You know what they say: if you're going to f*** up, you best get it out of the way early!

~Alex Mason, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

My shoulders were heaving in anger as I stared at the window once more. Cobalt didn't understand my situation at all. He didn't know what I'd been through, and what I'd lost, and where I was standing now. And yet I would never be able to see exactly what the reaction was from my interrogator. Never. And that was what made me angry.

"You'll never know what it's like to be me! You probably have never worked in the field, and you're just being fed information and questions to ask me like some moron. Nobody cares about the truth anymore, everything is a lie. Just because I was gone doesn't mean that you can't trust me," I protested, getting more and more frustrated. Was this all the rest of my life was going to be, trapped here and protesting to some guy behind a wall?

I forced myself to calm down. There was some effort in trying to self-realize that trying to fight my case by yelling at my interrogators wasn't going to cut it. Once my nerves were gone, I lifted the chair up from the ground and propped it back up against the table. Then I sat down in it, collected my thoughts, and breathed slowly. I was going to have to be as calm as possible if I wanted to somehow escape this room, legally or not.

"Are you done with your spectacle?" Cobalt asked, his voice as static as always. The electricity in it made it almost sound like he was speaking through a sheet of iron, making the consonants metallic. It was weird, not like any voice amplifier that I had ever heard before. Even amidst my thoughts, though, I bowed my head in response. "Yes."

"Then we can continue. If we're to search your entire memory, then we'll have to go over everything important. I don't care what we have to do, but we need to spark your memory so that you can figure out where the Enderdragon is. We need you to remember the folder's contents. You have to, Hawkeye," Cobalt continued. I bit my lip, now out of habit because of nervousness. I didn't like going through my memories vigorously. It made me feel self-conscious, and that was something that I really didn't like.

There was no point in trying to persuade him that I really didn't know anything about the Enderdragon's whereabouts on Earth. It seemed that the faster that I came up with an answer for it that somehow turned out to be true, the less time I would spend in this cell. So there was nothing to do except for going through my memory like he asked me to.

"Fine, then. What's next?" I muttered, basically admitting defeat for my cause. I still believed that whoever Cobalt is was acting like a selfish idiot by keeping me locked up in here, and that all of my friends, the only other people in the world who knew how to defeat the Enderdragon, were in danger without my help.

There was a sound similar to the shuffling of papers emitted through the speakers. In fact, I was pretty sure that that was exactly what it was. "After you were appointed Captain by Admiral Johnson?" Cobalt questioned.

"I was able to rest for a day," I told him, leaning back in my chair casually. "And then all hell broke loose."

Burnt Ice

Captain Jay 'Hawkeye' Richter

November 16th, 2246

23:16

Danderyd, Sweden

Earth

The helicopter floated down from the sky above toward the launch pad that I stood on, waiting for it to pick me up. The sky was pitch black at this point, and the only way that I saw the helicopter was because of its red blinking lights that gave radar workers an idea of who was flying in toward them. It also helped me see the chopper approaching.

Just because it was the middle of the night didn't mean that I couldn't see outside. In fact, with the heavy snowfall, I could see the ground around me pretty well because it was covered by two inch deep snow. The moonlight reflected off of the white crystals to make a surface that reflected the light, almost like a mirror, but I couldn't see my own reflection in the ground. I didn't want to see my reflection, anyways. I didn't even look human with the body armor that I was currently suited up in. Juggernaut armor, they called it, but I just thought it to make me really slow and harder to move my legs. There must have been at least a hundred and fifty pounds of the stuff on me.

The helicopter touched down on the snow white surface of the landing pad, and I strolled over to it, my L86 LSW light machine gun in a firm grip between my two hands. The door on my side slid open, revealing a man a couple years older than me, but still in his twenties. "Captain Richter, right?" he asked, and I nodded. He was in juggernaut armor as well, but he didn't have his helmet on yet. He stretched out a hand and I took it, lifting myself onto the helicopter. He sat down in an empty seat facing two others with their helmets off, and beckoned for me to sit down next to him.

