The official temperature for the Nevada desert was "Hell-adjacent."
At least, that was the reading on my phone, which I was desperately trying to shield from the sun with my own shadow. The Wi-Fi at the Nellis Air Force Base auxiliary training ground was, as always, complete garbage.
"C'mon, c'mon... connect..." I muttered, watching the Lag icon spin mockingly.
My name is Specialist Kyle Rogers. "Specialist" is a rank the National Guard gives you when they've decided you're smart enough to not be a Private, but too anti-social to ever be a Sergeant.
It's a rank that meant, in theory, I was a highly-trained communications expert. In practice, it meant I drove a Humvee full of water bottles and MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat) while trying to optimize the base's router for my handheld.
"Rogers! Stop fondling that thing and get your ass over here!"
Speak of the devil, and the Sergeant appears.
Sergeant First Class "Sarge" Miller. A man whose face looked like a catcher's mitt that had lost a fight with a lawnmower. He stomped over, his mustache twitching in the heat.
"What is it this time, Rogers? World of War-craft?"
"It's a Gacha game, Sarge," I sighed, not bothering to look up from the loading screen. "I'm trying to pull for the new limited-time unit. Her stats are broken."
Sarge just stared at me. He was old-school. He thought "lag" was what you did when you were tired.
"You know," he grunted, "when I joined, we didn't have fancy phones. We had rocks. We trained by throwing rocks. You know what your problem is, Rogers? You're soft. This whole generation is soft."
"Yes, Sarge. Soft. Like a memory-foam pillow, Sarge."
"That's it! You're on latrine duty. The whole week."
I finally looked up, my blood running cold. "Sarge, you can't. The Sandsea Serpent world boss raid is tonight. My guild needs me. I'm the main tank!"
"Your 'guild' can tank this," he said, pointing to the row of foul-smelling blue porta-potties shimmering in the heat. "Now, mov—"
That was when the world... stopped.
It wasn't a sound, at first. It was a feeling. Like the universe had just skipped a frame. My phone, in my hand, flashed ERROR: NETWORK DISCONNECTED before going completely dead.
Then came the sound.
A low, vibrating THRUM that you felt in your teeth. It wasn't like a jet engine (I heard those every day) or an explosion (heard those, too). It sounded like a billion-ton bass guitar string being plucked.
"What the hell..." Sarge said, his 'I'm-angry' face replaced with an 'I'm-confused' face.
The alarms on the base went off, a series of piercing shrieks. "ALERT. ALERT. UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALY DETECTED. SECTOR 12. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."
We ran out of the motor pool. Other soldiers were pouring out of the barracks, some without their shirts, all looking confused.
"What is it? Did China finally do it?" one private asked.
"Worse," another said, pointing a shaking finger toward the horizon. "Look!"
We all looked.
About twenty miles out, where there should have been nothing but sand, rocks, and classified military hardware, the sky was... torn.
It looked like a mirage, at first. A heat-haze. But this haze was dark, shimmering, and vertical. It was a perfect, massive, rectangular archway that seemed to be made of shattered glass and static. It climbed thousands of feet into the air.
It looked... it looked like a video game portal.
"My God..." Sarge whispered.
We watched, frozen, as the first specks appeared. Black dots, high up, pouring out of the top of the anomaly.
"Are those... birds?" I asked.
A soldier with a pair of binoculars focused on them, his face going pale.
"They're not birds," he choked out. "They're... they're dragons. And they're heading this way."
A moment of perfect, crystalline silence hung over the base.
I looked at Sarge. He looked at me. My tactical-slacker brain, trained by years of optimizing raid strategies and calculating DPS, could only process one single, solitary thought.
"Sarge," I said, my voice deadpan.
"What is it, Rogers?"
"I think those guys just pulled aggro on the entire United States Air Force."