The dark green forests and the mighty glacial peaks of the Peninsula came into view as the Titian slowed and descended below the clouds. Much of the region was wild and verdant with only a few roads running through its valleys and foothills. Sixteen dark-blue obelisks called laserliths stood at equidistant points around the entire area, located mainly on mountaintops. Each of the devices stood at over 100-meters tall, towering over their surroundings.

  The Red Wolves had always valued the natural beauty of the region. They did their best to preserve it by building much of their bases underground and within the region’s many mountains. The peninsula’s civilian inhabitants were only allowed to build dwellings in designated areas near its western border with Ruskeda.

  Wolf City, a sprawling metropolis stretched across the region’s western valley, appeared like a patchwork of small blocks from the Titian’s windows. Boats of all shapes and sizes dotted Syulka Bay to the southwest, many of which brought goods to Wolf City’s docks. The noonday sun was reflected off of the cold blue waters of the Okane River. The river ran from one end of the Peninsula to the other, from the many mountains to the east all the way to Wolf City. It emptied into Syulka Bay, splitting the city into two culturally distinct sections.

  A smaller, uninhabited city sat silently in a northern valley of the peninsula. The valley and a small portion of the city met the icy waters of the North Arctic. The city served as a comprehensive training environment for the Red Wolves. It was known simply as Battle City.

  The tiltjet glided at a downward angle towards the dramatic white peak of Mt. Kyero, the largest mountain in the Peninsula’s western alpine range. It only took the Titian ten minutes to fly over the 500-kilometer stretch of land that RED-1 called home. Waves from the Eizic Ocean crashed into the rocks further west, where the mountains met the sea.

  An opening appeared in the side of Mt. Kyero as its large hidden hangar door parted to welcome the Titian. The ship flew into the straightaway tunnel, slowing its speed until it came to a sizeable hemispheric cavern that served as an aircraft hangar. The Titian landed smoothly with a few final bursts of its pulsejets.

  “Wake up, you two. We’re back at HQ.” Ursun shouted to Srell and Prism as the rear ramp of the transport bay lowered onto the floor of the hangar.

  Srell was quick to jump out of the pull-out bed he’d been asleep in. He pushed it back into the bay wall just as quickly before wiping his face and nodding to his commander. Prism, on the other hand, barely began to move from his seat. He yawned and stretched as he slowly stood up.

  “Drink some coffee or something, sleepyhead. You know that we’re in for hours of debriefings since we’ve been away for so long.” Leanna reminded Prism, who groaned in irritation.

  The rest of RED-1’s afternoon was spent in brightly-lit conference rooms. Each of them retold all that they’d experienced in the past three months of continuous missions. From the thwarting of a doomsday plot by mad scientists deep in the Disdüti desert to the rescuing of a prominent historian from a global cultural preservation organization, no detail was kept from the analysts responsible for carrying out the debriefs. RED-1’s most recent mission to stop the Ceders in Pargrad was child’s play compared to what they’d been through weeks earlier.

  “I’d like to personally thank you all again for tending to that matter concerning my nephew.”

  A tall elderly man with dark skin spoke to the team as they left their respective conference rooms for the day. They all stood in a wide, round hallway that led to the hangar where the Titian has landed.

  “It was our pleasure, sir.” Leanna said with an overly polite bow to the well-dressed man. He wore a fancy uniform that featured a dark-orange blazer and black pants that had equally orange lines running down their sides. He smiled and nodded to her, revealing the white ring of coarse hair atop his head.

  “Prism was able to stop him before the Queen got a whiff of what he and his colleagues were up to.” Ursun pointed his meaty thumb at Prism as he walked closer to see what was going on.

  Prism nodded to the man he knew to be Gnapp, Commander of the Red Wolves’ Engineering Division. Prism had a great deal of respect for the man, as he’d been one of the founders of the mercenary company that Prism was a member of. It helped that Gnapp had always been kind and respectful to Prism, even when his colleagues had not.

  “Yes, I’m eternally in your debt, Mr. Prism. If my nephew and those fools who kidnapped him had completed his ultrawide-range quantum disruptor, there is no doubt that the Queen would have wiped him and the entire region he was in off the map, just as she did to Jelessa.” Gnapp said with a sudden look of utter graveness.

  “That’s what Battle City used to be called, back when it was inhabited, right?” Prism asked without much of a thought.

  “Oh, yes.” Gnapp said with a deep-set frown. After a short moment of silence, he began to speak again. “I was close enough to see it, you know, when the Queen killed everyone within Jelessa’s city limits. I was up at the observatory on Beina Hill, the place we now use as a supply depot. I saw her suddenly appear over the city without warning, and I saw her unleash her anti-biological nanites from her hands. They left nothing but dust where millions of people had been.”

