The massive dryfftnaught exploded from under nearly twenty five meters of frost-covered, rocky soil with a sound resembling a thundercrack in a metal bell.  The cyborg craft surged from underground, moving at the rate of a horse’s gallop, knocking aside collapsed buildings, architectural columns and dirt-stained, weather-worn alabaster sculptures with little regard to historical reverence.  Swirling clouds of dust and fragmented debris flew higher than a giraffe’s head as the ship surfaced topside and slowly came to a stop, its engines thrumming percussively.  Waves of intense heat, generated by the friction of prolonged travel through the soil, rolled off the sides of the whale-like burrow-ship, radiating arcs of reflective, mirage-like optical ripples.

Knighted Arch-Inquisitor Purge, inscrutable as ever, greeted the vessel.  He was flanked by a half-dozen of Arvenall Dampiko’s mercenaries.  The ever-present triad of scarlet-armored Pater-guardsmen, each carrying the symbolic segmented lance that signified their authority, retained their posts at his side, awaiting instructions.  The edges of his capacious purple robes fluttered in the stream of hot wind that danced away from the dryfftnaught’s slowly cooling hull.

Purge frowned.  “What’s going on?  Why hasn’t anyone appeared on-deck?  Why isn’t anyone disembarking?”

“This doesn’t feel right, m’lord,” one of Purge’s sentries muttered.

For a moment, the huge vessel sat silent in the valley of the trench it had carved in the ground, until strange, muffled percussive sounds were heard to come from deep in its interior.  The sounds reverberated and grew in volume until the group outside the ship realized it wasn’t just the same noise repeating itself: it was a series of conflicting noises.

 The sound of battle.

 That was when the large, hexagonal external hatch under the front base of the burrow-ship suddenly blew out, tumbling and splintering under the force of the concussion behind it.  A column of blue-black smoke preceded a flash of bright orange sparks and red-tongued flames as a resounding crash accompanied the explosion from that hatch portal.  Purge and his personal guard were knocked to their knees by the blast.  Arvenall Dampiko’s contingent of guards alternately ducked or scattered, looking for cover, as the hatch door disintegrated.

 The Traveler in Red emerged from the maw of the vessel, his arms wrapped around the body of a massive, multiple rotating-barreled, dual-magazined assault rifle.  Ryonne was at his side, kneeling, as she released a volley of superheated, coherent light bursts from a long, pyramidal firearm, targeting different positions in front of and above the Traveler’s field of fire.  Unhesitatingly, he took aim on Purge’s position and let fly a cavalcade of deadly, explosive-tipped metal projectiles…

“Six units have reported in, but my Perimeter-Psych says he’s getting nothing from units two and five,” the grizzled, one-eyed commander of Arvenall Dampiko’s field operations  monitoring force reported to the Warlord.  “It’s not like they are not answering his mental beacon, and not like there’s some kind of interference blocking their collective mental patterns, but more like they have relocated to someplace beyond his extrasensory reach.  They’re no longer here, on-site.”

 “That’s not possible,” Dampiko responded snappishly.

 “Not at first observation, but it is if someone is using The Discipline,” the commander, a soldier named Re’luth-Ki said.  He referred to the use of Magick, which was the Art and Science effecting physical Change to occur in cosmically-conforming inanimate objects and organic matter though ritualistic focus of Will.  Magick was long-forbidden, even more so than the pursuit of rebel machine Tekk, even after the fall of the Emperium by nearly all warlords, sovereigns and imperators.  Its mercenary practitioners kept their knowledge hidden, only revealing themselves to possible clients when there was no other alternative --- or if the promise of remunerative reward was fabulously large.

 “Only the Pilgrim is capable of that and he works for me!”  Dampiko said.

 Re’luth-Ki pursed his lips, hesitant to comment further.  “There are rumors that the Last Princess may be involved with the Upworlders.  Men claim to have seen the Darkest Angel, Nygeia, and her ally The Knight, guiding the otherworld humans across the Forever Plain.”

 “When did they report that?”

 “Nearly a cycle ago,” the commander said.  “But since we had no verification, the unit captains did not want to send the report upstream for your ears.”

 “No.  Nygeia cannot be among us,” Dampiko said.  “There has to be another explanation.”

