The heat pressed in from every direction, dense and suffocating, and with it came pressure across her chest, her ribs, the base of her skull. Not pain exactly, more like weight that had been there a long time and she was only now noticing it.

  Something is wrong.

  The thought surfaced and dissolved before she could hold it.

  Sound came next, a low hum vibrating in her teeth and sternum, something nearby working very hard. She tried to open her eyes and nothing happened.

  Move. You need to...

  Her fingers didn't respond, her legs didn't exist, and she floated in the warmth and the pressure and the dark with no idea why any of it mattered.

  Then something beeped.

  [HEART RATE DROPPING. 60 BPM. 58. 55.]

  That's mine.

  The warmth around her thickened and shifted, pressing against a wound in her side she hadn't known existed until that moment, and she wanted to scream but the sound stayed trapped somewhere below her throat.

  [LOCATING VIABLE HABITAT. SEARCHING.]

  She tried to ask where, tried to ask who she was, what any of this was, but nothing formed. The hum grew louder, closer, and then even that disappeared. The last thing she felt before the dark took her again was movement, faster than she expected.

  A red line tore open in space, twenty meters wide, its edges flickering like static on a dead screen. The portal held for three seconds before the sphere shot through.

  Scarlet metal with no seams anywhere on the surface, moving fast enough to leave a trail of red particles hanging in the void behind it, fading as it went.

  Inside, suspended in translucent gel, a woman floated unconscious. Her chest rose and fell in shallow movements, and the gel had gone pink around her, blood spreading through it in thin drifting clouds.

  Data streams lit up the sphere's interior. Seventeen points on the woman's body glowed red: ruptured spleen, three fractured ribs pressing against her left lung, internal bleeding in her abdomen, heart rate dropping. Sixty beats per minute, fifty-eight, fifty-five.

  Text appeared, projected onto the gel:

  MISSION 1: REACH DIMENSION 8712390823-INF

  STATUS: FAILED. DIMENSIONAL TRANSIT FUEL EXHAUSTED.

  MISSION 2: PROTECT PASSENGER LIFE

  STATUS: CRITICAL.

  ACTION: LOCATING VIABLE HABITAT FOR EMERGENCY LANDING.

  The sphere adjusted course. Stars slid past the viewport, and it had already crossed three systems inside the fissure. Gray worlds with dead skies, unstable stars, gas giants with no surface to land on. None of them met survival parameters.

  Now it approached the fourth system.

  A yellow sun, stable, with four planets in orbit. The sphere slowed as it entered the system's edge and swept sensors across each one. Three came back immediately: the first too close to the sun with a molten surface, the second and third frozen solid, one methane and ammonia, the other ice with nothing underneath. The fourth made the sensors run six full seconds before returning results.

  Heat signatures across three continents. Liquid water. Vast oceans. Oxygen at 18% atmospheric composition. Carbon-based life with humanoid skeletal structure detected in multiple locations.

  And surrounding the entire planet, an energy field.

  The sphere's sensors traced it carefully. It started 200 kilometers above the surface and extended outward another fifty, pulsing in slow waves that sent ripples of blue-white light across its layers. The energy signatures didn't match anything natural or anything in the sphere's database. No gaps, no weak points, no entry corridors.

  More data appeared:

  GRAVITY: 1.4 EARTH STANDARD

  ATMOSPHERIC ANOMALY: UNKNOWN COMPOUND, 3% CONCENTRATION

  AUTHORIZED ENTRY POINTS: 0

  The sphere ran the calculation. Forcing through the field would rupture structural integrity, collapse the gel suspension, and the woman would die before she hit the ground. Survival probability: 2%. No better options available.

  It set course for the fourth planet and committed full power to propulsion.

  Inside the sphere, the alarm started beeping, soft at first. The woman's heart rate hit forty-two beats per minute.

