily, but the raindrops weren't water; they were entirely composed of tiny, glowing strings of blue digital code that vanished the second they touched the rusted ground. Below them, the flooded streets of Neo-San Francisco were heavily patrolled by aggressive, heavily armored raider gangs riding scavenged hover-bikes, violently engaging in running gun battles with corporate enforcement droids.
Massive, fifty-story-tall holograms of smiling politicians and heavily armed corporate mascots actively flickered and aggressively danced across the ruins, endlessly promising safety and violent retribution.
The entire country was a completely saturated, hyper-violent, neon-drenched warzone.
A sudden, loud, heavily metallic clanking sound aggressively echoed from the dark stairwell behind them.
The Pack instantly turned, raising their weapons. Upepo sparked with blue lightning. Chacha heavily hefted the Cryo-Hammer.
Stepping completely out of the deep shadows of the ruined skyscraper was a terrifying figure. It was an eight-foot-tall cyborg, entirely heavily covered in rusted, scavenged American military armor, heavily heavily painted with neon graffiti. The cyborg's entire right arm had been aggressively replaced with a massive, rotating, heavy kinetic chain-gun. Its face was heavily hidden entirely behind a glowing, digital visor displaying a constantly shifting, aggressive smiley face.
"Attention, completely unauthorized tourists," the cyborg's voice actively boomed from external speakers, sounding exactly like a cheerful, overly enthusiastic gameshow host. "You have violently trespassed completely on the heavily premium real estate of the Liberty Prime Corporation!"
The cyborg aggressively spun up the massive chain-gun, the heavy barrels violently whining as they reached lethal, aggressive speed.
"Please entirely prepare to be aggressively, enthusiastically downsized!" the smiling cyborg announced.
Amani didn't reach for his gravity magic. In a world where the laws of reality were entirely randomized, he couldn't entirely trust the Void yet. He heavily drew his scavenged kinetic repeater rifle, perfectly matching the aggressive stare of the neon nightmare.
"Welcome entirely to America, Pack," Amani whispered deeply.