The world snapped back into focus with the jarring clarity of a targeting laser painting my retina. My personal universe had just been rewritten at a fundamental level, my very soul reforged in the crucible of the System’s cold, logical fire. The afterglow of Copper-rank advancement still hummed in my veins, a heady cocktail of raw power and terrifying potential. But the Kalisti Rift, in its infinite, murderous generosity, didn’t give a damn about my existential epiphanies. It had a schedule to keep.

  It looked like while I’d been advancing, Dienne’s golems and the troopers had polished off the remains of the first wave and the second one. The evidence was scattered across the cracked, dried-mud plain: shattered scorpitaur carapaces oozing ichor that steamed in the strange, flat light, and the mangled, multi-limbed corpses of… whatever the hell that second wave had been. Now, the third wave was getting comprehensively smashed.

  The rodents, four-foot-tall, six-legged moles with a disgusting fringe of prehensile tentacles around a mouthful of translucent, dagger-like teeth, were the universe’s answer to the question, ‘What if annoyance could dig?’ They were difficult to detect by sight while they were tunneling, churning through the sun-baked soil with a sound like grinding bones.

  But to my newly expanded senses, they were glaringly obvious. Their frantic life-signs were dark, frantic sparks against the Rift’s dull spiritual backdrop, and the minute vibrations they sent through the earth were a language my enhanced Physical affinity could read like a children's book.

  I powered up my primary construction drones—hulking, blocky things of magi-steel and brute force—and sent them stomping around the edges of our enforced perimeter. The drones were gloriously, beautifully heavy. Simply having them step firmly on a tunneling rodent’s path resulted in a sickening, wet crunch that was half-squelch, half-shattering bone, followed by the collapse of the tunnel itself. It was efficient, if messy.

  After a moment of watching the troopers stab semi-blindly at shifting patches of earth, a spark of inspiration struck. I slaved the pod’s low-power guidance lasers to my drone’s targeting systems. Instantly, faint red dots appeared on the ground, dancing over the subterranean paths of the moles.

  The effect was immediate. The troopers, who had switched to long, wicked-looking pikes to stab the things as they erupted from concealment, suddenly gained a terrifying efficiency. A pike would drive down, there’d be a muffled squeal cut short, and the ground would darken with another spill of alien blood.

  A perverse sense of theater gripped me. Why should they have all the fun? I programmed the drones’ basic audio emitters.

  “Smash!” my lead drone intoned in a flat, synthetic baritone as its three-ton footplate descended with finality.

  Dirk, his armor spattered with gore, turned and flashed me a grin from within his helmet. That was all the invitation I needed. I grabbed a short stabbing spear from a rack beside my cockpit—a tool more for utility than combat, but it had a nice pointy end—and hopped down to join the fun.

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  The air hit me like a wet, hot blanket, thick with the coppery stink of blood and the pungent, earthy smell of churned-up soil and mole. It was vile. I loved it.

  I wasn’t nearly heavy enough to stab the spear through the ground, but when a tentacled, whisker-twitching head would burst from the soil, jaws snapping, I was there. I’d sprint the few steps, my new Copper-rank body moving with a speed and grace that still felt borrowed, and jab the spear point into its skull with a satisfying thunk. It was visceral, primal. A far cry from remote piloting, and a necessary reminder that at the end of all the tech and the magic, it often came down to pointy things and violence.

  “Hey!” Dirk said as he drove his pike into the ground where one of my targeting lasers illuminated a tunneler. The resulting squeal was music to my ears. “We got a bet going on. Lindsay bet me you would take a pure assault class, something flashy and murdery. But I’ve seen you fight in heavy gee in the gym, all economy of motion and using your opponent’s weight against them. I was betting you’d take a support class and then figure out how to turn it into a goddamn killing machine. You’re tricky like that.”

  Oh, if only you knew, big guy. Force Sage. The words echoed in my mind, a secret so profound it felt like it should be glowing. I couldn’t tell him that. ‘Support Pilot’ was my cover, my bland, acceptable mask.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I asked, sidestepping a flailing tentacle and driving my spear into the mole it was attached to. The creature shuddered and went still.

  “Wuzzat?” he asked, quickly stepping sideways to impale another tunnel vole and avoid my drone’s big stomp as it crushed a tunnel and its inhabitant into paste.

  “Give Lindsay my sincere apologies,” I said, putting on my best ‘aw-shucks’ voice. “I grabbed Support Pilot. It’s got a pretty clear career path and command utility. Someday I want to fly my own ship, and the traits,” I coughed, taking a breath as I swatted away the tentacles of a pair of voles that were squealing as they sprinted towards us in a final, desperate charge, “translate perfectly into command rank. Sorry to disappoint.”

  Dirk was watching me just a little too closely, his attention split between the fight and… me. I pointed sharply behind him as my drone had to drop the hammer—literally, its left arm was a massive pile-driver hammer—on a vole that Dirk hadn’t noticed because of his unfocused attention.

  “Yeah,” he said, a bit sheepishly as the hammer fell with a ground-shaking whump. “I will do that.”

  He turned back to his work, stabbing with renewed vigor. Then, after a moment, he called over the din. “Hey, don’t tell the Warrant that I asked, but… did your tits get bigger?”

  I nearly fumbled my spear. I rotated my shoulders inside my armor. Yeah, it pinched just a little across the chest. They probably had, a final parting gift from my rapid maturation, sealed by the jump to Copper. Thank the absent gods they weren’t heading for the cartoonish proportions some of the Fleet’s propaganda vids seemed to favor. Still, investing in a slightly larger, more armored support garment for high-gee training was moving from ‘maybe’ to ‘urgent priority’.

  “Probably,” I called back, my voice dripping with false sweetness. “But I am pretty sure yours did too. Tell you what, I’ll let the Warrant know you guys need a little extra training in heavy gee to work off your new fat layer. It’s a good thing I’m allergic to chocolate, or I’d be joining you.”

  Dirk grumbled and took a moment to give me a very clear, one-fingered salute before he turned back to his mole-murdering duties. Crimwell, standing next to him, murmured, “Did you just buy us all extra high-gee training, manboobs?”

  I grinned, a real one this time. Welcome to the party, pal.

  The last of the mole-things were dispatched with brutal efficiency. The field fell silent, save for the hum of my drones, the heavy breathing of the troopers, and the distant, weirdly organic sounds of the Rift. A quick check of the squad’s vitals on my HUD confirmed it: zero fatalities. Not even a serious injury. This was, by Rift-raid standards, a walk in a very bloody, murderous park.