I floated in an eternal abyss for an indeterminate amount of time. It stretched out forever, but I was not alone. In the green veins of Balaur’s anima network, he held me. The expression on his face was not a cheerful one.

“A human should not have been able to do what you just did,” he said in admonishment.

“I did what I had to do,” I said.

“Yes you did, which is why I know that I made the right choice. The actions you took would have been enough to snuff the spark of any other human, but yours endured. I have brought your soul into my embrace so it would have time to heal. I cannot see into the man-made structure that you entered, but I caught your soul before it could go into the great beyond.”

“Wait, did I die?”

“Yes and no. Your body survives. Your friends do not know how to wake you and fear that you will never open your eyes again. Your hound weeps. You can counteract the effects of what your choices cost your body by filling your anima tank and letting it re-energise you. But you cannot linger here. It is time to return.”

“Wait, Balaur I-”

I had so many more questions, but a jolt of white sent me spiralling out of the eternal abyss and back into my body.

Khopesh stood over me with an AED – an Automated External Defibrillator – in his hands.

“Holy smokes, Hatchet! Are you back?” Stiletto asked.

He looked like he’d been crying.

I propped myself up on one arm and was shocked at how weak I felt. A glance down at my body showed just how much damage I’d done to. There wasn’t much of a chance to feel too bad about it, because Kaiser jumped me and knocked me back down. His big pink tongue slobbered all over my face as I tried to sit up again.

“I’m okay, you bloody muppet! Let me up!” I said with a laugh.

I said I was okay, but I wasn’t and everyone knew it.

Naginata looked down at me and offered me her hand, which I gladly took. She helped me back to my feet, then threw her arms around me in a firm embrace.

She didn’t let go, and I put my arms around her too.

Ah, damn it.

All of my mates said that I needed to get out to farmer’s markets or arts and crafts expos if I wanted to find love. I bet none of them expected I might find someone to crush on while fighting monsters in the Romanian mountains.

The embrace lingered a little long, and I was kind of happy that I was the one who had break it. It’s always hard to know if that feeling is reciprocated, and I had a pretty good idea that it was.

Xiphos cleared her throat, and that was our sign to cut it out.

“We’re safe for now. By the time you finished off Trench and revived Naginata, Bastard and Scythe fled. It seems like we weren’t their primary target, and I feel like there’s some gaps we need to fill in our collective knowledge,” Xiphos said. “You’ve got claws now?”

I laughed awkwardly. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

We had a quick debrief where I passed all the information Balaur had told me onto my team. I admitted that thanks to a previous mission, I was the only one who could have survived the dragon’s blessing. Then I had to admit that dragon was only a metaphorical title, and that Balaur himself was more like a huge colony of mycelium than anything resembling a reptilian monster with leathery wings and a penchant for fire breath.

“My-silly-what-now?” Stiletto asked.

“Mycelium is a part of a fungus colony that you never see,” I explained. “It grows under the ground, connecting a huge network of fungi. Some scientists even theorise that some kind of collective consciousness could arise from a big enough mycelium network.”

“Mushrooms that can think?” Khopesh laughed. “No way.”

I shrugged. “Balaur is like that, but his network spreads over an immense area. Everything with an anima spark that he touches, he’s connected to. When I touch anything connected to that network, I can expand my own consciousness into it for a little way, though I’m still figuring out how this works.”

“Are you part mushroom now?” Stiletto asked.

I activated the claws and grinned. “Yeah, but a cool mushroom. A dragon mushroom.”

“But you can’t breathe fire?” Khopesh asked.

“Metaphorical dragon, remember?” I said.

“Like a mushroom, but cooler,” Stiletto said with a grin.

“How do we fix this?” Xiphos asked, motioning at my body, then waving a hand in the direction of the dust pile that had once been our enemy. “We don’t want you to end up like Trench.”

“I pushed too hard. I drew on the anima in my own body to save Naginata,” I said. “If I fill up my anima tank my body should repair itself. That’s what Balaur said, anyway.”

“He’s here now?” Xiphos asked.

“Not really. He said I came close to dying, but he managed to snare my soul before it floated off, then he sent me back.”

Xiphos’s eyes went wide, but she accepted the answer. “Khopesh, Stiletto, we are going to let Hatchet siphon off some of our anima to get him back up and running. If we each give a little, Hatchet should be healed soon. I can’t have a liability on our team.”

Stiletto immediately held his hand out. “You got it. Anyone who’d risk their own life to save one of ours… how the hell could I not repay the favour? Glad you’re back with us Naginata.”

Naginata thrust her hand forward and slammed it down on top of Stiletto’s. “I will not let the rest of you help while I stand by and watch.”

“But you’ve just healed-” Xiphos began.