"You can take that helmet off, you know. It impairs you're hearing, and you do want to be able to listen to introductions," he explained as I laid my gun on the floor. I then lifted the helmet off and placed it on top of my gun.

"Why do we even need all of this armor? I just got informed that I needed to suit up, so I hope that you guys know what our mission is," I told them, sliding the door shut as the helicopter once again began to rise up into the night sky. The small window showed heavy swirls of snow in a whirlwind as we were lifted off of the ground.

The man on the right across from me cracked a smile. His hair was cut extremely short, almost to the point of being bald. His light brown eyes stood out from his dark skin, as did the white teeth he showed with a smile. "All the rooks don't know what they're up for the first day. We don't know if they're going to chicken out or something," he explained jokingly.

I raised my eyebrows. "What do you mean, are all of the new guys scared of doing what they have been for a long time?" The others looked at the man who had just spoken, as if to say, 'what are you doing, giving away all the tricks of the trade?'

"Anyways," said the man beside me, breaking the silence, "Welcome to DEVGRU. I'm sure that you know you're already been informed you're with us now, but not the specific squad you're in. Here we are, I guess. DEVGRU Hit Squad, or just plain Hit Squad if you're part of the team, which you are now."

"Three minutes out. Why don't we just give him the sitrep on what we're doing today?" the man diagonal from me said. He had short black hair that barely hid any of his forehead, as opposed to my brown haircut that almost hung over my eyes.

Can you stop talking about your hair and continue your explanation of the mission?

"Right. Captain Richter, I'm Major Dalton, and if I must say so myself, I'm basically your new boss. No more of the Admiral Johnson guy," the man sitting next to me said.

"I haven't even talked to that guy in four months," the guy diagonal from me said. He leaned closer, extending his hand. It was completely covered in black body armor anyways, so it wasn't that big of a gesture. "Captain Teague," he said shortly as an introduction.

"Captain Richter. I suppose that I'm the rook to you as well?" I introduced myself, grasping his hand and giving three shakes.

"You'll always be the one," he joked, cracking a smile.

"Exactly. You follow my orders if you don't want to get yourself killed. Understand?" Major Dalton told me, and I nodded. "And to finish up introductions, that's Captain Lewis," he continued, gesturing toward the African American man across from me. He raised a hand in short greeting, leaving it at just that.

"Down to business, then. I've only got two minutes and a half to brief you, so let's make it quick. We're flying in to a Danderyd nuclear power plant that was reactivated a couple months ago and is currently housing experiments for Anonymous to try and find new ways to duplicate nuclear energy in their own main bases. Our job today? Well, it's quite simple," Major Dalton explained, faltering off at the end.

"Blow the entire place to hell," Captain Lewis commented.

"Um, I suppose that's exactly what we're doing," Major Dalton shrugged, as if that it wasn't that big of a deal. "We have very specific assigned places that we're planting charges as to not blow up a reactor from the core, as that would make our chances of getting out alive zero. They're already slim enough, after all. If we stray of course from the start though, we'll be overwhelmed by enemies."

"That's why we've got these," Captain Teague confirmed, tapping his arm against the heavy juggernaut armor that he was equipped with. "And by the way, we've got one minute. Get your helmets on, or you won't make it very far."

As we put our helmets back on, I dared to ask the question that they knew was on my mind. "Do you guys do stuff as crazy as this pretty often?"

I lifted my light machine gun once more, looking over at the others for a response. It came from Captain Lewis as he slid open the helicopter doors, letting in a large gust of icy cold wind. "All the time, Captain."

The helicopter was coming to rest just outside of a nuclear power plant, the ground blanketed in snow that kept falling from the sky. The rotors of the helicopter drowned out any other noise as the metal landing gear touched the ground for a short second. The four of us leapt out of the helicopter, coming down to the ground heavily because of our juggernaut armor. Major Dalton proceeded to the front of our group, walking away from a large forest of trees. "Follow me, and you won't get your ass kicked. Now let's move out!" he shouted.

