My head spun as my eyes opened. I blinked the blurry vision away and found myself looking into the scarred face of severe looking woman in a military uniform.

“Hatchet,” she said. “Glad you finally deigned to join us in the land of the living.”

I hadn’t been conscious last time EDGE Force came for me, and after six months I kind of expected a little more of a gentle introduction. But no. Why wasn’t I surprised?

“Yeah, that’s me, I guess,” I said.

The woman smiled, but the scar that ran across her cheek and through both of her lips made the skin pull back in an involuntary sneer.

“I’m Xiphos, your commanding officer on this mission,” she said. There was a nametag on the left side of her EDGE Force combat gear that said the same. Then she motioned to my right. “This is Stiletto, Naginata and Khopesh.”

I swivelled my head to the right, which was a bad idea. The sudden shift in my equilibrium caused me to pitch forward out of my seat and onto the ground. The unbalanced dizziness threatened to make me blow chunks, but I kept them down.

“Well that was certainly an introduction,” A darker-skinned man with a black moustache said. Khopesh, according to his nametag. A tuft of black chest hair poked out from his collar.

“Is it too late to ask for a refund? This warrior is clearly defective,” the woman next to Khopesh said. This was Naginata.

The pale man sitting between Naginata and me was Stiletto. The look of pure contempt on his face confirmed that I’d absolutely nailed this whole good first impression thing.

Awkwardly, I slid back into the chair.

I lifted a hand to my own chest and felt my nametag there. “Hatchet. Nice to meet you all. Do they always do this? Just pluck you out of wherever you are and plonk you down where they need you?”

Xiphos nodded. “Yes. It’s how EDGE Force works, but as this is only your second mission, it sounds like you’ve got some gaps in your training.”

“This is only his second mission?” Khopesh asked, incredulous. “A mission this dangerous requires a team of highly trained soldiers.”

“EDGE Command chose him for a reason,” Xiphos insisted.

“What is your background?” Naginata asked. “SAS?”

I laughed. The Special Air Service Regiment, otherwise known as the SASR or SAS, was one of Australia’s elite military special forces units. They were the very best of the best.

“No, not quite,” I said.

“Then what?” Stiletto asked. His deep voice surprised me, coming from such a lean frame. “You’ve only completed a single EDGE Force mission, and you’re not special forces. Captain, I second Naginata’s concerns.”

Somehow working alone might actually be better than working with these meatheads.

“Does my background change anything about the fact that I was taken against my will to fight for EDGE force again?” I asked.

“Yes,” Naginata said matter-of-factly. “We all volunteered for this.”

What the fuck. What the actual fuck. These guys had been given a choice?

“If he doesn’t want to be here, he’s a liability. He should be left behind,” Khopesh agreed.

Xiphos put a hand up in front of her, and all other EDGE Force team members fell silent. You couldn’t buy that kind of power; it had to be earned.

“Hatchet was chosen by EDGE Command for this mission due to his outstanding ability to understand systems and use them to his advantage. He single-handedly carried out a mission objective that should have been beyond his capabilities and did so by manipulating the system to his own benefit. All of you approach these missions like soldiers, because that is all you know. You have your own shortcomings that need to be balanced out, and Hatchet is that balance.”

I relaxed back into my chair a little. I’d expected to be put on blast, but Xiphos had gone in to bat for me big time.

Just then, a door slid open at the side of the room. The person standing there took me by complete surprise.

“Miranda?” I asked, getting to my feet and rushing over to her.

The moment she saw me, she did the same. We hugged, not giving a shit about what any of the others might think.

“Why is Hatchet hugging Commander Cullen?” Stiletto asked.

“Why is she hugging him back?” Khopesh added.

I broke away from Miranda and saw her with a fresh set of eyes. The crisp uniform. Her brown hair tied back in a no-nonsense bun. The same kind eyes.

“Commander?” I asked with a wry smile.

Miranda blushed. “It’s a long story.”

“Yeah, a lot can happen in six months,” I agreed.

