Kei

  Balk the enemy's power; force him to reveal himself.

  --Sun Tzu

  Suddenly, the mech holding me aloft is shouting.

  “Move, move, move!” she thunders as we rise. Her fingers tense, ever so slightly, which is like an immense vise squeezing my insides with bone-grinding force, because that’s exactly what it is.

  The roar of her jet turns into a single, continuous explosion of force and sound, hurling us upward so hard the pressure of the steel beneath my feet almost matches that of the rubber-coated titanium grinding into my ribs.

  Sheets of light are appearing all around us and below us, and many more are rising fast. They are all sliding up or down or sideways, edges slicing along until one-by-one they slam into each other and instantly stick. And stop moving, not so much like they abruptly welded together as if they’ve always been a single structure, and anything suggesting otherwise was just a trick of the light or a fever in my brain.

  I see Chris and Andrea rising also, both trailing blue exhaust as they rush upward.

  And in the distance, far past, the approaching breach to the Maze above us, I see a patch of sky warp and writhe as though it is alive.

  I point and shout despite the impossible noise of our acceleration, and the mech’s helmet turns towards it.

  “Faster!” Hammersmith thunders, pointing at the twisting space.

  Walls begin to appear and close around us, the ones already in place right below us slamming together again and again just behind Hammersmith’s giant boots, as if trying to catch her in a trap and crush the metal of her mecha.

  Others simply fold and join at the edges.

  I look over the edge of Hammersmith’s clutching gauntlet and into the abyss. Far below, layer after layer of an infinite labyrinth is forging itself together in our wake. I watch dozens of complex, obviously three-dimensional shells of this ever-deepening maze form with blinding speed.

  Shining walls of solid light folding themselves like origami, merging together as if they’ve always been a single structure and attracting more sheets of crystallized light in turn.

  I see gold and blue and purple to begin with, but soon every color joins in the race. The race to ensnare us.

  A rainbow of imprisonment or death. Given how hard the panels just below us are crashing together just after we pass, probably death.

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  As hypnotic and terrifying as it is beautiful.

  “What,” I ask, “is that?”

  “Lost Tech. Hard light and harder spacetime,” Hammersmith observes. “Brace yourself. They’re not done.”

  “Infinite Labyrinth’s more than a catchy phrase or a few hedges,” Chris rasps out over our comms. “The Nexus has more than one way to stop invasions.” There’s a weird vibration to his voice, as though his engines are vibrating him inside his armor.

  “Anyone trying to run the gauntlet can just be shunted off to the wrong universe,” Hammersmith adds, sounding distracted as another two-dimensional plane slices across at us like a sideways guillotine. I hear it scrap the bottoms of her boots, but we keep climbing, and the mechrider’s focus is elsewhere.

  She points a giant finger at the rippling region of spacetime far past the gate to the Maze.

  “That’s what we need to worry about.”

  “Worry less, fly faster,” Chris gasps out.

  I think I’m hearing him through some kind of vibration from the mech’s surface, projecting the sound of this conversation through my bones so the engines don’t drown it out. Which is nice of Hammersmith. But the tone in their voices worries me.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  I notice I’m feeling oddly weak, despite the terrifying circumstances. Normally I have strength and awareness to burn in situations this tense. But I feel spent and, stranger still, like I’m not recovering. Almost as though my energy is leaving me almost as fast as it flows in.

  From whatever well of power that normally fills me to overflowing.

  I give a mental shrug. It’s a relief not to feel that invincible strength, if it means I’m not drawing chaos to myself with every breath.

  Then again, nothing around me suggests that I’m not.

  Then I look up at the Maze directly. And I see the faintest glimmer of a river of purple energy flowing through the breach into the Earth above. A river, I suddenly guess, that’s flowing straight from me to something on the other side.

  And now I no longer feel weak. Instead, I feel sick.

  I drop my gaze, about to shout something, and my eyes fall on the roiling spacetime beyond.

  Just as it bursts apart with a roar of onrushing stars. Titanic dark claws tear a breach in the open sky while a geyser of stars shoots sideways, angling for us… and then curving upward towards the Maze.

  Hammersmith opens up with a plasma cannon on her left gauntlet, and Chris does the same with both of his.

  The mecha’s initial burst spreads out – more like a tide of charged particles pushing back against the flight of stars. But almost immediately it focuses, along with Chris’ weapons, on the breach and whatever is tearing its way through.

  A howl slices through everything and makes my bones resonate in pain. I can feel the force of it from what must be many miles away.

  I swear there’s another Dragon there, but one which makes the great Dragon we fought before look like the tiny hatchlings it shed from the wisps of its body.

  There’s a sense of incalculable scale as the beast rends its way through the open air. And implacable fury at our resistance.

  “Give it everything!” Hammersmith shouts. Chris listens.

  I can see the power from their weapons increase, and more weapons fire from elsewhere on the mech’s surface. And every energy weapon seems to blaze with blinding brilliance, even as the metal around them takes on a dull red glow that steadily intensifies to white.

  And I wonder, distantly, just how much power might be available if Chris and especially Hammersmith have fusion reactors powering their tech.

  The world turns incandescent.

  And then the sky is full of blazing starlight, shattering shields of frozen force, and a battle between some ravening power from the breach and the endless labyrinth ensnaring us all.

  Human or otherwise.

  I look up at the Maze and get one last look as a crimson wall appears between us and our last way out. Followed by a hundred more as layer after layer of furious radiance appear to block our path and converge to crush us.

  Hammersmith is firing upward now, as is Chris. Futilely. Andrea is clutching a shining piece of crystal to her chest in what seems a hopeless gesture.

  And then a vast and terrible voice thunders above us.

  “Arden!”

  And the living Sun descends to join us.

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