Flames danced outside my window. I sat and stared for a frankly stupid amount of time. The idyllic scene that I had admired just a few days ago was transformed beyond recognition. The nights were never totally dark if you counted all the exterior lighting.

Tonight? Tonight was dark. None of the exterior lighting beyond the arcology was lit, I could only see little patches of fire on the ground, far below. I could just barely make out tiny figures moving around in the light cast by the fires. Worse, several of the gardens on the terraces of the arcology were burning as well. Who would attack the arcology outright?

This… this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. Corporate warfare was always conducted in the shadows. Assassinations and sabotage of critical infrastructure. Though, now that I thought about it, I didn’t have any sources for that beyond fiction. Shadow wars didn’t exactly make it into history books. I didn’t have any non-fiction references for… whatever this was, either. A legacy war? I knew there had been many in the past, but the specifics were always glossed over.

A loud thumping from my door startled me out of my daze. I whipped around, facing the door. My heart was hammering in my chest as I heard shouting just outside. Were they here for me? I looked around, but there was nowhere in my apartment that I could properly hide. Maybe I could hide in the bathroom, and ambush whoever it was? I knew that my power worked to some extent here, so I could probably do something.

I turned to make a break for the bathroom, but a badly timed spasm sent me crashing to the floor. I rolled to the side just in time to hear the beep of my door being overridden, and see it slide open.

Enforcers. Two men in black ceramic and polymer armor, tinted face shields, submachine guns hung loose in front of them. They didn’t have their hands on their guns, so my fall probably wasn’t a fatal one. One rushed to where I was laying, the other faced out, keeping watch over the hallway.

“William Bekker, are you injured?” the Enforcer asked. His voice had an artificial quality to it. They were rumored to be more metal than meat, but it was mildly surprising to actually notice it.

“No, I just tripped.”

He nodded, extending a hand to me. I took it and he stood, pulling me up with him. Even his movements were slightly mechanical. It reminded me a bit of how The Painter had controlled his shell. Precise, efficient, but not exactly how one might expect a human to move.

“Good. We need to move, now.”

He jogged back to his partner. I tried to match his pace, but my lower body was wracked with shooting pain. I stumbled a bit, but didn’t fall again. He halted and turned mid-stride, and came back for me. He ducked under my right arm, and set off again. He was moving just about as quickly while hauling me as he was without. I could feel the machinery in his limbs shifting as he moved.

We moved out into the hall, the Enforcer’s partner following along, scanning behind us occasionally as we moved. I was startled when the one supporting me spoke.

“You aren’t responding to pings.”

“Ah,” I looked over at him, not expecting to be addressed, “I haven’t got an interface. I didn’t grab my AR glasses. I’ve got-”

“No more,” he interrupted, “Don’t say it out loud. I just checked your file, I understand the specifics of your situation now.”

I limped along, doing my best not to be too much of a burden. The Enforcer didn’t seem to struggle with my weight at all, but having to haul around extra mass inevitably hindered his mobility - particularly on corners where we weren’t turning the way I was expecting. We turned away from the central elevators, the two Enforcers working in perfect harmony despite never speaking to one another. They were probably on a private channel, with some kind of specialized tech for purely mental input. Impressive stuff.

Just as I was starting to come down from the shock of the initial attack, a burst of gunfire rang out behind us. I nearly tripped again, but the Enforcer held on to my shoulder, his steel grip digging in painfully as I got my feet back under me. We turned the next corner, his partner didn’t follow. I could hear small bursts of gunfire growing more and more distant, with responses of longer, quieter retorts, presumably from the submachine gun of the Enforcer covering our retreat.

Finally, we reached a small service elevator, far from the areas of the floor I was familiar with. The door opened just as we reached it, we entered, and the doors closed immediately. This elevator was a lot more like the ones in my old building, the ride less smooth and certainly not silent.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

He just shook his head. Typical. My pounding heartbeat had time to settle a bit as I watched the number on the old style LED screen tick up. I guess a week of fighting in the game, or in the… whatever the hell the alien tower dreamworld was, I guess it wasn’t enough to keep me cool in an actual gun fight.

Realistically, I shouldn’t have expected anything else… but I was packing some alien tech now, wasn’t I? The unfocused energy from my sun might keep me from freezing up, if I didn’t throttle it quite so much, but that didn’t seem like it’d let me actually keep my wits. Nico, can you do anything about that?

Instead of words, I felt a rush of confidence, which did absolutely nothing to settle my mind. It was the wrong sort to let me stay calm in a firefight. Could I walk into a boardroom and face down a dozen executives and negotiate? Yeah, I think I probably could. But it didn’t do anything for the sort of nerves I was dealing with right now.

Did I have anything else that might help? I had that minion that made people forget about it. I wasn’t sure if that was its power at work, but even I had almost forgotten that I had it. I couldn’t pull anything out of my inventory, but could I engineer some way to maybe make the shooters look away from me?

