Soren was struggling to understand what he was looking at.

  He had awoken naked and drooling with a screaming headache, struggled to even push himself off the floor, and immediately cracked the back of his head on the underside of a table. The spaceship he was on had felt… weird. No one else was on board and everything around him felt too damn small.

  Now, staring in the bathroom mirror, he was starting to understand why.

  He recognized his face for the most part, but his hair had gone from brownish-black to white. His torso, arms, legs—everything had gained significant muscle. And according to a dusty tape measure he found in a kitchenette drawer, he was 7’5”.

  He’d grown nearly a foot and a half taller.

  “What the fuck is going on—” Soren stopped mid-sentence.

  His voice sounded alien to him—it was much deeper and emitted a strange, bass-filled reverberance.

  He went up to the cockpit and saw an auxiliary panel with scanning equipment similar to the particle he studied under The Professor. But when he flipped it on, it exploded in his face. Coughing, he wiped a hand in the air to clear smoke away from his face, and turned his attention instead to the navigational charts. The languages almost looked familiar, but they were strange, and he found more questions than answers on the computer screen. The ship was parked somewhere in a jungle on the planet Nox—one of the planets that shared a star system with the last planet he remembered being on—Mandachor.

  But Mandachor was gone.

  In its place, the star chart said a black hole was supposed to be there, The Mandachor Abyss. He didn’t understand how that could be possible. He stared at the map for what could have been minutes or hours. Finally, his fight or flight response pulled him out of his stupor and he realized he couldn’t stay on this ship. He needed to move, he needed to find answers.

  So he searched the ship and found a coat that didn’t really fit, trousers that barely reached his calves, and walked out of the ship.

  The sun was already high in the sky, but strange weather patterns hovered over the jungle. Several arcs of lightning twisted a web through the clouds, but a moment later, the overcast veil dissolved, and rays of sunlight poured back through. It happened so fast, it didn’t seem natural.

  He headed east at first, the terrain soft beneath his feet, until he found a worn path that curved north through the trees. As he traipsed through the jungle, the pounding in his skull finally started to ease, but each step still felt foreign in this body—like moving through water with limbs that weren’t quite his. For a while, he struggled to focus on anything more than putting one foot in front of the other, until eventually, the subtle scent of smoke brushed his nose.

  He perked up and realized he had zoned out while walking, unsure if he had been stumbling through the foliage for 20 minutes or 2 hours. Smoke brushed his nose again, and he found what direction the voices were coming from.

  There was no way to tell if they were friendly, but he decided to investigate.

  Soren’s military instincts quickly returned, and he crouched, carefully placing his steps to stay silent. As he moved closer, he began to pick up the distinct words they were saying. The only problem was he couldn’t understand them. The language felt like it could be familiar, but trying to focus on it and understand only made his headache worse.

  After progressing another twenty meters, he saw movement through the trees. A small grouping of tents was pitched in a clearing with two men and a woman sitting around a campfire.

  One man was short and squat with one of the thickest beards he’d ever laid eyes on. He was wearing ballistic armor under a leather coat and had a long gun slung across his back. He held a long pipe in one hand that he was smoking something out of. In one hand, he was smoking a pipe as long as his forearm.

  The others were dressed similarly absent the leather coat, and each had handguns holstered on their hips. They were conversing in proud tones using that strange language that made his head hurt.

  He paused for a moment, deciding if he should approach. There wasn’t really a way to determine if they would be hostile, but it wasn’t like he had many other options, so he decided to try talking with them.

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  He did not get the chance, however.

  A noise to his right caught his attention, and he quickly looked over to see another short man with a thick beard take a step toward him, raising the barrel of a long-gun in Soren's direction. He shouted something in that strange language that Soren guessed was an order to raise his hands.

  Soren complied, but the man was nervous and jumpy.

  A shot rang out, barely missing, and the trunk of a tree next to Soren's head exploded.

  He didn't want to fight them, but he wasn't interested in being gunned down either.

  He ducked, bolting through the trees towards the man’s left side. A second gunblast exploded a tree just after he passed, but before the man could chamber a third, Soren was next to him. Towering over the man, Soren stomped down on his gun, forcing it from his grip. He swung a fist at the man’s head, connecting squarely on the side of his face.

  He wished he’d realized how strong he was.