  The sphere's core built a low vibration through its hull and accelerated. Every system rerouted power to propulsion, and the planet's energy field ahead began reacting, layers of blue light rippling outward as the sphere accelerated toward it. Ten kilometers. Five. One.

  Contact.

  The sphere hit the field at full speed. White light exploded outward across its entire surface, a shockwave rippling in every direction.

  The hull tore through in one impact, three meters of barrier giving way all at once.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Behind it, the field began closing.

  Below, in a forest that stretched to the horizon, the Giant stood among the trees.

  Three hundred ninety feet tall and humanoid shape. The trees around it barely reached its knees.

  White skin, bone white. The surface appeared smooth until you got close enough to see thousands of cracks covering every inch, like porcelain about to shatter.

  The body was too thin for something that tall, with arms that hung past its knees, and the limbs moved in smooth curves.

  It was naked and hairless, smooth where a human would have them.

  The head was featureless except for hundreds of eyes.

  They covered the entire head in every size imaginable, from dinner-plate large down to grape small, in shapes ranging from round to oval to nearly rectangular. The colors varied wildly: brown, blue, green, black, red, yellow, orange. Some had pupils and some didn't.

  Each eye looked in a different direction, tracking birds, following wind in the leaves, watching ants three hundred feet below, and monitoring the sky, the ground, everything at once.

  The forest around it was old with trees that had trunks thirty feet thick and a canopy so dense the ground stayed in permanent shadow.

  Massive structures stood among the trees, buildings that must have been five hundred feet tall but were broken now and tilted. Stone walls twenty feet thick, cracked down the middle with trees growing through the gaps. Roads wide enough for six eighteen-wheelers side by side, buckled and split by roots. Columns that could have supported coliseums, lying in pieces among the ferns.

  Everything was covered in moss, vines, and mushrooms the size of cars. Whatever civilization had built these things was gone, and the forest had reclaimed it all.

  A separate energy field covered the entire forest, different from the planetary barrier above, older and weaker. It formed a dome following the treeline, stretching for miles in every direction and nothing could enter or leave without passing through it. It had kept the forest sealed and isolated.

  But the forest wasn't forgotten. The outside world knew it was here and they'd been trying to break in for years.

  One of the Giant's eyes moved, a green oval-shaped one on the left side of its head, shifting upward, tracking something in the sky.

  Then the ruins hummed. The Giant's head tilted. Hundreds of eyes focused in different directions, on the stone structures, on the roads, on the broken pillars.

  Blue light flickered in the carvings, dim and irregular like a power surge, then went dark.

  The Giant stood motionless for three seconds.

  It moved fast, faster than something that size should be able to move, crossing three hundred feet in two strides before stopping next to a collapsed archway. One hand pressed against the stone.

  The carving underneath flickered again, and the light pulsed and weakened. The pattern was inconsistent.

  The Giant's voice came from somewhere inside its body. It vibrated through the ground.

  "Breach detected."

  More eyes focused upward, scanning the dome above the forest. The barrier was still there and still active, but thinner. The Giant could see it now, the shimmer in the air that was usually invisible, but now visible because it was weakening.

  The ruins hummed again, louder this time, then the sound cut off abruptly. Lights embedded in the stone structures went dark, all of them simultaneously.

  Then they flickered back on, dimmer than before.

  The Giant's hand remained pressed against the archway where it could feel the flow of energy moving through channels carved into the stone and branching through the entire forest network. The flow was stuttering as sections went dark, came back online, then failed again.

  The planetary barrier breach had created a cascade.

  The Giant lifted its right hand and reached for its face. Fingers touched the green eye gently.

  Then it gripped and pulled.

  The eye came out cleanly and the socket sealed immediately. White surface underneath, smooth and unmarked.

  The Giant held the eye in its palm. The eye was still moving, its pupil contracting and expanding.

  Then it grew.

  The eye swelled and stretched, the round shape elongating and forming a torso. Arms sprouted from the sides and legs from the bottom. In thirty seconds there was a humanoid standing in the Giant's palm.

