The trip to the Rift itself was wholly uneventful, which while I kind of expected it, was a bit boring. It was pretty far, father than I recall having travelled in the past for any Rift, something István, who was driving, commented on.

"It seems that they wish for us to be removed as much as possible from support," he observed, not really seeming concerned about this development.

"That's not a problem?" I asked, curious as to what preparations they had made. Well, Viktor had made, anyway. If István had worked with him, it had been outside when they were together, since I figured I'd remember if they had talked about it.

"Indeed it is not," István replied, a bit of a grin sneaking onto his face as he kept his eyes scanning the road, still looking for signs of a potential ambush. I thought it was unlikely. If I was them, I'd wait until Viktor was stabilizing the Rift, or even until he was shoulder deep in it.

It seemed like István was not about to elaborate, and I could forgive him for not being forthcoming about it. While they seemed to trust me, who knows what manner of trickery could be in the truck itself. It wasn't like these plain old transports were particularly well guarded or anything.

We were out in some kind of scrubland. It had a desert feeling to it, but it was pretty clear that in the not too distant past, this area had been some kind of grassland. Only the grass was as dead as the dust, and the bushes nothing more than sticks decorating a rather rocky landscape.

The road gradually got worse as the trip drug on, jolting us around the cab of the truck in a way that quickly got the best of me, making me feel nauseous. If this was some sort of psychological warfare our opponents were waging on us, it was super effective.

On me, at least.

István didn't seem to notice at all. All the jostling might as well have been a relaxing afternoon stroll, for all his expression betrayed. Eventually I closed my eyes and focused on circulating my Streams. Surprisingly, it helped, although I'd be hard pressed to explain why.

Eventually, the tear in reality came into view, signaling the end of the journey. It was very exposed on the top of a rise, so perfectly placed that it made me wonder if the bad guys had created it there on purpose. Surely not, right?

The first truck, the one Viktor was in, screeched to a halt on the far side of the rift. Our truck stopped behind it, but about thirty degrees off straight. There were two more behind us, and both of them imitated our relationship to the first truck. The net result was a half circle of trucks that neatly obscured the view of the area around the base of the Rift from downhill on one side.

I hopped down out of the cab, and the wind coming from the front of the truck slamming the door shut for me. A group of men were unloading containment units and stacking them up in an odd manner. They'd put a big stack near the nose/tail pair of each set of trucks, two deep, then a single stack, four tall, to the right of that.

It took me a while to realize they were building bulwarks. They'd set up everything to give us secured positions to fight back from. At first I wondered why they'd set it up in the direction they did, but I realized after examining the surrounding area more closely - there was a ravine in that direction, and virtually no cover in the other. The Bulwark would work relatively well in either direction, but Viktor anticipated the attack coming from the ravine. The most impressive part of the whole thing was that there had been no communication at all regarding this erosion feature, or the way we aligned everything against it. Everyone had just done their jobs without further instructions.

Watching the men carrying the CUs, I realized they looked just a touch awkward, or out of place, doing it.

Then I realized I didn't recognize any of them, which probably should have been the first thing I noticed. One would think, anyway.

They were a pretty well-built bunch, and seemed to defer to Viktor in a very respectful manner. Honestly, I had no idea where these people had come from. Well, it wasn't like carrying a CU around was that hard - just needed to mind the meter and all that. Despite István's presence, I kind of doubted we'd be doing much appraisal of the Artifacts out in the field.

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Indeed, they hadn't even set a table up to extract the Artifacts from whatever crust the Rift left on them. The whole thing made me wonder if Viktor intended to extract anything at all. At this point if he'd started setting up a cannon or a catapult it wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest. Well, the catapult might, since I had no idea where we'd have been keeping such a thing.

Not to long after I had that though, though, I heard the telltale paper-ripping sound of the Rift fighting Viktor's advances towards anchoring it. Unlike the other day, though, he got this one anchored in record time, as not even thirty seconds had passed before it was stabilized. He set down a second and a third case of anchors next to the first, my only guess being that he could re-stabilize the Rift in case things got to that point.

A couple of the men helped Viktor get into the front-facing shield that he used for Rift Extraction, grunting as they lifted it onto him, where it settled like a stack of bricks.

He turned back around, facing the Rift again. István walked up next to me. "Are you ready for this?"

I looked back at him, surprised to find a big grin on his face. No idea what he thought was so amusing, though. "No." I said, reflecting how I actually felt.

His grin just got wider.

I watched Viktor sink his hand into the Rift.

We'd extracted about two dozen artifacts, and I was surprised with what the runners did with them. They'd run them down and then stack them on top of the stacks. Well, it was more of a brisk walk than a run, these were still unstable balls of anger we're talking about, but away they went. Before long, there was a row of neat little lights lined up around our camp, competing with the midday sun.

It wasn't directly above us thanks to the season, which meant there were patches of shadow from each truck. We were standing in one of them.

Viktor turned back to the Rift, plunging his hand back in. He was at full reach when I heard a keening sound come over the air, a high pitched whine that grew in volume, coming from the far side of the trucks.

"You should get your head down," István said. I was about to ask why when the air split just above us, whooshing overhead as stone spike the size of an arm flew directly at the Rift, and Viktor, who was in the middle of extracting from it. The sound of a high speed collision rang out behind us, as István leaned around me to grab a CU that was leaning up against the side of the truck.

"Time for some fun!" He said, flicking a latch on the side.

Wait, a latch?

Turns out what I had thought was a CU was actually a well-disguised case. István had taken what looked to be a gun out of it, only it had cartoonish dimensions. The barrel was far too big, and the breach looked like you could fit a flowerpot in it. Turned out we had brought a cannon. He racked the action open with a practiced ease.

Then he did something ever crazier, and grabbed a still-hot Artifact directly off one of the CU's. At first I'd thought he'd did it bare-handed, but I felt the flow of Nebula and realized he'd wrapped his hand in a thin layer.

Either way, I felt my heart skip a beat hearing the angry sizzle the Artifact made being touched. And my eyes damn near bugged out of me head when he tossed it rather nonchalantly into that flowerpot space, running Nebula out of his other hand into the grip. The sides of weapon lit up, and I saw the Nebula flowing around the Artifact, suspending it, even as he worked the action to close it. The lights moved forward, flowing through lines and etchings I hadn't noticed, that covered the whole surface of the weapon until it was lit from stock to barrel. We were in the shade, and the light it cast off lit István's face from the underside a little, which would have made him look sinister except there was way too much science puppy showing through with his eyes practically sparkling like that."Let's go!" He said excitedly, leaning around the truck, eyes searching the distance.

I could practically see his tail wag.

A line of black, shiny objects were moving in the distance, kicking up dust. Each one was large, somewhere between a person and the trucks we had come with, although it was hard to tell from this distance. There were at least a dozen of them, although with the dust behind them, there could easily be more. István propped his gun on the tailgate of the transport in front of of us, looking through a sight that had little pairs of sharp ledges with numbers on each side. Realizing what was about to happen, I threw my hands over his ears right as he fired, my brain doubting the almost comical "bloop" noise the weapon made, even as I felt it reverberate through my chest.

The almost white hot artifact blasted out the end in a haze of steam, and swirled through the air a little as it went down range. The bright etchings in the sides of the cannon dimmed as István wrenched it back open, barely sparing a glance at the flight of the first shot as he trapped another Artifact in his Nebula, practically flicking it into place before closing everything up again.

No wonder we didn't have anything to clean and appraise the Artifacts… they were ammunition for this crazy thing István had bought with him.

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