The journey back home was quicker and less painful than he’d expected it to be. The experience was vastly different from that of his exit of Abwickeln. This time it didn’t feel like he was traveling through space and time. It was more like he’d just turned around, or tilted his head, and was now merely shifting his perspective.

That was the moment where Andrew realized the scale of his own existence. The feeling was oddly mundane. It reminded him of the time when he was a kid, in his mother’s house, and it occurred to him that it had been some time since he’d last needed to use the stepping stool to reach the upper cabinets in the kitchen.

That was how normal and natural moving across the dimensional divide felt for Andrew. He now understood what Sophia meant when said that his little change had been all but inevitable. He could now see how very easy it’d be to transition between realities entirely by accident.

There was still a sizable energy cost associated with a transfer but Andrew suspected that this was a temporary thing. A cost incurred by his youth, and his untrained muscles, when he was older and stronger he’d barely feel it. He’d be able to move from one part of the cosmos to another with the same mortals move from the bedroom to the fridge.

*************************************************************************************************************

Andrew set the arrival spot for the heavily warded, and largely invisible, open-air lounge area on the roof of his condo instead of within the suites below, because he still needed to make some final modifications to his form. Modifications he hadn’t wanted to make back in Alma, because he was just a little paranoid that the costs would forestall his return home.

“The hell?” said Andrew. Looking down from the rooftop and seeing that the condominium seemed to be the only intact building for miles.

Andrew returned to Harlow and found himself mired in a cacophony. A maelstrom of violence was unfolding around him while he stood on the roof of his condo. There was gunfire, blaster fire, and the sound of explosions. There were cries of pain and panic.

Andrew’s expanded his senses and made them cover the entirety of the city. Getting a bad feeling, He expanded his senses again to make the cover the entirety of the planet and its closest neighbors.

Andrew was dismayed to discover that there wasn’t a single part of Harlow and its nearest neighbors that wasn’t caught up in some kind of desperate life and death struggle.

Swearing beneath his breath, Andrew retrieved his senses, focusing his attention on the city below. The city of Eblouir was covered in smoke and many of its buildings were reduced to rubble.

Up in the sky, there were biomechanical machines that resembled squids and insects. Machines built of metal, chitin, and flesh. Machines armed with energy weapons that had been mounted on their overabundant limbs.

These machines battled against building-sized metal men and similarly massive airships.

Andrew watched as one of the humanoid mechs took down one of the squids destroying one of the few remaining city blocks in the process.

Frowning, Andrew decided to read what Harlow's collective unconscious could tell him of the current situation. What he read there,was alarming enough that he also dipped into his connections to the akashic plane and the data with the various mortal networks.

“Seriously? Is this for real?” said Andrew. Aghast.

Andrew modified the density of his particles and became intangible. Then Andrew let gravity pull him down into the condominium propper.

Andrew was still shaking his head as he sank through the roof of the building into the condominium's penthouse suite. He adjusted his molecular density again and returned to being tangible, landing lightly on his feet.

The first thing Andrew saw, was the all too familiar doll-like face, and snow-white hair, of his partner-in-crime, Sophia.

“Welcome back, Hoheit.” said Sophia.

“Good to be back, Soph.”

The two embraced. Despite her seemingly delicately frame, Sophia all but squeezed light out of Andrew. The young man winced but endured the crushing hug with a smile because naturally, he’d missed her even more, because from his perspective it had been two and a half months since he’d last seen her.

They parted with a kiss. Then after a moment of emotional quiet where Andrew found himself growing more determined to quickly marry the woman in front of him, the two returned to business as usual.

“So the Stygians are attacking Harlow?” said Andrew.

“Yes.” said Sophia.

“How?! This might not be a core world but it’s not some frontier world out in the sticks either”

“From my research, it looks like everyone just got complacent. A lot of people got complacent. The Defensive Network for this solar system, the Odessa System, was outdated and has needed a major overhaul for nearly a century now.

