The earthquaking boom had startled him. When he'd tugged open the door, the world he once knew had collapsed into a sphere of heat and flames. A wall of immense pressure had thumped him against the back of the small office room, almost knocking him unconscious. Reith lamented not passing out since the excruciating torture of being burnt to dust inside a metal suit was a nightmare. Although the agony was short-lived, it was an experience he'd rather never suffer again.

He took a ravenous breath and opened his eyes. He was bewildered but took great pleasure in the frigid air.

Almost like a nightmare, Reith thought, but he knew it was far too real for any dream. He had perished from his hubris and gullibility, and this wasn't the medical facilities located aboard the naval's vessels. No, it was too enclosed and grey for it to be a regeneration pod or a surgical operating table. Reith simmered with resentment; they had abandoned him. The Naval Intelligence Agency, the Fleet Command Centre, Eileen, Lillian, and himself, they had all failed him.

Reith controlled his breathing, although he did not feel a need to breathe, inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth, just as they chastened into every trainee on boot camp. When he had gathered his shambolic mess of a mind, he took notice of the scarlet cushions beneath him. They were soft as fur but ostensibly resembled something similar to satin. Almost as peculiar as the inexplicably lit grey box, which encased him. Reith craned his head a moment in search of the light source but soon lolled back without an answer.

Although remnants of his anger lingered, he funnelled all his attention toward the problem above him. It reminded him of a coffin, although the walls were of rock as opposed to the traditional, cheaper wood. Even more perplexing was why someone had done it. In the Space-Assault Marine Battalion, the burial regulations strictly commanded that any casualties of the battalion who perished in combat were to be ejected deep into space. But Reith unquestionably sensed some gravity, an indication that either he was buried deep underground or had encountered a stray planet on his journey to the underworld. Either way, the longer he remained idle in this coffin, the higher the chance of suffering oxygen deprivation and possibly suffocate—and Reith did not fancy another round of dying.

He raised his arms to get a feel of the slab above him, the rock cutting and cold beneath his fingers. He gawked at his hand, alien and eerie; the complexion was pallid and the skin haggard. The fingers were enlarged and slender, embellished with jagged, raven-black claws—similar to a cat's, only studier, sharper, and longer. Reith found it hard to digest, but its size and length felt intrinsic as if it were his authentic shape.

"What am I?" he muttered under his breath. He retrieved his arms, his previous worries forgotten, and brushed his face with extreme caution, suddenly afraid to get cut and catch an infection in this dusty coffin. The cheeks were porous with what little skin remained sleek, the lipless mouth packed with jutting teeth and two elongated fangs. When he reached for his eyes, he discovered them vacant.

"Impossible!" he blurted but swiftly overcame his fright. Now was not the time to brood, Reith knew. He lifted his arms again, palms against the slab. If he truly were buried deep underground, there was no chance for him to escape this confinement. But he refused to believe in that possibility, lest his fragile confidence would vanish like dust in the wind. And with all the strength his alien arms could marshal, the slab launched into the air, then crumpled upon contact with the cave ceiling, its debris clattering about inside the cavern.

Stupified, Reith climbed out of the coffin with ancient limbs which cracked as if they had been in slumber for hundreds of years and glanced around the room with mild curiosity. Spikes of rock lay strewn about within the oblong cave, its many inhabitants scuttling on their small sharp legs disturbingly loud back toward the fissures peering from the walls. There were spiders, centipedes and other creatures Reith had never encountered before, despite having ventured on many of Earth's outer and more exotic colonies. Some were large as forearms, others the size of a thumb.

Reith stretched his stiff limbs, then glanced at the lone coffin in the room. It reminded him more of a sarcophagus, with adroitly chiselled outlines similar to pictures he remembered from his history books, from ancient Egypt. They portrayed a tale of gallantry and death: a story where a knight courted a princess, set out on a journey to later encounter a giant of a man. The two beings clashed swords, but the knight fell to a swift jab in the chest. Before he died, however, he waved a gesture in the air, and the giant shrieked as both the man and him collapsed.

Reith lifted his fingers from the etchings and looked over at the looming door at the end of the tapering cave. Bands of metal reinforced the dark wood. He crossed the rock floor and palmed the door, creaking on its rusty hinges as a corridor slowly emerged before him. A slight brisk assailed him; his supple cape draped round his collar rippling along with his hair reaching his lower shoulders. Running his fingers along the rough wall, Reith ascended the narrow corridor winding left or right at every corner.

The thumping of his leather boots against stone accompanied him until the passage hollowed out into a cavern comparable to the one stuffed with insects and the sarcophagus. Only different from that room, this was smaller, warmer, and—to Reith's delight— devoid of life. Although his current objective was to locate the nearest town, in hopes of answering his questions, he was profoundly troubled over how the residents might react to his new looks. Assuming the populace were the humans he knew, he doubted the encounter would be a pleasant reunion. Consequently, Reith wished some time to craft a mask to veil his appearance.

The air was dank and carried the freshness of the outside. At the opposite side of the cave mouth was another fissure, spears of sunlight visible through the crack. Spread haphazardly around the cave were jutting rocks. At the base of these, tiny ponds of sheet ice and gloom. The walls were glistening as Reith walked calmly across the chilled floor.

Idly contemplating on who to contact after reaching the closest town, a shadow stirred in the corner of his vision. His head whirled around, eyes darting to and fro, but he detected nothing but empty shadows and blueish rock. Now that Reith ruminated over his irrational strength, he started to realise that he may not be the only being of such preternatural powers. And at that moment he also sensed he was without heart, or else the tiny thing would be wildly drumming its cacophony.

