The heat hit the troopers like a physical blow the second the drop-ship's hatches groaned open. I felt a pang of genuine sympathy for them, a sentiment that felt strangely maternal amidst the baking, cracked-mud landscape of this gods-forsaken rift. Mother of storms, they’re not built for this.

  There were only a few orcs mixed in with the human contingent, and they were a far cry from the wild, desert-hardened Korse breeds I’d grown up around. These were standard-worlders, bred and born under a steady one gee, their frames built for power and endurance, not for the soul-sucking, wet-blanket heat that now engulfed us. Probably from some chilly, high-altitude colony world where sweating was a novelty. The minute the atmosphere of this place—a mix of baked clay, ozone, and something faintly metallic—invaded the bay, they started glistening, then pouring, their body odor cutting through the other smells with a potent, musky tang of discomfort.

  Dienne’s ship, parked a cautious distance from mine, was already disgorging his nickel-iron children. The golems moved with a chilling, silent purpose, their blocky forms fanning out among the rough, wind-scoured sandstone outcroppings that would serve as our initial defensive perimeter. The elf’s earlier reassurance that this would be a “simple landing” felt like a particularly bad joke now. Simple. Right. After we’d deposited the command team—Taera, Sergeant Murphy, and him, David—at the rift’s edge, I’d been tasked with remoting both dropships through a nightmare gauntlet of twisting canyons to this designated waypoint.

  Remoting drones in the void was a ballet. This was a bar brawl in a collapsing building. Atmosphere meant turbulence, wind shear, and gravity’s incessant, greedy pull. The ships handled like pregnant boulders, their responses lagged and dulled through the remote interface. Every micro-adjustment was a prayer, a single missed calculation away from painting one of these beautiful, expensive chunks of alloy and magic across a cliff face. My knuckles were still white from gripping the console.

  The one silver lining in that nerve-shredding flight was the soft chime from my wristband and the corresponding notification that scrolled across my inner eye. I’d gained a rank in Technology, pushing my affinity to Adept+. The rumor was true: inside a rift, with its atmosphere thick not just with strange air but with what the eggheads called ‘advancement essence,’ everything accelerated. Gains came faster, attributes improved quicker. My current band was a cheap, Fleet-issue piece of junk, not configured to show me the full, glorious spreadsheet of my being like a proper node could, but I could feel it. A slight sharpening of my senses, a tiny increase in the speed of my thoughts. This was why people delved for the raw, addictive rush of becoming more.

  Now, with the ships down, I had my heavy drones—big, brute-force construction models—methodically building earthworks between the larger rock formations. Dienne’s golems were masters of violence, engineered for smashing, not digging. They were already proving their worth. The first wave of this rift’s welcoming committee was a breed of chaos spawn I’d only read about in bestiaries: scorpitaurs. Ugly bastards. Imagine a scorpion the size of a small car, then graft a muscular, armored humanoid torso where its head should be, and give it a second set of crushing pincers. Then, because the universe has a sick sense of humor, top it all off with not one, but two venom-dripping stinging tails that lashed about with psychotic frenzy.

  They were suicidally aggressive, as all chaos spawn tended to be, hurling themselves against the line. Dienne’s golems simply stood their ground, swinging massive fists and arms sheathed in kinetic dampeners. The sound was horrific—a wet, crunching pop as chitinous armor gave way, followed by the sizzle of venom harmlessly scoring the golems’ metal hides. It was efficient, brutal, and strangely detached. No wonder Dienne sleeps around so much. After a day of this, you’d need to feel something warm and alive.

  The troopers, meanwhile, were stuck in the middle ages. The tech cap here was a firm three, which meant anything more sophisticated than basic mechanics and enchanted materials was just so much dead weight. Their armor was heavy plate, modern alloys crafted to look medieval, lacking any of the environmental controls, sensor suites, or comms arrays they were used to. They were sweating buckets inside those metal shells, relying on muscle, skill, and hope. I saw one of the humans, Corporal Casparov, flip up her visor to spit a stream of water from her canteen onto her flushed face. At least it’s not a tech two cap, I mused. If they were in solid bronze, we’d be scraping cooked meat out of the shells by now.

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  As for me, my new armor was a blessedly light affair of articulated plates over a smart-mesh bodysuit. New, because the old one had become… uncomfortably tight. My body, responding to the constant influx of energy and, if I was being brutally honest, David’s proximity, had decided to finish its journey into adulthood with a vengeance. The curves were a logistical nightmare and a personal embarrassment I was still learning to armor effectively. The suit was wired, of course. I could activate its limited systems if I needed to, but for now, I left them dormant. The heat was a familiar embrace, a ghost of Korse deserts, and one less thing to split my attention.