  “Awful…” Leanna shook her head and looked down at the floor. She clenched her fists and her teeth.

  “That’s where Gnapp met my father for the first time, at that observatory.” Ursun said to Prism.

  “Yes, yes it is. He saved my life and the lives of over a dozen people by getting us into an airtight underground tunnel beneath the observatory.” Gnapp said as he placed hand onto his chin and nodded to himself. “That was so long ago. Vulk was only in his early twenties then, just a Ruskedan soldier on leave for the day. He already had so much courage and strength of will.”

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  Lorias let out two low coughs, which drew the old man out of his reverie.

  “Please excuse me. I’m sure all of you would like to take some time to yourselves after being away for so long.” Gnapp smiled guiltily at the group. “Finisome won’t need to see all of you until tomorrow afternoon, so feel free to go off-base if you wish.”

  Srell looked at Lorias with the exuberance of a small child, but looked away just as quickly when Lorias rolled his eyes at him. Prism watched Gnapp turn around and leave RED-1 to their own devices. Ursun stepped away from the rest of them and clapped his large calloused hands together to get their attention.

  “Get your affairs in order over the next 16 hours, kids. It’s looking like our next mission is going to have us gone for even longer.” The hulking commander said loudly. Srell was the only one to express his frustration aloud.

  “Finally off the Sguvi?” Lorias asked with a wry smile.

  Ursun did not answer the question, though the way he rubbed the back of his neck was enough confirmation for his team.

  “What happened to our plan to take Prism all over our part of the world to absorb as many ancient mana confluences as he can find? I thought we all wanted him to become powerful enough to wipe out the Queen and her Kingdom with a snap of his fingers?” Srell asked as he pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted. He felt a stress headache coming on; a consequence of getting worked up as often as he did.

  “Crises beyond any of our “normal human capabilities” have kept coming up. You know that.” Lorias was quick to answer, sarcastically echoing the sentiment expressed by another one of the Red Wolves’ commanders.

  “It’s as if the Queen herself was manipulating events to thwart our original plans.” Leanna looked pensively at Prism. “She must’ve noticed how powerful you were getting during that first month of us putting the plan into action.”

  “It isn’t like you to spout conspiracy theories.” Srell barked.

  “Too many fires to put out…” Prism said in almost a whisper.

  “What was that?” Lorias asked. He leaned towards the short elementeitan to put some pressure on him.

  “She’s treating this world like a giant laboratory, and we’re just mice in a maze to her.” Prism said after taking a deep breath. “She’s got me putting out fires instead of putting any real pressure on her.”

  “Do you think you can beat her with the power you have now? Even with the gravity powers she’s apparently gained?” Leanna asked in earnest.

  “I wanted to fly in there and unmake her after I absorbed that first big confluence, the one over Battle City. But Jaik told me that it’d be suicide.” Prism said in a hushed tone. “There’s just so little that we know about her for sure. That’s what makes her so dangerous.”

  “She’s like a force of nature…” Lorias said after crossing his arms. Everyone nodded their agreement to the often-heard statement.

  “Your magic lets you do incredible things, but it still obeys certain rules that limit how truly destructive you can be. For whatever reason, you can’t destroy an entire nation or kill someone from thousands of kilometers away.” Ursun noted.

  “In my prime I could. Before I arrived on ?ba, there was little that I couldn’t do. But I sacrificed all that in order to save…well…it doesn’t matter now.”

  Prism could see that Leanna was about to grill him on his lack of an explanation. He shook his head and kept talking, doing his best to resist her voracious curiosity.

  “What matters is that I’m still too limited. A lot of that comes from ?ba itself. This is a world that seems to recoil from magic. It’s abundant with mana, but it doesn’t like that mana being crafted into anything structured for very long. I have to constantly retrace even simple enchantments that I make just to keep them active. I may never be able to cast the sort of decisive spells that you all wish that I could, not without doing incredible damage to your world.”

  Prism’s honesty stung the team gathered around him, but it did little to dissuade them of his usefulness. He’d voiced similar concerns during the months that they’d pursued the high concentrations of mana found in seemingly random corners of ?ba.

  When he absorbed the especially old mana confluences, they strengthened him and permanently gave him a greater capacity of bodily mana to draw upon. This had translated into ever grander displays of magic against the team’s enemies. However, such power hadn’t stymied the threats against the Red Wolves or their allies in the Conjunction.

