I used my dragon body to scout out the surface. I was confident that it was near my other two bodies, and that Vonnie and Alex were buried underground somewhere in the area. At the same time, I pondered on the alien yet familiar sand.

Sand on Earth could be reddish, but it was never this red, at least not that I knew of, covering an area as large as this. I knew that it wasn't Mars, either. Having been there, it was too warm, the air was too thick, and once again, the sand on mars wasn't actually that red.

The gravity would have been another major tell. No, this was somewhere with an atmosphere and gravity similar to that of Earth, but with sand so red that it looked artificial. It was cold, too—not as cold as Mars had been, and well within what was normal for Earth. Still noticeable though, for what was otherwise an annoyingly bright stretch of sand.

I felt like I would get hypothermia and sunburn at the same time, if I didn't have a heat affinity, and if I wasn't made of hundreds of tons of metal, and if I didn't rapidly regenerate—okay, that was a lot of 'ifs,' but the point stood.

My working hypothesis was that I was now on that planet that the Bouquet bosses dragged me to in order to use me as interior decor. It had been nighttime, then, but this was close to what I imagined the landscape would have looked like in the middle of the day.

There was one feature in particular that stood out from the ruby sands and stark white and black rock outcroppings. In the distance, a patch of city hung upside down and sideways, looming over the landscape at an altitude of hundreds if not thousands of feet, the bottom—top?—of it vanishing back into nothing.

It was like someone had wedged a huge chunk of a modern day Earth city through a rift to the wrong place at the wrong angle and gravity hadn't yet figured out how to equalize itself. You know what? I think that's exactly what happened.

I couldn't tell from this distance whether there were people in the city. Even with much better vision, courtesy of larger eyes, it was just too far. Nothing dramatic was happening, like buildings toppling over or explosions from superhuman combat.

Since there was nothing else in any other direction, I knew that I would be heading there once I dug my other two bodies out of the bare concrete tunnels.

I was right. All of my bodies were close together, and it only took a few false starts for Dragon to dig a passage that Vonnie and Alex could climb through.

Damn, it really is fucking cold. Both of my human forms were shivering. Vonnie cuddled Alex for warmth, but both of me were still cold and unhappy about it. If I could just use my powers in all of my forms, that wouldn't be a problem.

It was frustrating. For better or worse, all three of me could feel the same well of power but only one of us could access it. That might be encouraging, though. If I could at least feel it with all my forms then there was a chance that I could break down that barrier.

There was one small upside. Holding the tip of my foreclaw at a convenient height for my other two bodies, I cut myself against it as both Alex and Vonnie. I wanted to test if I was locked out of supernatural regeneration along with the rest of my powers.

The answer was kind of, kind of not. The regeneration in both bodies was way slower than I was used to, but it was also obviously superhuman. It took about thirty seconds for a medium-sized gash to fade away.

Medium-sized for a normal human. In the context of being an interdimensional monster, that level of injury wasn't even relevant.

Good to know that I can still bounce back from otherwise lethal damage, though. It wouldn't carry me through a fight nearly as well as before, but it was a colossal advantage over a normal human. Really, the regeneration was the biggest benefit to becoming a Guardian at the lower tiers.

With nothing else left to do, I started the trek towards the city in the sky. It was tempting to fly myself there, and taking a ride on Dragon would help with the temperature issue. I could channel a low level of heat to make myself more comfortable.

But I decided it was better to have Alex and Vonnie approach on foot and have Dragon scout things out from a distance. Gliding around at a few thousand feet, I never strayed more than a few miles from the vulnerable Alex and Vonnie pair. At that distance, I could scout the terrain for dozens of miles while still being able to go defend myself within a matter of seconds.

It didn't take long for me to spot something interesting. I wasn't alone, and there were several other tiny figures trekking towards the city in the sky. Most of them were alone, and the closest one was over a mile distant, but it was good information to have.

I suspected that several of them had also spotted me—my Dragon form—mostly because there was nothing else other than the sands and the city and I wasn't hard to spot at this distance. I was big and shiny. If any of them were paying attention to the sky, they would notice something bright and reflective looping around in the distance.

Stephanie "Amethyst Reaper" Shadow

Stephanie stared up at the floating city. She wasn't great at judging distances, but the 'ground' of it had to be at least a mile away. The tips of the tallest buildings were closer, but not by as much as you might think.

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"How are we going to get up there?" Katherine asked.

It was a good question. It was the same question Stephanie had been meaning to ask. "I don't suppose your ability will help us with this one?"

The supposed Star Guardian shook her head. "No. It's basically useless for any physical obstacle. Well, unless there are electronics involved, but that's not important right now."

Damn. That was what Stephanie expected to hear, but not what she'd hoped. She could jump high. Really high—even back at Tier 1, she could jump high relative to her strength.