He continued onward, slightly faster than before, vigilant. While Reith would happily admit the former shadow might have been a sign of his paranoia, his gut was bellowing otherwise. There was so much he didn't know about this world, and he dared not gamble on surviving an attack from one of those insects, small as they were. But then he sidestepped around a tall rock and its frozen pond, and a smudge manifested at the back of his mind, inching closer.

Before he could react, his tensed nerves acted on their own, and he pirouetted and punched his fist forth where he presumed the root of the throbbing at the back of his mind to be. Reith felt a sturdy body collide with his knuckles before launched back whence it came with a loud crunch, which reminded him of chalk against a blackboard.

It was a giant serpent with black protruding scales, a small depression located at its underbelly where Reith had struck, the scales there cutting inward and purple blood seeping. At the sight of the gleaming purple liquid, foreign energy surged through the veins of Reith's body, watering his mouth and parched throat, kindling his nerves and muscles and loins. For a second, his undivided attention remained funnelled upon that delicacy, and the need to gorge it.

He wrenched himself out of the tumult, then focused on the elongated fangs of his assailant. In the beginning, he had feared the damage the moving shadow could inflict with whatever poison it wielded. But observing now the deep purple droplets leak and sizzle against the stone, leaving behind small cavities as it dissipated into the air, made him realise how much he again had underestimated this world.

The snake started to slither in circles, its dark beads of eyes following Reith, displaying menace and strength. The occasional hiss and wheeze of the snake or the patter of the drops plunging off the ceiling filled his ears. Then the wind from the large fissure leading outside increased in ferocity. And although it was unremarkable, the temperature plummeted, and the crackle of freezing renovated throughout the room. Phantom sweat dripped from Reith's forehead, but he felt oddly peaceful without his drumming heartbeats. He knew his fists could damage the creature, evident by the oozing depression, but then there was the unanswerable question on how to approach it while avoiding the purple acid.

As Reith pondered, the serpent suddenly vanished, its shadow lingering a mere moment before it materialised as a smudge again at the back of his mind. It propelled at a speed which would rival a Hermes aircraft. But Reith was swifter and ducked as he sent an uppercut. The snake couldn't react in time, and his fist struck at the wound, penetrated through the gelatinous inside and emerged on the other side with a splatter of purple blood. It flopped limply over his shoulder.

His fangs were in the serpent before he could appreciate the victory, the blazing energy from earlier turned overwhelming. He gorged on the creature's lifeblood with ardour, the mouthfuls drowning his sense of fatigue, filling his body with renewed vigour. Although Reith was a man far from qualified to claim what would be considered humans' best dish, he would stake his soul this blood transcended even that. It was sweet, but not too sugary, and it contained tastes he never knew existed.

Reith halted his feast and scanned the surroundings, exasperated. Someone had dared to interrupt his meal! And to add salt to injury, it was the woman who spoke before the bomb triggered, her evocative voice murdering his great mood.

"Show yourself!" he bellowed, dropping the near exsanguinated carcass. He continued to look around, but when the woman neither emerged nor talked again, Reith concluded it to be his madness.

At first, he tried to call her out inside his head, make her talk once more. A whisper to start, but yelling at the end. However, it did not work, and the woman maintained silence. Then Reith tried to inquire about the meaning behind her gibberish; cruel, bloodthirst, siphonage, teleportation, rebirth, the words made no sense. But it did not take long for Reith to start to understand as he continued to meditate on the words, even if they were mere speculations.

After taking the final dregs from what remained of the serpent, Reith resolved to attempt to substantiate one of his most feasible assumptions. He reached inside himself in search of that foreign energy from earlier. Reith was confident it could be linked up to the vexatious woman. And if it were, he also figured it would become a prerequisite to his survivability in this enigmatic world, where reasonable judgement and sound logic had ceased to exist.

By the time his patience had run thin, and he was about to yield, his probing finally met with success. He happened upon a raging current within his body, reaching from toes to head, swelling a couple of metres past his skin before dwindling. It fluctuated with invisible powers, enough to make him tremble. But then the woman in his head returned.

Suddenly, the world blazed with colours. There were translucent motes of glow dancing all around the cavern, but even so, it did not in the slightest hinder his line-of-sight of the background. In fact, it was as if a third, detached eye was observing the spectacle.

Reith smiled. While he gladly accepted another ability to his arsenal, he felt more gratified by the validation of his speculation, which postulated that his preternatural powers were related to the peevish voice and the enigmatic energy, presumably named magyk.

This time Reith willed , and in his mind's eye pictured himself by the inclined cave mouth opposite the one from where he'd entered. He estimated it was a ten-metre walk from his current position, but in a heartbeat, he materialised at the threshold and towered over the hollow, populated now with nothing but the carcass of the snake and rocks. An insubstantial portion of the blazing inferno of magyk enveloping him dispersed—the cost of utilising the serpent's ability.

"So any abilities I acquire become intuitive to use," Reith said, nodding to himself, satisfied. The more he could apprehend of this alternative reality, the better he would manage alone.

With a final glance at the previous battlefield, Reith ascended the narrow corridor. Rays of light of the day fingered its way into the nightly dungeon, and as he continued, the chilled air diminished into a soft summer warmth.

A landscape of dense forest spread out as he exited, trees so tall they almost veiled the mountain range behind and were coated with snow, a clear contrast to the summer warmth he sensed. To the south of the cave mouth, almost wholly hidden, a towering shaft of stone rose. Based on what he could see, Reith reckoned a few weeks travel by foot would suffice. Other than the shaft of stone, he spotted little more than trees and more mountains.

Just when Reith considered on where to travel, the wind shifted, and a faint odour of roasted chicken drifted from the east. Then he entered the forest.