Standing at the edge of the caldera, Zed watched the sun rise above the horizon, chasing away the star-studded darkness of the night. A forest covered the slope of the volcano, appearing black in the scarlet light of dawn, and beyond it, the sea was a shimmering line in the distance. He had watched scenes like this before on holo-vids. Who hadn’t? But this was his first time seeing it in person. He had been too busy training for his post to have ever gone off-world.

Zed stood there, letting the cool morning breeze play on his body as he watched the sky change colours. Reds, pinks, oranges, blues! And not a cloud in sight. It was beautiful.

In contrast, the sky of Pyrrhus was always covered by a dark pall of smoke. Only when the seasonal storms ripped a gap in the clouds would the Pyrrheans get a rare glimpse of the sky beyond. Even then, the extremely dense atmosphere meant that the sun wasn’t distinguishable in the daytime sky, and the stars weren’t visible at night. Their sky was monotone. Orange in the day, black at night.

It was this contrast that finally drove the point home. He wasn’t on Pyrrhus anymore. Back within the magma chamber, it had still been possible to pretend otherwise, but out here, watching an alien sun rise over an alien sky, the gravity of his situation finally pressed down on him. His flames dimmed as a terrible loneliness spread through his being, paralyzing him in place. He had left everything behind. He was thousands of lightyears away from home. And the only way back was by pitting himself against an entire race of people as well as the strongest experts of several other worlds.

All of a sudden, the world seemed too big, the horizon too far away, and the inverted dome of the sky just too high above his head. The morning breeze chilled him to the core.

New Quest! Seek and Destroy!

Objective: Defeat hostile drone squadron: 0/5.

Reward: Title – Legion of One.

Instincts developed over years of military training allowed Zed to dive to the side without a second thought, saving him from the bullet that pinged off the ground, throwing up a clump of dirt. Turning the dive into a roll, he moved behind the cover of a large boulder.

‘Ashes of the Ancestors! How did someone find me so fast?”

Picking up a loose rock approximately the size of his head, he wrapped it with both his Thermal and Force Fields and set it on fire. There, now it looked like him. Just a lot less handsome.

Holding the burning piece of rock out from behind cover, he flinched when a bullet immediately smashed through it, shattering it into pieces. Shaking fragments of melting rock off his hand, he crawled forward and pried the bullet out of the ground before quickly retreating and pressing his back against the boulder.

‘A sniper,’ he concluded from the shape of the bullet. ‘I have to take it out before the rest of its squad arrives if I want to stand a chance.’

By wrapping the decoy rock in his Force Field, he had managed to sense the vector of the bullet as it passed through it. Factoring in the wind velocity and the weight of the bullet, he quickly Calculated the approximate location of the sniper.

His highest-level Field was the Thermal Field at level 4. At the base condition it was shaped like a cube with 4m sides centred on him. Not even close to what he would need to get the drone in range.

Pushing all extraneous thought out of his mind, Zed focused on reshaping his Field; thinning and elongating it keeping the volume constant. The most experienced of professionals could shape their Fields into a thin thread, making even a level 1 Field extend beyond a few kilometres. He wasn’t that good, but he wasn’t too shabby either. Thinning the field down to a cylindrical beam two kilometres long and a couple of fingers thick, he swept it around the general region he had obtained from his calculations.

‘There!’ he exclaimed as he sensed a blip of heat much higher than its surroundings. The drone’s engine.

Tossing another flaming rock out of cover, he stood up as soon as the drone shot it down and returned fire. His valves opened wide, sucking in the air from the surroundings. The air mixed with the magnesium in his furnace, bursting into white hot flames that surged down channels in his body and out of the fingertips of his right hand. A thin stream of white fire raced down the line of the Thermal field and slammed into the drone nearly a kilometre away.

Magnesium burns at 2500K, nearly half the temperature of the surface of the sun, and amplified by the Thermal field as it was, the drone didn’t stand a chance. It exploded in a shower of molten metal, sending glowing shrapnel shooting everywhere.

True to combat protocol, Zed immediately dashed away from his spot in a zigzag manner after the successful shot. Just in time to avoid the hail of bullets that impacted his previous location. 'These drones aren't ordinary,' he thought as he ran. While the sniper had him pinned down, another drone had circled around to flank him. Either their controller was quite the military strategist, or their AI was advanced enough to formulate such tactics. Accelerating using his forcefield, he managed to keep himself ahead of the stream of bullets that threw up clumps of dirt as they impacted the ground right behind his heels.

Diving behind the nearest boulder he could find, he huddled up as the hail of bullets pinged off the rock. Racing through his options in his mind, Zed swiftly locked onto a course of action.

Swinging his arm in an arc, he flung a wave of dazzling fire upwards just as the drone came close enough to see him over the edge of the boulder. With the fire obscuring the drone’s sight and preventing it from locking onto his thermal signature, he leaped onto the boulder and pushed off explosively, boosting his jump with both his forcefield and a blast of fire from his feet.

You have allocated one free Authority point to the Override skill.

Override has been unlocked!

Override (Lv. 1): Leverage the System to hack into a device. Note: Has a 100% success rate on all pre-quantum technologies. Fails otherwise. Range: 5m.

Shaping a conical deflection ward in front of his head with his forcefield, he burst out of the sheet of flames. Catching sight of him, the drone opened fire, but the small target presented by his head-on approach combined with the ward subtly altering the vectors of the bullets let him approach unscathed. Reducing his weight and boosting his forward motion yet again, he stretched out his hand at the peak of his jump and brushed the drone with the very edge of the 5m limit of his Override skill.

The drone suddenly seized up, then began jinking and juking erratically in the air as Zed fell back to the ground. Tiny lights on the drone’s chassis alternated rapidly between red and blue, finally settling on blue just as Zed landed in a crouch, raising an expanding circle of dust around him.

Override successful!

Drone K2 added to device menu.

Model: Seek and destroy quadcopter.

Fittings: Bottom-mounted machine gun. Camouflage skin. Unranked AI.

Getting to his feet, Zed scanned the details of his new acquisition. It was a standard quadcopter with four powerful rotors providing the lift. There was a six-barrel machinegun attached to a flexible harness under the drone’s chassis. The harness allowed it to aim at any direction in a hemisphere below its level. The gun was quite accurate within 30m and somewhat accurate between 30 and 50m. Beyond that its chances of hitting a target were pretty horrible. The drone also came with an optical camouflage skin that let it blend into the sky when it was active. When it wasn’t, the drone was a sleek metallic black. The entire thing was powered by a low-capacity fusion battery with enough fuel for a week’s worth of flight and combat.

But, most importantly, it was equipped with an AI pilot. The System’s classification of 'Unranked' meant that it was pretty barebones as AI went. Accessing its communication logs, Zed quickly located the positions of the rest of the drones. A sniper at six-o-clock, a gunner approaching from three-o-clock using the lip of the caldera to hide from sight, and the squad leader circling around and approaching from his nine. And the best thing was that none of them were aware that one of their comrades had defected to the enemy camp.

Zed’s flames blazed brighter in excitement, the rush of confidence from successfully applying his training washing out his fear from earlier.

‘Two down, three to go.’