Restless waters of the Arentz Sea clashed with an islet chain in an endless attempt to erase the landmass from existence. The result of this timeless standstill was known as the Schweiglands: a southwestern territory of Kriemreich. Rocky beaches teemed with moss, lichen, and the loose strands of seaweed tossed by the ocean. Inland were bare rock, dotted by small tree clumps, stunted after drawing much of their strength to sprout from unforgiving earth.

  A little farther beyond was a strange sight: a high wall that reflected the sea. Sunlight broke into the colors of the spectrum as it tried to grasp the anomaly. How an empty, uninhabited landscape possessed such a phenomenon was a question yet to be asked.

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  An aging, yet firm-framed man, walked into the grounds of an ornate, yet empty, tower. Only an elevator shaft stood at the center, flanked by wooden boxes arranged as makeshift desks. A loud breath of air escaped his nose, looking at the men sitting while halfway asleep; they were expected to spring into action in case any incident arose, though. At least the boxes could serve as barricades in case the tower was compromised.

  He had to get his hands on work soon. An articulated limb was drawn from his laboratory coat pocket, replacing the three-pronged hook that served as his left hand. A jolt surged up his shoulder: sharp, almost electric — and he grinned. The connection was good.

  "Finally. With the additional generators, energy reaching up to the First Tier of Vis should be no problem..."

  Irregular clanking, followed by the slamming of metal, confirmed the elevator's arrival. He pocketed his hook and raked a hand through his wispy, iron-gray hair, flattening it in one swift motion. He entered the car, waited for the door to close, and looked outside.

  At the highest point in the sky was the sun, and the sea below kept hammering at the cliffs, crashing and whipping at the compound walls, adding more chaos to the spectral layer with founts of rising seawater. Black barrels of nearby coastal artillery placements gleamed; the guns pointed at the watery expanse presented an aura of vigilance. They were also a perfect contrast to the armed men who leaned, yawned, and loitered on the battlements. A necessary nuisance, he thought: they were fighting men, after all. To them, this was another job at a place far from the Empire's prying eyes.

  The ancestors might have intended to leave everything as questions, but on this site, with him overlooking it all, this knowledge-seeker stood to triumph over them. From working at an undisclosed location to standing tall with the world paying him reverence.

  Shudders and shakes were felt in the elevator's ascent. Through the reinforced window, the man watched the Arentz Sea smash itself against the island's rocky teeth. An endless, futile assault. He respected the ocean's persistence, but it was nothing compared to his own.

  The elevator clanked to a halt and hissed open. He stepped out. His presence alerted a pair of riflemen guarding the hallway; their faces twisted in confusion: should they nod or extend a salute? It led to half-raised hands and almost shaking heads. Who recruited these hooligans, the tower's master thought. The door to an inner chamber opened with a heavy metallic bang. A wide working area appeared before him; lights from the ovoid ceiling revealed similarly dressed individuals without time to even look at each other.

  A small group of people worked from one point to another, bees tending to the many devices on the sides of the chamber. The newly arrived man traced a small web of translucent cables laid out on the floor. These cables led to the backs of large, bulky rectangular machines with arrays of buttons, levers, dials, and gauges on their faces. He looked at a set of diodes; more than a third of them were inert.

  "The power is not yet connected," he snapped, his eyes tracing the inert, translucent cables on the floor. "What is taking them so long?"

  It had to be the new power layout. The tower had to be rewired to handle the new load without compromising the interconnected, energy-hungry crystalline installations of the defensive layer, but the delay was galling. The risks climbed higher with every second.

  He checked the watch in his coat pocket. Ten minutes had passed since the power was supposed to be flowing to the eighth-floor machinery. He held tighter on his timepiece and slid it back to his coat when he noticed faint blue currents passing through the semitransparent cables.

  "Doctor, we are ready." Another man, also in white laboratory attire, tapped him on the shoulder.

  This elevator passenger, the overseer of this experiment, promptly nodded before raising his voice for the rest of the personnel to hear.

  "Positions, everyone. We begin the process."

  He noticed that the chamber had become 'livelier'; green, cyan, and orange lights were seen on the graphs, charts, and gauges of the machinery. A tolerable brightness has taken over the dim white of the ceiling lamps. He went deeper inside the workplace, seeing the stern faces of many men and women working on numerous machines that were attached to the chamber walls.

  Five metal rings were embedded in the middle of the floor, staring at a ceiling that mounted a deep, dark orb at the center with downward-pointing needles on four sides. Faint figures of men and women were looking at the centrally placed machines while working on consoles at the same time.

  "And now, it is time to test if the theory is right. We should be able to complete the process with proper calculations."

  "Course energy on all filaments. Start the power outflow at sixty-five percent."

  His voice boomed across the room, and the other personnel began working on their machinery with no question. One of his aides pushed up a green lever; a turbine-like device not far from the man began to hum.

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  "The Target energy output will be met in thirty-five seconds," said a random low voice from the left corner. The onion dome of another mechanism started to spin, gradually picking up power until its grooves were no longer visible.

  "Output at sixty-five percent in three... two... one..."

  "That will be enough, Mister Krantz. Lower the medium sphere!" The research leader raised his left arm. A gunmetal-colored hand connected to a steely appendage peeked out of his sleeve. He had to raise his voice to be heard amidst the growing buzz, whirr, and screech of the room.

  Another assistant flicked a switch on his console, and this was reciprocated by eight clicks from above before the ceiling-mounted black ball began to descend. Clacks and cranks were done by other assistants from their consoles, causing a surge of blue energy to course through four cables that led to the downcast rods. These crystalline apparatuses gave out a faint purple light; their glow intensified with more energy that was passed to them.