  The man’s jaw shattered, and his head whipped to the side further than it was meant to, snapping his neck. He slammed face down into the dirt.

  Soren looked down in horror at the corpse, but was snapped back into fight or flight by two shots hitting his left shoulder. He looked up, locked eyes with the taller man from the campfire, and darted left, pushing through the pain.

  He circled as half a dozen more shots rang out, all either missing or hitting trees. When the attacker paused to reload, Soren ducked out to close the distance.

  He’d been wrong about the man reloading.

  Another shot hit his lower right abdomen, but Soren knocked the weapon from his grip before he could shoot again. He slammed an open palm into the man’s torso, trying to incapacitate.

  Ribs cracked, the chest plate bent in, and the entire chest cavity sank inwards. The man crumpled with a dying look of surprise and panic.

  The shorter man screamed, just a couple feet away, and blasted Soren’s left shoulder with a shotgun.

  He had no idea how he was still standing, but Soren responded by taking a single step and kicking—hard. The man was punted like a football, flying 30 feet back and 6 feet into the air before being stopped by a large tree. His lifeless body fell to the ground near the tree’s roots.

  A sound behind him caught his attention and he turned to try to find the source, assuming it was the woman. Instead, a fifth adversary exited from a tent. Soren’s eyes went wide with shock, as the figure standing before him was not human.

  The creature stood almost as tall as Soren even with his newfound height. It had a somewhat human-shaped face with green skin and big black eyes that sat in its skull at an angle. There were two slits for nostrils above a somewhat human-shaped mouth. Skin or some sort of shell ran from its shoulders to the back of its head, like over-exaggerated trap muscles. It wore armor below the belt, but nothing above, like it had been interrupted while getting dressed.

  The most striking feature were its wrists, where long, blade-like appendages grew out, running parallel with its forearms.

  It said something and readied the blades in a fighting stance, but they were interrupted by the woman stepping out from behind the tent. She screamed at the carnage and pointed two handguns at Soren.

  The creature was distracted, so Soren lunged—diving under the blades and driving his momentum into the creature. They rolled back into the tent, and when he sprang back up, Soren was holding onto the creature’s ankle.

  This time Soren intentionally used his strength to swing the alien like a club. He flung it towards where the woman had been, and it sailed through the canvas, catching her off guard. They landed together in a heap with the creature sprawled on top.

  The woman had dropped her gun, and Soren seized it, aiming it where they lay.

  “Enough!” he shouted. “I do not want to fight you!”

  Who knew if they understood him.

  The creature rolled and moved off his ally, watching Soren, but then looked down. Its alien face shifted into unmistakable mortification. One of the wrist-blades had left a deep gash in the woman’s throat, and all she could do was sputter and cough blood.

  It looked back at Soren and roared, sprinting with blades ready.

  He shot it three times in the torso and once in the face before a wrist blade sheared the handgun apart. Somehow, it missed Soren’s hand completely. The creature fell to the ground, coughed twice, and went still.

  A pool of red blood began welling underneath the body, and Soren heard only the fire crackling and his own rapid breathing. He stood frozen, the weapon’s remains still clutched in his fingers. He looked down at his hands, caked in warm alien blood that looked like it could have been human.

  He didn’t feel fear or rage. Not even guilt. It was as if his brain refused to assign meaning.

  But his hands started to shake.

  “I’m in shock,” he muttered. “That’s all. I’m not… I’m not handling this well.” His voice, low and strange in his ears, sounded like someone else had said it.

  Maybe they had.

  With the last adrenaline fading, Soren moved through the ruined camp in a haze. He found a field pack, stuffed it with basic supplies, and recovered a rifle from where the alien’s tent had been.

  He left the bodies where they lay, fleeing deeper into the woods as quickly as possible. He didn’t stop until he found a thicket quiet enough to feel hidden. There, among roots and moss, he laid down beneath a tangle of trees with the stars barely becoming visible above.

  He tried to sleep, but found himself just laying there, struggling to understand what had happened and remember who he’d been. When he had fought Lulu and lost, the year had been 2090. But as he closed his eyes, he could picture only one thing—the computer screen aboard the ship he’d woken up on. In the lower right corner, the current year had been listed:

  9982.

  If you're like me and like to keep track of where the characters are, here's a handy map!

  - Earth to Mandachor: ~8 hexes = ~35 light-years

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