The peculiar, and frankly somewhat concerning, hydrological benefits Old Gimpy attributed to the adult magazine were swiftly filed away in a remote corner of Michael's mind, marked 'Wasteland Quirk – Do Not Examine Closely.' He refocused with a scholar's intensity on the notebook in his hands. The cheap, hardbound cover felt brittle, the pages within whispering of age and dry rot. He carefully turned past the first few entries, a litany of hormonal fantasies scrawled by a young man named Paul Joseph, an assistant researcher in a materials science lab at Wayne State University. The content was, to put it mildly, banal and prurient. No wonder he kept a physical journal in the digital age,Michael thought with a flicker of pity. This stuff would get you flagged in a heartbeat.
Beyond establishing Paul as a lonely, scientifically-inclined horndog, the early pages were useless. The entries were sporadic, jumping weeks or months, written only when the urge struck. Skimming became Michael's method, his eyes scanning the neat script for any fragment of useful data, any crack in the mundane that might reveal the cataclysm.
He found it on a page dated over half a year later. The paper here was slightly different, the ink a darker blue. Michael's fingers stilled.
Tuesday, December 22nd, 23. Light Snow.
I still can't believe it. I mean, I heard the address. Saw the seal. The flag behind him. But it feels like I'm reading a translated web-novel. The kind with the terrible prose and cringe dialogue that pops up in ad banners.
The President—and let's be honest, history's already judging him as the worst—just declared a National State of Extreme Emergency. On television. Prime time. And the reason… the reason is literally insane.
According to him, twenty-three hours ago, a… let's get the official term right… a 'Spatio-Temporal Anomaly' appeared. On Denali. Mount McKinley. In Alaska. And within minutes of this… rift… stabilizing, over a thousand humanoid entities emerged. He described them as 'green-skinned, of robust and militaristic bearing.' The news feed cut to a blurry, shaky image taken from a drone. They looked like… orcs. Straight out of a fantasy MMO. Tusks, heavy brows, clad in furs and crude metal.
A National Guard unit on a training exercise in modified LAVs was rerouted to make contact. They never got a chance to say 'hello.' The report says the lead vehicle was taken down by what appeared to be ballista fire and enchanted arrows. Then the crew was… disassembled. With axes. The President used the word 'disassembled.'
So, the geniuses in the Situation Room finally concluded these were 'hostile interlopers.' Their first response? A cover-up. A 'quiet resolution.' They actually thought they could wipe them out, keep it quiet, and maybe even send a recon team through the rift to claim some 'new territory.' The arrogance is breathtaking.
They sent in the 82nd. With air support. Fighter jets, drones, the whole package. How do you lose to guys with swords and bows?
You lose, apparently, in two ways. First, the rift isn't a door; it's a highway. By the time the 82nd hit the ground, there weren't a thousand orcs. There were thirty thousand. And they were still coming.
Second, and this is where the web-novel plot gets truly wild, they aren't just big and strong. The briefing footage they showed us… one of them took a direct hit from a 25mm chain gun. He got knocked down. Then he got back up, his skin glowing with a weird, amber light, and threw a javelin through the armored cockpit of an Apache. It wasn't a lucky throw. It moved like a missile. Another one chanted something and a wall of ice three feet thick sprouted from the tundra, blocking a volley of Hellfires. They have… magic. Or something so close it doesn't matter. The analysts are calling it 'thaumaturgical augmentation' and 'combat-grade arcane theory.'
The 82nd got chewed up. The cover-up failed. CNN got ahold of cell phone footage from a hiker fifty miles away, and the world saw a dragon. A freaking, fire-breathing, scaled dragon strafing a column of Abrams tanks. So now we get the televised speech. The 'We Have A New And More Evil Enemy' speech. This guy should be launched into the sun.
