Francis steps through the portal and sees a world of dark clouds.

Then, in the distance, a massive city carved out from the tallest mountain in the world.

For some reason, the portal has taken Francis and Julie to the outskirts of the city, on an airship taking them from a landing platform to the mega city proper.

Maybe for the theatrics of showing off the city in all its grandeur from the distance.

If that’s the case, Francis is pretty impressed.

Julie and Francis. Francis and Julie. It’s sort of a weird team-up, especially because Francis has always suspected that she doesn’t like him. But he really didn’t want to deal with all the Eryk stuff right now, and this is a nice reprieve from the drama and possible heartbreak to come.

Instead, he’ll get a chance to bond with his best friend’s wife and all her aloof mysteriousness.

The airship captain turns out to be the chatty type. She’s totally fine with these two random people who just appeared in the middle of her ship without tickets or any identification, apparently, because it means she has someone to rattle off facts to.

And oh boy does she rattle off some facts.

So that mega city, it’s known as the Warring Core. The whole world is, but then again, this city IS the whole world as far as anyone cares. Everything below the surface, down on the ground, is empty wasteland, ravaged by endless, vague war. And the city is so grand that there’s no point leaving.

The Warring Core is powered by its namesake, a gigantic magical orb that gives magical energy to everything and everyone. It consists of equal parts red, yellow, and blue magic, the three types that exist, and absolutely nothing beyond these three exist let me tell you that.

The city itself is also divided into three, based on the colors. Each section hones its magical craft on their chosen color, and are constantly fighting to gain supremacy over the entire city and greatly enhance their powers.

Children are raised together in the center of the city, closest to the core itself, and on their thirteenth birthdays they are chosen by the magic flow and automatically sent to the faction that aligns most with their greatest magical affinity. An entire family can be split apart if everyone is traditionally yellow, but the youngest child is suddenly cursed with blue. No one knows why the magic works in such mysterious ways. But they do not question it. Only fight.

Francis takes this all in with more than a few grains of salt. Not to get too Delta about it, but it sounds like a really contrived Young Adult dystopian novel. A few too many conspiracies and factions and inevitably a young girl getting assigned green and having to evade execution by the entire planet, for his personal tastes. Unless he was that young girl who got assigned green and got hunted down by cruel and cold bounty hunters. If it happened to HIM, then it’d be kind of awesome.

He needs to stop thinking about this before he starts planning the novel out in his head.

Julie takes it all in without uttering a word. She seems entirely focused on the city, as if she’s preparing herself for something big. How big? Francis has no idea.

The airship captain is still chatting away as the ship docks on the port in the Warring Core. They disembark and wave her goodbye, but she’s too busy telling nobody about how combinations of magic are rumored to create brand new powers, but it is highly illegal and dangerous so nobody tries it.

And so Francis and Julie enter the Warring Core mega city, with all its castles and winding, vertically inclined streets. If you’re the type of person who gets winded going up a flight of stairs, Francis has got to warn you about this place.

Fortunately, Francis is extremely fit now, after his year of solitude and training. He’s strong enough that he could take on an army of Jedi. Jedi don’t actually exist, though, so that’s a bad comparison.

He doesn’t actually have too much fighting training, though, just the training they’ve done in Osorezan so far. He knows he’s getting stronger and more powerful, but he’s still far weaker than practically everyone else around him. He could probably defeat... Delta? Maybe The Goddess in her new half-human form, but that’s blasphemous to think too much about.

Still. No longer being the absolute weakest of the bunch is a good feeling. He’s kinda proud of it.

The two of them wander through blue-hued streets They’re on the blue side of city, so naturally that means all the street lamps and all the buildings and even the dashed lines on the roads all share that warmest of colors.

The few people out tonight glare at these two people with obvious contempt. It doesn’t appear utterly blasphemous for them to be here, but the fact they have no blue clothes, no blue hair, means they are marked immediately as suspicious outsiders. In fact, Julie’s pink hair probably marks her as some sort of Red-affiliated warrior, which means she is distinctly in enemy territory.