She flushed even deeper at that. “I wanted to reach out, but the work-”

“-was more important,” I said in a tone that tried to convey that I understood, and there were no hard feelings.

She nodded. “Exactly. I wish there was more time for us to catch up, but something’s happened that requires an immediate response. If you can take your seat, I’ll brief you on the mission.”

I complied and was quietly proud of how much had changed in such a short time. Miranda held herself differently now. She’d never been shy, meek or anything of the sort, but now she commanded respect.

Miranda approached the table in the centre of the room and pulled a transparent tablet out of her pocket. She moved her fingers across the screen and swiped towards the table. A hologram of the planet Earth appeared in the centre, rotating slowly.

“Whoa, this is some Tony Stark shit,” I said.

Miranda smiled, then pointed to an illuminated section in the southeast of Europe.

“This is Romania,” Miranda said, pointing to a mountainous section above somewhere called Râmnicu Vâlcea. “These mountain ranges are the Romanian Carpathians. They encircle the Transvylanian Plateau and-”

Khopesh snorted a laugh. “Transylvania? Like with vampires and shit?”

“Yes,” Miranda confirmed. “With vampires and shit. Although we really have no idea what actually happened. The attack came at night, so we can’t rule out any possibilities.”

“What kind of attack?” Xiphos replied, getting the conversation back on track.

“At first, it was just one village. Here, on the northern side of the southern Carpathians.” Miranda pointed above the crest of the mountains, inside the Transylvanian plateau. “A small village called Creșterea was wiped out overnight. We are still in the dark about what happened.” Miranda sighed, and her composure cracked a little. “We sent in a fresh EDGE to investigate, and she disappeared too.”

“A fresh EDGE?” I asked. “Like what happened to me on Mori Island? You sent them in alone?”

Miranda looked stricken. “I didn’t send them, I-”

Xiphos put a hand up to silence me. “It’s standard practice, Hatchet. It’s called honing the blade. Potential EDGE Force recruits are sent out on solo missions first to gauge their capability. If they’re worthy recruits, like you, then they’re sent back to their lives with their memories intact. If not, their memories are restored from a previous state, and they keep on living, none the wiser.”

I laughed a dry, humourless laugh. “Restored to a previous state? Like restoring a computer to its factory settings? That’s such bullshit.”

“No, that’s actually an apt analogy,” Miranda said. “We take a snapshot of them at a certain point in time, then restore it if they’re not suitable for recruitment.”

I shook my head. “But you need them back alive to reset them, don’t you?”

Miranda nodded. “Yes. We’ve been unable to find any trace of Pike since she disappeared.”

“So this is a rescue mission?” I asked. “Just like I rescued you?”

The gasps of shock and confusion from the others were audible.

“That was you?” Khopesh asked.

“Damn,” Stiletto said, looking at me in a completely different light. The contempt was gone, replaced with what might have been awe or wonder.

Naginata seemed to consider me carefully, then bowed her head towards me without saying another word.

What the hell had Miranda done to earn such high esteem with these warriors?

“This is not a rescue mission,” Miranda said, continuing. “Last night, another village named Incolţi disappeared in exactly the same manner. A group of hunters were out of the village for a night, then when they arrived back, everyone was gone. No tracks in or out of the village, but there was definitely a struggle this time. Whatever attacked them faced heavy resistance before the village fell.”

“You want us to go in and figure out what happened,” Xiphos said.

Miranda nodded. “Yes. You leave as soon as you’re geared up. Hatchet, can I see you for a moment? Alone?” Miranda added that last word with a pointed look at Xiphos.

Xiphos nodded. “Time to gear up, soldiers. To the armoury! Let’s give these two a chance to catch up.”

The other EDGE Force members followed Xiphos out of the room. Miranda and I waited awkwardly until they were gone before we both laughed.

“Damn, those are some stuffed-shirt sons of bitches,” I said.

“Soldiers, JD. That’s just how they are. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in contact. I’ve wanted to, but the work-”

“Kaiser misses you. He keeps asking about you.”

