I had heard that there was a certain feel to a pocket breach. A sensation of pressure, like your exoskeleton would burst if you are there for too long, and you have no contact with your ancestors. It was supposed to be terrifying, getting abruptly cut off from all contact with the wisdom of your elders, and there was a reason only those that were excluded from the soul and those too young to be linked were permitted to enter.

Perhaps it was my human body, but while I felt a certain pressure to it, it was not unpleasant. On the contrary, it made my heart race a bit, made things seem to become clearer, and I had the strangest urge to survive, rather than discorporate. Perhaps that was simply fear, but it was as exhilarating as it was terrifying.

The Terminator, as the team called my drone, had to go in with me. Like transporting through the node, I had to be in physical contact with my animated creature in order for it to even enter the breach. And, because Terminator was intended to bear the brunt of the damage, with the hopes that my point of attraction ability would keep the focus on him, I had to go in first.

Supposedly, all breaches lost power as you approached the entrance from the inside, to prevent chaos spawns from exiting and infesting the environments, but there had been hints of history where a breach exploded, causing waves of creatures to escape and wreak havoc until a greater portal could be established.

From what little I understood, there were constant cracks forming in reality as the forces of chaos assaulted it. The game could move those cracks within a small radius, pushing them outside of galactic boundaries or within the galaxy in some cases, by forming a sort of force around a breach. They were almost always anchored on physical matter when they formed, possibly due to the natural increase of order around solid objects, or possibly because of some kind of intelligent forces acting upon them.

When those breaches were closed or defeated, more resources formed, more solid matter, and the entity which created the pocket around the breach seemed to focus on creating matter which was valued by whichever form chose to assist in closing the breach.

Max probably had much more information than me, but he had ventured the idea that fighting the breach if you could tolerate the violence, the puzzles, and the hazards that were formed either to stop the chaos beasts or created by the chaos itself, the resulting bursts of reality would be much higher than simply ripping away the core and closing the breach.

He posited that there was a maximum amount of energy that the Chaos could bring to bear attempting to breach reality in a single area and that regularly containing and policing the breaches would sap that energy far more effectively than simply allowing a new breach to form elsewhere. Sort of like giving a steam pressure system a release valve for overpressure rather than allowing it to build until it cracked a seal somewhere.

This was not terribly comforting as Terminator and I stepped into the tunnel. At Tech 3, I couldn’t even give it advanced mechanical energy to keep itself upright and balanced and give it a modicum of self-motivation, it was like trying to control a second body alongside the human one that I was still trying to learn to use effectively.

Which meant that I was unprepared when something awful tried to kill me.

I was able to let go of Terminator when we were inside the tunnel, which was large, almost 30 grells in diameter… close to eight times my height, or 40 feet, as far as I could tell. The rock was sandy, much like the stone that had flanked the entrance, and was peppered with large, rounded boulders that implied water had once flowed through the cave… it was not true, of course, this place had probably been created only a week ago when the breach formed and the game had enough control to create a pocket around it instead of shifting it between the galaxies or someplace it could be put to use. But the breaches often mimicked local terrain.

I had no idea how much control the game exerted, but Max had implied a lot. One of his jobs was to make things ‘exciting’ to encourage local life forms to explore and conquer pockets and be rewarded both psychologically and physically for their efforts, turning the released energy into advancement and resources in an encouraging way. Yes, this caused a lot of lost lives, but I had hopes that humans could eventually create their own version of the soul so that lives lost were not lives wasted.

I kept moving forward so that my teammates could follow me through the portal, pushing my new point of attraction onto Terminator. It felt very odd, since, while I was used to the sensation of telepresence and aural strengthening, this used a part of my sorcery that I had never flexed before. Using both was distracting, but I thought it was safe, so I didn’t feel the need to use aural strengthening on the construct yet.

It was primitive, but the sheer material strength of it was a bit staggering. I had never controlled a Drone that was this massive, or this primitive before. I made it march to the front of the cave, where it seemed to open out into a sunlit space filled with tall ferns, trees, and sunlight, and then locked its legs and hips to ease the strain on my resources.

