---

  // John 1103 - Five seconds since impact. //

  ---

  I swore loudly as the building crumbled around me, chunks of the grey stone tore apart with deceptive ease, the rusted red wires of that strange metal running through the stone almost like nerve fibres as the walls crack.

  I leaped across the widening gap in the floor, the act rewarded by alert that power reserves had dropped five percent. I scrambled across the floor. The towers lead would leave me crush or worse, trapped beneath a pile of rubble.

  I felt my chest growing tight. A rock slammed into the visor of my helmet, shattering it completely. I screamed as a chunk of the thick glass slammed into my face. Thankfully it was made to shatter into rounded not lethal shards.

  I shook my head, feel bits of the glass getting in between my suit and the skin tight bodysuit I was wearing.

  I rolled over to avoid a collapsing pillar. My mind had started to race, everything slowing down. I spied a way out. With the way the tower was rapidly descending if I timed it right I could leap from it to a nearby tower.

  I pushed myself up, I didn't have much time to even consider how batshit insane such an idea was so I stumbled past falling rubble and support beams as the structure seemingly came apart at the seems.

  I found my opening, one of the walls of the floor I was on had been shattered open by a stray bit of debris. I stumbled towards it, I activated the hydraulics, feeling the suit shudder as it was forced to use up its already drained power reserves.

  I flew for a moment. Suspended in the air between a two buildings, one collapsing the moment I left it.

  I felt weightless. Then I slammed into the surface of the other building. I groaned as I hit the side of it. I felt my centre of mass shift downwards and desperately scrabbled at the edge of the building.

  I felt my still functional arm bite into the grey stone of the building and rip through it like cheese as the weight of the suit and myself was focused on such a small area.

  I swore repeatedly as I sailed downward, my grip barely there as I desperately tried to find something more substantial to grip onto.

  Thankfully I got something, a slightly thicker part of the building finally didn't give way underneath my weight. I used the chance to haul myself upward, using the momentum to slam into the stone and break through.

  Thumbling onto the stable-ish floor of that building felt like heaven. I was covered in dust, bits of rock and the glass of my now completely shattered visor dug into my skin. I groaned, forcing myself to move despite the complaints from my body and mind.

  I tried to reach into my suit only remember that the gloves of my suit were too bulky to do much. I swore, ending up awkwardly shaking myself to attempt to dislodge most of the bits of rubble and rock.

  It worked, but I could tell the finer stuff was still well and truly stuck. I'd have to get out of my suit to do that but with the power reserves flickering between empty and five percent full I didn't want to get out only to find that the suit was stuck there.

  I sighed. Looking around before getting up I trudged over to the hole I'd made to get into the building. The wires that ran within the grey stone were bent inward, the result of my quite forceful entry.

  Peering out I saw that most of the upper half of the building I had just been in was gone. The lower half seemingly had a bit more stability and had remained relatively whole aside from chunks missing here and there.

  I could see the mechanical spider half buried under the rubble, it was unmoving and most of it was twisted, bent in wrong directions from the sheer force of both the collision with the tower and the towers collapse upon it.

  I leaned out the opening and turn my head towards where the other spider machine had been. I didn't see it anymore, but with how destructive it had been I doubted I wanted it nearby.

  I turned my gaze back to the corpse of the spider, it was smoking faintly, which reminded me that it was indeed a machine. My mind flickered to my power reserves, perhaps it had some form of a battery I could... borrow.

  I didn't have many opinions, but I doubted I would survive long without the utility of the suit. Extra power would let me attempt to fix the damaged arm as well.

  I mentally assessed how to reach the spider, it was around forty floors down. I guess I had a few flights of stairs to enjoy. I check the power gage. It still read five percent, hopefully enough.

  Trudging down the stairs was hell, not only because at this point, just to prevent the suit from basically locking me inside it I had to drop the amount of power being routed to the exoskeleton to almost null, making each step weight far more then it needed to.

  But also because several times when I descended the stairs they had just given away beneath me. Sending me into the next set below and so on.

  But hey, at least I reached the damn corpse of the mechanical spider quickly. Never mind the fact my spine felt like jelly.

  I stumbled over. The buildings thankfully had one of those many rusted metal bridges I'd noticed earlier when viewing the city of towers from affair, joining them. This one was a bit less rusted then the one I'd taken to get in so I didn't feel quite as freaked out crossing it.