"Hoorah!" the other two yelled back at him, but I stayed silent. Hoorahs were 75th Rangers in the army; it was basically their battle cry. So why were Navy SEALs shouting the exact same words? It didn't really matter, so I proceeded behind the others as our helicopter lifted off without us, moving back in the direction that we had come from.

From the trees, we came over a short stretch of land that was no larger than a department store parking lot. It was grass, I supposed, but was completely covered in snow, so there was no way to be quite sure. Once we reached the end of that stretch, our path clearly marked by a countless amount of footsteps in the snow, there was a grated metal walkway that acted as a bridge over some sort of walkway under us. The bridge wasn't covered in snow, for it would just fall right through the small holes once it reached the cold metal. It made walking a lot easier for us, proceeding to a set of double doors with a logo emblazoned on both of them. It was a single man, black and white, surrounded by a globe of sorts. The one odd thing about the picture was that where the man's head should have been was a question mark.

Captain Lewis stepped up to the doors, running his gloved hand over the markings. "Anonymous' logo. This is definitely the nuclear plant we were looking for," he alerted us, trying to glimpse inside through the blue glass doors. While he did this, Major Dalton stepped to the right side of the doors where a small keypad was embedded into the metal wall of the exterior of the nuclear power plant. He typed some numbers in it and it flashed red. He retried with a different set, and it blinked green. The doors that Captain Lewis had been looking at automatically slid open to reveal a very large room with nuclear reactors.

"We'll stand out a little bit from the scientists here, as you can probably tell," Major Dalton explained to us, waiting outside of the open doorway before we entered. "Stay close to the rest of us and you'll be perfectly fine. As long as nothing goes wrong."

With that, he turned and stepped into the building. There were four large nuclear reactors in here in the four corners of the room, with walkways around them on all sides as well as catwalks about halfway up them. "This is the east wing, our main target," Major Dalton explained to us, looking up at the many scientists inspecting things up on the catwalks. "Shoot everyone you see that isn't one of us. When I say protect me while I'm planting explosives, protect me. When I saw follow, you follow. If I say to get out of here without me because I'm dying, you do it. Do you all understand?"

"You bet. Alright, let's plant the explosives on the reactor to our left," Captain Teague confirmed, pointing to the reactor just next to us. The metal structure was being supported by a large cement base which made walls on the sides, in turn making special corridors for Anonymous scientists to make their way through. We turned into the one nearest to us, lifting our guns to make sure that there were no soldiers in this specific corridor. As soon as we fired a single shot, the entire room would become a madhouse of people trying to kill us.

Major Dalton led the way out of the main room and in between the facility and the reactor base. Captain Teague was right behind him, while I was third and Captain Lewis rounded out the back of our convoy. It was slow moving in the heavy juggernaut suits, but halfway across the corridor Major Dalton stopped in his tracks. "Here," he muttered, reaching into a pocket of his armor and taking out a complex looking explosive. There was a block of C4 in the middle of it, plus identical red strings that stuck out of either side of the explosive that had their own, smaller blocks of plastic explosives

"How exactly does that work?" I queried, standing guard as he strapped them onto the cement base of the structure. My iron sights were trained on the direction we came, just in case any guards tried to stop us from planting the intricate explosives.

"They're activated by a single button, well, all of them connected to the specific switch are anyways. At least, when they're turned on. Once the explosives are set, you can wait as long as you'd like before you flip the switch, we activates the two outside blocks first," Major Dalton explained to me while he worked. The blocks of C4 stuck right to the cement surface as usual, although it was cool to see how they seemed to defy physics. "The last one goes off about a second after the other two. It makes the most central explosion."

"In other words, you get more bang for your buck," Captain Lewis commented, staring down in the other direction from me. "Contact. Angry scientist alert."

