“Netcall, all assets, we are Action, Action, Action. Horus One-One, Voodoo. Stand by for release.”

  An overwhelming amount of radio chatter flooded Lysandra’s in-ear communication system as she sat against the bulkhead of the massive MH-47. There wasn’t much for her to do right now as mission controllers launched their operations and coordinated with all units and team leaders, who made last-minute checks to ensure everyone was clear on their roles.

  “Hey, as soon as we get on the ground, make sure you give it a little more space when we’re MSD…” Lysandra glanced at a PANIC specialized assaulter talking to another who was taking point during entry. “Nate’s gonna blow the door off its fuckin’ hinges.”

  Lysandra turned away and closed her eyes, trying to interpret what was just said into something she could understand. It's been less than a year since she first thrust into this world, but it feels more like her entire thousand-year lifespan. Lysandra couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in that brutal conscription program that turned industry and construction mages into warmages in less than a year.

  The amount of operational knowledge forced into her mind was so vast and intense that she felt like she might explode. Yet, the more she was around it, the easier it became to understand without asking questions like an idiot.

  "Jesus fucking Christ, Lys…" Marcus would always growl at her when she wasn't 'up to speed' during operations.

  The acronym MSD flickered in Lysandra's mind as she sifted through all the possible meanings until one finally clicked. Minimal Safe Distance. The minimum distance you needed to keep from a breaching charge so your brain wouldn’t turn to complete mush, or you wouldn’t get shredded into chunks when the charge detonated.

  It was a simple concept, really. Well, at least once someone took the time to explain it. But Lysandra remembered how several months ago she found herself twiddling her thumbs, standing in the kill house with rain pouring down during a particularly miserable training session. Marcus was berating her like some kind of bushy-eyed idiot because she didn’t know what those three little words were.

  Lysandra felt like a complete and utter fool, humiliated and stripped of every ounce of pride she once had. She'd been a knight, a retainer of House Ithyca, someone who walked past the common, mundane rabble with her head held high after facing down unimaginable monsters that would have sent most of these humans running for their lives.

  And yet, there she was all those days ago.

  She wanted to argue. She tried to tell Marcus that she had fought in thousands of battles before he was even born. She wanted to shout that she knew what she was doing, that she didn't need some human with a lifespan of a gnat explaining combat to her like she was an amateur. But Lysandra swallowed that pride because deep down, she knew he was right. This wasn't her kind of warfare. These weren't her tactics. And if she didn't adapt, she could get someone killed—probably herself.

  So she instead bit her tongue and learned. Goddess, had she learned.

  Every acronym, every procedure, every radio call, and hand signal. She stayed up late reading notes she scribbled in a notebook, which made her eyes cross. She pestered the more patient operators with endless questions, watched footage of previous raids, and practiced with imaginary weapons in her small apartment until she could recite the movements in her sleep.

  It had been completely demoralizing at first. Lysandra had fought Wyverns, tracked the worst kind of criminals and bandits throughout the territories, survived a noble house's collapse, and here she was struggling to understand why they couldn't just kick the damn door down instead of blowing it up with precisely calculated explosive charges.

  But slowly, painfully, it had started to click.

  In her world, combat boiled down to seconds. A spell being cast, gaps being closed, or a potion being thrown. Here, life and death depended on the millisecond, and there was no margin for the slightest error.

  Death can come for you with a twitch of a finger or a pull of a trigger in this goddess-forsaken world. If Lysandra had to explain it, she’d say it’s like a never-ending, fast-paced duel to the death, where you must make decisions based on the slightest twitch of your opponent's wrists. Is it a feint? Are they committing to the blow? Should I parry and risk being grappled? Or should I dodge and try to create distance, hoping I don’t get a blade in my belly?

  Each decision here could be your last in a duel, but that was just a brief burst of violence. Here, it was sustained over long periods, in a much more chaotic fashion, so information came in highly condensed bursts. The phrases and acronyms that Lysandra once thought were nonsensical now became lifesaving, as they allowed her to make quick decisions and maintain speed, surprise, and violence of action.

