Working an office job was never what I had wanted with my life. 

When I was younger I’d had all these grand aspirations of becoming a famous writer, publishing articles to the biggest newspapers and writing novels that would be read the whole world over. 

That had never really happened. 

My dreams had flickered and sputtered out like the dying flames of a campfire in the depths of the night. 

All of that had led me to walking home through the park after a night checking emails for spelling mistakes at what some would consider the perfect time, and what others would later come to consider the worst. 

As I reached the halfway point through the darkness of the park I was distracted by a sudden bright light illuminating the night sky above me. 

I looked up, expecting to see something along the lines of a police helicopter searching for a criminal in the area. That guess couldn’t have been further from the truth. 

A ball of fire was hurtling down from the heavens above, streaking across the sky in a majestic blaze… and it was headed directly for the park that I was walking through. 

I broke into a sprint as soon as I had seen what was coming, but three years of sitting behind a desk had left me unfit and unprepared to have to run at any degree of speed or for any distance. 

In other words, before I knew it I was bent over with my hands on my knees gasping for breath… and the fireball was still coming. 

I glanced up again. 

It was closer now, much closer, and I fancied that within all the flames I could just about make out flashing lights and pieces of metal. Was a plane crashing? I hadn’t thought I was near any flight paths, planes weren’t something that I saw often in the sky. 

I sucked in one last gasp of air and broke into another sprint, knowing it was futile but not willing to give up on my life, no matter how much I had grown to dislike the humdrum mundanity of my day to day. 

That was when the… thing, whatever it was, hit the ground. 

For a split second, I thought I might have been okay. I felt a jolt as the object impacted the ground, and then nothing… until the blast wave hit. 

A torrent of superheated screaming air whipped me up off my feet, the pressure flipped me through the air end over end until eventually I came crashing down into the trees nearby. 

I hit the trunk of one of the trees so hard I was sure I had broken a rib, or several.

Dazed I looked down at my chest. 

Things were worse than I’d originally assumed. 

A gnarled tree branch was protruding from my flesh and had poked straight through my skin and my shirt and was currently leaking blood all over my front. 

“That’s… Not good…” I croaked, surprisingly calm about the situation that I had been thrust into. 

Shaking, I looked up from the damage that had been done to my chest, each breath I took becoming raspier as my chest cavity filled with blood. 

The park had been almost completely obliterated. 

What had previously been a green field with a path running through the middle was now a burning crater with a strange metallic orb directly in the middle. It looked like a satellite, or perhaps some kind of spaceship. 

Oh well… 

It wasn’t like any of that mattered to me now anyway. Because, in all likelihood, I was about to die. 

I coughed and let out a low groan of pain as the branch in my chest scraped against my internal organs. 

It wasn’t the best way to go, I’d admit that much. But maybe… 

I gasped as something cold latched itself onto my foot and bit down, hard. It was pain unlike that I’d ever felt before, more so even than the tree that had impaled me. 

The icy cold feeling flooded up my leg and down the other, it felt like they had been encased in a block of ice. 

Was this… was this dying? Was this what dying felt like? 

The icy feeling flooded up the rest of my body, up until it reached the place where the branch had pierced my chest. It stopped there and probed the area as if it were… alive… inquisitive. 

I gasped again as the chill consumed the injury. But this… felt different than before. It started off icy and cold and then began to heat up, specifically in the place where I had been injured. The heat increased and increased until it was too hot to bear.

A guttural scream forced its way out of my throat, I felt as if I were being incinerated from the inside out! 

And then it stopped, and the iciness continued to creep its way up my body. 

I screwed my eyes shut as the iciness reached my head. I didn’t think I was dying anymore. I didn’t know what was happening. 

Whatever it was, I didn’t want to see it. 

The icy cold reached the top of my head and… nothing. 

Nothing happened. 

Nothing changed. 

I was still… alive. 

In fact, I was more than alive, I felt better than I’d ever felt before. 

I cracked my right eye open and was greeted by something that looked very similar to the heads up display of a video game. 

There were a dozen readouts for a dozen different things, ranging from light to heavy ordinance to power available. 

And… beyond that, intricate scans of the rest of the world, telling me exactly what things were made of and whether we could take them out. 

I looked down at the rest of my body. The clothes I had been used to had been replaced by a twisting mass of liquid metal. 

Nothing was making any sense.

Just what in the hell was going on here?!