“-and I am back at full health. I will not let Hatchet carry this burden alone.” Naginata shot me a smile, and I thought I saw a little blush rise on her cheeks too.

“As you wish,” Xiphos said.

Khopesh just nodded solemnly as he added his hand to the pile. Xiphos added hers, then a furry paw slammed down on top of all the others.

“Kaiser, no buddy-” I began, but he barked at me firmly.

Just once. Yes. There would be no denying him.

“I love you, you furry bastard.”

Kaiser grinned, letting his tongue loll out the side of his mouth.

He barked again, but I swear this one was self-satisfied. Like he was saying, I know you do, you stupid human.

I placed my hand down on theirs and drew slowly. I closed my eyes and got flashes of images that looked like they were taken from the memories of my team.

In one, I held a naginata in my hands and used it to banish evil yokai ghosts from a small Japanese village. These spirits fed off the fear, anger, heartbreak and grief of a village that had seen too many hardships.

In another, I was a soldier fighting a war in a desert, watching the rest of my squad get gunned down as hopelessness threatened to drive me down into the dark. I reached down into the sands of the desert and remembered what I was fighting for. My home, my family, and the legacy of my people.

In the next memory I held my xiphos aloft as I commanded a team of EDGEs to assault a fortified bunker, knowing that there was little chance any of us would come out of it alive. Then, I was hiding in an apartment downtown, aiming down the sights of a rifle at a motorcade carrying my designated target.

In the next flash, I was in a warm cave, sitting by the fire, with my mother showing me flash cards as I learned the language of humans. Her name was Doctor Daisy Cathcart, the woman who had rescued Kaiser from Mnemtech.

While these flashes of memory rushed through me in a kaleidoscope of unconnected scenes and emotions, my anima tank expanded to the Level 3 as it filled with an accompanying notification. I could now hold 250 anima, which was a marked increase from the second level, which only increased capacity by 50.

The memories receded and the real world took their place. The rest of my EDGE Force team recoiled and shook their heads. None of them looked worse for wear thankfully, and I felt a marked improvement in my own physical condition already. I wasn’t quite back to where I had been, but there would be time to get better than ever before we left this facility.

“I'm guessing that everyone just got a little flash of memory from me?” I asked. “Because I certainly got a little snippet from each of you.”

Xiphos nodded. “So you’re the one who rescued Commander Cullen?”

I nodded.

“And she’s an anima construct,” Xiphos said in a strange tone.

“That’s not her fault,” I said, immediately on the defensive. “She didn’t ask to be pulled through into our realm, but she’s fighting for us now.”

“It would appear that way,” Xiphos said, continuing to sound sceptical.

“What are you trying to say, Captain?” Stiletto asked. He sounded as concerned about Xiphos as she did about Commander Cullen.

“I’ve spent my career fighting monsters and anima constructs. It’ll take some time before I fully trust one,” Xiphos said.

Khopesh stood a little closer to Xiphos after that comment. He puffed out his chest and his chin rose an inch in a show of machismo.

Reaching down, I scratched Kaiser behind the ears. “Well you’d better get over that quick smart, because Kaiser is an anima construct too.”

XIphos narrowed her eyes. “He’s a what?”

“I saw it,” Naginata said. “One moment, everything was dark and quiet, and the next, Kaiser was pulled out of the nothingness. They experimented on him, but there was one woman that showed you a kindness. The doctor.”

“Wait, you saw into Kaiser’s memories?” I asked. “I thought the connection only went from me to you all, and vice versa.”

Naginata smiled. “I believe Kaiser and I already have a connection. Didn’t you say that Balaur’s presence was like a network? Like a spider’s web? Networks can travel in many different directions, covering large distances. Perhaps this is what now binds us all together.”

I nodded slowly. “That might just be right.”

“I’ve got a confession,” Stiletto said, casting his eyes downward. “I don’t know if any of you saw into the person that I used to be, but I swear I’m not that guy anymore. I’ve done a lot of bad shit, but I’m trying to get right with the universe now.”

Khopesh put a hand on Stiletto’s shoulder. “I’ve taken lives too. Sometimes we do what we must to survive.”

Stiletto laughed nervously. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“This doesn’t change our mission,” I said. “We still need to get to the bottom of what’s happening here, and Balaur was quite clear about what we’re up against.”

I finished briefing them on everything I knew. The self-proclaimed dragonslayer – Trajan – had already corrupted one of Balaur’s obelisks in a place called the Sunken City, and was rallying his forces there. The dragonslayer we killed was just a shadow, maybe like the anima clone that Bastard had used to engage Xiphos earlier. The more of Balaur’s obelisks he corrupts, the stronger the dragonslayer will grow.

“Our best chance to stop him is to go on the offensive right now,” Xiphos said. “That aligns with our mission parameters, but we don’t have any intelligence on where this Sunken City might be, do we?”

