The darkness was beyond suffocating. It wrapped around me so tightly that I couldn’t even see beyond my elbows if I stretched my arms out all the way. The only light visible in the… wherever I was… were tiny motes of light dancing in the distance. They flickered into being and fluttered down from somewhere above to somewhere deep below where they were snuffed out. The motes of light were the only reason I could see the two creatures before me: creatures that made my head ache and my heart pound like a jackhammer in my chest. They were nothing more than silhouettes, a darkness so deep it was darker even than the black that made up my surroundings. The purest dark. If I looked at them for too long I could imagine my sanity slipping away into a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportion. One of the things drew closer and, somehow, even though I could barely see myself in the dark I could distinctly see what looked like a giant figure shrouded in a hooded cloak. “Now then, that is most u

I ripped my hand away from the shelf and practically flipped myself out of bed. [Oi! Chill out human, it’s like you’ve never had a neurolinked hyperspatial artificial intelligence hotwired into your consciousness before,] the voice in my head said snarkily. “A what?!” I squawked, I’d thought taking my hand off of the shelf would cut off the connection with whatever the thing had been speaking in my head was. Clearly, that wasn’t the case. [Oh great, he’s as dense as he is weird,] The AI said, [Long story short, I’m the thing that’s going to keep you from getting killed now that you’re in this universe. And uh, yeah, obviously I have access to your memories so I know all about what’s happened to you. Properly weird situation you have going on here.]“So… you’ve given me like… powers, or something?” I asked, my heart rate was already returning to normal. I was in a super advanced sci-fi world, there was no telling what strange innovations I was going to come across. I was going to h

As I ate the AI that had taken residence in my head explained the positives and the negatives of my situation, and there definitely were both at play. The biggest, and worst, thing was that the AI units that everyone in the GDC were equipped with had never been designed to deal with the sheer amount of energy that the creatures from the Space Between had granted me with. That meant that, for a long while, I wouldn’t be able to access the greater portion of my power. If we were to take off all the limiters and go full force without a care in the world it’d be like taking the pin out of a grenade… literally. I’d physically explode in a shower of magical energy that would probably be big enough to wipe out a large star system with some power left over to wipe out an entire galactic sector. In other words, it would be pretty bad. The second thing was that using mana and magic was, believe it or not, a fine and delicate art. Sure having boundless power was all well and good if all yo

The pressure from the squeezing hand of the mecha was immense, but I quickly realised that it was nothing that my newly buffed body could handle. The robot was just a little bit too weak to squeeze me hard enough to do any real damage. While that was the case, sitting in the palm of the mecha’s hand wasn’t exactly going to win me many points with whoever was watching. I’d planned to put on a show, and that was still my goal. I took a deep breath and began to push back against the colossal grip of the robot. For a moment nothing happened, our power was seemingly matched, but then inch by inch it was clear that I was breaking my way free of the thing's grasp. Before I could break my way free completely the robot took things into its own hands. It slammed me down into the ground as hard as it could. The chairs that had been in the way were smushed into the ground and I was buried in a pile of dust and rubble, the ground cratered away beneath me. The robot stared down at me triumpha

The atmosphere in the coliseum was electric and I couldn’t help but find myself swept up in it.Looking around and grinning up at all the cheering alien faces, it felt like I was somewhere I truly belonged. “We’ve got a few more initiates than usual this time around,” The woman on the screen said, drawing my attention back to her, “But I’m sure a replay of what exactly went down out there can explain exactly what happened!” The holographic screen flickered and all of a sudden instead of showing the girl it was showing me, moments before I began fighting the mecha. I barely recognised myself. In the footage, you could actually see the power crackling off my body in the moments before I launched myself toward the giant mecha. Lightning trailed after me as I soared through the air, only to be gripped by the mecha’s hand. But what had felt like an eternity of me being squeezed by the mechanical monster was actually only a few seconds in the footage. When the mecha threw me out of i