Congratulations! Due to your continuing use of telepresence and aural manipulation at maximum strength in combination, Your abilities have been merged into Telemanipulation!

Telemanipulation has all of the abilities of telepresence and aural strengthening but allows you greater flexibility with animation of ancient technologies, far higher weight maximum, and the ability to merge technology levels more efficiently in constructs.

Please note that while this will allow you to increase the tech level for constructs in instances by up to 1 rank, this will have no effect on the local tech level in general.

I had never had a merged ability before! Supposedly, Soul merge was a merged technique from two more ancient abilities, but I had no idea what those abilities were, except that one of them was native to my species.

I was distracted by a series of ringing noises coming from Terminator, which was odd because even though I still had the point of attraction attached to it, I hadn’t reactivated telepresence or telemanipulation yet in order to regain some energy while I waited. He shouldn’t be moving at all. And then he fell over, almost a dozen large objects on the ground near him.

The things were long, bone-tipped sticks. Some kind of tools. The creatures might not be able to approach the entrance, but they had some kind of ranged attack that could, because, to my shock, something hit my leg, knocking me to the ground as I looked dumbly down at one of the objects sticking out of my leg.

And then the pain started, and I started screaming.

I almost didn’t recognize the sensation. It was absolutely awful, and terrifying, and filled my mind with horribleness radiating from my upper thigh. I had never, in all my life, felt anything like it.

“I know it hurts, Tracy, and Cody will be inside in just a second, but you have to concentrate! We need to get Terminator up, we're being attacked.”

I tried to focus on the voice. It was Jessica, the Captain’s mate. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and then opened them up, turning towards Terminator. Ignoring the pain was not an option, but I tried to concentrate on him, sending my thoughts out to telemanipulate the drone, or I guess iron golem, in this case.

Unlike telepresence, I was able to feel him, without losing as much of my feel for my own body. While this was clearly a huge step up in my abilities, with the horrible pain I was feeling I wished I could do complete telepresence, allowing my knowledge of my body, and pain, to fade away while I controlled it.

Still, Terminator leaped to his feet. It seemed lighter than it had before like it was not taking all of my energy to animate, although it still took a great deal of concentration. Once he got to his feet, though, the point of attraction gained a much stronger effect as he became a legitimate threat to whatever was throwing the stone-tipped rods at us. They started focusing on him, but they were hidden and impossible to see clearly through the vegetation in the clearing, and I hadn’t installed anything that could be used as remote senses.

Tech level 3 had remote sensors as part of sorcery, but they were imperfect and had to be attached to some sort of sensory medium rather than directly translating into sensory impressions for the caster. I couldn’t see out of Terminator’s eyes because it didn’t really have eyes, and I didn’t have some kind of sympathetically bonded medium like a mirror to look from his point of view.

The pain in my thigh abruptly increased for a moment, which caused Terminator to drop down and favor it’s left leg for a moment in response. The thing was, as horrible as the pointed sticks were hurting me, they were nowhere near heavy or dangerous enough to affect Terminator’s solid metal flesh. A few of them seemed to penetrate and stick into the fibrous armor he wore, but they simply bounced off of his artificial face, exposed legs, and the heavy shield he carried.

After another moment the pain started to ease, and I felt a hand on my leg. Cody was staring intently at me, and I bit down on the strangled cries as a sort of warmth seemed to flow from his hands and into the wound. The warmth was pleasant, but the sensations as my muscles forced my torn flesh together were not… but the discomfort was eased by the slow reduction of the pain of my pierced thigh.

I could honestly state that this was the first time I had ever been wounded. My original form was armored, with very few nerve receptors. In general, if a limb was injured, there was a vague feeling of wrongness and usually, if the chitin was cracked, the leg had to be removed, to be either regenerated or done without. A main body carapace rupture generally resulted in death, as the sudden depressurization displaced… everything.