“Don’t worry about it. Balaur will show us the way, but I refused to do it without my team,” I said.

“Let’s face it, Cap. If Hatchet didn’t come back for us, we would probably all be dead,” Stiletto said.

Xiphos grunted. “You might be right there. If you’re sure Balaur will show us where to go, we shouldn’t keep him waiting. However, I fear that we must. Before we go, I want to do a sweep of this facility, and we still need to get you scanned.”

I laughed at that. “Really? I’m still functioning just fine, and I am absolutely, one-hundred percent corrupted by an anima-powered entity.” I flashed my green claws. “Is the scanner going to reveal anything that this doesn’t?”

“The Edgebreakers took all of our comm units, so at the very least we need to re-establish connection with EDGE Command,” Xiphos said. “I daresay they’re going to want to know all about what Balaur’s blessing can do to a human.”

“I guess that explains why there’s a facility here at all,” Stiletto said. “Because I was wondering that, you know? Hiding it under a ski lodge in the middle of the mountains, no-one around for miles except for a little village that suddenly disappears? Are you sure EDGE Force didn’t have anything to do with this?”

Everyone’s heads swivelled at Xiphos. That was a very good question. Trajan’s power didn’t just come from Balaur – that red anima had to come from somewhere else. From something else. Was it something EDGE Force was experimenting on? Just whose side were they on anyway?

Xiphos cracked a smile. “I don’t think that terms like good and evil really apply when we’re talking about the preservation of our reality. EDGE Force’s mission has always been simple: prevent the reality crash.”

“About that,” I said. “I saw the reality crash happen.”

Xiphos’s eyes went wide. “You what?”

“Time didn’t work the same for Balaur in aspect of reality he came from. He could rewind, fast-forward, and look at any moment in the timeline of our universe.” Even as I was explaining it, it sounded insane.

The gormless look on Khopesh’s face drove home the point. Yes, this absolutely sounded insane.

“Look,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t know how all of this works, and I have no idea how an entity like Balaur could rewind and fast-forward through our reality like our planet has a Be Kind, Please Rewind sticker on it, but he can. Well, he could. Long story short, he saw the reality crash happen, and he came back to a point in our history where he could grow strong enough that he might be able to stop it.”

“EDGE Command is going to want to know this urgently. We need to set up some kind of open channel of communication with Balaur,” Xiphos said.

“You’ve got one. It’s me,” I said.

Xiphos gave me an appraising look. “You do seem to be very hard to kill.”

“I hope that trend continues,” I said.

“When is this reality crash going to happen?” Naginata asked.

“Balaur said it was going to happen in about a year, give or take a few months. He didn’t pin it down with any more precision than that. But trust me, we need to find a way to stop it.”

I gave them a brief overview of what Balaur had showed me. Rings of transformative light exploded all over the surface of the planet, turning people into monsters and heroes who had the ability to level up just like we did when deployed on an EDGE Force mission.

Xiphos interjected at that. “Did you get a good look at the interface? Was it an EDGE Force interface?”

I shook my head. “No, it was something else. Anyway, shortly after the pulses covered the face of the planet, most people were turned into horrific fiends and some were transformed into heroes. Then, our timeline stopped.”

Stiletto blinked. “What do you mean our timeline stopped?”

“That’s all Balaur said. He could travel anywhere in our timestream, except for past that point. Time stops just after this event, which I think could be the reality crash that EDGE Force is so terrified of,” I said.

“Others will be granted power like ours, but they won’t be shackled by EDGE Force,” Khopesh said as he balled his hand into a fist. “They couldn’t be controlled like we can.”

“It looks that way,” I admitted. “That’s not all. Shortly after that, the world as we know it disappears. The borders of continents fray, the seas move and shift, mountains rise and fall. Everything changes, and then everything ends.”

“EDGE Force will want to know of this,” Xiphos said.

“Yeah but should we tell them?” Stiletto asked. “Call me crazy, but you pick a bunch of killers up from their lives and make them fight monsters, even with the best of intentions, makes you kind of fucked up if you ask me.”

I found myself nodding along with Stiletto. He had a point.

“EDGE Force needs to know about this,” Xiphos said, emphasizing the word need. “You said it’s coming soon, maybe in the next year? Then it affects all of us, especially those of us who have loved ones.”

Xiphos looked at Naginata, myself, then Stiletto in turn. Just how much had she seen when we touched minds earlier?

“You may not have any family left,” Xiphos said to Khopesh. “But your duty to your land and your country can’t be fulfilled if the entire world is destroyed. EDGE Force has the resources to throw everything they can at this problem, and I will tell them.”

Khopesh pulled his assault rifle from its mount and aimed it at Xiphos.

“No you won’t,” he said with a chilling coldness.