They walk up hills and stairs, reaching closer to the center of the Warring Core. The titular sphere at the center that will probably end up being really useful to them uniting at least one of these factions against the U.S. If there’s anything Francis knows in his life as a hero, it’s that powerful mysterious macguffins either end up being extremely important, or total blind-siding red herrings. He’s not sure which one is more likely, though...

“You know what?” Francis remarks. “There’s no American military dudes out here.”

“I’ve noticed,” Julie says in an inscrutable tone. Is she just as glad as him? Disappointed she won’t have anyone to duel? Impossible for a mere mortal like Francis to tell. He ain’t nearly emotionally competent enough to read this woman. Neither are we.

If she did want a fight, though, it looks like it’s coming pretty soon.

As the two of them climb higher and venture further inwards, they reach a sort of factional barrier. A part of town where Blue and Yellow meet. Some of the buildings are blue, some are yellow, and some are neutral colors. A few are even some strange mixtures that lean towards green.

And with the mixture, the strangers on the streets are more actively hostile. Color-coded gangs on each side of the street, actively taunting each other. A bunch of rowdy butch girls with bandannas and broken bottles screaming and jeering. A few of the blues have magic motorbikes, while the yellows are much better equipped with makeshift magical weapons.

“Bet you blues don’t got the balls to deal with us!” a yellow gang girl shouts, hands cupped around her mouth.

“A yellow ain’t nothin’!” a blue shouts back. “We ain’t afraid of you!”

Francis and Julie straddle the middle of the road, where cars would be going except the streets seem eerily empty tonight. They aren’t going to egg on this battle any more than the two gangs are already egging it on themselves. They’re far too smart to get involved in something like that while they’re trying hard to unite the factions—

“Julie. Julie what are you doing...?” Francis asks once he realizes she’s gone off the middle path and glided right up to the Blue faction gang.

They meet her with the same taunts they were previously giving the Yellow faction gang.

“Long way out for a Red,” one of the butch girls says with a sneer. “What’s your problem?”

“I’m not part of any factions,” Julie says. “I’m an outsider. Just arrived an hour ago.”

“Outsider... From the sky islands?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Whatever answer you’d like. I’m not very interested in your political warfare stuff. I’d just like to know some information.”

The girl is taken aback by the bluntness of Julie’s response.

“Well, uh, information ain’t easy to come by. Gotta make it worthwhile. Yeah, pay up.”

Julie ignores that. “Does each faction have a leader, or is it more of a decentralized thing? Who’s in charge in the Warring Core?”

“Hey, I said pay up!”

“I’m not keen on cracking skulls open tonight, but you kids might force my hand.”

This statement has the opposite of its intended effect. Or the intended one. Francis still isn’t sure what’s going through this crazy woman’s head right now. But it sure makes the blues angry. The yellows on the other side of the street start taunting louder than ever, now throwing insults at the Red faction too.

“Back off now, lady, or you go down!” a blue shouts.

The fight starts so fast that Francis isn’t even sure who throws the first punch. But he sure sees the rest go down. Julie warping around the place, letting her fists collide with heads and stomachs and backs all over the place. The blues swarm her, but she’s far too fast for that to make any impact at all. If Eryk has a current [Speed] stat of 24, Julie probably has something more like 400.

The blues are utterly walloped. Bagged on. Rag-dolled around like an old Xbox 360 open world shooter. Each and every single one of them is KO’d with an intensity Francis hasn’t seen since all that time ago, when Eryk was fighting hordes of surfers in Santa Barbara. A curbstomp that these kids will probably speak of for generations to come.

This was the moment Lord Zedd beat down the Green ranger. The moment Obi-Wan and Anakin went up against Dooku the final time. The time the Prospitian Avenger got surrounded by a bunch of angry Squiddles.

Francis, on occasions like this, is reduced to only being able to speak in pop culture metaphors. that’s how brutal the beatdown is.

Once all the blues are knocked out, Julie takes one of their magic motorbikes. Painted fully blue, of course. She points to Francis and beckons him to come over there. “Hop on. This’ll be faster.”

The yellows scatter the moment she looks at them. No more rowdy butch girls prowl the streets tonight.

They take off on the magic motorbike and head towards the Warring Core’s core.