The ruined city of Oakhaven was completely dark. High above the broken buildings, the sky was a terrifying painting of dark purple clouds and golden lightning. The giant, broken egg of the dead moon hung in the air. The Overlord’s black pyramid was gone, but the heavy, evil magic still pushed down on the world.Inside the broken city hall, Commander Oliver stood alone in the dark. He looked at his right arm.He did not wear his heavy combat glove anymore. He could not wear it. The black Wraithborn metal had grown too thick. The dark magic from the alien coin had eaten away his human flesh. The smooth, pitch-black metal now covered his hand, his wrist, his forearm, and his elbow. It stopped just below his shoulder.Tiny, glowing purple veins pulsed inside the metal. Thump. Thump. Thump. It beat in perfect time with his human heart.Oliver raised the heavy black metal arm. He did not feel pain anymore. The pain had been replaced by a cold, terrible numbness. He closed his metallic fin

"Twelve hours," Oliver whispered. He looked at the blue holographic map. He looked at the tiny green dots of Sergeant Miller and the Ghost Squad hiding in the subway."Lira," Oliver said. He turned to the pale ghost. "If the Overlord is planting anchors across the planet, he must have a central control node. A place where the magic connects. Where is it?"Lira pointed her white finger at the map.She did not point at the city. She did not point at the deep core where the vault was.She pointed at a dark, empty space on the map, about fifty miles outside the city walls. It was a place called the Black Forest. It was a dense, dead woods filled with petrified trees and thick, poisonous purple fog."The central node is there," Lira said. "It is a Wraithborn Spire. A giant tower made of pure dark magic. The Overlord is building it right now. When the tower is complete, he will use it to pull the planet down."Oliver analyzed the location.Variable A: Distance to target is fifty miles.Vari

Oliver did not wait for Miller to answer. He walked to the edge of the glowing, jagged crack in the earth. He looked down.Two hundred feet below, he saw the secondary Rift corridor. It looked like a giant, glowing blue glass pipe buried in the dirt. But the blue glass was heavily cracked. Huge chunks of the ceiling were falling inward.Crawling all over the outside of the glass pipe were horrible monsters. They were Rift-Corruptors. They looked like giant, fat, glowing purple leeches with hundreds of tiny, sharp legs. They had round mouths filled with spinning teeth. They were biting the magical glass, eating the blue energy.Inside the broken glass pipe, Oliver saw a heavy human transport truck. It had crashed into a fallen piece of the ceiling.Oliver stepped off the edge of the cliff. He fell straight down into the glowing crack.The wind rushed past his helmet. He fell incredibly fast. He did not scream. He did not wave his arms. He held his body perfectly straight like a diving

Oliver reached out with his black metal hand. He aimed it straight up at the falling ceiling.He did not use a machine. He did not use a gun. He used the raw, terrible magic that was slowly eating his humanity.Oliver closed his eyes. He pictured the math of gravity. He pictured the exact weight of the falling dirt. He pictured the kinetic force required to stop it. He forced the purple magic to obey his logic.A massive, invisible pillar of dark energy shot out of Oliver’s metal hand. It hit the falling glass and dirt.The ceiling stopped falling.Oliver was physically holding up the entire tunnel with one hand.The pressure was unimaginable. Oliver’s boots sank two inches into the solid blue glass floor. The muscles in his human legs screamed in agony. His human bones felt like they were going to snap. Blood poured from his nose and ears, dripping down his chin. But his black metal arm did not bend. It held the weight of a mountain."Lira," Oliver whispered through his bloody teeth

"How do we sting a god?" Miller asked."By destroying his eyes and ears," Oliver said. "The Overlord will send advanced scouts through the Rift to secure the landing zone around this Spire. I am going to engage those scouts. I will need you to coordinate the city defenses. Do not fire your heavy weapons unless I give the order. We must hide our true strength.""Understood, Commander," Miller said. "Ghost Squad is ready. We trust your math."Oliver turned off the radio. He looked at Lira. The pale ghost was shaking her head slowly."You are crazy, Oliver," Lira said softly. "You are treating the end of the world like a game of chess. You are one man standing in a dead forest. You cannot fight what is coming through that signal.""I do not need to fight it all at once," Oliver said. He squeezed the black coin in his hand. "I just need to fight the pieces that step onto my board."Suddenly, the black coin flashed with a blinding, bright red light.BZZZZT!The air in the Black Forest twis