  But as much as she wanted to complain about her drop in social status, Lysandra didn’t really have much to complain about if she was honest with herself. While this wasn't exactly the job she would have chosen, considering the deception and dishonesty involved. Then again, she was involved in everything except normal circumstances and didn’t quite have a choice.

  The options presented to her had been crystal clear: sit in a cage doing nothing for Goddess knew how long while bureaucrats argued over her legal status, or swear fealty to a new house. Well, not a house exactly—a "Constitution," whatever the hell that was. Some kind of binding document that supposedly governed everything in this land, though she still didn't fully understand how a piece of parchment could command more loyalty than a living lord.

  The choice wasn't tough to make. Sitting idly in some cage while the world moved around her? That was a fate worse than death for someone like Lysandra. So instead, she accepted the offer Ms. Toivonen graciously extended and swore loyalty to a new house. Well… not exactly a house, since Ms. Toivonen was no landed noble, and her new Goddess was rather… unconventional, so her direction wasn’t exactly well-defined.

  At the very least, she was doing something, even if that something felt wrong in ways she couldn't quite articulate.

  “Wraith 1-Actual, Voodoo. Aircraft are departing IP, you are cleared to engage Alpha 0-0-1 and Alpha 0-0-2 the moment you hear rotors.”

  The voice in her earpiece snapped Lysandra out of her thoughts like a bucket of cold water to the face and dragged her back to reality. She blinked and refocused on the cabin around her. That piece of information meant they were committed and likely to be on the ground slugging it with whoever in less than twenty minutes.

  Not that she needed to worry much about most of the assaulters' coordination anyway. If people wanted her to know something, they'd tell her. Her mission set was extremely narrow, almost insultingly so, compared to the complex choreography everyone else was executing. All she had to do was follow behind Grumps, wait for the initial resistance to clear as the assaulters ‘set conditions," and then run in to subdue any arcane users—mages, warlocks, whoever in the infinite hells—by any means necessary.

  Simple. Brutal. Exactly the kind of work she'd done dozens of times before with this new team. Sometimes she’d have to go in with the assaulters, but the target building she’s hitting will be quarantined, while everything else was to be disposed of violently.

  Lysandra leaned back against the helicopter's fuselage, feeling the vibrations travel up her spine as the twin rotors continued their relentless roar overhead. She let her head rest against the cold metal before turning her gaze toward the small window beside her.

  Most of the last-minute changes and impromptu briefings had stopped now. The radio chatter in her ear had shifted from reminder-based briefings to steady, professional communications from pilots and mission controllers doing their jobs. Callsigns she didn't recognize, acronyms that meant nothing to her, altitude adjustments, and heading corrections were delivered in that clipped, monotone voice that all aviators seemed to share.

  She didn't have a damn clue what the fly boys were talking about half the time, and to be honest, she didn’t give a shit. She'd long since stopped trying to decipher it and instead, Lysandra focused on what she could see.

  Which, in this case, were the MH-6 Little Birds flying in formation beside them. Lysandra couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the aircraft’s anti-collision lights flashing rhythmically in the darkness like mechanical fireflies. Red and white strobes cut through the storm, illuminating the skeletal frames of the small helicopters for brief moments before plunging them back into shadow.

  But as captivating as the flashing lights were, what really caught Lysandra’s attention were the poor sons of bitches sitting on the outside benches.

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  She could see the operators crouched between each flash of the strobe, hunched over to protect themselves and probably cursing loudly as they tried to shield themselves from the elements. An amused and sadistic smirk crept across Lysandra's face as she saw just how soaked the operators were, clutching their rifles tightly to their chests and soaked straight through to their skin.

  Sitting out there exposed to the full fury of the storm, wind tearing at their equipment, rain hammering against their helmets and plate carriers, probably freezing their asses off at altitude where the temperature dropped even lower than the miserable cold at ground level.

  A soft chuckle escaped her lips as she pondered the kind of arcane string of profanities they were cycling through. Even though humans in this realm were mundane, their creativity in combining obscenities was unparalleled. It made any spell conjured by an Archmage or Sage seem juvenile.