As a result, extreme pain sensors were basically useless for survival reasons. Either our species never had them, or they had been bred out over generations. What’s the point of feeling discomfort from a wound when there was nothing you could do to prevent expiration from it? Humans had billions more nerves than my prior species, for all sorts of reasons that would probably never even be conceptualized by F’lok’nyran geneticists.

Max had his shield in front of him, and looked worried, curled up behind it. The captain, while he was crouched behind his squared shield as well, had one of his… guns out. It was interesting, I could clearly see the sorcery flowing through his body, but it was feeding directly into the large device and shooting out from the end of it as a crackling burst of… I think kinetic energy, almost as though there were actual tightly-focused projectiles coming out of it.

Jessica was standing to the side, and I watched her actually catch one of the thrown sticks, spin it around her waist, and then she tossed it in front of her in the air… spinning around and kicking the blunt end to send the entire thing streaking back into the vegetation, it was an incredible display of agility and focus that I could only envy.

Selena was kneeling behind Max, taking cover in the shadow of his shield, and said, “Tracy, I cannot use the vegetation from here… can you get Terminator closer to cover me?”

I nodded, “I am at my maximum range right now too. I can push him farther, but without a repeater, my range is very short.” Now that the pain had subsided, I started struggling to get back up, only for Cody to maintain his grip on my leg. “I sealed your wound, and gave you a pain block, but your leg is still kind of wrecked. If you put weight on it, you could tear it back open. You are lucky it missed your femoral artery.”

“Are you strong enough to take me closer?” I asked. The idea was terrifying, but without some way to get into wherever they were hiding, they could shower us with ranged attacks indefinitely. This was far scarier than drone piloting, but my drones had been in similar situations before… sometimes you had to take the fight to melee to overcome a range advantage, and right now the layer of greenery was like the skin of a capital ship.

He chuckled a little, “Like I couldn’t lift a little girl even before the upgrade.” He started picking me up, and yelled, “Max! On your feet. Cover us from the spears while we advance.”

Max nodded, worriedly, and stood up from his crouch, keeping the shield in front of him. Cody tucked one arm under my knees, the other behind my back, and then easily popped up, keeping low behind max as he started marching forward, his own shield awkwardly resting on his wrist and sort of covering us.

As we moved forward, I was able to intensify the point of attraction. That worried me because that meant that I could only get the strongest effect if I were practically on top of Terminator… a position that would be incredibly risky. I brought up my aural strengthening, though, and applied it to expand the area of Max’s shield.

Terminator marched forward, crashing into the greenery with heavy footsteps, and things started appearing, popping up and trying to strike at it with their… spears?

They looked like humanoids, but not human. Their frames looked like human skeletons, only slightly thicker, covered with desiccated shreds of some kind of fibrous substance that made them even more terrifying than bare bones would have. Their eyes were black pits, and they had pieces of something attached to their bodies that looked like the ragged remnants of some kind of garments, dripping with rotted plumage.

Cody called out to Max, “See, I told you, Aztec, not Incan. Wrong continent.”

I didn’t think they were alive. They were more like drones, so I had Terminator start swinging its fist and shield at them. They were fast, considerably faster than Terminator, but they didn’t seem to care about dodging or avoiding his hits if they could stab one of their ‘spears’ at it.

He finally managed to catch one firmly, and it tore apart, breaking into pieces before plunging into the foliage. I could feel a slight tingle as advancement entered my body, but it was vastly stronger than the tiny amount I got from destroying a drone… It was even more than I received from destroying a drone carrier!

Jessica started running forwards, towards Terminator where he was half-submerged in heavy undergrowth, but then Selena yelled, “Hold!” as she moved forward and lifted her arms.

James was really making his presence felt, each tingling jolt as he shot his sorcerous bullets coming in rapidly as each of them struck a head as it became visible.

The greenery started twisting and waving, and Jessica pulled back before she got to it. I felt a slight stress on Terminator as the greenery wrapped around and restricted him, but he was apparently far too heavy for it to affect.

“These are just rank ones,” James stated. Rank ones? But they used tools and hurt me badly. “Don’t overdo things. We may need to conserve energy to fight bigger stuff deeper in. The dungeon did say it was class 1, which means rank one through five.” He stated.

