Ty opened his eyes to a meadow of grass as tall as his waist.
The grass was yellow, looked more like wheat, and it stretched as far as he could see. In the gray sky, two moons hung lower than they needed. One was the color of a grape, the other a washed red.
The air was warm. Wet too, that much he gauged with his boots sinking into the mud.
Worst of all, it tasted clean.
Just like Earth.
None of the other convicts were here. Ty scanned for any trampled grass or footprints in mud.
He found nothing.
So the rift scattered all of us. Pretty fucking stupid of them not to tell us that.
It'd save time for people trying to make friends.
The fairy cradle sat in his palm. Ty traced the sleeve of the jumpsuit still infused with lingering matter from the rift. It did its job after all.
So did the sphere, being able to withstand the warp.
Thing about Helios: sometimes they try too hard to fix the simplest things. Thirty-seven million dollars, at that.
Ty hooked his fingers around his back molar and pulled until the root gave. The hollowed shell sat in his bloody palm. Travel by rift transported whatever organic matter stepped through, including everything inside it, and a tracking device made of the same calcium as the jaw it hid in was no exception.
Yoko had given it to him two years ago, a goodbye gift in case she never made it back.
He cracked the shell between his fingers and the dust scattered upwards in the warm air. Then it shot far west, towards a valley.
No time to waste.
Ty ripped the cradle from the sphere and the thing inside it stopped hovering. Its wings were twitching in small bursts, waiting for its purpose.
He pressed the sphere into the socket at the center of his jumpsuit. The wings folded flat against its body and the fit locked tight. Warmth spread from the contact point across his chest.
[Initializing symbiosis...]
[Please stand by...]
[Acknowledging heightened dimensional wavelength...]
[Awakening in progress...]
"Hurry the hell up," Ty said, already moving through the grass.
The fairy pulsed from the socket, then it went dead.
[Awakening failed]
[Error: 432 dash Hecta]
[Please report this anomaly to a licensed Helios Corporation bio-technician]
[Resuming with all other F.A.I.R.Y. protocols]
Ty didn't need it to confirm anything. He felt it the moment he opened his eyes. The lack of power.
Rather, the lack of anything at all.
To the Oasis, he was just meat.
The fairy's wings unfolded and it lifted from the socket, hovering above his right shoulder.
[All F.A.I.R.Y. systems fully online and functional]
"About time. What's the threat here?"
[Hostility: low to none]
Ty kept walking west, through the meadow.
No point looking back now.
✦✦✦
The meadow ended at a tree line. The grass cut off clean against dark soil, and the trees beyond were nothing like the wheat field behind him.
The bark was purple, its trunk wider than any tree he'd seen before. More of them spread across the ground than grew upward, blocking most of the light from the twin moons.
"Fairy, what is this?"
The fairy flew to his face, its wings flapping with perfect beat.
[Location: Amethyst forest]
[Hostility: minimal, though straggling lesser beasts may roam]
[Warning: without an Awakening, your normal human body proves useless against—]
Ty waved it away.
The valley was on the other side. The trees stretched further than he could see. He could turn back and detour around the trees, but walking around the forest risked wasting countless hours.
There's only one choice, and that's forward.
The ground was hard-packed dirt, better than the mud in the meadows. At least now he could run if it came down to it.
Old tracks cut through it. The prints were too small for any of the convicts. Even Kimiko's.
Besides, they had three toes, and there were dozens of them overlapping each other.
[Warning: hostiles detected]
Three goblins crouched around something dead in a gap between two trees. Waist-height with green-grey skin, they wore pieces of armor that didn't match. One had a short blade strapped to its back, rusted at the edge but solid at the spine.
The other two had clubs made from bone or something close to it.
The thing between them was still breathing, even half-eaten.
Ty had seen goblins before. Everyone had, on the news feeds when the rifts first opened. The footage from the Pacific Breach showed thousands of them pouring through, shoulder to shoulder, and the earliest Grauer-Mak 3 had proved useless against their armor.
These three weren't elites. Rather, the armor was scavenged, strapped on with cord and wire.
The smallest one didn't have armor on besides a dirtied tunic.
Small mercies.
Going around would cost even more time.
More annoyingly, it was no use trying to sneak past; the small one was already sniffing the air.
Ty picked up a rock from the base of a tree. Heavier than it looked, the rock was chipped with a sharp edge.
Good enough.