  Lysandra almost felt bad for them. Almost. These guys gave her more crap than anyone else she worked with. At first, the elf thought they simply disliked her, but it soon became clear that each barb and prank was a sign of affection after seeing how they treated people they truly disliked.

  Enjoying her walls and roof while she still had them, Lysandra’s eyes drifted downward, past the formation of aircraft, toward the ground far below. At first, she couldn't make out much through the rain and darkness—just vague shapes and scattered points of light that marked the outskirts of Birmingham or whatever this city was called. But then something caught her attention, something that stood out against the city’s general darkness like a glowing serpent slithering through the night.

  A crooked line of law enforcement vehicles stretched along the highway for a little over a mile, their emergency lights flashing in a pulsating stream of blue and red. The convoy finally broke out onto the open road, no longer restricted by city streets and traffic, and raced northeastward, in the same direction as Lysandra.

  They were the second wave.

  The clean-up crew. The glory hounds who swoop in after she and the teams finish all the dirty work. Once the shooting stops and the bodies hit the floor, the law eventually arrives in their tactical vehicles, waves their badges and warrants, and slaps zip-ties on whoever's left alive. It’ll probably all end with them standing in front of cameras talking about ‘interagency cooperation’ and ‘protecting American communities from transdimensional threats’ so a few politicians can get their sound bites.

  Bureaucrats would get their metrics, some assistant director would probably get a promotion out of it, and all the Law Enforcement involved would get the good ol’ pat on the back. Meanwhile, Lysandra and everyone else on these helicopters would vanish back into whatever black site they'd crawled out of, their faces never appearing in any report, their names redacted from every document that mattered.

  But that was the job.

  It wasn’t the usual glory or fanfare that Lysandra knew back in her world. Being a shadow in the night irked and frustrated her, but this was her life now. She was no longer a knight.

  Lysandra watched the convoy for a few more moments, tracking its progress along the highway as it sped northeast toward Little River Canyon National Park. The flashing lights looked almost festive from this altitude, like some kind of macabre parade celebrating violence that hadn't even taken place yet.

  It made her idly wonder what life would be like in a few years once this world's technology and culture eventually spread out of the rift and into her realm. Even as a relative layman, Lysandra understood how pervasive it would become.

  The moment technology made its way through the rift, it would bring entertainment media along with it. It would spread like a plague, completely consuming entire peoples and societies that obsess over such things.

  It was inevitable.

  However, this would also become a two-way street with the influx of the arcane and all the dangers it brought. Lysandra didn’t know much about the local culture, but she could see all the issues that would surface soon.

  The Fae’s Seelie and Unseelie courts would be unavoidable, given her current Goddess’s presence here. More interestingly, Lysandra thought about the Holy Dominion and the very strange parallels she saw with the god these humans prayed to.

  A bitter smirk tugged at the corner of Lysandra's mouth. She had a complicated history with the Dominion, but she was going to have to dwell on that later, because out of her peripheral vision, something caught her attention.

  Just outside, Lysandra watched as the flashing anti-collision lights on the Little Birds suddenly winked out of existence as it went dark. One by one, every aircraft in the formation killed their external lights, snuffing out the strobes like candles. They were flying dark now. No lights. No strobes. Nothing that would give away their position to anyone on the ground who might be watching.

  This was it.

  Lysandra felt something shift in her chest—not quite fear, not quite excitement, but something in between. That familiar pre-combat tension that settled into your gut when you knew that you were going into the shit and there was no turning back. Her hand drifted down to the rifle resting across her lap, fingers brushing against the familiar contours of the weapon. There was already a round chambered, the safety was on, the magazine was properly seated…

  Everything was exactly where it needed to be.

  As she looked around, Lysandra noticed that everyone else had the same change in demeanor. The jokes and banter stopped, and her team grew quiet as they became a study in contrasts. To her right, Bishop was pressed against the hull, calmly checking his .300 Blackout magazines to ensure they were seated properly. To her left, Grump, the seven-foot-tall orc, sat near the ramp on the floor with his massive ballistic shield and demolition sledgehammer steamed between his legs.

  The orc's massive, granite-gray frame was draped in Black Multicam, looking like a statue carved from tactical gear. He wore no mask; none fit him. Instead, he had to rely on the sheer hardiness of his orc physiology to deal with the CS gas that was going to be spewing all over the place.

