MC awoke to the sound of hushed conversations and the salivating scent of cooked meat. Sanctuary chefs delivered hot meals directly to his troops in the damp cavern—a decadent luxury obtainable by anyone with the ability to create wormholes on demand.

A quick glance at his suit’s HUD showed that three hours had passed. Not quite enough to eliminate his headache, but good enough for round two.

Taking a seat by his thirty troops, MC retracted his faceplate and gratefully accepted a bowl of steaming chicken soup that made his mouth water. There really was nothing like a warm meal to recharge the spirit. Though its meat had been synthesized by Dyn matter fabricators, MC was hard-pressed to recall anything more delicious.

His soldiers’ banter hushed the instant he’d awoken. A small part of him despaired at that reaction. How he missed shooting the shit over a campfire with teammates, talking about all sorts of nonsense. He hadn’t had that kind of camaraderie since, well, a lifetime ago, or so it felt.

To these troops, he was their infallible commander whose herculean feats had grown to mythical proportions. Forget about banter, the Zevan knights hardly ever had the courage to even make eye contact with him. The Resistance Dyn were a bit better, but even they stared in awe—or sometimes in jealousy—of his mind-boggling abilities.

So it was no small surprise when Torneus initiated a conversation.

“Executor, sir?”

“What is it, Torneus?” he asked the Dyn commando.

“We were just talking about your exploits before you organized the Resistance. I imagine you must have seen your fair share of action, to have grown so experienced. We couldn’t guess how many decades of experience you must have accrued.”

Decades?

“I hate to burst your bubble, bud, but I’ve only been around for a small handful of decades myself. I’m not like you Dyn. Living for centuries or millennia is just a pipe dream for me. In fact, my body’s probably not that different from the Zevan.”

Hushed conversations rippled through the crowd, though if anything, it made them hold him in even higher regard than before.

“As for stories, sure, I could bore you all night with tales of the ops I’ve been on. Too many for one lifetime, and none of them happy. My only hope is that no one else ever has to see the kind of shit that I’ve seen in my career. If I can get us even slightly closer to that goal, I could die in peace.”

“Magnus…” Nina whispered over comms.

“Such a goal fits you perfectly, Lord Executor,” a Zevan warrior said. “We shall do everything in our power to see it achieved. As a knight, I swear this to you.”

MC nodded at the kneeling knight in graphene armor. Eleus, if he remembered correctly.

“Thank you, Eleus. I’m feeling a lot better now, so let’s get back to it. We’ve only got a handful of pillars left to mine and the Resistance’s undercover operatives have already begun evacuating their posts. We’ll pick them up when we head out. We’re in the home stretch people, so let’s not fuck this up.”

“Yes, Executor!” they responded in unison.

The following hours dragged on uneventfully. Eventually, MC received an encoded notification informing him that their operatives were ready for extraction. He’d asked the undercover agents to hold off until the last moment to avoid raising any suspicion, but now that the teams only had three pillars to go, pushing his luck any further would only invite trouble.

And he had to admit, he’d been more than a little excited to see Sareen again after so long. She deserved a break.

“Depth: One-hundred feet,” Edana reported as the sub rose through the abyssal depths. “Fifty.”

The dim glow of the pillar slowly grew brighter.

“Bravo team, we have picked up our packages, we’re returning below.”

“Roger that, Bravo team.”

The plan was to have their agents in nearby pillars all meet at one location, organizing at three pickup points. The congregations were large enough for a convenient extraction, yet small enough that they wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows when they gathered.

“We have arrived,” said Edana, when the sub silently broke through the mutagenic water’s surface. As the crew extended the conning tower, MC teleported up onto the hull of the vessel as it approached their rendezvous point—a short stretch of rocky shoreline. The presence of tall cliffs meant that there was no direct access to the shore, but with MC around, there didn’t need to be.

MC spied the Resistance agents standing at the edge of the precipice, searching the ocean for any sign of the sub. Male and female Zevan-types, Qephyx, and Apoadeid, numbering around thirty. They wouldn’t have spotted anything, not while the vessel was stealthed.

He teleported them two at a time from the coast back onto the sub where the rest of the crew helped them aboard. Startled though they were at MC’s feats, the operatives had been briefed on what to expect, so their surprise was short-lived. Soon, all thirty operatives had stepped through the portal back to Sanctuary, safe and sound.

It was at that very moment that shit hit the fan.

The familiar drain caused by his teleportals abated, much to his initial relief. But relief quickly turned into confusion: why would the drain lessen? He hadn’t closed any of his portals, not that he—Fuck!

Once created, MC lost most of his spatial awareness of the portal’s location, but he did maintain a link to each one, allowing him to sever the connection on demand. When he reached out to sense the portals, he found only five. There should’ve been six—the water collection portal at Sanctuary, the portals at Kyron and Thesbea, and three from the subs. All but two of those portals were distant.