  Most of the troopers’ gear was standard issue, but a few pieces glittered with the soft sheen of enchantment—a prize from a previous delve or a hard-won purchase. The others watched those pieces with naked envy. Rift rewards were the great equalizer, the chance for a common soldier to earn something legendary.

  My attention was split a dozen ways: directing the drones, monitoring the battle through their sensors, and maintaining the open channel to the command pod. The trace was a live wire humming at the back of my skull, a vast improvement over the empathic link Dienne could establish. That was just a blast of raw fear or urgency. This was clarity. I could hear the calm, focused cadence of Taera’s voice, the grizzled professionalism of Sergeant Murphy, and the low, gravelly rumble of David’s. Just hearing him, knowing he was there, was an anchor in the chaos.

  He’d been particularly pleased when I’d reported our landing zone: a wasteland of cracked mud. Apparently, this rift had several biomes, and the sandy desert was the nightmare scenario. That’s where the tunneling species liked to play, specifically the dreaded sand worms. The kind of thing that could surface without a whisper and swallow a whole fire team whole. Here, the hard-baked ground was our friend.

  The earthworks were nearly complete, a low, serrated wall of packed dirt and rock between the natural pillars of stone. I moved carefully through the controlled chaos, my eyes scanning, my other senses extended. I was looking for weaknesses, for threats, for anything out of place. I found it in one of the orcs, a big guy named Jordax. A scorpitaur, in its death throes, had lashed out with a tail, the barb scoring a deep gash along the outside of his thigh, right where the plate armor gave way to jointed mail. Blood, dark and thick, welled up, mixing with the dust and sweat.

  I slid up beside him. “Hold still,” I said, my voice barely a whisper but cutting through his pain-grunted curses.

  He glanced down, his piggish eyes wide with surprise and pain, but he nodded, bracing himself against his spear. I didn’t bother with remote healing. That was for the showboats and the truly powerful. For me, touch was cheaper, faster, more efficient. I placed my hand just above the wound, feeling the heat of torn flesh and the angry discord of damaged life energy. My triage affinity unfolded in my mind, a schematic of muscle fiber, severed capillaries, and ruptured skin. I poured a trickle of energy into the pattern, guiding it, persuading the flesh to remember what wholeness felt like. The muscle knit, the skin sealed, leaving behind a pink, tender scar that would fade to nothing in an hour.

  And then it hit me.

  It wasn’t a trickle. It was a tsunami. The act of healing, combined with the ambient energy of the rift and my own simmering potential, culminated in a wave of pure advancement that slammed into my core. It was like every cell in my body suddenly woke up and started screaming in ecstatic unison. My knees buckled. The world swam, the sounds of battle fading to a distant roar. I sat down hard on the sun-baked dirt, my drone momentarily forgotten, its treads still grinding mud into the wall.

  Corporal Casparov was there in an instant, her visor flipping up again, concern etched on her grimy face. “Hey! You okay, gremlin?”

  I blinked, trying to force the world back into focus. My voice came out a little breathy. “Yeah. I… I just got hit with copper.”

  A wide, genuine grin split her features. “Hell yeah, you did! Good on you!” Her demeanor shifted from concerned comrade to seasoned professional. “Right. Power down. Take five. We got this. We actually got lucky—skipped two weaker waves by coming in at waypoint one. These ugly bastards,” she jerked a thumb at the last few scorpitaurs being methodically pulverized, “are the main event for this phase. Next waves should be cleanup. The XO said you’re to bunker down at the node the second you hit your breakthrough. Go on. I’ll let the LT know you’re out of action.”

  I heard a low whistle from nearby. Dirk, one of the human troopers, had overheard. He turned to Lydia Stormwind, a fierce-looking woman who was cleaning gore off her ax blade. He made a crude gesture involving two interlocked fingers and a wagging eyebrow.

  Lydia didn’t even look up. “I told you no, Dirk. Not even to celebrate. Keep that shit up, trooper, and you’ll find yourself hot-racking with Chief Braxis. I hear he’s into butt stuff with subordinates who can’t keep their betting pools to themselves.”

  My face flushed with a heat that had nothing to do with the desert sun. I decided now was an excellent time to develop a profound interest in my boots, quickly scrambling to my feet and making a beeline for the drop-ship’s access hatch. The things you hear.