I watched on the viewscreen as Magnos came into view. Almost the entire planet glowed red hot with the deadly gas—except for a single dark spot that at the moment was the size of a pinprick. In the best-case scenario, all I’d need to do was designate that spot as the landing zone and let the lander’s autopilot do the rest.

Most of the pod-piloting simulations I’d run through were to cover worse cases where one or more Kinetic vessels broke through the line the Firebrand would be holding. If that happened, I’d have to switch to manual thruster control and put the lander in a constant state of evasive maneuvers while continuing the descent.

The Firebrand drew closer to Magnos, gradually closer minute after minute until the dark spot that was the only safe place to land was the size of the Class Evolver at its smallest. I set the pod to target the exact epicenter for landing, and mere moments later, alerts appeared that the detachment sequence had begun.

The ride was relatively peaceful for about three minutes, when a pair of small Kinetice ships managed to break away from the battle still going on above me. They were pretty fast, but at the rate they were closing it’d be a minute and a half before they were in firing range. In two minutes, the pod would enter Magnos’ atmosphere and be beyond their reach.

So for thirty intense seconds, I switched to manual thruster control and evaded their blasts. Fortunately, having kept up a perfect approach for quite some time, my safe maneuvering margin was larger than in most of the sims I’d ran. Avoiding the shots themselves was actually pretty easy, since the lander was such a tiny target. The hard part was doing so while still ensuring that it wouldn’t hit the molten gas when it entered the atmosphere.

I successfully reached the atmosphere, and was about to switch back to the autopilot when a warning siren blared. The Kinetice ships, it seemed, had decided to pull a kamikaze on me, voluntarily ensnaring themselves in Magnos’ gravity well, trying to bring themselves down on the lander and crush it. The Kinetice didn’t usually rely on such crazy maneuvers, so this hadn’t been anticipated in the sims.

Frantically, I thrusted the lander away from the falling ships. By accelerating downward thrust as well, I was able to get out of their path. I got dangerously close to the plasma wall before I was able to stop the lander’s lateral motion with a counterthrust, but eventually I was able to put the lander back into autopilot and watch as the Kinetice ships plummeted beneath me.

I took a moment to ensure my Memory Gem was fed with enough mana so that it wouldn’t stop recording suddenly anytime soon, then stepped into the airlock. Before stepping out, I cast a spell—the formula for which had also been in the dossier:

1st Circle Fire Spell

Intuition Required: 99

Completely protects the caster from nonmagical fire, superheated air, and similar.

Duration: 30 minutes

Cooldown: 2 minutes

It was, for obvious reasons, required reading for setting foot on Magnos. Basically useless otherwise, and prohibitive to learn to boot, it was another example of a spell that was rare, but not valuable in market terms.

I emerged from the lander onto a black plain. At first I thought it was some kind of volcanic rock, but it was more likely some kind of artificial Tower material. It was large enough that I saw nothing else in all directions, and it was exceedingly flat and smooth. Above, the superheated gas filled most of the sky—except for the perfect circle of a gap through it directly overhead that I could make out high above.

This was just the starting point. The Sanctuary would be at the end of a dangerous path that led away from the round plain. I took a deep breath and started my search for the path’s beginning.

After a while, I’d not only reached the edge, but gone surely well more than halfway along it. I kept a decent distance from the actual edge, because at the actual “beach” there were a large number of Salamanders in and around the molten sea. Those were basically creatures of pure flame in the shape of reptiles, one of the only forms of life that could possibly survive in an environment like this.

I was starting to worry that I’d need to get closer enough to provoke them to keep searching, or that finding the path involved some kind of weird puzzle even though I’d only just started, when I finally spotted the thin trail, just about wide enough for three people to walk it side-by-side, leading outward and upward from the landing site.

I made my way up it. It went up quite a bit, to the point that I could tell the molten sea was substantially far below me. I reached a point where the ground leveled off, and right when I did, I felt the ground begin gradually to sink.

I had no idea how long this part of the trail would end, so I started running as fast as I could. A good thing, because it was soon clear that the answer was not five miles, or even ten. Finally, when the path had sunk by, I guessed about halfway, a high cliff, wider than the path, came into view. Now I was even more convinced that whatever the path was made of was not natural, because there were clearly artificial hand and foot holds visible on the cliff when I was close.

They weren’t spaced to be convenient, though. I made the climb with some difficulty—I hadn’t trained much for an obstacle like this. The closest I’d experienced had been some of the levels of the 10 point Stamina course I’d taken on...wow, that really was a long time ago, now.

When I reached the top, in the distance, I got my first glimpse of the Fire Sanctuary.