  Suddenly, the troop commander's voice cut through the headset's encrypted channel as he announced a last-minute mission change. "Net call. Be advised, situation in AO Dominion has changed. Intel indicates a high-value transport leaving the area. We’re shifting priorities from Objective Baron."

  A wave of sharp, terse acknowledgments followed the abrupt shift. Lysandra watched Grump look up from the floor, his massive brow furrowing in confusion, while everyone in the mixed specialized team of defectors and hand-picked paramilitary officers—the only people insane or skilled enough to handle the unconventional threats—looked down at their End User Devices (EUDs).

  The entire mission was changing on the fly.

  "Dancer Two-One and Dancer Two-Two will move, shoot past your objectives, head further west, and interdict the vehicle with said HVTs. You’re cleared hot on all occupants. Don’t take any chances."

  Lysandra's eyes once again scanned the cabin, observing as the human operators immediately buried their faces in their devices. She watched thumbs vigorously swipe across the glowing screens as new mission data flooded in. Maps shifted, waypoints updated, and routes recalculated as the mission evolved in real time.

  But none of the more fantastical elements in her unit looked down at their devices.

  Including herself.

  Kaeth, a Sun Elf mage and outright bastard, sat there with the same detached calm he always carried. It was as if sudden mission changes were beneath his concern; then again, Lysandra likely viewed them the same. And then there was Grumps. The massive orc certainly didn’t care a single bit, since he hadn't moved from that spot at the ramp. He just sat there with his demolition sledgehammer and ballistic shield, looking like a statue carved from granite and bad intentions.

  Poor guy couldn't even read his own name, but they didn't really need him to. What they needed was seven feet and four hundred pounds of muscle that could smash through walls, soak up punishment that would drop a normal human, and either intimidate or simply shut down anyone stupid enough not to raise their hand in surrender.

  Reading mission updates on a touch screen? That was someone else's job.

  Everyone who worked with or was part of the elite unit they were rolling with—former CAG, DEVGRU, or 24STS operators who had been poached into PANIC—absorbed the new data with the efficiency that comes from years of being in the field under JSOC.

  "Dancer One-Three, abandon your targets and instead hit Objective Earl and augment Wraith infil.” The troop commander's voice continued in a calm, professional tone despite completely rearranging their assault plan mid-flight. “Dancer Two-Two, you will provide overwatch on the Villains at Objective Duke and land on the roof."

  A brief pause lingered as the troop commander let everyone absorb the new information before he finally got to the part that everyone had been expecting since the beginning.

  "Be advised, we are operating without air support over this objective, so Wraith is going to open up this play with a little surprise."

  It was all information they already knew anyway. The lawyers and politicians had made damn sure there wouldn't be any gunships, no AC-130s circling overhead with their cannons ready to turn the compound into a parking lot, no AH-64 Apaches waiting in the wings to provide overwatch or save their ass if things went catastrophically wrong. Just the operators, their small arms, and whatever bullshit they could fit in their packs.

  They all knew they weren't getting any air elements over this target and they already understood the targets were going to be mobile. That was exactly why two Littlebirds were now being rerouted to intercept the vehicle before it could scatter into the Alabama wilderness. They had planned for every contingency and run through every scenario during their six days of rehearsals while the bureaucrats argued over authorizations.

  As the troop commander went on and on about adjusted objectives, patrol routes, and updated timing sequences, Lysandra found herself sinking back into her thoughts. The mission hadn't changed for her, and it probably never would. She was still going in with Grumps and her assaulters, still waiting for her target building to be isolated and contained, and she would still be responsible for subduing any arcane users before they could turn the raid into a shitshow.

  If that changed, they'd be very vocal about it. Until then, she could tune out the tactical minutiae and—

  "We are going nape of the earth. Stand by for descent."

  The pilot's voice cut through her wandering thoughts, and before Lysandra could even remember what ‘nape of the earth’ meant, she felt it.

  A sharp, stomach-dropping sensation of weightlessness as the MH-47 Chinook suddenly pitched forward and dove.