I sighed. No, it was probably a huge engineering undertaking, and would lean heavily on Nico for any technical aspects of assembling or disassembling monster parts. Even with the time dilation from my inventory, there was no way I’d be able to put anything together in time. Hmm. My time dilation. I looked inward, flexing my power as much as I could to push the dilation ratio.

No, now was not the time for trying to create anything new. I was stuck with what preparations I had already made. If I lived through this, I’d take this lesson to heart and try to be better prepared. I spent a few minutes, just staring into the dark. Nico had set all the smaller butterflies to some sort of training exercise, while he personally performed some sort of arcane surgery on the biggest one, my survival minion to be. Every few minutes, I took a peek outside to see if the elevator had stopped yet.

After maybe ten subjective minutes, I spotted the doors opening and reluctantly left my time accelerated refuge. Those few extra minutes to calm down were probably the best I could do right now. The floor indicator was in the high eighties. I wasn’t sure how many floors the arcology actually had, but we had to be nearing the top.

We stepped out into a service hallway. The lighting was simple and functional, the walls and ceiling had pipes and wires in brackets. Up ahead it opened onto a larger service hallway, running perpendicular to this one. As soon as we set foot into the larger passage, there was a sudden noise, and something red, then I was slammed back into the wall of the narrower hall by the Enforcer.

“Oh, fuck me!” he shouted. It was the most human thing I’d yet seen out of him.

He peeked back out into the larger corridor, unloading a hail of bullets on something there. I looked down to see that there was an ugly wound across my right shoulder, a furrow of meat that was just gone. Turned into red mist. There was a bit of white visible in the deepest part. I loosened the restrictions on essence flowing into my sun.

New energy flooded my body. I felt giddy, my heart was beating so fast it hurt. I’d never felt so amped. I wanted to run, jump, fly, anything to burn some of the energy that was filling my every cell. I was practically vibrating, but somehow I managed to reign in the impulse to action. I looked again, and found that I was bleeding pretty badly. The entire right half of my pajama shirt was soaked in gleaming red. Fuck. I was going to die in my pajamas, wasn’t I?

Compared to storing the pen, it was a small flex of my power to take a thin ring of fabric from my shirt, though the exertion still drew a gasp from me. Now no longer connected, I pulled my right sleeve free, balled it up, and pressed it into the open wound. Now, where were we going to go from here? Back to the elevator to try another route?

The Enforcer had other plans, it seemed. He pulled a red clip from a small metal cylinder, held it for a few seconds, and tossed it into the hall. There was a thump and a rush of heat. My eyes widened. I hadn’t known Enforcers carried those.

He pulled a grey clip from another cylinder, tossed it into the hall, and pulled me with him as he stepped out. No gunfire greeted us, though I could see people moving around behind the inferno deeper in the hall. Suddenly, there was a hiss. A bulbous mass of grey erupted from the tiny container, filling the bottom half of the hall. My escort tossed a second one, which stuck into the top of the expanding mass. A few seconds later and the entire hallway was sealed.

He halted a moment before ducking under my right arm again, presumably looking at my wound. He reached out and touched the cleanly cut edge where my right sleeve once met my shirt. Then he looked down where my blood had soaked my shirt. I hadn’t noticed at first, but my blood, even outside the towers, was looking unusually metallic.

“Do you have anything that would be useful in a fight?” he asked, surprising me. Did he know? It was phrased vaguely enough… but he wouldn’t be asking at all if he didn’t.

I shook my head, letting my legitimate surprise into my expression. A burst of intuition from Nico had suggested it. I didn’t want them to know that I knew it was all real yet, and this should create some doubt. Plus, later on when they look at his video and run me for microexpressions, I should come back clean.

“Damn. Nevermind.” He pulled out a small roll, which turned out to be a proper bandage. He wrapped it around the bundle of cloth I had made from my sleeve, using the bandage to press it tightly into the injury.

“Once we’re safe, make sure you get that looked at by a doctor,” he said, “don’t just leave it like that.”

He ducked under my left arm, shifting his gun to his left hand.

“This will impact my accuracy,” he said, “I’ll drop you if we have any further enemy contact. I don’t want you to be surprised if that happens.”

And with that, we set off away from the grey foam barrier. We didn’t run into any more bandits looking to fill us with holes, though I did hear hints that there was definitely some fighting still going on.

“Will!” a familiar voice called out as we approached a utility room. Roberts was here. “Damn it, I knew I should have assigned you a bodyguard until you got your tech sorted out. We almost lost you from bad timing and coordination alone. Stupid.”

Well, it was nice to be appreciated. I stumbled into a chair, the woman who previously occupied it leaping out of the way at the sight of a man covered in his own blood, and tried to get my limbs to stop shaking. I tried to regulate my breathing, and found that I wasn’t even out of breath. My lower body was still a storm of spasms and shooting pain. My shoulder was more of a ripping, throbbing variety of pain. My magical high was taking the edge off, but it was still a profoundly unpleasant state to be in.