There was indeed a man in a lab coat hurrying toward us, a beaker in his right hand and his left diving toward his pocket. There was no doubting that he was reaching for a gun. "Stop where you're standing!" he exclaimed pulling out a small pistol. It was a standard issue Makarov, absolutely nothing against a pack of four juggernauts. "You aren't supposed to be here, and what in the world are you doing? Setting off explosives could trigger a meltdown throughout the facility!"

"Hey kid," Captain Teague interrupted, lifting up his own Five Seven. "That's exactly what we're trying to do, so good luck trying to stop us." With that, he fired two bullets, one into the Anonymous man's chest and one into his head, and the scientist fell over backwards with no resistance. Just like that, two gunshots had gone off and everyone knew we were here.

Major Dalton connected some wires together on the central block of C4 and then flicked a small switch on it. "It'll be a while before they are able to disable the explosives. It's an intricate wiring system, and if they make a simple mistake, then the whole thing goes boom right in their faces!" he shouted to us over the alarms that had begun to wail and the footsteps of guards rushing toward us by the dozen. We were going to have company.

I turned a little worriedly toward the others. "And if they do set off the explosives prematurely? I mean, that can't exactly be good, can it?"

"It doesn't matter who sets off the explosives; us or them. But either way, once they go off, we have ten minutes until a meltdown throughout the facility," Captain Lewis responded, growing a little agitated by staying in this one corridor for this long. I agreed with his body language. If we stayed here much longer, we were sure to get overwhelmed.

The question seemed to radiate between the entire group without actually being asked aloud, like a thought that just seemed to transfer between all of us somehow. It was finally Major Dalton that addressed the subject. "Captain Richter, for a few moments stay here and guard the explosives that we've already planted. We need them locked down before we can move on to the next reactor in the facility," he ordered me, so I planted my feet and stared down the iron sights of my L86 LSW and waited for any enemies. "We'll be just around the corner planting an identical set on the other side of this reactor."

"Roger that, Major," I replied, crouching down to reduce my body sway. That was a factor in aiming, and it could get really annoying. In a position like this, I would be able to get better accuracy on target on any enemies that came around the reactor. Considering the circumstances, the amount was surely going to be high.

The other three kept walking down the other hallway. I heard somebody fire bullets of their light machine gun, but only a few. There must have been another scientist on that side of the reactor, or the Anonymous guards had reached us. Sure enough, in my sights a man wielding a submachine gun appeared, sprinting toward me with it raised. His body was mostly covered by black clothing as to keep his identity masked, but that didn't help it at all in combat. A short squeeze on part proved more deadly to him than an entire clip worth of bullets had been to me in my juggernaut armor. I had felt about three hit my chest, but they bounced off without doing much damage. It was going to take a lot more than that to kill me.

A lot more appeared to be approaching, however. Around the corner were about five more men, and I fired more. Each shot left a large bullet shell on the ground to my right, and soon enough they were scattered all around my feet. The gun was getting the job done, though, and I continued to fire shots at the Anonymous guards. It was going well until I squeezed the trigger and found that my magazine was empty.

Light machine guns took a long time to reload, which proved costly for me. I wrenched out the circular magazine and threw it aside, jamming in another one while turning a small switch on the gun. A man darted around the corner with a large gun with a very recognizable gun locked over his shoulder. The missile protruding from the launcher was a sickly green, and it shot through the air at an alarming rate. An RPG.

It whizzed past me and hit the cement wall just behind me, creating a giant explosion that set off the plastic explosives on the wall just behind me. The force of the blast knocked me over, bathing me in red hot flames. My skin was protected because of my heavy armor, but that was exactly the problem. The armor was literally fried in the heat, and once the explosion had gone off and I was laying on the ground helplessly, I threw off my helmet. The glass was red hot, and it wouldn't be doing much to protect me anymore.

Footsteps hurried back from behind me. "How in the world did the explosion go off already?" one of the Navy SEALs shouted in surprise, though I couldn't tell who's voice it had been because of a heavy ringing in my ears. Another explosion went off from down the other corridor around our reactor, so I assumed that the explosives on the other side had just gone off as well. Hopefully no one had been harmed in the explosion, or at least, no Resistance soldiers.

