Shards of metal drifted through space. Fire clung to the last gusts of oxygen escaping punctured cockpits. The warmask faces of fallen Titans stared blankly, the pilots inside dead. The space above the bright moon of Jupiter was a drifting sea of glinting metal and broken, twisted shapes. A floating graveyard.

They were Titans. Mechas. Warriors of the new age where man and machine melded.

LEAKAGE IN CORE DETECTED

POWER DOWN?

Pike reached out to the holographic interface that displayed across his screen, discarding it. Powering down now would condemn him to freeze to death even before his oxygen ran out. It was better to go out in a fiery blaze when his reactor core went critical.

He just wished he had something to smoke.

At that moment-

Pike’s armored titan floated backwards through space, one arm completely torn away, oil and hydraulic fluid leaking from the wound. There was a golden light, and what looked like a medieval court jester materialized standing atop the head.

The jester wore a suit of gold and black, with silver bells on his three-pointed hat and the backs of his pointy slippers. His face was half covered by a black mask.

“You’ll do.” He chuckled. “But as for what you’ll do, mmm, couldn’t say. Let’s-”

He stretched his hands out, a pack of cards flickering from one palm to the next

“Find out!”

-0001-

With a blaze of gold, Pike was suddenly in unfamiliar airspace. His eyes flashed open, recalled from his drift into memory as he waited to die by the sudden spew of flashing red warnings across his HUD. He swiped them all off-screen. Beyond, a glorious blue sky was shining.

“Holy shit.”

He wasn’t within a day of the nearest habitable system. There was no way he could be in-atmosphere.

“Lucrecia. Kill power. Kill it NOW.”

Which meant he would take the entire planet with him if he let the reactors go critical. With a shuddering jolt, the cockpit went dark. Automatic safeties made his metal harness click open, the control panel turning dim, the only light a red emergency flashing.

If there was a planet, there was a planet. Pike didn’t get to be a jarhead by asking questions.

If there was a chance to live, he was taking it.

Putting the fist of his socket-suit through the safety glass, he grasped the release lever, turning it slowly in the socket till the manual action clamped down. Then it was a simple flip and the cockpit canopy - the mask of the Titan - would be blown free by explosive bolts.

Beneath him, alien continents hurtled closer and closer. To his surprise, the world was more red than green, with vast expanses of rust-colored forests and inner seas the shade of blood. He squinted. Just above the main landmasses, almost hidden by the clouds, were those-

Floating islands?

He wasn’t just on an unknown world. He was on a world unlike anything he’d ever heard of. With the no-grav offline, the g-force of the fall was beginning to build, gravity drawing the mech towards earth with a terrible, gathering momentum. As they pierced through the dim blue halo of stratosphere that stood between the world below and the black of deep space, a fiery corona was building around the titan.

It was time to get out before the blaze grew hot enough to crisp him on exit.

Yanking the lever down, Pike felt the wind strike him as the mech’s front visor went flying away, propelled by a series of blasts.

“Goodbye Lucrecia…” It was a bittersweet moment. The wind was all around him, a storming fury wrapping around his limbs, overpowering every word with an all-consuming shriek. Clicking his heels together like a modern day Dorothy, Pike engaged in his jump-jets. A burst of blue fire flung him free from the falling mech.

He watched it topple, limbs ragdolling in free-fall, down and away, a half-dome of blue fire wreathing its limbs as it plummeted towards the cloud layer below.

Putting his hands to his belt as he fell, he grasped the wing-engage and pulled. As he lifted his arms out to either side, clamps deployed and stretched a thin, solar-sail membrane out, allowing him to glide on the buffeting air currents with the blue con-trails of his jets providing thrust.

The wind caught him and lifted him from a fall, sucking stale air from his flight mask as gales tugged at his messy black hair.

That was when an unknown message blipped across his visor.

Welcome to the Primordial World

Entering your soul-signature to the System now…

Class -

‘Pilot’

Race -

‘Outworlder’

Signature Skill -

‘Lucrecia’

Pike blinked. The message was unlike any of the fancy, user-optimized messages that regularly vied for his attention. It was a large blue box with simple text.

It was like something out of the classics.

“Dismiss.” He ordered, and the blue box was gone, replaced by the sight of the rapidly approaching land below. The red mass covering the land was resolving into a kind of vast, maroon forest, with trees the size of skyscrapers melding together into a vast canopy of blood-red leaves.

Intuition told him that wasn’t where he wanted to put down. The rare spots where the forest hadn’t spread had lights, signs of civilization, but they were all too far to meet on his current trajectory.

Which left the floating islands.

Grimacing at the stomach-churning g-force involved, Pike swung his trajectory out, flattening it into the longest, slowest arc he could to sail for the largest of the islands. It sat half-engulfed in black stormclouds, threads of lightning arcing around the shadow of the floating land. Mountainous crystals of blue jutted out from the underside, a thankfully-green forest stretching across the flat top.

It was a whole new world.

And he met it crash-landing style, smashing through the treetop canopy in a sea of tiny impacts smacking against his nanoscale-armored suit. He crashed, rolled, tumbled, doing his best to slow down with his jump-jets as the earth came careening towards him…

Impact.

It wasn’t fun.

But it was a landing he’d crawl away from.