Jack levitated a bunch of pebbles and shot it towards the beast that was lunging at him.

The pebbles whizzed through the air, releasing deafening supersonic booms amid the barbaric roars.

The beast became broken like a rag mid-air and reversed its momentum due to the extreme kinetic force.

However, another beast immediately filled in.

The dark energy manipulator on Jack's hand was pulsing in red light in between the blue steady light.

Naomi was standing next to him, shaking like a leaf in a storm. Their backs leaned onto the hull of the ship wreckage.

"We are running out of battery, we have to leave this place!"

"Let's get to the escape pod signal!"

"Do not let any of these creatures touch you."

"We don't know what pathogens they might carry."

Jack commanded as the two exhausted humans steadily and carefully retreated away. Small, ferocious pairs of lights filled the darkness.

***

It was not until morning that the pair finally caught a breath.

Thankfully, the intensity of the beast attacks reduced as they advanced. Otherwise, they would have fallen long ago.

Jack wasn't sure what caused the beast number to reduce. However, he wasn't in the position to question good fortune. They had established contact with the escape pod, which Emma was in.

The sound of Emma's trembling, sobbing voice ignited the small fire of hope in Naomi. If it wasn't for the occasional attacks of strange creatures, she would have hugged the phone and cried along with Emma.

She reluctantly turned off the phone to save power, as they had obtained Emma's exact coordinate.

They walked for another couple of hours, until something came into attention.

"This is… a battlefield?" Jack raised an eyebrow.

There were signs of battle and dark energy manipulation. Broken, charred trees. Craters of various depths. Pieces of meat and limbs on the ground. Chunks of metal that looked like they used to be armors.

"…Human limbs? How?" Jack asked himself in astonishment. There seemed to be humans living on this planet. Which is absolutely incredible.

This is a planet in a parallel universe!

There is zero chance of evolutional coincidences to create the same exact species on a random planet, in a random galaxy, in a random universe, in a random dimension!

Humans must have traveled to this place, or they have been brought here for unknown reasons.

Naomi became more and more uncomfortable walking in the middle of all this scent of death. Jack discovered a black, smoking pile from afar, at which he told Naomi to never look.

They finally reached the place where the underground signal was coming from. A black alien in a white blouse was sitting at the center of the scene where an awesome explosion seemed to have happened.

Naomi immediately ran up and hugged the alien. Jack scratched his head as he grinned. The only non-human crew member, doctor Emily survived the landing.

"I saw three escape pods leaving the ship. Do you know where the last one went?" Jack asked the psychology doctor. He avoided asking Emma as the girl was emotional, and Jack knew Emma had a habit of blaming herself.

"Andrei didn't make it, sir." An alien-sounding hoarse voice replied to him. "The enemy punched a hole through his escape pod. None of us could do anything."

The three went silent for a moment.

"My escape pod was fried when I opened the pod at the bottom of a river. Floats didn't work." The alien continued. "I traced the dark dimension communication to here." The chitauri species could communicate directly using dark dimension. They didn't need a mobile phone.

"I only got here a few minutes ago, sir. The creatures in this place seem strangely hostile." Emily sighed. "A battle seemed to have happened over there. There was a pile of burned human re…"

Jack shook his head.

The doctor stopped.

"The tool storage was blown to smithereens. Luckily we have this." Jack showed Emily the dark energy manipulator. "Let's wait a bit while this thing recharge. The air is full of dark energy, it'll be full at night. Then we rescue Emma."

"Roger!"

The two crew members obeyed the captain's command.

***

The scary night came again. Captain Jack took it upon himself to dive into the ground with the dark energy manipulator. He put the only rebreather scavenged from the ship on his mouth, then slowly descended like he was standing on quicksand.

Naomi hasn't had any practice with displacing dimension yet, and doctor Emily, well, she was kinda scary. Racism not intended.

Her face popping up inside the small escape pod would probably not scare Emma, but the psychology doctor insisted that a friendly human face would be better.

Since the captain had to "swim" through a kilometer of soil and back, the process took a long time. Naomi and Emily chatted near the campfire. They tried their best to avoid the depressing current events, but some of them still snuck into the topics. Then silence ensured.

The happiest time of Naomi's life was the two years she studied at the academy and the 6 years she became a cherished member of the Motive. It was hard not to mention the dead people if she wanted to talk about that.

So, doctor Emily told Naomi about a story that wasn't taught at schools in the Milky Way.

Emily was among the rare chitaurians working for the Corporation. Chitaurians were the intelligent race inhabited the Andromeda galaxy, before human came 3000 years ago.

Different from humans that eat food and breath air, chitaurians did not need to eat. However, they had to breath dark energy infused air, commonly called the dark gas. This gas would be naturally generated in a planet with rich condensed dark energy ore, through volcanic activities under the surface.

When the humans came with the intention of mining their literal life source, the chitaurians, obviously, did not respond in kind. However, the humans were a type III civilization on the Kardashev scale, which meant they had the power for interstellar travel and the ability to harness energy from matters of other dimensions, the dark matter.

With the same level of development as humans of the 21st century, the chitaurians at that time were a type Zero civilization. The result of the fight did not deviate from any prediction.

The corporation that obtained the exclusive right to the new galaxy, Micro, brutally oppressed the chitaurians, in relative secret. Humans had used every type of energy harnessing and mined every bit of dark energy in the Milky Way, but it was not enough to sustain the ever-growing energy-hungry society. Price of energy was sky-high. People got greedy. The chitaurian population dipped drastically, to the point that they were nearly wiped out.

The act of a brave chitaurian, the legendary Zerzhul, who led a team of suicidal rebels to attack a Corporation port and stole a ship, saved the race. As Zerzhul breathed his last in front of the reporters of the Milky Way galaxy, the inhuman treatment of the chitaurians was brought to light. Many chitaurian right groups appeared and oppositions and political activists caused Micro to go bankrupt.

Alexa Corporation took over, with promises to treat the chitaurian race with fairness. So far, the big guy hadn't broken his promise, as Alexa Corporation maintained exclusive right to the Andromeda galaxy until the present day.