"Captain Richter, what the hell happened to you?" I heard another voice say as someone stripped off my juggernaut armor. I stepped out of the leggings once they had gotten to that point and stumbled over to the cement wall opposite of the reactor. My vision was blurred, but the metal structure of the nuclear reactor seemed to be leaning this way. Maybe it was just that my eyes were swirling around, manipulating everything instead of processing things normally.

Finally, I somewhat regained my senses, and that was when the realization of what had happened hit me. An RPG had set off the explosives prematurely, and my juggernaut armor had been rendered useless because of the destruction. I picked up my gun off of the ground, the rubber grip warm. Any more exposure in the heat of the fire that had burned out my juggernaut suit and the rubber what have begun to melt. Now I was left but nothing except for my black undershirt, which clung to my body, and long sweatpants. My combat boots were scuffed, but I would still be able to use them. "Doesn't matter now. We have less than ten minutes to get out of here before a meltdown commences, and I have a sense that the scientists around here aren't going to make it easy," I explained, lifting myself up over a small pile of concrete wreckage that blocked the easiest path back out. "So let's get to the extraction point."

"There's going to be a Vector fighter jet with a cargo bay that'll load us on and fly us away, but it was originally going to pick us up at an exfil point that we won't be able to reach in time. I'll call Overlord to get the Vector to redirect onto the roof of this wing of the building, but it's going to be really close," Major Dalton responded, making his own way over the rubble.

"C'mon, we don't have any time to spare!" I shouted, getting the group to begin walking faster behind me. The lobby was much emptier than it had been before as the Anonymous personnel raced to try and get out of the facility before a meltdown, and I made my way over to a stairwell embedded in a wall to hurry and try and get to the roof as soon as possible.

Behind me, Major Dalton was barking requests into his radio frantically. "I don't care, unless you want us to get radiation poisoning you have to send him in now! The plane has enough armor, anyways." It wasn't until we actually reached the stairs on the other side of the giant room with just six minutes left that a look of relief washed over his face. He put his radio back inside a pouch in his juggernaut armor (which luckily for him was still intact). "The Vector is two minutes out. It won't take long for us to get up to the roof, will it?" he queried.

"Personally we're about one minute out with this armor on. I never want to use it again, you can't walk faster than five miles per hour with it," Captain Teague commented as we ascended the stairs up the catwalk. Those were the last words he ever spoke. The bullet hit him cleanly in the side of his head, smashing right through the glass part of his helmet and shifting his balance so that he fell over the metal railing. It was a thirty foot drop to the cement floor, and he had already taken a shot to the head.

"SNIPER!" Captain Lewis shouted, and indeed there were Anonymous snipers on the catwalks below us. There was no time to count how many, though, as we reached the hatch to the roof just as a bullet hit the wall next to me. It made a loud ping noise, high pitched and quite frightening. But just like that, we were on the roof.

"Anyone else hit?" I asked, panting to catch my breath. Major Dalton collapsed on the snowy rooftop, breathing even more heavily than me. It was hard for him to try and make out what he was trying to say, so instead he pointed down to his right leg. There was a hole in his armor, a small chink in the armor that must have been opened wider by a bullet piercing it. There was blood there as well, but it was not able to actually spill out because of the distance between the skin and the edge of the armor… Sorry, it's kind of gruesome. Do I have to talk about that specific subject right now?

Whatever you want. Just try to make it quick. Tell us what is important, or at least go through everything quickly. We don't have much time, Hawkeye.

Fine, but Major Dalton was injured. That was important, and Captain Lewis knelt down next to him. "Richter, take his radio. You need to be up to date with Overlord if we're going to make it out alive," he ordered me, having more experience as a SEAL to be rendered as authority in a sort of way.

