“Can you hear me?”

  Derek frowned as a sharp pain stabbed through his temple, twisting his face into a grimace. But it passed in an instant.

  Now it felt like he was floating on a soft cloud, neither hot nor cold. Everything around him was warm and comforting, like being wrapped in a protective cocoon. He could’ve stayed there forever, just sleeping. Life had been brutal these past few years. He deserved a break... just a little rest.

  “Derek, can you hear me?”

  Why wouldn’t that voice stop calling him? And who was it, anyway? It sounded like Yuki, but… off. Had someone used a voice synthesizer to mimic Yuki’s voice and was now using it to disturb his sleep?

  What a stupid, pointless prank.

  Unless…

  Memories crashed into his mind like a shower of ice water, and Derek shot upright, gasping as if he’d been drowning.

  A blinding glare hit his eyes, like a spotlight aimed directly at his face, while flashing messages of error and warnings filled NOVA’s display. Derek squinted and shielded his eyes with an armored hand.

  “Derek, can you hear me?”

  “Vanda… yeah, I hear you.” He squinted harder. “What’s with the blinding light? Is it the Kolaar Node?”

  “No, it’s the sun. You must still have your visor set to dark mode.”

  The sun? How could it be? Just a moment ago, he was in the middle of a massive alien pyramid on a planet that saw full sunlight maybe a couple of times a year. And there, a year lasted thirteen Earth years!

  With a mental command, Derek toggled the setting, and the brightness dimmed to a manageable level.

  “Still seems way too bright,” he muttered with a grimace. Shaking his head, he added, “For a second, it felt like you said it was the sun. I must’ve taken a hit to the head without noticing.”

  “No, you didn’t. It is the sun.”

  Derek blinked. “Vanda, we were inside a stone pyramid miles high. There’s no way there’s a sun here.”

  He finally dared to glance around. Beneath him stretched a rocky slope, jagged and uneven.

  He looked up. Trees. Massive, gnarled trees surrounded him, their vibrant green almost pulsating with life. Moss and dangling vines clung to the trunks, swaying like sleeping serpents. High above, the branches twisted and interlocked, forming a dense canopy that allowed only scattered beams of sunlight to filter through.

  His heart skipped a beat. What the hell was going on? Where had he ended up, and who had brought him here? Could this be some kind of trick or illusion? He sprang to his feet with a metallic clang. Dizziness made him stagger, but the armor’s neural safety protocols kicked in, keeping him upright.

  “Take it easy, Derek,” Vanda said, her voice soft and calm.

  “Where are we? Was I extracted from the pyramid?”

  “Unknown. I experienced a complete systems blackout for approximately three minutes. During that interval, all sensor input was lost. Upon reboot, I initiated a full-range scan, but found no recognizable landmarks. Current coordinates suggest you are located far beyond the perimeter of the Wardilai ruins.”

  Derek scowled. Whatever had happened must have seriously damaged Vanda. “That’s impossible.”

  “I know, but I detected no temporal disruptions. The armor’s chronometer indicates it’s been roughly fifteen minutes since we were in the alien pyramid. You’ve been unconscious for nearly all of it.”

  What the hell was going on? And why were they in a damn jungle? The planet they’d been on had a variety of biomes, but he was certain there were no jungles.

  As sunlight filtered through the canopy, a thought struck him.

  “Vanda, analyze the light frequencies from the sun.”

  “Already done.”

  “What kind of star are we dealing with?” Derek asked, his mouth dry.

  “The emission peak is around 500 nanometers, so it’s most likely a yellow dwarf.”

  Derek clenched his teeth. “The sun that lit the planet we were on was a red dwarf.”

  He paused as the realization hit him. “Damn it. We’re on a different planet!”

  He stared at the display showing the external environmental conditions. At least the atmosphere was breathable, according to the indicators.

  Maybe… he was dreaming? He scanned his surroundings and pressed a gauntleted hand to his helmet, right at his temple. They were near a steep, rocky cliff, with rubble scattered at its base. No signs of life. No traces of civilization.

  Something had pulled him out of that pyramid while he was surrounded by indestructible monsters, not only getting him out unscathed but also transporting him to another planet.

  And it had done all that in... what? Five minutes?

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  That was insane. That was foulness. Nothing he knew of should have had that kind of power.

  Except maybe...

  “The Kolaar Node!” Derek gasped.

  He looked down at his armored arms, half-expecting to still have it strapped to him somehow. Where the hell had it gone? He was sure he’d been clutching it when… when that blinding flash had wiped everything out. Maybe he dropped it right at the end, when he blacked out. It couldn’t have gone far. It had to be around here somewhere.

