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The Precursor civilization operated on a strict hierarchical system—think Roman Empire meets insectoid hive mind. At the top sat a council of elders who made all strategic decisions. What was invading Earth wasn't their entire species, just a colonial outpost. A beachhead established by the council, staffed with expendable forces, designed to terraform a new world for eventual settlement.
The Anteverse and Earth existed in different dimensional planes—parallel universes separated by a thin barrier that the Precursors had learned to puncture. According to Scunner's memories, the colony on the other side wasn't their homeworld, just an industrial staging ground. Their technology focused on biological engineering and exotic energy manipulation, following a completely different evolutionary path than humanity's mechanical approach.
Knowing it was just a colony changed everything. Aidan could go through with reasonable confidence he wouldn't face their full military might. If the other side had been their birthplace—their capital, their seat of power—the only sane move would've been collapsing the wormhole and praying they never found Earth again.
But a colony? That was manageable.
The day after the Kyoto meeting, before the Precursors could decide whether to collapse the breach themselves, Aidan transferred all relevant technical data to Tuantuan's databases and made final preparations. The most critical piece was obtaining Kaiju genetic markers—the wormhole had built-in security, only allowing passage to objects with Precursor-approved DNA signatures. Smart defense against nuclear warheads or conventional missiles. Humans couldn't just throw bombs through the portal.
But Aidan wasn't human anymore. Not entirely. And Magician wasn't a conventional weapon.
Mariana Trench, Challenger Deep.
The weather had turned foul. Dark clouds pressed down on the ocean like a steel ceiling, turning the water black and angry. Wind screamed across the surface, whipping up whitecaps and churning swells. A storm was building—the kind that made experienced sailors turn around and head for port.
Nobody was around to see the massive scarlet portal tear open above the waves.
Magician dropped through, seventy meters of bio-metal and magical engineering hitting the ocean with a tsunami-scale splash. The mecha didn't float. It sank, streamlined form cutting through the water column like a purple blade, descending toward the deepest place on Earth.
The Challenger Deep. Nearly eleven kilometers down, where pressure would crush a human skull like an egg. The darkness was absolute below the first hundred meters—no sunlight penetrated this far. Magician's optical sensors switched to alternate spectrums, painting the abyssal landscape in false-color thermal and electromagnetic gradients.
Two points of red light appeared in the distance, growing larger as Aidan descended.
Then he saw it.
The breach wasn't subtle. A massive fissure split the ocean floor, glowing with internal heat like a wound in the Earth's crust. Magma flowed through the crack—actual molten rock, somehow stable despite the crushing pressure and freezing water. Pillars of fire rose from the breach like offerings at an altar, sustained by physics that shouldn't work but did anyway.
It was beautiful in a primal, terrifying way. The wormhole sat at the heart of an underwater volcano—one of the estimated hundred thousand such formations scattered across Earth's ocean floors. Most were dormant or extinct. This one was very much active, its energy twisted and co-opted to stabilize an interdimensional gateway.
Aidan guided Magician closer, moving through the water with surprising grace for something that size. The bio-metal construction gave him fluid motion, none of the mechanical jerkiness of hydraulic systems.
Then something moved behind a thermal vent.
Too fast. Too large. Too aware to be natural fauna.
The Kaiju launched from concealment like a depth charge in reverse, jaws wide, claws extended, accelerating toward Magician's flank.
Aidan didn't even turn his head.
His fist came up—Magician's right hand mirroring the motion—and connected with the Kaiju's skull mid-charge.
"CRUNCH."
The impact sent shockwaves through the water, creating pressure waves that disturbed silt kilometers away. The Kaiju stopped cold, momentum arrested, and tumbled backward through the current.
But it wasn't hurt. Not really. Water resistance had slowed the punch, reduced its effectiveness. And Magician wasn't built for brute-force combat anyway—it was a magical amplification platform, not a brawler.
"Well, that's inconvenient," Aidan muttered, examining his opponent.
The guardian Kaiju was massive—Category-5 at minimum, maybe larger. Two curved horns swept back from its skull like a demon's crown. Six compound eyes glowed electric blue, pupils dilated with predatory focus. Its body was built like a lizard crossed with a battle tank, all muscle and armor plating, with a thick tail that could probably shatter a submarine's hull.
It recovered from the punch and charged again, claws tearing through water, creating cavitation bubbles in its wake.
Aidan's right hand moved through a familiar gesture pattern. Magician's hand mirrored it perfectly, fingers tracing geometric shapes that left glowing trails in the water.
A scarlet portal materialized directly in front of the charging Kaiju.
The creature was moving too fast to stop, too committed to its attack vector. It plunged through the portal—
Ten thousand meters above the Mariana Trench, inside the storm clouds.
—and erupted from a second portal at high altitude, momentum unchanged, trajectory now pointing straight down.
The Kaiju had maybe three seconds to register what happened before atmospheric friction set its hide on fire. It tumbled through the air, wreathed in flames, accelerating under gravity, becoming a biological meteor.
It hit the ocean surface with the force of an artillery strike. The impact created a brief vacuum—water displaced so violently it took a full second to rush back in. When it did, the Kaiju's body sank slowly toward the bottom, covered in third-degree burns, bones broken from the fall, bioluminescent blood leaking from a dozen wounds.
Still alive. Barely. But no longer a threat.
Back at the breach.
Aidan watched the seafloor where the guardian had landed, confirmed it wasn't getting up, and continued his approach to the wormhole.
The heat was intense this close, even through Magician's shielding. Magma flowed past in lazy rivers, casting everything in hellish red light. Blue electrical arcs danced across the surrounding rock faces—the wormhole's security system, scanning for approved genetic signatures.
"Activate simulation protocol," Aidan commanded.
"Affirmative," Tuantuan's synthesized voice responded. "Deploying camouflage matrix."
Blue energy spread across Magician's frame—not solid, more like a second skin of light. The color matched Kaiju blood almost perfectly, mimicking the electromagnetic signature their biology produced.
"Simulation complete. All systems nominal."
"Good. Stay alert. Survey everything once we're through, and be ready for combat."
Aidan looked down into the breach itself—that glowing fissure where magma met impossible physics, where Earth's crust had been torn open to connect with somewhere else entirely.
The lightning intensified as he approached. Blue arcs converged on Magician, probing, analyzing, searching for authorization codes written in DNA. The camouflage held. The arcs danced around the bio-metal frame like curious spirits, finding what they expected to find: Kaiju genetic markers, dimensional clearance, passage approved.
Aidan took a breath he didn't technically need—old human habits dying hard—and dove into the breach.
The transition was immediate and disorienting.
One moment: ocean floor, magma, crushing pressure, Earth's physics.
Next moment: elsewhere.
The environment changed completely. Rock and lava disappeared, replaced by something organic. The walls around him looked like the inside of a living creature—cross-sectioned tissue that might've been blood vessels or neural pathways, impossible to tell. Octopus-tentacle structures crisscrossed the passage, pulsing with faint bioluminescence.
Blue light. Purple light. Orange ambient glow from sources Aidan couldn't identify. The passage looked like someone had taken a fever dream, given it physical form, and called it architecture.
It was beautiful. It was wrong. It was utterly alien in ways that made pattern-recognition systems in the human brain scream warnings.
Aidan floated in the transitional space, Magician's sensors working overtime to map the impossible geometry.
"Well," he said quietly. "No turning back now."
The passage stretched ahead, leading deeper into the Anteverse, toward the colony, toward answers.
Toward war.
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