My gaze drifted to the cloudy sky, though. "I don't think that that is going to be a problem for us," I said shortly, watching the black plane flying closer to the ground against the black sky as it extended landing gear and settled down next to us. The pilot, visible through the glass dome in the front, dropped out of his seat and opened the cargo door. "Get in now, I want to get the hell out of here as soon as humanly possible," he stated, but was shot in the chest from behind us. There was a single man in black clothing, another Anonymous guard. I shot four bullets at him, and they hit him cleanly so that blood dropped onto the white, shining ground. Just like that, the snow was tainted and we were without a pilot to fly us away.

Captain Lewis helped me lift Major Dalton into the cargo hold, laying him up beside a crate of ammo. "I'll tend to him for now. Have you had any experience flying?" he asked me once I shut the automatic door.

"I did some training in simulators before I was assigned to work in the field four years ago," I replied nervously, bending over to remove the headset from the dying body of our pilot. "That's going to have to be good enough. Try to tend to the pilot as well, OK?" I hurried into the cockpit and slipped into the seat, pulling down the safety belts quickly and activating my newly acquired headset.

The controls in the cockpit of the plane sprang to life, and I flicked some switches that I vaguely remembered to be in a Vector. Thrusters, brake system, activating machine gun and missile targeting systems… Soon enough, the plane was lifting from the ground at a relatively slow speed, but the fact that it even was brought great relief to me. I tested speaking into my headset. I had no idea where to go in order to reach a base once more, or maybe the pilot even had some objective to carry out.

"Overlord, this is the Vector plane in Danderyd, the pilot has been shot out in the extraction of SEAL Team Six Hit Squad, this is Captain Richter from the cockpit available for immediate tasking," I spoke frantically, hovering above the nuclear facility. A red blinking light started to flash on the right of the joystick that controlled the plane's movements. There was an RPG missile flying toward us, and I swerved out of the way to the left. In this process, I spotted a convoy of four cars driving away from the direction that we had come, going southeast.

"Vector 2-6, we are turning on infrared sights for you, there is a convoy leaving the nuclear power plant facility as we speak with HVIs onboard. We need you to fly the plane in pursuit of the convoy, keep it slow as cars can only travel so fast and you aren't a normal pilot. What's the sitrep on your squad's status?" Overlord responded back, and instantly the window of the cockpit became a light green color. The cars that I had seen were suddenly highlighted in red, and knowing that these were my objectives, I steered the plane in that direction and activated the thrusters. The cars were going just a bit slower than me, and I was going 110 miles per hour.

"One casualty in the power plant, which is subject to meltdown in about thirty seconds, and two major bullet wound injuries onboard our plane. How long before we have any reinforcements?" I asked, flying just above the road that the convoy was cutting through. It winded around a forest of trees covered in snow, making visibility for them very difficult unless they were using infrared sights like I was at the moment.

"We'll be able to send in support helicopters in about fifteen minutes time, but for now you're on your own. Keep tailing the convoy until they stop, at which point you are to secure all officers within the group. Good luck, Captain," Overlord explained, essentially bidding me goodbye with that last sentence. I was screwed, pretty much.

More red blinking lights appeared, and another plane flew past me on my right, banked left, and slipped back behind me. Through both runs, bullets sprayed the sides of my plane, and I lifted up into the air to try and get a view of my attackers. In red on my infrared sightlines were three other enemy jets, and none of them were cargo ships; all were designed for fast flying and shooting up areas on close air support runs.

Nevertheless, I locked onto one of them using my targeting system and fired three missiles at it. One of them was deflected by flares that the plane released and flew into the trees below, demolishing a small area of the forest far from the road the convoy was on. The other two missiles smashed into the plane that they had locked onto, as the pilot hadn't fired enough flares for three missiles. The explosion rocked the ship and it spiraled out of control beneath me, creating an even larger explosion amid the snowy forest. Apparently the people in the convoy were really important, so I needed to pick up the pace if I wanted to reach wherever they were going. Or, I could face the alternative of shooting down the other planes. It seemed like the right way to go, but I didn't like my odds.