The one with the blade saw him first. It bared its teeth and the other two looked up at once. The small one turned to Ty who had his elbow already primed.
"Human! Big human!" It lunged for Ty.
Ty loosed the rock and it punched into the goblin's skull.
THUNK.
It tripped over its limbs and stayed in the dirt.
The blade goblin roared, staying low to the ground. Ty scooped another rock from the dirt, aiming at its bigger skull. "HUMAN KILL SON? I EAT SPINE." Its head veered right at Ty's second rock and braced its feet, sword already swinging loose.
Ty sidestepped the swing and kicked it in the chest. It weighed nothing, hitting the dirt and rolling but already back on its feet as its partner closed the gap to the right.
The second goblin's club caught his knee and Ty's leg buckled. It was already swinging another at his chin but he brought his arm up in time and let his forearm take the brunt of it.
Ty stamped down on the goblin's foot and grabbed the club goblin by the face, his hands covering most of the goblin's skull.
He kicked the goblin's legs out from under it, going down with it. His thumbs found its eye sockets and he pushed into the soft.
The goblin screamed and thrashed against his grip, claws raking his forearm open in three lines. Ty looked up to the sword goblin checking its child, whispering something incoherent to the caved-skull's ears.
Plenty of time.
Good.
Ty kept pushing until the whites pooled out from what little gaps there were. The goblin's thrashing turned to twitching, then nothing.
He exhaled, the breath turning to mist. It was getting colder. The moons were shining brighter now, darkness creeping at every crevice.
Squeezing once more for good measure, he wiped the sludge of white and red across his suit and pried the club from the goblin's death-grip.
"LOOK, HUMAN!"
The blade goblin cut its child's neck with a chop, hooked the head beneath its jaw, and drank from the base of the neck.
[Warning: hostile is performing a blood ritual; combat output now at an 87% increase]
I fucking see that.
"Human pay," the goblin said as it gargled more blood.
It brought its sword up, and the air around the steel thickened. Red incantations formed over the base of the sword and through its grey skin.
Then the goblin charged forward, foam bubbling out its tusks and sword raised high.
Ty threw the club.
It broke against the goblin's skull, and still it kept charging.
Figured as much.
He kicked dirt and it flew into the goblin's enraged eyes.
The goblin swung blind and the edge of the blade dug into Ty's thigh through the jumpsuit. Even enraged, a dull blade could only do so much. Ty kicked at the goblin but the sword still buried in his thigh carried the leg wide, wrenching him off balance.
Ty hit his back and the goblin pulled the sword free from his leg. It brought the blade over its bald head and struck down. Ty threw his left arm up and the blade punctured deeper than he'd imagined it would.
The pain was cold, ice cold; only after a second did the warmth flood in where the blade had struck.
The goblin was clawing the paste of foam and dirt from its face, the red incantations along its skin pulsing faster now. It was seizing up, high over its own buff.
Ty raised his legs and crossed his ankles around the goblin's head and twisted with all the strength he had left.
Its neck went limp, tongue splayed out from its pale lips.
Then the red sigils along its skin flared brighter. The broken neck cracked back into place and its bloodshot eyes snapped open. It pulled the blade out of Ty's forearm.
Before Ty could retaliate, it sank the tip deep into Ty's gut. Blood spilled from his lips before he could swallow it down.
The goblin was leaning over him now, pressing its weight into the blade.
Ty grabbed its skull with both hands and twisted.
The neck snapped again and the sigils sputtered. He shoved the body off and kicked away.
Breathe, Ty. Breathe. Just a knife wound. You survived a nuke.
This is nothing.
Ty found his knees and heaved himself up, gasping for air that wouldn't come. He pulled the sword free from his stomach by the hilt and staggered towards the goblin still thrashing on the ground.
He didn't look at the blood seeping through the jumpsuit. His mind was foggy, or maybe it was the sudden temperature drop.
Either way, he plunged the blade into the goblin's throat. Then again, and again.
A dozen more times until it stopped twitching altogether.
Ty dropped to his knees. The fairy followed his descent and stayed hovering without so much as a care. He let the air bring him to the ground.
There were stars in the sky. Even through the leaves he could see them.
The stars blinked down at him, one by one, indifferent.
Step three... fuck.
I need to get up.
[Warning: injuries are fatal, please seek immediate medical attention]
[Warning: abnormal presence detected]
[Warning: DO NOT ENGAGE]
I'm sorry, Yoko.