  He frantically scanned the area, breath quick and shallow. Then dropped to the ground, digging through bushes and tall grass like a madman. A bead of sweat tried to form at his temple before the armor absorbed it. Rocks. Leaves. Bushes. Nothing else.

  Damn it, he couldn’t have lost it. Not after everything he’d gone through to retrieve it!

  “Derek, there’s something else I need to tell you,” Vanda said.

  He kept searching, shoving aside bushes and circling boulders. He even glanced up at the treetops, just in case whoever had brought him here had decided to fling the artifact like a frisbee. It definitely had the right shape.

  “It’s got to be around here,” Derek muttered to himself. “I must’ve dropped it during the transport.”

  “Derek.”

  “A glowing, multicolored disk with the power of a small star shouldn’t be hard to spot. Can you locate it?”

  “Derek!”

  He froze. He could feel it in his gut. This was one of those moments when Vanda was about to give him bad news.

  “What?” he asked.

  “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

  “Ok… Go ahead.”

  “You didn’t lose the artifact. It’s right here.”

  Not bad news for once! He really needed to stop assuming the worst about Vanda.

  Derek searched the area again, shoving aside leaves and rocks, panting like a dog. Still nothing. “Can you please just point me in the right direction?”

  “Of course I can. It’s inside the NOVA armor.”

  Derek blinked. “What do you mean? Did it turn invisible?”

  If he’d had any doubts that more than a few of her circuits were fried, they were gone now.

  “How could that disk fit inside this armor with me? There’s not enough room in here. I mean… I think I’d notice if I were sharing it with a glowing frisbee.”

  “No, Derek, it’s a bit more complicated. I don’t mean it’s there physically. The artifact’s energy source, its vibrational patterns, its essence, and its software, if you can even call it that, are now embedded within the armor. I’m detecting traces of its energy across all of NOVA’s subsystems. Including myself.”

  “You?” Derek blinked. “Are you telling me there’s alien code inside your software?”

  “Yes. There is.”

  Derek swallowed hard. He was already stranded who knows where, deep in god-knows-what jungle. If something happened to Vanda, he’d never find his way out. “And how do you feel about that?”

  “So far, I’m not detecting any malfunctions. But, of course, that could change over time. There’s no way to know.”

  Derek nodded, his jaw tightening. As crazy as it all sounded, there were few things truly impossible when dealing with Wardilai technology. Maybe none at all.

  He lifted his eyes toward the treetops with a sigh, resting his armored hands on his hips. The trees looked similar to those he’d seen in jungles on Earth, but the sounds were entirely unfamiliar. Something like the chirping of crickets, deeper and rougher, filled the air. Small iridescent orbs drifted around him, floating like ethereal pollen and emitting faint, blobbing sounds.

  “How could this have happened? And why?” He asked.

  “I can’t say. This is technology far beyond my understanding. And… there’s more.”

  “What else?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper. Derek’s head started to spin. How could there be more?

  “I’m also detecting traces of the artifact’s energy in your neural patterns. Your neural link with the NOVA must have acted as a conduit, and…”

  “And its energy got into my brain,” Derek finished, pressing a gauntleted hand against his helmet.

  Damn. What else could possibly go wrong? The Kolaar Node had become little more than a trace of energy within the NOVA… and now it was inside him too. Maybe it was going to kill him. He still felt fine, but that didn’t mean anything. His hopes of discovering what had happened to Yuki had vanished along with the Node, and now he was stranded on some unknown planet, stuck in the middle of a goddamn jungle, with no apparent way to get back home.

  How the hell had all this even happened? This was getting more ridiculous by the second.

  He needed answers.

  “Vanda, did the plasma shot hit the artifact?”

  “According to the last recording, no. The final frame shows the plasma round a few meters from you. Then there’s an energy emission, and the feed cuts out. A few minutes later, the recording resumes here in this jungle.”

  “Nothing in between?”

  “Just darkness.”

  Derek frowned. A few meters. That meant just a few milliseconds before his likely demise. Whatever happened had saved him… sort of. If his head weren’t enclosed in the helmet, he’d be scratching it. “None of this makes any sense.”

  “I know as much as you do.”

  Suddenly, the flashing messages on his display vanished, replaced by a single white line:

  System reboot in progress.

  Derek frowned. “And now… what’s happening, Vanda?”

  “I’m not sure. The operating system appears to be initiating a reboot on its own. It might be an automatic recovery attempt. I won’t be able to respond for a bit, but I should come back online once the reboot is complete.”

  If the reboot managed to complete. If it didn’t, he’d be stuck facing this alien, and almost certainly hostile, jungle with nothing but his clothes and bare hands.

  No water, no food, no direction.

  Nothing.

  “See you on the other side,” he muttered.