  Purple light emanated from the four energy-packed rods, competing with the chamber lights for space, giving the team the signal to move them closer to the black sphere. Whizzing sounds made by the rods' moving receptacles were distancing from the chamber operators and stopped when their tips touched the ball at the center. The energy coursed to the obsidian ball, draining the purple glow out of the crystal rods until it manifested on the orb's surface in the form of a small swirling aurora. Seven colors that came from the infusion merged into one circle of pure whiteness that was slowly occupying the sphere's space with each passing moment.

  Goggles were worn the moment the light was too much for the naked eye to stare at. The solid shape lost form, bursting into a wave that drowned the room in white. This brightness joined with the sun after two minutes, leaving a perfectly dark wound floating in the middle of the chamber. It was an umbral streak bearing enough width for a man to go through. None of them could see anything inside the tear, but the team did not have the foolish curiosity to go anywhere near it.

  "Send a probe to check, perhaps, Doctor? Maybe we should wait until this... stops twitching?" Freckle-faced Krantz approached the metal-armed leader while raking his hair with his hand, which did not help to fix the top of his head.

  "No need for that yet." The group leader gazed at the artificial dimensional wound his team had created. "We are yet to see what stirs from the other side."

  He was right: the dark line was being contorted by something. Ripples formed at first, followed by a large, four-fingered arm shooting out of the rip. Its palm slammed on the floor and shook the chamber; hard, crystalline skin glinted in its frantic search for something to grip. Krantz and the rest no longer stood in place and moved near the exit when a second arm appeared and swung into space. Both hands gripped the floor; the creature then had the strength to pull itself out of the void completely. It banged on the ceiling and crushed the mounted instruments; the mangled and broken devices that once held the energized crystal rods sent sparks and burnt metal ash across the floor.

  What appeared before them was a humanoid, or at least, a creature that could stand on two legs. Its skin shared the orange-redness of adobe; its blocky head sported ruby-like eyes. The monster roared upon seeing the tower’s master and his now frantic team that rushed to the chamber exit; the sound of its cry was identical to one screaming through a long steel pipe. Its agitation worsened when it could not stand straight; the room only allowed two-thirds of its four-meter frame. Five men, one with a sword and the rest with rifles, passed through the exiting workers. Rounds were chambered; muzzles were aimed at the otherworldly behemoth.

  "Do not shoot. We do not know how it will react to bullets,” the leader commanded, his right arm set on one of the rifle muzzles. The guards reacted accordingly and took a step back.

  After seeing that the puny beings did nothing but stand in their presence, the creature's roar echoed as it swiped — the sheer force forcing the men to shield their faces. Its eyes followed the light coming out of the chamber, and it rammed its body through the wall, where it plummeted to the ground. They were spared from a grisly death, but the monster left the place in ruin; sunlight entered the chamber, highlighting the remains of machines that got in the way of the creature's escape.

  The mild quake and the loud bellowing of its source alarmed the guards outside the tower. Bullets were instantly rained on the massive being: none of them being more than a source of irritation. A brigand at the battlements aimed its handheld cannon at the beast and struck its head. The missile exploded on impact and made the giant kneel, but the hit achieved nothing but the creature's first taste of pain from the little beings that littered the place. Heavy limbs tried to scoop the smoke away as its legs dug into the ground. It did not like what it felt, whether heat or pain; the creature began its desperate dash away from the place.

  Sounds of crushed objects, cries of pain, and gunfire greeted the leader's ears after descending from the eighth floor. He was no longer with the five who had first seen the rampaging beast that plowed anyone in its path with its massive build. On his right hand was a crude, crown-like implement made of flexible metal; a red gem was fixed on one of its triangular points. Six uniformed men were with him; each carried a long gun-type weapon attached to a metal backpack. The metal-armed leader approached one of the squad heads.

  "Order the men not to waste bullets on the beast." The tower’s master spoke and shook his head; there was no point firing at a creature that ignored the pelting of metal at it. He then followed the enraged giant in casual steps, watching his six guards run ahead of him.

  At the fortress' western wall was where the men cornered the creature, where it roared at its would-be attackers. All six of the uniformed gunners discharged their weapons at the creature; harpoons with four-pronged claw heads speared the target on its arms, legs, chest, and head. The huge beast ignored the metal implements that struck it until jagged currents of energy appeared on the shafts connected to cables attached to the gunmen's backpack devices.

  The monster howled — a raw, metallic cry — but its body didn't blister, didn't crack. Whatever it was made of, it was built to endure. Its body wobbled twice before its knees lost balance, and the giant fell sideways to the ground.

  Emerging from the protective screen of his armed guards, the research leader secured the steel crown on the disabled being, after which he pulled up his left sleeve to reveal a compartment on the artificial arm's wrist. He emptied two vials' worth of a strange red fluid on a fine-pointed syringe, unloading all its contents on the monster's left temple. Somehow, the crown's gem gave off a red glow after the serum was injected.

  "Its mass should make it a worthy specimen. Let no one approach the creature."

  He looked at the plowed path and a few streams of blood that came from the men who were foolish enough to underestimate the giant's strength. Broken and displaced crates were scattered on the central grounds. Above everyone else was the cloaking orb that continued generating the invisibility field set on the fortress boundaries. At least the damage was minimal, he thought to himself. It would take twenty minutes before the serum entered the creature's brain and allowed the crown to take control of its entire body.

  He had to be content with this small circle of people witnessing these starting steps. The world would have to wait. Whether this era marveled or feared this feat, he was far from done.