  It had white skin with the same texture as the Giant, stood five and a half feet tall with human proportions, and had one eye in the center of its face, the same green oval eye. Below it was a mouth with thin lips, closed.

  The Giant lowered its hand to the ground and the clone stepped off, bare feet touching moss and stone.

  "The system is failing," the Giant said. Its voice was calm but the words came faster than before. "The breach damaged the primary conduit. The dome will collapse within minutes."

  The clone looked up and its single eye found the streak in the sky, red fire cutting through the atmosphere and getting brighter.

  "Is it a weapon? From the countries breaking through the barrier?"

  "No. They don't have space travel yet." The Giant's eyes blinked in sequence, a wave starting from the left side of its head and rolling to the right with hundreds of eyelids closing and opening like dominos.

  "But they'll be here soon. Multiple factions."

  The ruins hummed again but the sound was weaker, dying. Another section of lights went dark and this time they didn't come back on.

  The Giant looked down at the clone. "When the dome falls, they'll come. All of them. The core must be preserved. The trial protocols must activate."

  The clone hesitated but just for a moment, and then it nodded.

  The Giant reached up with both hands. Gripped its own head. The hands wrapped around the neck. Fingers interlacing.

  A section of ruins fifty meters away went dark. The blue light in the carvings died and the hum stopped.

  Then the Giant pulled.

  The head tore free. Blue blood poured from the neck, thick and luminous, splashing onto the ground below. The Giant lowered the head carefully and set it down among the roots of a massive tree. Blue liquid dripped from the severed neck, pooling in the moss.

  The eyes on the head were still moving, still tracking everything around them.

  The massive body swayed, then fell. The impact shook the ground, making trees tremble and ancient stones shift. The body lay motionless among the ruins. White skin already beginning to dull.

  From the neck opening, blue-white light spilled out, pulsing slowly.

  Then eyes started emerging from the head.

  One crawled out of the opening and dropped to the ground. It landed, bounced once, then began transforming. Another followed, then dozens at once, the process accelerating until it stopped as suddenly as it started.

  Hundreds of clones stood in the ruins, all white, with single eyes in different colors, all watching in different directions.

  They scattered without words, some climbing the trees while others moved toward the ruins in the north or headed south. In ten seconds the area was empty except for the original clone.

  It approached the Giant's headless body. The neck opening was five feet across and inside, the light pulsed brighter.

  The clone climbed up, gripped the smooth surface, reached the neck, and looked inside.

  The core sat in the center of the chest cavity, suspended by thin strands of white tissue. It was a sphere of energy glowing blue and white, bright enough that looking directly at it hurt.

  The clone reached in with both hands and gripped the core. The tissue strands stretched and snapped. The clone pulled the core free and climbed back down.

  The moment the core left the body, the ruins went silent. Lights that had been embedded in the stone flickered once, dim blue glows appearing in carvings, doorways, and the centers of broken columns, then went dark.

  The energy field above, invisible from the ground, weakened but didn't disappear. The shimmer became visible now, a faint blue wall following the forest's edge.

  The clone held the core in both hands and looked up.

  The red streak was very close and making sound now, a roar that grew louder every second.

  The sphere fired reverse thrusters, struggling as power drained rapidly. It couldn't stop, only reduce speed. It dropped from six thousand meters per second to three thousand, still too fast.

  The hull burned as it cut through the atmosphere. Flames wrapped around the metal in orange and white, trailing behind in a long tail. The outer layer cracked and peeled. Pieces of scarlet metal broke off and disintegrated. The sphere shook, the gel sloshing inside, the woman's body shifting with each tremor.

  It was still losing speed, fifteen hundred meters per second when the forest filled the viewport.

  Inside the gel, her fingers twitched. Just a reflex, nothing more. For a moment her eyes moved under her eyelids, like something pulling her back toward the surface.

  Then the sphere hit.