  The messages disappeared, along with Vanda’s voice and basically any other sound or output from the NOVA. The armor went completely inert.

  Without active controls, the NOVA armor was dead weight. Over 400 kilograms of immobile, dark, shiny metal. Even if he could muster the strength to move it, the safety protocols had locked the joints during the reboot to prevent collapse. If he wanted to get out, he’d have to use the manual emergency releases and crawl his way to freedom.

  But no, that wasn’t an option. He needed to regain control quickly. He had to locate the nearest city, find a shuttle, and get home. From there, he’d start figuring out another potential location for a fully functional Kolaar Node. Hopefully that one wasn’t the last in the galaxy.

  Fortunately, even during a system reboot, NOVA allowed the display and life support systems to keep functioning, along with limited head movement thanks to separate servomechanisms. Otherwise, he’d be sealed inside a suffocating, lightless coffin in the middle of the jungle, with no oxygen to breathe.

  Derek looked up at the dense canopy of leaves overhead, grimacing. There was no way to tell if there was any aerial traffic, or even where the nearest spaceport might be.

  Maybe once the armor reboots, he could try climbing a tree. A ten-meter jump was well within NOVA’s capabilities. From the top, he’d have a much clearer view of his surroundings.

  A new message blinked onto his display:

  ||System restoration complete. Integrated system ready for activation.||

  Integrated system? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  Maybe the artifact’s software had begun installing itself into the NOVA, and the installation had triggered the reboot.

  More lines of text appeared on his display:

  || Welcome to the System. Dimensional transfer successful. Integration complete.||

  ||Current Auric Level: Iron 1.||

  ||Upgrades acquired: 0.||

  ||Base stats aligned to current level.||

  Derek stared at the words, his mouth slightly open.

  This definitely wasn’t part of his operating system, no doubt about that. But if it came from the artifact, why was it in his language? He’d expected incomprehensible symbols like the ones carved into the pyramid walls.

  Had the artifact somehow tapped into his mind during integration, learning his language to display these messages?

  And what the hell did “Auric Levels,” “Base Stats,” and “Upgrades” have to do with the NOVA?

  Maybe it was just a mistranslation. But the terms felt oddly coherent. Bad translations usually spat out nonsense like ‘the tomato is bolted to the attic.’

  These lines, though, seemed to have a clear purpose.

  The real issue was that Derek had absolutely no idea what any of it meant.

  “Vanda, are you back?” he asked, biting his lip.

  “I’m... back.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Weird,” Vanda said, her voice trembling. “There are a lot of additional elements in the operating system, like someone installed a major update. You didn’t do this, did you?”

  “Nope, not me.” He frowned. If he had to guess, he’d say it’s the Kolaar Node’s doing. “Any idea what an Auric Level is?”

  “Y… yes. I believe this information was installed with the alien update. An Auric Level is—”

  A rustling sound came from the bushes ahead.

  Derek turned toward the sound as a figure stepped out of the bush, lowering a large leaf with a calloused, gray hand. He stood as tall as Derek, with gray skin, a bald head, and thin black stripes painted across his body. He appeared old, but not the kind of old that seemed fragile or shaky. His muscles looked well-trained, with no signs of weakness. He wore rags that seemed to be made from animal hides and foliage.

  The figure stopped just a few meters away, gripping a gnarled wooden staff in his fist. At the top of the staff rested the skull of a horned animal Derek couldn’t identify. The man glowered at him with a hostile scowl.

  “What are you?” he asked in a low, gravelly voice. The words came slow and deliberate, as if the language he was using was unfamiliar to him.

  The translator in Derek’s earpiece had no trouble parsing the sentence. Whatever the man was speaking, it was at least one of the languages stored in NOVA’s database.

  Derek flexed his arms and legs. The actuators responded smoothly and silently, as always, with the heavy armor moving in sync with him. At least he had full control of the NOVA again.

  He’d handle the old savage pretty easily. Maybe he could even make a new friend.

  Tapping his armored chest with a fingertip, Derek smirked. “I’m Derek Steele, genius extraordinaire in disciplines you’ve probably never even heard of. Care for a salted peanut? I think I’ve got a pack around here somewhere.”

  The skull on top of the figure’s staff began to glow faintly.

  Derek blinked. “Uh, Vanda? That caveman stick is glowing.”

  “I’m detecting strange readings from that person,” Vanda said, her tone cautious.

  The gray-skinned figure bared his yellowed teeth in a menacing snarl and shouted, “Die, shaitani!”

  With a thunderous roar, blinding light burst from the skull at the tip of his staff, erupting into a massive globe of fire. It hurtled toward Derek in a blazing arc.

  He froze, eyes wide, mouth open, as the fireball slammed into him.