  “You say that, but then you do things like create a tsunami that capsizes an entire fleet of Destructor ships.” Srell said with a hand raised in incredulity at Prism.

  Prism sighed as he thought back on the event Srell mentioned. The mercenary company of terror-loving pirates known as the Destructors had bombarded the recovering eastern coast of Athea months after the Battle of Getla Base that he’d been a part of. Prism had been much more powerful when he’d returned to the Etrysian island. He’d shown the Destructors little mercy when he’d turned the sea against them.

  “These conversations usually go on for an hour or two. I’m ready to put my feet up and find what little peace I can until tomorrow.” Lorias said.

  He slowly ran his dexterous fingers through the length of his golden locks before flicking his hair dramatically over his shoulder.

  “Agreed. Let’s focus on the present. Get some rest, kids.” Ursun said as he took a moment to look each member of his team in the eye.

  While the others went in separate directions, Leanna lingered near Prism for a moment longer. His room was within the same area that they stood in, just down a neighboring hallway. The Auxiliary, the name given to the upper portion of the Red Wolves’ headquarters within Kyero Mountain, had become his home on ?ba.

  “What will you be doing tonight and tomorrow morning?” Leanna gently asked as she placed her hand on her hip and tousled her green hair a bit with the other hand.

  I need to retrace the teleportation circle in the hangar bay. I was going to do that and then go to bed. If they are sending us to Sguvi, then they’ll probably want me to set up a teleportation circle there, so…”

  Prism saw Leanna lean to her side and tilt her head at an extreme angle, as if she was trying to read something upside-down. He tilted his own head slightly and narrowed his eyes at her.

  “Something on my face?” He asked.

  “Let’s go out to the city tonight, after you’re done doing maintenance on the circle.” Leanna said after snapping herself back upright and smiling.

  “Aren’t you tired?” He crossed his arms and asked her.

  “Psh, of course not. All we did today was take a plane ride and do a bit of talking.”

  “More than a bit…”

  “Oh, come on. You’re the one with a superhuman constitution. If I’m not tired, then you certainly aren’t.”

  “I think you’re underestimating the mental strain that things can still cause me…”

  Leanna rolled her eyes and shot Prism a look of derision. “We’ve had it pretty easy the past week. Quit with the introspection and have a little fun, why don’t you.” She said while shoving Prism lightly on the shoulder.

  Prism staggered back a little bit before shaking his head and looking down the hallway towards his room. He sighed and nodded sheepishly as he slowly looked back at Leanna.

  “Alright, alright.” He put his hands up in defeat and said.

  “Great!” Leanna said with a big smile. For an instant, Prism was reminded of Jaik’s boyish enthusiasm. “Meet you at the tubetrain in…an hour?” Leanna said with her pointer finger raised.

  “It takes me an hour to retrace the teleportation circle.” He reminded her.

  “Sure. Two hours?” She raised two fingers and spoke a bit more carefully.

  “I’ll meet you there in two hours.” Prism said almost mechanically.

  “Okay!” She said brightly.

  Prism couldn’t help but smile upon hearing the word that was once alien to ?ba’s people. It had caught on so quickly amongst his teammates.

  Leanna dashed down the hall towards an elevator leading down to the main base. Prism walked the opposite way, but turned around to see Leanna wave to him before she stepped onto the elevator. He smirked before priming himself to meticulously go over each line and rune that made up the large magical circle that he’d engraved in the middle of the tarstone floor of the hangar bay half a year ago.

  Each portion of the magical enchantment, which was invisible to humans, was vital for the circle’s function. And like clockwork, ?ba’s natural processes degraded the lingering magic bit-by-bit each month. It was more irritating to maintain the enchants, as the Red Wolves called them, than it was energy-intensive. But Prism’s meeting with Chaik had worn on his mind, and the distraction would only make the high-focus task more difficult.

  When he walked into the hangar bay, with its high dome and massive round size, he saw the ornate circle of intricate, deep-set runes at its center. The teleportation circle was about 50-meters in diameter, large enough to teleport even the Titian, if necessary. Several planes were parked around the rune circle, including the Titian. It had not yet been moved to its maintenance bay on another level, but it would be in the coming hours.

  “Hmm, not as bad as I thought.”

  Prism spoke to himself as he looked at the state of the magical energies resting within the grooves of the teleportation circle. He hadn’t gotten a good look at them when he’d first gotten off the Titian that day, as he’d been too groggy to even care. He walked to the edge of the circle and bent down on his knees. With outstretched hands, he began the work of repairing the portions of the complex geospatial spell that had been degraded.

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