Whatever happens next, whether the 1st Armored can push them back or not, Christmas is canceled. The State of Extreme Emergency means all non-essential personnel are on standby or reassigned. I was supposed to go to the midnight premiere of the new Star Wars with Selina from next door. Her in that green sweater… damn. Now I'm looking at a mandatory double-shift at the lab. They're fast-tracking every materials project with 'ballistic' or 'energy-dispersive' in the title.
So yeah. I hate the green guys.
Michael leaned back in his chair, the vinyl creaking loudly in the silent room. The afternoon heat seemed to recede, replaced by a cold, cognitive chill that had nothing to do with temperature. He stared at the page, the words swimming before his eyes. A rift. Denali. Orcs. Magic.His mind, which had constructed elaborate theories about radiation-induced mutations and slow genetic drift, reeled. The sheer, alien, fantastical stupidityof it was overwhelming. It wasn't a slow collapse. It was an invasion. A war of worlds, stumbled into by politicians too arrogant to think they could lose a fight. The various hybrids and oddities he'd seen in Cinder Town—the minotaur, the foxkin, the dog-men—they weren't products of this world. They were descendants of its conquerors.
His hands trembled slightly as he turned the page. The next entry was dated over a year later. The tone had shifted from shocked incredulity to a grinding, hopeless fatigue.
Friday, February 3rd, 24. Drizzle.
Does God even look at this continent anymore? Has he just… tuned us out? Changed the channel? Every screen, every headline, every radio bulletin is the same dirge. Another line broken. Another battalion encircled and lost. Satellite recon shows the rift on Denali is still pouring them out. A steady, green, endless tide.
Pentagon briefs now confirm the 'Interloper Collective'—that's the new term, isn't it nice and sterile?—isn't just orcs. Their main battle lines are, but there are others mixed in. Humans. Shorter, barrel-chested ones they're calling 'dwarves.' And the ones with the pointed ears… 'elves.' The elves seem to be the officers, the mages, the long-range planners. The orcs are the siege engines.
Today's brilliant move: Operation Glacial Shatter. They tried to collapse the mountain on the rift. Dozens of cruise missiles. And… I still can't believe I'm typing this… three low-yield tactical nuclear warheads. Neutron bombs. The idea was to kill the biomass around the rift without causing a full geological event.
It failed. The news is calling it a 'partial interception by unknown countermeasures.' The lab rumor, from a guy who knows a guy in NORAD, is different. He says the missiles just… stopped. A mile out. Like they hit a wall of thickened air. Then they were sheathed in ice and fell harmlessly into the glaciers. The nukes? They detonated, but the fireball was contained, shaped, and then hurledback into the upper atmosphere by a concerted effort from what looked like a hundred elves standing in a circle, chanting. The radiation was… purified. Dissipated by magic. They have anti-nuclear wizardry. Let that sink in.
Alaska is gone. Not officially, but it is. The line is in central Canada now. And everyone knows they'll push south and east, towards the Great Lakes and the populated coasts, not into the Siberian emptiness.
There was one moment of bleak, universal comedy today. Protesters—a wild mix of doomsday preppers, conspiracy theorists, and just genuinely furious people—burned the Blizzard Entertainment campus to the ground. The roads were jammed; fire trucks couldn't get through. Not that the firefighters tried very hard. The mob's logic? Blizzard created the Warcraftuniverse. They designed the orcs. Therefore, they somehow summoned them. It's the dumbest causality ever, a complete non sequitur born of rage and helplessness.
And you know what? I laughed. A sharp, ugly little bark of a laugh. Because I hate those green bastards so much, I hate their pixelated shadows, too.
Reading this, a completely inappropriate, strangled sound escaped Michael's throat—a hybrid of a gasp and a disbelieving snort. The weight of the horror described—the fall of a continent, the nullification of a nation's ultimate weapons—was colossal. Yet, the image of a terrified, furious mob blaming a video game company, the sheer absurdist tragedy of it, punctured the solemnity with a needle of pitch-black humor. He knew he shouldn't find it funny. But for a second, perched in his ragged chair in a tavern in a world this journal helped explain, he did. The laugh felt terrible, and necessary.