 And at about that time an explosion shook the necropolis from a direction to the left and behind the Warlord.  The shockwave from the explosion hit them in the chest like a fist.  A handful of the crystal egg-like lamps exploded into sparks as the effects of the explosion shattered stone statuary and darkness lengthened as the artificial luminescence faded.  The Warlord whirled about unsteadily, then jogged over to the stairs that led to an outdoors mezzanine on the building he’d chosen for his perch.  He rustled through his utility kit and raised his bi-ocular, illumination-intensifying spyglass to peer into the distant shadows.

 He didn’t see anything.

 He heard the staccato report of small arms fire and the sound of men screaming.  Changing posture, he turned in that direction and scanned the landscape.  An image came into view…

 There he saw an armored man riding a very large, muscular reptile routing his troops with what looked to be a twin-bladed shatter-sword.  A pair of Upworld soldiers with projectile assault rifles were behind him and were firing upon the Warlord’s men to deadly effect.

 Light flashed to his right-hand side and Dampiko pulled his face away from the night-vision spyglass in time to see a literal bolt of lightning tear through the darkness and strike a small ground force of men below him.  There was no weapon he knew of that could produce such an effect.  It was doubtless Magick.

 Re’luth-Ki had run to the balustrade and was excitedly pointing down into the dark.

 “There!  Right there!” he yelled.  “I saw a woman with some kind of a wand or scepter floating on the air!”

 Dampiko strode over to his field commander’s position…

 A brilliant light and the searing heat from a blossoming fireball, issuing skyward from three stories beneath them, suddenly enveloped the mezzanine.

He could smell smoke in the chill air and he could hear the dull electronic hum of a laser-like particle weapon as it projected a destructive beam across the killzone.  The stone wall only an arm's length to his right emitted brittle popping noises as a swarm of metal projectiles smashed into it.  Chips and slivers of fractured rock flew in all directions.  The sky flickered as a lightning bolt slashed across it to strike a target beyond the range of his vision from behind the gargantuan fallen statue he hid behind.

 Raphael Karamanga couldn't believe the absolute frenzy of violent chaos going on around him.

 Alien warlords.  Alien armies.  Alien zombie killers.  Futuristic Knights mounted on dragons and Princess Super-witches.

 Lunatics, all of them.

 Madness.  All of it.  Madness.  He was one hundred percent certain there was no realistic way he was going to live through being in the middle of a small war.

 The ground shook from yet another explosion, this one closer than any of the others.  He had to move.  He had to run.  He instinctively knew he needed to be anywhere but in the center of this death-trap.

 "Enough, I'm outta here!" he thought.

 Karamanga tightly closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths before finally launching himself into frenzied motion.  He figured if he could move fast enough and stay low, he could avoid being targeted by either side of combatants during the raging conflict.  He ran, heading for an opening in front of a low wall with steps descending into an open clearing that led to the road away from the giant dilapidated cathedral.  He ran...

 Inside of thirty steps he was standing face-to-face with Marshall-Captain Tragg of the vengeful Night Marshal Squadron they'd first encountered at the beach.  Karamanga drew to a stumbling stop that, in his near-hysterical state, felt like it went on forever.  Almost distractedly, Karamanga noticed the S-shaped metal hooks, like those a butcher back on Earth would use only larger, in each of his gnarled fists.

 “Oh, come ON,” he wailed.

 Tragg smiled toothily, an insanely homicidal light behind his eyes.

 Karamanga tried to jerk himself backwards and run in a different direction, but an odd piercing pain paralyzed his trembling legs.  The hooks.  He couldn’t see those hooks in the alien monster’s hands anymore.  He felt an abrupt flood of liquid fire in his abdomen and a strange sense of pressure and he knew, he knew…

 He looked down and could see the meat hooks were buried deep in his gut.

 Blood, blood, look at all that blood and how could he still be conscious and thinking when he was bleeding like a waterfall…

 Tragg laughed at him.

 You’re laughing?  At me?  Laughing at me?  I’ll see you in hell, asshole!

 Karamanga, clenching his teeth and, hissing an unintelligible string of invective at the alien, reached down to the tactical web belt encircling his waist and yanked open a vinyl utility pouch, withdrawing a small metal ball with attached cap and lever-handle.

 He thumbed a toggle on the metal ball’s cap and the safety clip flew off from it, arming the model M68 fragmentation grenade, and he thrust it at Tragg’s ugly, gloating face.

 The world combusted violently into a shattering kaleidoscope of bombastic sound and burgeoning light.