  Still felt a bead of sweat roll down my neck when the damn thing gave out the loudest creak I've ever heard. But it didn't matter because I'd made my way to the spider.

  Up close it was massive, easily large enough to dwarf the building it was laying upon, but this was only its front half. I hadn't noticed but the other half of the spider had been torn from it, the metal remaining after the other spider had blasted a hole through its belly too weak to hold.

  The butt was laying somewhere in the black depths of the ocean that surrounded the towers. I really hoped whatever powered this thing wasn't stored in its abdomen.

  I got up close and recoiled. I'd been calling it a corpse just because but up close its metal innards looked far too much like real fleshy insides. The internals were full of a grey metallic goop. The stuff just oozed from gaping ruin of its lower half. Bits of the stuff hung down, intestines like.

  I shuddered at the sight. "Disgusting." I muttered, I'd never been much of a gore kinda guy so the sight of something similar but just not quite it still gave me deeply unpleasant feelings.

  I felt a little worse about defiling what appeared to be the corpse of some strange manner of machine life. That feeling was quickly dispelled by the beeping of power critical warning in my hud.

  I pushed pasted a large chunk of the stuff. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for but something that look like it would power my suit was a good place to start.

  I looked into the cavity that had been bored through the being. The edges of it metallic shell were twisted and burnt, the insides that leaked out looked almost glassed, the dark metallic goop moving sluggishly, as if it had been boiled before forming a thick metallic crust.

  I frowned at the sight, which while gross didn't provide a good idea of what I was looking for. I moved up the beings body. It was surprisingly sleek and almost organic in nature.

  Much of its body was interlocking and seemed to be both built with a clear design behind it yet also grown organically. I could help but marvel at it. Just the sheer level of technology to build whatever this was is far beyond anything a human mind could imagine.

  I reached out to touch it and winced as a electric charge suddenly ran through my body. I hear the faint nose of the suits warning alarm of power low suddenly stop.

  Checking the power reserves I felt my eyebrows shoot up. Just touching the thing had increased reserves by almost ten percent. I reached out to touch it, electric shock be damned.

  But unfortunately it seemed the first shock was a fluke, merely a built up of static charge that had unloaded into my suit. I felt my brow suddenly grow wet with sweat as I realised just how powerful that shock had to be if it had charged my suit by a full ten percent and I had felt it through the many insulating layers of the suit.

  I shook my hand, suddenly aware of how close I had brushed with death. I let out an exhale, while the whole event was a little nerve wracking I'd still gained a full ten percent charge. I quickly allowed more power for the exoskeleton and let out a relieved sigh as I felt the weight bearing down on my body lessen a bit.

  I swallowed, my mouth feeling dry. I'd deal with water later, hopefully the ocean of it all around me would be drinkable. I didn't get my hopes up as I carefully ducked underneath a chunk of the grey stone.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Slipped past it I paused, it seems I had founded the power source. The upper half including a tiny camera like head stood before me within the small cavity inside the rubble. Its chest had been torn open, exposing a soft blue light that filled the space.

  I stared, it had a face. A human face, well, humanish. It had two eyes and a mouth but that was where the resemblance ended, several odd rod like structures stuck out from its face, antenna array or something similar I guess and the face itself had an odd bone structure, several areas being far too pronounced and its eyes were set a little too close together.

  I torn my gaze from its lifeless visage and walked towards the fluttering light. Whatever it was, it was producing power or something similar. All I could hope for was enough charge to last a few days. Maybe more.

  I pulled aside organs made of the same grey metallic goop, the fluid splatter and smelled like the inside of a car engine. I swore loudly as some of the stuff spurted from what appeared to be a ruined heart, the stuff splattering across my chest. I wriggled my face, feeling a single drop of it on my cheek.

  "Ew." I muttered as I pushed the heart away and finally revealed the source of the light. A strange white orb with lines running across its surface, the lines were emitting a strong blue light and I reached for it.

  Even before I touched the odd fist sized ball my suit was telling me of increases in power reserves, it quickly shot up to eighty percent full then the suit let out a soft beep to indicate reserves were at full power.

  I let out a chuckle. "Well that's some good news." I muttered to myself, it was a small victory. The looming challenge of surviving past a few days in this place still made me felt despair but I had a source of power. Or at least something that was giving off enough electricity to power my suit to full almost instantly.

  I pulled back, letting the exoskeleton do its thing. The weight of the suit finally gone. I stretched sighing as I felt my legs and arms finally relax. I took a moment to try and use my damaged arm. All I got was the warning of damaged hydraulics. I gave up on that, first things first I needed to attached this clearly very powerful and volatile to my suit.