Miranda flushed. “How does he ask about me? Like Scooby Doo?” she asked and gave her best Scooby-Doo impression. “Re-randa?”

I chuckled. “Not quite. We use buttons with sounds prerecorded on them to have conversations now. It works pretty well. Speaking of working pretty well, are you running this joint now?”

“No, not quite. But my anima sight and eye for pattern recognition have made me invaluable in identifying potential threats and potential new EDGE Force recruits. They listen to me.”

“And you’re helping save the world. Good on you, kid.”

“You know I really tried to get them to leave you alone.” She swiped the globe away from the tabletop. “I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way again, but EDGE Command insisted on you for this mission.”

“That’s kind of bittersweet,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for six months for another call.”

“You wanted this?” Miranda asked, aghast.

“Kind of? I don’t know. Whatever you did to me changed everything. I had a beer belly before, now I have a damn six pack, and I blame you.”

“Wow, so the anima battery supercharge is still there? I thought it’d wear off after a while.”

“Nope. Still making me Superman.”

“That’s going to be a big advantage in the mission to come. You should know that it’s not going to be the same this time around. There’s a team now, so each of you will get a class, and you won’t have my mother’s help.”

I swallowed nervously. The only reason I’d been able to power myself up to superhuman levels last time around was because of Miranda’s mum: Altrighus.

Technically she was an extraplanar God who crossed over a little into our little slice of paradise. Her blood, which was pure anima, let me open portals into my own creative nexus to break EDGE Force’s system.

“How much did you tell them about what I did on Mori Island?” I asked, worried that somehow my own abilities had been exposed.

Miranda shook her head. “I told them everything, but made it very clear that I was responsible for opening any portals. If I told the whole truth, I don’t know what they would have done to you or Kaiser, and I couldn’t risk that. I-I care about you both too much.”

It was all starting to make a strange kind of sense. I thought I’d been abandoned and forgotten about, but Miranda had deliberately been trying to keep me out of things to protect us.

“Thank you,” I said. “For protecting me. And Kaiser. But a phone call? You couldn’t have picked up the phone and called? I’m hurt.” I feigned being shot and staggered back a step.

Miranda laughed, then grew serious. “I’m sorry. For not calling and for letting you get dragged back into this. I-”

I raised a hand to cut her off. “The last six months have been amazing. I’ve gotten so much writing done, had so many adventures with my kids, and I’ve even got Kaiser addicted to Rick & Morty.”

“Oh my god, really?”

“It’s the portals. He loves portals. I think he misses being able to be a magic dog. Now he’s just a smart dog with existential dread.”

“I miss him too,” Miranda said.

“Yeah, he’s a good dog. After we’re done with whatever’s going on in Romania, you need to come visit. That’s not an order, by the way. I’m sure you outrank me now.”

“Mm,” Miranda said.

I couldn’t tell that was a commiseration or affirmation, so I changed the subject.

“How’s your Mum going?”

“It’s hard. Her reality moves at a fraction of the speed ours does. I can go weeks between speaking with her, but it feels like seconds to her. And this-” Miranda said, holding the twisted purple medallion carved from her mother’s blood that she wore around her neck. “This isn’t working as well as it once did. The moment she withdrew from our reality, I felt the power start to wane.”

“This thing in Romania, is it connected to Mnemtech?”

“Not as far as we know.”

“This new system, how does it work?”

“It’s better if I explain it to everyone all at once to save repeating anything,” Miranda said. “EDGE Force team missions are much different to solo missions, so you’ll have to forget everything you know about how it all works this time around.”

“Those other four look like they can take on pretty much anything. I’m sure we’ll be fine,” I said.

“You won’t be going in blind this time. EDGE Force will be with you the whole time over comms. Plus, Xiphos is one of the longest-serving warriors of EDGE Force. If there’s one person who can keep you safe, it’s her. Plus, you’ll be going into this mission with a friend.”

I gave Miranda a quizzical look, but she turned away and headed out of the room.

She stopped at the doorway and turned back towards me. “It’s time for system induction. Follow me.”