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Back on Earth, everything had changed.
Since the Kyoto conference, Dr. Aidan Ryan's identity as the "Magician" had become public knowledge. The Security Council made a calculated decision: don't hide it. Humanity needed a symbol right now, a figurehead to rally behind. In times of existential crisis, people craved heroes—someone who could stand between them and annihilation and make it look easy.
And if the nations of Earth were going to implement Aidan's impossibly ambitious plans, they needed his authority to justify the costs. This wasn't just military spending. This was civilization-scale restructuring, resource reallocation on a level humanity had never attempted. It needed to be framed as something sacred.
So they called him what he was: humanity's savior.
The revelation had unexpected benefits. The apocalyptic religions—the groups preaching that Kaiju were divine punishment for humanity's sins—collapsed almost overnight. Hard to maintain "God's wrath" narratives when a magician explained the monsters were just alien bioweapons from another dimension. People needed something to believe in during dark times, and Aidan had given them a unifying cause that transcended borders and creeds.
The downside? Everyone on Earth was about to get very, very poor.
Building a stellar energy harvester, manufacturing bio-metal, constructing orbital fortifications, developing a space fleet—none of that came cheap. Global belt-tightening was the optimistic prediction. More accurate assessments involved words like "austerity" and "rationing" and "wartime economy."
But people accepted it. They'd stared extinction in the face and been given a reprieve. That bought a lot of cooperation.
The first major project broke ground in Egypt—optimal solar positioning for the stellar collection device. The technology Aidan provided was being reverse-engineered, adapted, prepared for mass production. Cosmic detector probes were being assembled in facilities across three continents. Nobody fully understood why they needed neutron star coordinates, but the underlying tech was so far beyond current human capabilities that everyone just trusted the process.
This was wartime. Different voices of dissent existed, sure, but they were drowned out by the sheer momentum of species survival. Humanity had been granted a miracle. They weren't going to waste it.
Meanwhile, in the Anteverse, Aidan was getting his first look at the colony.
The transition through the wormhole had been disorienting—that organic tunnel structure, bioluminescent and wrong, like traveling through a living creature's digestive tract. The exit was worse: a flower-like aperture that opened to release him, petals of flesh peeling back before resealing.
Then he emerged into the alien world proper, and his first thought was: This place is dying.
The energy sphere from Scunner's memories hung in the sky like a malevolent sun—except it wasn't blue anymore. It burned crimson, pulsing with heat that painted everything in shades of red and orange. The "pupil" at its center was black as a sunspot, a void within the light.
Artificial sun. Had to be. This dimension's natural star had probably burned out millennia ago, forcing the Precursors to engineer a replacement.
Aidan descended slowly, Magician's optical systems scanning the landscape below. Barren didn't begin to cover it. This was a dead world—endless Gobi desert, rocky outcroppings, geological formations that looked like they'd been sculpted by erosion and abandonment. No vegetation, no water, no signs of natural life.
Just technology. Dark blue devices scattered across the wasteland, generating electrical arcs, surrounded by ring-shaped structures that resembled metallic vertebrae. Power distribution nodes, maybe. Or monitoring stations.
Movement on a high platform caught his attention.
Three figures stood watching him. Precursors—the first living ones he'd seen in person rather than through memory playback.
Two were identical: flower-shaped bone crowns, bodies supported by multiple spider-like legs, maybe three meters tall. The third was different—larger, bone crown swept back like a trident, standing on two clawed legs that looked more crustacean than insect. That one was clearly in charge, positioned slightly ahead and above the other two, radiating authority through pure body language.
The colony administrator. Had to be.
"Tuantuan, scan for life signatures," Aidan said, keeping his voice level.
"Scanning... detecting three contacts—" The AI paused, tone shifting to something almost concerned. "Correction. Fourth energy signature detected. Bearing zero-nine-zero, your three o'clock position."
"What?" Aidan's head snapped right. "You mean the red sphere?"
That was an asteroid. A construct. How could it register as alive?
Then the ground attacked him.
Tentacles erupted from the desert floor—massive, segmented, stone-textured appendages that looked more like mobile geological formations than organic tissue. They moved with horrifying speed, coiling through the air toward Magician's position.
The entire landscape was moving. Rock pillars that Aidan had dismissed as natural formations twisted and bent, revealing themselves as limbs. The ground rippled like a disturbed pond. The whole world suddenly felt hostile, malevolent, aware.
The fourth life signature wasn't hidden somewhere in the terrain.
It was the terrain.
Aidan didn't panic. His right hand moved through the familiar summoning pattern, and Magician mirrored the gesture perfectly. Geometric patterns flared crimson, and the flaming holy sword materialized—thirty meters of burning blade that scorched the air around it.
The first tentacle reached him. Aidan swung.
"SCHLKKT!"
The blade cut through stone-flesh hybrid tissue like it wasn't there, cauterizing as it severed. The tentacle segment tumbled away, crashing back to the ground kilometers below.
But there were dozens more. Hundreds. They came from every direction, varying wildly in size—some as thick as the Magician's torso, others large enough to wrap around a city block. They moved like whips, like grasping hands, like the world itself trying to drag him down.
"Schlik! Schlik! Schlik!" The holy sword became a blur, cutting through tentacles in rapid succession. Each strike severed cleanly, flames preventing regeneration. But it was exhausting work, reactive rather than strategic, and more tentacles kept coming.
Aidan pulled back, jets firing to gain altitude while he dodged the worst of the assault. Time to shift tactics.
The sword vanished. Both of Magician's hands rose, fingers extended in precise configurations. Aidan began casting—not a quick spell, not a combat trick, but something big.
The tentacles sensed opportunity and surged upward, hundreds of them converging on his position like a living tsunami of stone and sinew.
Aidan's hand formed the final gesture—index and middle fingers extended, sweeping down toward the ground in a sharp cutting motion.
The sky shattered.
Not metaphorically. The air above the Anteverse fractured like safety glass under impact, geometric cracks spreading across the entire visible sky. The dimensional barrier between normal space and the Mirror Dimension splintered, creating fault lines in reality itself.
On the platform below, the three Precursors reacted with visible shock. The leader removed its bone crown—revealing four compound eyes arranged in two pairs, glowing electric blue—and stared upward at the impossible sight.
The tentacles kept coming, undeterred by the visual spectacle, still reaching for the purple mecha.
Aidan's hand changed from pointing to an open palm. Then he pushed downward.
The fractured sky began to descend.
Not falling—descending with purpose, with control, like a massive invisible ceiling lowering onto the world below. The Mirror Dimension, manifested on a planetary scale, moving to envelop this entire section of the Anteverse.
"VRRRMMMMM." The sound wasn't quite sound—more like a frequency the soul could hear, reality groaning under the strain of dimensional overlay.
The fractured barrier touched the ground. Then reality inverted.
Suddenly the landscape existed in two states simultaneously—normal space and mirror space, occupying the same coordinates but operating under different rules. The transition zone spread outward like a shockwave, kilometers per second, until everything within visual range had been swallowed by the spell.
The tentacles froze mid-strike, suddenly subject to different physical laws. The Precursors on their platform found themselves standing in a world that looked the same but felt fundamentally wrong.
Aidan descended slowly, holy sword manifesting again, flames casting dancing shadows across the mirror-dimension landscape.
His voice echoed through the transformed space, carrying to every corner of the affected zone:
"Welcome to my domain."
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