  I considered my opinions. The simplest and crudest was to just opened a panel and shove it inside. It would work considering the thing was powering my suit and it wasn't even touching anything inside.

  The hardest but safest would be to place the orb far enough away, then get out of my suit, open up the power hatch, remove one of the power cells and then somehow slot the orb into the empty power cell slot and then close the power hatch and get back inside my suit.

  I placed the orb down as I begun to pry at the chest plate of my suit. Crude and simplest would have to do until I figured out how dangerous this thing was.

  ---

  // Nickol 1157 - 2 hours since contact loss on moon base. //

  ---

  "Yes sir, yes the files are directly from the moon base. No sir they are not corrupted. No sir this is not a prank... what kind of pranks do you normally experience sir? Yes sir... I... alright sir." I muttered before putting the phone down and rubbing my forehead.

  I felt like I'd aged almost twenty years in the matter of a few hours. I'd first I had to contact the governments that were involved in the moon base to inform them that said moon base was now not responding to any communications sent.

  Then I had to deal with the flood of calls asking about details and such. The last call I'd taken had been an angry Indian man who hadn't taken a single breath, just a long spew of something about costs and such a failures flowing from his mouth in one uninterrupted stream.

  That one had given me a migraine within a few minutes. I'd ended up just sending the recording of the final transmission and the files we hard received before loosing contact over, video recordings of the thing's entry through the gate and the data that had been detected from the gate when it had started up on its own to all of the respected parties involved.

  But even as the scientists with each faction quickly started to dig into the data I still had to deal with the disgruntled world leaders. The worst part was I'd never trained for this, I was a scientist. Not someone expected to deal with people who led counties damn it!

  I exhaled. "Breath in... Breath out." I muttered over and over again to try and calm my racing mind. But what hope did I have? The greatest moment of my life went to shit the moment John vanished into another reality and hours after that, on the very moon base John was supposed to arrive at. Some mechanical monstrosity turned on the bloody gate by itself and entered through and was now most likely wrecking said the moon base.

  I felt my brain beginning to boil, only interrupted by the knocking at my door. "Come in." I muttered, gesturing at the door as an intern stumbled in. They gave a short nod. "Uh sir... we have good news and bad news."

  I frowned, good news? I leaned forward, my attention peaked. "Please do tell. I'm dying for something good." I said, the desperation clear in my tone.

  The intern nodded. "Yes sir, its about John. We are exactly not sure how, but it seems whatever occurred on the moon base opened up some kind of permanent line from wherever that thing was from." He swallows, clearly nervous. "We've begun to detected signals from John, heart rate, oxygen levels. Although, our readings are reporting anomalies, which is the bad news."

  I raise a brow, gesturing for him to continue. "Well?" I say. He nods, seemingly not quite sure of himself. "You see sir... uh, from his suit we are reading that he is currently at..." The intern pauses, reading something from the papers clasped in his hands. "Well, his power reserves are at thirty million times the capacity they should be. We are not sure if this is an error or not, but we believe John's suit might has sustained damaged during his... entry to the alternative reality."

  I stared. The readings were clearly false, at that level of power he'd been lugging around the amount of energy required to power the gate seven times over. Almost twice the highest power output that the nuclear reactor here could produce. If that was contained within a space the size of someone's fist you'd be hauling around a pocket star.

  "I see, it doesn't matter so long as John is alive, report this information to our research department. Lets see if we can bring john back. Maybe fix something of this mess." I mutter, a small but brightly light ball of hope burning in my chest.

  ---

  // John 1200 - 57 minutes since impact. //

  I closed the panel and felt something click. I checked my power reserves, the icon had glitched out and appeared both full and empty at the same time. I chuckled, guess I overloaded it.

  Didn't matter as I had a source of power. I got up, looking around. I recalled that odd black crate I'd found, it had a bunch of random metals inside but perhaps other crates would have something usable.

  Gear, food. Anything. It was a long shot but I wasn't exactly left with much else. I navigated through the rubble once more, I paused to collect one of the torn feet of the spider. It was like a large claw, clearly built to dig into the stone that surrounded this place and anchor itself.

  I shoved it underneath my unusable arm, which I still had to fix, I'd checked it and it wasn't just the hydraulics broken, part of the exoskeleton had come loose, damaged from the strain placed upon it in the tunnel from before.