“Bravo team, Charlie team, report!”

“Bravo here, we’re all good. Proceeding to our next target.”

MC waited, but Charlie squad’s transmission never came through. MC brought up his troops’ health readouts, only to witness Charlie team’s all-green switch to all-black at that very moment.

“Charlie team is down. I repeat, Charlie squad’s submersible has been destroyed. All hands lost, including our agents who were on board,” a Sanctuary operator said.

“How the fuck—”

“Executor! We’re picking up a broadcast on a general-purpose Dyn channel. You will want to hear this.”

The Legatus’s’ voice boomed into all of their headsets in the next moment.

“Magnus! How delightful of you to join us this evening. Uninvited though you are, your presence here is quite fortunate. Before we continue, I must warn you that if you believe you can hide from me, you are gravely mistaken. Though, I must commend you on cloaking your submarines with Illusion Fields. While you were not easy to locate, your stealth will serve you no longer. There is only one recourse for you now. Meet me in fifteen minutes at the coordinates encoded in this broadcast. In case you need more motivation, know that the fate of the one you hold dear rests in the palm of my hand…”

“No!” Nina whispered.

“Indeed, I speak of the Artificer you seem to have grown attached to. If you do not wish to see her die miserably, you will meet me at those coordinates.”

“Magnus, this is obviously a trap,” Nina shouted the instant the Legatus’s transmission cut out.

MC ruthlessly squashed his emotions, even though they threatened to send him into a rage-driven rampage. Instead, he sent his mind into overdrive, attempting to predict what the Legatus had planned. Did he really have Nova, or was it just a bluff? Was the mission compromised or could they still pull through this mess?

“Sir, the coordinates listed are at another island in this ocean. Your orders?” Edana asked.

MC ignored her. “Krar, Nina, I want your thoughts,” he said over comms. “The enemy claims to have Nova in his custody. What do you think?”

“If what he says is true, we may be unable to ignore his summons,” Krar said. “The risk to Nova’s life would be too great.”

“I think this is a goddamn trap,” his sister said. “There is no fucking way he just wants to chat. He’s got something planned. He could be bluffing, or—”

“Of course, it’s a trap, princess,” MC interrupted. “That much is obvious. But if it’s not a bluff? Krar is right. We can’t afford to ignore him and the Legatus knows it. If that fucker really has Nova, he’d just threaten to kill her if I don’t comply. I can’t imagine Nova’s worth all that much to him at this point anyway.”

Even if his heart hadn’t been captured by the angel, even if the parasite wasn’t compelling him, his rational mind arrived at the same conclusion: he had to go.

“Magnus, just think about it. If he’s kept her alive this long, he wants something from you. You really think he’d kill her if you refused to meet? He’d lose his best card.”

“He might not kill her, no, but torture? We know he’s already done that to her before. Hell, it’s his MO. I’m sorry, princess, but I’m not going to risk doing that to her. Not ever. I have to do this. Besides, I may be able to get him to reveal some intel we could use.”

“Sir? Should I set a course?” Edana repeated.

“Do it,” he finally replied. “Tell Bravo squad to evacuate back through the portal. All of you should do the same. I’m not risking any more lives than is absolutely necessary.”

“Magnus, there is NO way you are going there alone. No fucking way!” Nina shouted over their headsets. “Edana, please, ignore him. You have to accompany him.”

“Nina, you have no auth—”

“Apologies, Executor, but I agree with your sister,” Edana said. “For our Commander-In-Chief to meet with our greatest enemy alone is the height of stupidity. Fire me, reprimand me, I do not care, for I disobey your order.”

“As do I.”

“And I!”

Declarations of insubordination fired off like rifle cracks as both Alpha and Bravo squads declared their intent to accompany MC in this mission.

“That’s…” MC said, exhaling. “I don’t deserve any of you. I don’t know what to say… Thanks, everyone. It’s an honor.”

“No, sir, the honor is all ours. Besides, we have a vested interest in this as well. The Legatus just took out one of our own, We owe him retribution. Swift, and without mercy.”

“Hear! Hear!” Dyn and Zevan alike shouted in agreement.

“Well, you heard them, bro. So what’ll it be?”

“Alright,” MC said at length. “Bravo squad, head to our location. If we’re doing this, we’re going in together. And Krar, Nina, no matter what happens, you are not to send any more reinforcements from Sanctuary, is that understood? If myself and twenty others can’t handle whatever the Legatus’ got in store for us, a few extra troops aren’t going to change a damned thing.”

“No promises, brother. Just make sure you don’t put me in that situation. Swear that you’re not going to take any unnecessary risks.”

“I won’t, princess. You have my word that we’ll bail at the first sign of danger. I’ll bring everyone home.”

“Then I’ll say no more. Go do what you do best. Go kick some alien ass.”