3 Months AOI

After Outworld Invasion

After risking your lives and the lives of everyone in all of reality to fight a dimension super powered, soul stealing warlord Samurai, generally one would expect that the immense piles of shit would stop hitting the fan. Yet somehow, Shao Kahn's death only really seemed to make things worse.

Sonya Blade was a realist. And the reality was…the reality was that everything in the world sucked. America had been the first place hit in the Outworld Invasion. The first portal had opened up in New York City, swiftly followed by Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Within days Shao Kahn's army had but wiped out all resistance.

Sub Zero had led the charge into Outworld. An assassination attempt directly against Shao Kahn himself. She had never known him all that well. All she knew was: he was an assassin for the Lin Kuei, younger brother of another Sub Zero who she had briefly met, shortly before his de-skulling at the hands of Scorpion. She'd met in Outworld, when she was with Jax tracking down what turned out to be Lin Kuei Cyborgs. Then they had encountered that monster called Ermac and, well, let's just say Jax got those cybernetic arms for a reason and leave it at that. She knew that he was tough, as he' d taken Ermac down - after it had utterly destroyed her and Jax - single handedly, and directed her to a portal back to Earth.

Next time they met he'd become a cyborg for the Lin Kuei; against his will, evidently. Jax ""rebooted him and bang, he was on the side of the angels again.

But he was different.

The Sub Zero she'd met before had been…alive. This one was a broken empty shell that wanted nothing more than death.

In the weeks that followed, they had been running guerilla operations throughout the city. Sub Zero happened to stumble upon a Soulnado, and well, she didn't ask any details about it, but he had come back even more jaded. And with a certain necromancer in toe. Needless to say Quan Chi had been surprisingly cooperative; he opened a portal for them. He even mind controlled one of Shao Kahn's assassins into helping. Sub Zero had led the charge, taking Johnny, Jade, Liu Kang and Kabal with him.

They'd cornered Shao Kahn in his Coliseum. Sending the assassin ahead as a distraction and letting her, or, more aptly, it get captured to lull Kahn into a false sense of security. Then they'd pounced. Shao Kahn became dead; very dead.

Apparently there was disintegration involved.

Then everything went to hell. Liu Kang had gone power mad, killed Raiden and became a God. Kitana had ditched everyone. Sub Zero had gone crazy and disappeared into a hole somewhere. And while Kahn's army had stopped trying to conquer Earth they appeared to be more than content ruling America, they hadn't descended into chaos as she had hoped. Apparently someone named Goro had become the new Emperor. She didn't know why their march of conquest had stopped. But she had a sinking feeling it had to do with the armies of zombies, skeletons and demons currently waging war all over Europe.

She had a vague memory of seeing Liu Kang get teleported off to fight someone named Goro.

Hmmm...

Liu Kang was only the tip of the iceberg of weirdness she'd titanic'd her way into. Apparently he was a Shaolin Monk with a great hatred for shirts, possibly the dumbest haircut she' d ever seen, who could shoot fire balls out of his hands. He'd been the one to strike the final blow against Shao Kahn. Before she' d left the " Earthrealm Defenders" the last thing Raiden did was tell them that Kang had gone mad with power and that he was going to go confront him.

Word on the street, that is to say, the idle conversation exchanged between Tarkatan soldiers while their spines were still in one piece, is that Raiden had died and apparently Liu Kang was now a god. Good for him, not so much for Raiden and everyone else on Earth.

She sighed and dropped her head slightly as the wind whipped through her hair. This wasn't her place. She was a soldier, a fighter, a patriot. She wasn't a super human; and all of the fancy tech in the world wouldn't change that. Yet she had fought alongside humans in a cross dimensional war for the safety of all reality. And now she was riding down the highway on her Harley Davidson, under a sky of fire and brimstone as her dead father flew by her side.

Yes of course. On top of everything else, her dead father's soul had escaped the Netherealm; apparently that's where people go when they die. Hell was still real though, but apparently it was more like that New York is to the Netherealm as New Jersey is to Hell. Basically the same place but not quite.

She'd scared herself at how readily she accepted this as fact. 6 months ago she would have bought none of this, other dimensions, ninjas who could control ice and fire, necromancers, all of it was utter bullshit. But she took it, not so much with a grain of salt as with a truck load of it… but…she had taken it.

She'd sacrificed a lot. She was no stranger to sacrifice; she'd sacrificed her chance at a normal life when she chose to track down cybernetic super criminals for a living. Her dad had been her only family. But she'd made a new one with the Special Forces. Now they were all dead, except for Jax. He was now the "Commander in Chief of the Free American Army" or some bull along those lines. Needless to say he was in a position of power he could not handle and was most likely sitting at a desk for extended periods of time. His two worst nightmares.

Then there was Johnny. He'd been on the strike team that had taken out the big boss. But it had done something to him. When he'd got back, it was like someone had stuffed him full of time bombs. Without warning a wave of energy burst from him and obliterated everything within a half mile. Raiden and Nightwolf had sent him off to another dimension to learn how to control his powers; they'd said something about becoming a "Warrior powerful beyond mortal imagining." She hadn't been listening. She missed him. Of all the people she' d fought with against Shao Kahn, aside from Jax, she had gotten closest to Johnny. She'd realized that he was actually a person, not some rich prick. Well he was a rich prick, and he was also a self deluded, overconfident asshole. But he was the kind of overconfident asshole that left people, especially her, with smiles on their faces. He'd been the comic relief.

He'd known how serious everything was and he usually knew when to shut up. He'd continued with the comic relief antics because he knew people needed it. Not most of them though. Kitana, Jade, Raiden, Nightwolf, Liu Kang, Smoke, Sub-Zero. They had fit into all of this perfectly, not an ounce of disbelief. But the real people, Jax, Kabal, and Stryker, her they needed someone to help them ease into it.

She sighed as she entered the final stretch of the ride towards the molten leviathan that had once been New York City, her mind still knee deep in the chaotic trenches of the seemingly unending battle that was her new life.