"Owww," I said, rubbing my eyes. Next to me, István had been smart enough to look away. Even then, he was still blinking.

"Well, I've not seen that before either." He said, looking out into the battlefield. I followed his eyes, and saw a landscape peppered with glowing spots.

Focusing on the nearest one, I saw that it was in fact narrow hole or perhaps a crater with steep walls. The edges glowed with the searing heat of molten glass.

"It seems you accidentally created some form of a shotgun," István said, putting his thumb and forefinger on his chin, and his other hand under his elbow. It was a decidedly 'thinking man's' pose, and I couldn't help but admire how well it suited him.

There were only two giant beetle-things out in the field left moving, and they seemed to be having problems. Each was moving in an unusual manner, one was heading away from us in a straight line, but backing up, and the other was walking round in a small circle, which was stirring up a cloud of dust. Both had remnants of the damage I'd caused on their shell somewhere, as a constellation of small holes.

I suddenly had a sinking realization.

"Viktor was out there!" I shouted at István. He seemed surprised at the volume I made, but again unfazed at the proclamation itself.

"Viktor will be fine," he said dismissively, still staring out at the field in thought.

I heard a noise to my left, then a familiar voice, "What was that about me?"

"See?" István said.

"Oh," I replied, unsure where these two got all their confidence from. While the fight had temporarily went quiet, we'd been shooting at these… things just recently, and neither seemed that concerned about any of it.

Well, Viktor had a big frown on his face. Seeing it made me worried that he was angry at me for almost melting holes in him on accident.

"Now I am behind again…" I heard him mutter to himself.

He was annoyed I'd killed more bugs than him. Cause of course he was.

I wasn't really sure how to feel about that - either happy my boss wasn't angry at me, or concerned about what world-ending event it'd take to make him care about something.

Well, he'd once punched a family member out for breaking a CU, so there was that. But at the same time I could totally see him using one as a baseball bat. Maybe the line was wasting his money by not using it to hit someone in the face really hard.

That seemed about right.

Just as I was going down this weird rabbit hole in my head, I heard some scraping noises to my left, out where all the smokey bits and 'bug' corpses were. I saw the previously stationary body of one of the beetles begin to move around, before one of the wings lifted. When I saw what happened next, I was wondering if I was hallucinating from a lack of water.

I rubbed my eyes, but it stayed the same. A whole-ass man just crawled out of the back of one of the beetle things.

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"It appears that those are not biological. I was wondering how they had managed to apply a Seal to a biological life-form like that. I am pretty sure you could apply one to yourself because you would have a living subject…" István trailed off, and Viktor's meaty hand engulfed his shoulder.

"Less thinking, more shooting," Viktor said to him, which seemed to snap him out of it.

"Right." He pointed his mortar down range and fired, almost without aiming. That said, even with his shooting from the hip, the round tracked fairly true, impacting just to the left of the enemy that had just escaped from his motionless mechanical contraption.

At the very last second, I saw him raise a hand and a brief shimmer of light appear, diverting part of the explosion upward even as the shimmer shattered, rendering him staggering back towards his odd former conveyance.

"They have barriers," István observed.

"Sure they do," Viktor said, thrusting forward in a massive movement that looked like a cross between a jump and a large stride. The enemy who'd just had his head rattled by István was still shaking it off when he became the victim of vehicular homicide courtesy of Viktor's oversized fist hitting his face like one of our transport trucks.

He then proceeded to run about the debris of a battlefield, tearing open any remaining beetle mechs like a can opener and pummeling any signs of movement until a thick smoke was trailing him, around banner making it exceedingly easy to see where he was.

By the time he started to make his way back to us, he was huffing and puffing. And staring at his hands, moving the fingers back and forth. At first I thought he might have injured them.

But as he got closer I could see he was counting on his big ol' sausage fingers. Sure enough…

"I win," he said with a smile as big as the rest of him.

"Yes, yes you did." I wasn't about to contest him. Giant man plus big punch equals Viktor Wins in pretty much any form of math I was aware of, since I got the vibe I might get to experience the 'big punch' part if I argued too much. He did seem extra happy to see me admit it though.

Maybe he was the muscle-brained mutt to István's science puppy. Who knows?

"So is that it then?" I asked.

"Well, yes. But also no." István said, looking around. By this point, some of the other men were gathering around, looking for orders.

"Meaning?" I was starting to feel like a writer trying to move the plot forward around a bunch of people lost in their own little worlds.

István pointed at the trucks. The same ones that had been bifurcated by the beam from the one beetle mech. Probably a good thing that only one of the 'pilots' had the appropriate Mote to make that nastiness work. "They ruined all our transportation."

"Oh, so what now?" I asked.

It was Viktor that answered. But considering the contents, I shouldn't have been surprised, it was very on-brand.

"We find theirs."

We wound up leaving the rest of the group behind to secure the original rift location. I originally thought that we'd consider continuing the extraction, but István had examined it after the fight and determined that it had been destabilized somehow.

He wasn't exactly sure what had happened to it, and I couldn't see any difference, so I decided to just trust his prior knowledge on the subject. Viktor really didn't seem to care - which was odd, considering that he'd just lost a half-dozen transport trucks.

Which I guess made sense, he seemed excited to go out and 'tactically acquire' some more, as István so succinctly put it. So I found myself out in the arid landscape, walking with two men who were essentially opposite ends of the physical spectrum. They kept up a banter about the battle, seemingly talking cross-purposes with each other as Viktor was going on about hitting things and István was analyzing what Viktor told him and relaying his thoughts.

It was a little like sitting in a crowded space while different groups of people talked to each other, and to be quite honest, it just made my head hurt.

The rest of me kind of hurt, too. I felt like I'd overexerted myself, which seemed weird as I hadn't really done much. Either way, all my muscles were sore, which made walking a pain. So I trudged along behind my dueling bosses as we picked our way across the landscape, following the 'footprints' of the beetles as it were to figure out where they came from. Surely they must have gotten here somehow.

About half an hour later we came to an abrupt stop. The marks we were tracking just ended. The sun was starting to get low in the sky, and I was hungry and tired.

It was going to be a fun evening.

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