“Don’t worry,” Roberts said, laying a hand on my good shoulder, “we’ll head to the safe room now that everyone’s accounted for.”

I perked up at that, scanning the mass of people for faces I recognized. I could see a number of my coworkers, but not everyone. Joe wasn’t here, not that I could see. There was probably another shelter somewhere else.

“Alright, everyone,” Roberts spoke up, everyone in the room quieted almost immediately, “I’ve sent you all the route data. We are going to move from here to a saferoom in the core. The Enforcers stationed on this floor will make sure we are safe while we move. As always, make sure you follow any directions they send you, and if any fighting does break out, take cover or drop to the ground right away.”

“Let’s move out then,” he said, with a clap of his hands. Everyone else started moving. I tried to stand, but even that was a task that might be beyond me at the moment. Roberts swooped in and tried to hold me up, but he probably hadn’t been expecting to need to bear so much of the weight. The Enforcer smoothly switched places with the executive.

“I’ve got him sir. Our route should be clear, you go ahead.”

The trip was tense. The fear was nearly tangible in the air as the file of employees made their way through the access tunnels, working their way to safety. Roberts, the Enforcer, and I started out in the middle of the pack, but we gradually fell behind until we were at the tail end. The Enforcer was practically dragging me at this point, as I fought through the pain to put one leg in front of the other. Roberts glanced back at me, then moved back toward the center of the procession.

Up ahead was the door to the saferoom. At least, I assumed the massive vault door was our destination. About half of the employees had made it inside when the left wall exploded, throwing debris and dust everywhere. Employees near the door dashed inside, those further away dropped, either following instructions, or injured from the blast. There were grey shapes moving out of the newly opened passage. The Enforcer and I were far enough back not to be caught in the blast. He dropped me, moving forward.

I hit the ground. There was a jolt, and suddenly the shooting pain was gone. The Enforcer fired rapid bursts, each time he did one of the attackers fell. Abruptly, the bursts stopped. He dropped the submachine gun, letting it dangle from its strap, as he drew his sidearm and continued to fire. One shot for each form moving in the dust cloud. It was absolutely terrifying to see him work up close. He moved to inspect the damaged wall, and swore.

Only once everything was still did I reflect on what had just happened to me. The cold, sinking feeling was almost enough to totally drown out the erratic buzz of my solar magic. The Enforcer tried to help me up, but stopped halfway. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t move my legs at all. Couldn’t feel them. He seemed to realize it, then scooped me up and stalked to the vault. The employees who hadn’t been injured in the blast were getting up and rushing the vault. Most of those who had been were calling out in pain, though some were still and quiet.

Roberts organized some of the employees to bring in those who were injured, as well as those who were already dead. The injured were moved to the side of the room, being seen to by some sort of medic. I wasn’t really paying close attention at this point. The Enforcer who had brought me here had set me in a chair and went to talk to Roberts. So I sat. It was all I could do. It was all I’d ever be able to do. Healing this sort of damage was well above my already vastly inflated paygrade. It could be temporary, from inflammation or some auto-immune reaction or something, but deep down I knew that it wasn’t.

There was a thump, something big reverberated through the vault door, which had been sealed at some point.

“They’re setting up breaching charges,” the Enforcer said, “They won’t be able to make it through with one set, but if they focus on the door, there’s a good chance they’ll make it through before reinforcements can arrive. Worst case, we have only minutes.”

“Everyone!” Roberts called, taking command again, “We’re taking the stairs. It’s an escape route that leads to the roof. There’s a helipad eleven floors up, I’m sending you all the codes and calling in an aircraft now!”

People began to move to a small passage in the back of the room. Most of the injured were at least standing or walking with assistance, the imminent threat a higher priority than keeping them still.

“You,” Roberts addressed the Enforcer, “carry him, let’s get moving.”

“My command and control codes are only good here. If I try to follow you outside, carrying him or no, I’ll end up in the same boat as him as soon as the system detects that I’ve left my post. There’s a good chance that’ll be at the bottom of those stairs, not the top. Either way, I’m not willing to test it.”

“Then we’ll organize a few others to carry him,” Roberts said, “I can’t afford to leave him behind.”

The Enforcer looked around. The only employees that hadn’t already started up the stairs were already assisting the other injured.

Another blast from the door, followed by a cracking sound.

“We certainly can’t leave him to be captured,” the Enforcer said, “They’re too well equipped. Their intel is too good. They knew what they wanted, and where to find it. All we can do now is deny them what they came for.”

Roberts’ eyes widened. Suddenly, I was staring down the barrel of a gun. I dug deep, reaching for my power, anything to defend myself. There was a flash of light and then-

Nothing.