“Odessa’s naval fleet and regional army are run with only partial competence. Half of the folks in charge are like your mother, decent, hardworking, people with their heads on straight. The other half are jackanapes who happened to be someone’s nephew...Forcing the competent people to work around, and often under, the jackanapes inevitably left Odessa’s defense with a lot of weak points.”

Andrew absorbed the information. Nodding.

“Shit…I’m guessing with the frontier in front of us and the more competent core military behind us it didn’t really matter up until now how up to snuff our defenses are. At least until suddenly, it did matter.” said Andrew. Looking out the window at the chaos taking place outside.

For Andrew, the thing that hit the hardest was realizing that all his plans for settling back into life on Harlow had just officially gone out the window.

It had been a crapshoot coming back to this universe for the first time. He hadn’t expected anything to be here. In truth, he hadn’t even been entirely sure it’d still be the same universe. It had been beyond his wildest expectations when he found that not only was his universe still the same universe, Harlow was still present, and life on the tropical planet was still the same as when he’d left it.

When one first plays the lottery, one doesn’t expect to win. This was like managing to somehow, miraculously get hold of that winning ticket, and then having that winning ticket snatched out of your hand. Or more appropriately, this was like winning the lottery and then having the municipality responsible for the payout, get bombed out by an alien invasion.

After depressedly ruminating on his lack of luck, Andrew shook his head and returned his attention to Sophia.

“Wait, a minute. Why are you still on Harlow? The local government might have dropped the fucking ball, but we’re basically one-man surveillance networks, by nature. You should have seen this coming, days in advance.” said Andrew.

Sophia suddenly took a strong interest in the clouds of smoke and soot that drifted overhead. Fixing her gaze on the window.

“Soph?”

“Ahem...Well, about that...I did say a lot of people ended up becoming complacent, hoheit. And...you’d just disappeared. I was busy pretending to be you, I was also setting up my side of the root network, plus I was trying to focus on getting back to you ...A lot of things were happening and you know how it is...One thing leads to another, and before I knew it the Stygians were here.” said Sophia. Giving a small sheepish shrug.

Andrew just sighed. Massaging his brow.

“Okay...Okay ...I suppose that’s fine. What happens now?”

“Well, now there’s still the rest of the Novem Empire, so it’s not like our plans for living like normal people are completely out the window, and my predictive models have the Stygians getting pushed back in a couple of weeks. So hopefully we’ll be able to get things back to normal, soon enough. Honestly, I think this attack was just a probe on the part of the Stygians…”

“As well as an opportunity to bloody the empire’s nose.” said Andrew. Grumpily looking upwards and watching as a team of two flying mechanized-spiders took down an imperial corvette.

“Probably...” said Sophia. Also gazing upwards. Her focus placed on the flashes of blinding light taking place above the planet’s atmosphere, looking like a thunderstorm sans the rain, or the biggest daytime fireworks show imaginable.

“So...About those plans?” said Andrew.

“Oh...That’s actually a bit complicated.” said Sophia. Her expression taking on a difficult look.

“Complicated? Complicated how?” said Andrew.

“Love..Honestly, this one’s on you, not me, hoheit. Remember when a certain somebody decided that our entire building need to have its security revamped. Remember that same somebody waking up during the middle of the night after we’d had our us-time and getting it done?”

“Uh...I-, I guess.” said Andrew. Scratching the side of his and suddenly understanding how it was that half of the city could have been blown to smithereens and their condo was still standing.

When he’d snuck out of bed to make sure, he and Sophia, staid safe regardless of whatever might happen, he’d mostly been thinking about immortal threats. Such as the arrival of a demon king, and some rogue deity-class entity. The possibility of them being swept up in someone else's troubles had maybe passed through his mind, but he hadn’t given it any serious thought.

“It’s not entirely your fault...” teased Sophia.

“There were extenuating circumstances, those circumstances now make it a bit difficult for us to simply tuck the building into your core and fly off to some other planet, as we might have done otherwise. Because while the Stygians and the Imperials above us don’t really notice our presence, the panic and mayhem below, and the whole ‘being the only thing standing for miles’-situation, has made it so that more than a few of the survivors in the city ended up coming to our place to wait out the storm.”