The greenery seemed to grow lusher as it started lifting dozens of struggling… things out of its own concealment. I saw Selena clench her fist, and all of them suddenly burst apart in showers of dust, feathers, and bones.

All of us started to twitch a little as I felt that good feeling rush through me again. It was much more subdued than previously, but the ache in my thigh eased instantly and I curled up against Cody’s chest.

“That…” Selena said, “was just yard trash, but wow. I just made two ranks!”

Max nodded at his sister, “I only got one, but still, you are right.”

The whole group was suddenly rank 3? I had only met rank 3’s on a few occasions, and usually, they were civilian occupations… I was awed for a moment but then realized I, too had just received rank 3… and the game was trying to catch my attention.

You have reached Rank 3. As a human sorcerer, you have gained an ability unlock.

Would you prefer shadow manipulation(Sorcery), minor matter creation(Technology), propulsion (Ranged), or focus(physical)?

Shadow Manipulation: The first step in the path of illusion and light control. You may manipulate shadows to conceal yourself or distract an enemy. Size, movement, and control are determined by your sorcery affinity.

Minor Matter Creation: The first step in the path of matter manipulation, this ability allows you to create small amounts of molecular substances from ambient chaotic energy. The amount, molecular and atomic density are determined by your technology affinity.

Propulsion: This is an enhancement to your telekinetic abilities. You may greatly increase your available kinetic energy, and impart it on physical objects. The amount of kinetic energy added is determined by your ranged affinity.

Focus: This ability helps you to maintain focus on your other abilities, even when injured, distracted, or with impaired mental faculties. The strength of your focus is determined by your physical affinity.

Congratulations! Due to surviving a life-threatening injury, your durability has increased to 9.

I had absolutely no idea what to do. My last species already had most of that sort of thing pre-assigned. I had researched it, and Sorcerers would always gain soulweaving if they ever advanced to the third rank, and the option wasn’t even offered!

Should I just choose something? I had just been brutally introduced to the need for focus, but propulsion would give me the ability to do serious damage with my telemanipulation, far outside the range of any drones I could create that didn’t have their own ranged weapons, and I could even improve ranged weapons on my drones.

Minor matter creation had incredible potential as the basis of a magical line, and shadow weaving could not only help me remain concealed under any circumstances but would also allow me to create images without relying on technological repurposing as I had done with the monitors. I might even be able to help advance humans to the next stage of technological advancement!

Plus, I had no idea if all of my advancement in the future would come from being on a team with these ‘gamers’, or if I should be ready to fend for myself, as that would strongly impact my ability selection.

“Cody, you can put her down now,” James remarked.

Cody grinned at him, “Why would I want to?” he asked. I was a little confused. Why would he want to keep carrying me? It would greatly impair his combat potential, and it appeared that gaining a new rank, combined with rapid regeneration, had taken care of the majority of my wound. “I am no longer seriously impaired,” I stated.

“Because if you don’t, we get to stress-test your abilities as a hospitalier under controlled conditions.”

“Seriously?” Cody asked, but he tilted his arms and allowed me to regain my feet. My new garments, pants, had been ruined by the wound and the...bodily fluid that came out when I was injured. I felt a little sick looking at it. “You would shoot me for carrying her?”

James chuckled and shook his head, “No, but I might break your fingers.”

“Jesus, dude, you act like she’s your daughter or something,” Cody remarked.

Jessica chuckled, “All things considered, She’s only been alive for about a week. Someone has to keep an eye open for her. You shouldn’t flirt with the week-old baby, Cody.”

Cody grumbled, “She said she was older than Jim.”

I had no idea what my age on earth had to do with it. Certainly, you were reborn with a body of a certain appearance, and I was pretty ignorant of Earth, but why would someone want to be my spawner? “I have never known who my male progenitor was, but James does not act like a male. He acts like a very strong-willed female.” I said respectfully.

Why were they all laughing? And why did James have a scowl while his face turned red? It is entirely possible that I would never understand humans.