She couldn't jump high enough to bridge this particular gap, though, which she knew because she'd tried. They were hoping that because the buildings, vehicles, and everything else hadn't started falling, that gravity would flip at a certain point between where they were and the floating city.

Naturally, Stephanie tried jumping. She'd known from the start that she couldn't reach the closest building tip, let alone the 'ground,' but it was possible that gravity changed direction sooner than that.

But if it did, it was still out of her reach.

"Maybe someone else will arrive and can find a way," Katherine suggested. "Chloe would be able to do it, obviously. I still don't get why her power does that, but this is the perfect situation for it."

"Chloe?" Stephanie hadn't heard of this person before.

"Oh, right," Katherine said. "You haven't met her. She's one of my teammates. Her core power is sucking the lifeforce out of things from a distance or using it to heal people. For some reason it also makes her start floating, so she can fly but not well. Like, straight up and down, maybe drift a little bit."

Stephanie nodded. "That makes sense." She frowned. "Okay, not, it actually doesn't. You're right, I have no idea why those two things would be connected. But yeah, I can see why that would be useful here."

They stared up at the floating city.

"Maybe," Katherine hedged, "someone up there will let down a rope."

The Foreman

They were building a fortress.

Ryan Digulio—that was his real name—didn't yet have the full story on what went down, only that both Saber and the Black Faction were involved and that the source of the Star Cores themselves had appeared to settle things.

And every part of that was terrifying.

The idea that Saber might have been working with the Black Faction this whole time, and that she was now a Tier 9, was probably the worst bit.

The apocalypse was kind of scary, yeah, and so was the prospect of drawing the ire of some transcendent cosmic being that was responsible for all of their powers. But frankly, the possibility that one of the most powerful, and the most directly dangerous, of their number had thrown in with the only genuinely evil faction was more approachable and more immediately concerning.

Fortunately, she was keeping herself occupied by attracting every strong monster within several hundred miles to their location and then killing them. She was also the one who took down the Tier 11 whose enormous skull they were standing in.

Tier 11! It was absurd. That was the equivalent of a Tier 10 Guardian—Ryan didn't even know what happened between Tier 9 and 10, but he assumed it was the same general kind of jump that happened between 3 and 4 and then between 6 and 7.

But Saber had killed it. The fight had taken place over the north pole, of all places, and now the entire area was a cryovolcanic wasteland of ice, crystal, and stone. That must have been a result of the creature's abilities, and now, North America, Europe, and Asia were effectively one giant continent.

One giant continent with a bizarre, spiky, tectonically active, frozen wasteland in the middle. Oh, and the giant skull of course. Probably not good for the environment—Ryan knew that the Arctic Ocean was a large and fertile ecosystem, with the seasonal melting and freezing of the ice cap churning up the deep sediment, creating a rich marine environment…

Well, not anymore.

"Wow," Merlin said as he walked up to where Ryan was commanding the construction of a new Star Guardian headquarters. They'd chosen to use the dead Tier 11 megatitan's skull as a fortress, and not just because it looked cool—and evil—as all hell. "It's like evil Santa Claus."

The Tier 8 chuckled. His younger colleague was right—it really was like evil Santa Claus. The skull wasn't the usual off white, but rather a brilliant candy apple red and shiny gold. Like a huge macabre ornament dropped down into the center of a snowy draped crystal forest.

"We even have little elves," Merlin remarked, in reference to Ryan's army of construct workers. Not construction workers—construct workers. But really, they were both.

Ryan's job, as always, was to secure the development of large scale infrastructure. Pushing his abilities to their limit, he'd already constructed a huge airfield—that one was made easy by the nature of the terrain—and he was continuing to work on securing the foundations of their macabre fortress and constructing parallel rails and roadways that would join up with Russia, Norway, Alaska, and Greenland.

Oh, and of course some extra fortifications. The main defense would be the Star Guardians themselves, but also the giant skull. They chose it because even in death, the whole thing was both as tough as pure Adamantite and projected a 'limited' esoteric aura that protected against everything from the bitter wind to esoteric abilities.

The latter made working within it difficult, but Fabrica and Eigemacht were working on tapping into it and harnessing its lingering esoteric influence for their own benefit.

Eigemacht in particular was working overtime, bouncing between assisting Fabrica with turning the thing into a proper fortress, dealing with ongoing dimensional anomalies around the world, and bringing people and equipment over from the Mars base.

Yes, in light of what had happened, the Red Faction was returning to Earth. Both Fabrica and the Reds themselves seemed to think that their labs, weapons, and equipment would make a difference in the coming fight to maintain safety and stability.

As for the Black Faction…

They'd all run off, and both Eigenmacht and Aurora, of all people, seemed to think she would be willing to help hunt them down.

Why she had been involved with their mutual enemies, and how it was connected to this sudden turn of events, and why she would then help them again—Ryan shook his head. He didn't want to try thinking about it.

That could come later. For now, he was going to devote his focus to establishing the new Star Guardian fortress.

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