  I sighed as I trudged down some stairs. "one problem down. A thousand more to go." I muttered, mostly to the air.

  "I can help." Said a soft voice almost in my right ear. I whirled around, nothing. I quickly scanned the room I was in and the next. Did I imagine it? I wondered. I paused in my frantic search.

  "How can you help?" I asked, my voice echoed, the sound of my own words bouncing across the empty rooms and hallways.

  A moment later I got my response, clearer, coming from both ears now. "I'm not quite as... complete as I was, but I can tell you how to fix it." came the voice, it was soft, feminine but also decidedly electronic, its words had a slight hum to it.

  The echoing remains of digital construction. I frowned, testing to make sure I truly wasn't going insane after everything that happened I decided to play along with the voice. "Alright, I'll bite. But show yourself."

  The voice giggled, I pause, confusion filling me as I finally located were it was coming from. The intercom system. The one that had gone completely silent upon entering this place. I felt a electric buzz race up my spine as the voice spoke once more.

  "You put me into your suit silly? Or did you forgot how you pulled my core from the ruins of my body and shoved it into your... limited one?" It said, stronger now, clearer as well. The electric buzz I'd heard faintly within its constructed voice was gone.

  "You... are that spider thing." I muttered in a mix of awe of growing unease. The voice quickly returned surprisingly agitated. "I'm no spider! I might not have the knowledge to understand what a spider is but I can assure you I am no spider!" It said, its voice sharp yet stable.

  I swallowed, alright calling it a spider wasn't too great of an idea. I guess I would probably find insult if someone called me an ape too. "Alright... whoever you are, what are you then?"

  The voice didn't respond, not at first at least. But it did respond and what it said made me freeze. "I'm an angel. The ones tasked to build the perfect city! Or at least I was..." It said, the tone growing cold as it seemingly recalled some event in its past.

  "I see." I muttered as my mind raced. An angel? A perfect city? It all felt surreal yet it made perfect sense. It an odd twisted way. "So... you built this place? Wherever this is?" I asked, somehow hopeful, as having something that had built the place I now found myself in would be a huge boon to my survival.

  "No. I wasn't around for the earliest construction, this place is a relic, random connections of ideas and thoughts. I mean, the materials used in all this alone is useless, just some rocks from a dead moon and wires haphazardly forced together." The voice said, dashing my hopes at a guide but the information provided was quite useful.

  "I see then, so what did you build?" I ask, I'd started to move now, no sense it just standing aimlessly around as I spoke to the core of an angel I'd stuffed into the chest of my suit.

  "I built or at least did built for a while the upper layers. Ah... it was beautiful, I worked on the fields, every stem and fold of those plants were mine and mine alone to build and order." It said, the clear fondness in its tone told me that it clearly missed that.

  "So what happened?" I asked, wondering exactly how something like it went from... making a field of plants to fighting another of its kind far, far below in seemingly a relic of its kind.

  "Ah... I refused an order, they gave me a few warnings before demoting me, sent me down to the middle layers, that foul place, full of iron and death. No life there, nothing to careful nature, just hammering of steel and stone." It said bitterly, the hatred in its voice giving me pause.

  "I refused to do what they told me, tried to escape after a while. I'd heard that the lowest layers were free of order and law, I'd hoped to simply descend and escape... how wrong I was." It muttered, clearly sour.

  "Was it that... other angel you talk about? The one that.. shot you I guess." I asked, I didn't exactly understand what she was talking, I assumed it was a she. I'm not sure giant spider angels had genders but she sounded female.

  I got a huff in response before she dryly replied. "No, that was a hunter. Thought they were a myth to be honest. What got me was the curse for descending. It tore apart my shell, by the time I realised how weak I had become it was too late, the hunter had already found me."

  I felt my chest physically shake as she went silent. I wasn't exactly sure how to interpret that, but considering she acted mostly like a living being I wouldn't be surprised she was relieving the moment that blue light burned a hole through her body.

  "Well, uh... that's unfortunate to hear... say uh... angel-" I start to say but she cut me off.

  "Call me genesis." She said matter-of-factly.

  I paused, well if we were exchanging names. "Alright genesis, I'm Kon uh... do you know where I can find something to eat... or drink?" I asked, I didn't get a response immediately which struck me as odd.

  After a moment genesis spoke, her voice was soft, far softer then anything before and she sounded excited.

  "you... your made of meat!"