“And you let them in?!” said Andrew. Eyes wide.

Sophia just looked at him. One brow raised. Andrew deflated, sighing in defeat.

“Right...Of course, you let him in. It’d have been the only decent thing to do.” said Andrew. Feeling a headache, or ten, on the horizon.

“Don’t worry, they’ve been kept out of our personal areas and any levels that you’ve earmarked for sensitive use. Plus, you’re the one who made a big deal out of the two of us following a basic modicum of right and wrong, because you thought going all-in on that ‘angled lines and curved lines’ philosophy that’s been ingrained in your blood would probably end up driving us both crazy.”

“Yeah...Yeah, I did. So I’m assuming you took a brief accounting of our guests to make sure we didn’t have any ticking time bombs in the mix?” said Andrew. Rubbing the back of his head and frowning, as he watched a team of unarmored commandos escorts a hovering med-evac unit across the ruined cityscape. Gunning down the genetically modified monsters the Stygians used as infantry.

“I did...Which leads me to the second thing that also was not my fault.” said Sophia.

“Nh? Oh, shit...What happened now?”

“The Academy was destroyed.”

“Huh? Of course, the Academy was destroyed! Look at this city. I doubt a facility as big as the academy, with as many ties to the planet’s military, was going to get left alone.” said Andrew. Pointing out the window towards the devastated landscape.

“No...I mean the school was destroyed first.”

“...What?”

“Hours before the Stygian attack, unmarked ships entered Eblouir’s sky. I ran through the data for the whole plot, it seems that this attack was something that had been in the works for months, if not years. I suspect the Stygian’s immortals and some of Novem’s immortals were doing so backroom business. Either that or Blackvale’s dean and council of Elders have made themselves quite an enemy somewhere. There’s evidence of true-data suppression. Someone out there was meddling with the flow of the world to keep the powers-that-be from seeing what took place, but the residue was too muddled for me to tell if it was divine, infernal, spiritual, fae, or something more exotic like the two of us.”

“Fair enough, when the immortals decide to take on the heavy price of hiding their plots there’s nothing we can do about it.” said Andrew. Not feeling anywhere near as resigned as his tone suggested, and already making plans to pour over the data himself for clues, in hopes of getting even with the responsible parties someday.

“They dropped a group, fairly impressive, power-wielding unknowns in mechanized armor onto the academy grounds. They killed various key members of the school’s senior staffed. Then after the ships came back to pick up their people, they carpet-bombed the campus on their way out. They also attempted to capture and/or kill several of the students, somewhere in the midst of that, but I stepped in that point. Beyond the fact, at least three of my bodies, including the body that was masquerading as you, would have been amongst their targets...it seemed like it’d have been bad school spirit, to let them gun down or collar our classmates.”

“Yeah...So I’m guessing that most of the people in the building are students and school staff?” said Andrew.

“Yes...There were also a handful of regular townsfolk mixed up and a few emergency responders from the city who ended up getting stranded when the Stygians stopped dropping bombs and started dropping monsters instead, but its mostly people from the school.” said Sophia.

“Alright...So, I’m assuming you’ve got an idea of what to do with them.” said Andrew. Plopping himself down into a seat.

“Well, it turns out we’re still students...Blackvale was a branch school of an even larger entity. The quietly prestigious ‘Hundred-Night’ Academy.” said Sophia.

“Nh,....I’d say I’d never heard about them, but going by the data I’m reading through now, that seems to have been entirely the point.” said Andrew.

“Will they really take us?” said Andrew.

“They kind of have to. The late-dean was part of the family that founded the school and it’d be a black mark on their reputation to leave this large a number of students and staff out in the wind. Naturally, I can’t make any promises for after we’ve been pulled into the fold.” said Sophia.

“Tch...Fine. I guess that’s good enough. And for the rest of our mortal cargo?”

“We can either drop them off on the first imperial station, or world, we pass through. Or we can drop them off when we reach Nurari III, and the Hundred-Night Academy.” said Sophia.

“Nh. Another good plan. ” said Andrew.