It was then that there was an explosion far behind me, probably at the nuclear power plant as an explosion in part of the meltdown. This one was in the distance so it wasn't as loud, but for about five seconds the dark sky lit up, even when viewing through my infrared sights. It was quite astonishing, and the planes beneath me slowed down for a second, as did the convoy down in the trees. I took the moment as an advantage and locked onto another plane, firing three more missiles in its direction. This time there were no flares at all as I had caught the pilot by surprise, and it blew up in the sky without even spinning out of control. Wreckage just fell aimlessly to the ground, without a greater purpose than burying itself in the snow.

Another red blinking light, and I pressed a button to release some flares myself. There was an explosion behind the ship, but it hadn't actually hit me. I dived down closer to the ground and saw another missile streaking across the sky above me, actually slanting upwards. I had dodged that attack, so my confidence was building. If I could take this last plane out, then I would be free to capture the convoy in peace.

Of course, things were never quite that easy, and another missile hit my right wing. I was hit. "Mayday, Overlord, this is Vector 2-6, I'm going down…" I shouted, trying to keep control. Surprisingly, I still could steer the ship, although it was descending without me having any control over its altitude. There was also a slight unbalance so it hung a little to the left, making it harder for me to go straight. "Wait, the convoy is slowing down. I think I might have kept on their tail for just long enough, Overlord…"

The trees cleared out to reveal a railroad station, complete with small little buildings and even a train waiting for the convoy, I assumed. It was old fashioned, with a little steam coming out from the funnel in the front car. There were seven cars in all, including a caboose, and the cars pulled to a stop in a parking lot just outside of the building that led to the boarding station.

That was the last I saw, though, as my plane smashed into a tree and crashed in a field just to the right of the parking lot, a soft enough landing where I survived. But the glass cockpit shattered, showering me with glass shards, and a piece of metal hit me over the head. I slumped over the destroyed equipment, completely unconscious of my surroundings.

Back in the present, I touched my hand to my knee. It hurt still from the plane crash, a fracture in my kneecap. The doctors had figured that out simply; in methods that the Resistance would have no idea on how to comprehend the science behind it. But was it science, or was it something even greater; some sort of magic, maybe. Either way, the kneecap hurt even more when I touched my hand to it, a bitter memory of that day.

I forgot that Cobalt was still watching me. "The meltdown, I'm assuming, destroyed the facility while Captain Teague was there, so I'm assuming that he died," I said bitterly, chewing my lip. I hadn't known any of the Hit Squad for that long, but anyone who died because of Anonymous had a reason to be avenged. So whenever Cobalt disregarded the deaths of the people that I knew like it was just a simple part of passing war, something inside of me sparked. A human life was to be treated as something more than a pawn in the war. And as infuriated as I got, I hadn't even told the story of Lexi yet.

Throughout my tale, however, I was sure that Cobalt would end up questioning my loyalty based on decisions that I had made. At some point, there would come a time where I had to tell the roots of my life, and in turn explaining who Lexi was... and why she had stuck in my head like a bad memory that I couldn't drop. Then again, that was exactly what she and her tales were; there were just some beneficiary moments mixed in.

"The plane crashed next to a train station in Danderyd. You assume that the convoy was boarding the train, but then again you were in a pile of wreckage. Then what, Hawkeye?" Cobalt spoke to me through the amplified speakers, but my mind was somewhere else. Images of Lexi morphed into Sydney, and then into the Enderdragon as it prepared to kill us all… If this what it felt like to be drunk, or on some kind of drugs, I didn't like it. Hallucinations were everywhere, all of them fueling the sadness and rage inside of me to the point where I didn't lash at Cobalt, but instead just felt sick to my stomach.

I fell over, my metal chair tipping over in the other direction and clattering against the ground. Instead of the sound of steel hitting cement, though, I heard the sound of a magazine of ammunition being loaded into a gun. Then something that I didn't expect at all: my own voice. I heard it clearly, although I was certain it wasn't actually me speaking, but rather an old memory being replayed within me. "And then you insert the mag into the open space here, you see? It's not that hard."

The sound of another person followed. It was deeper, and slightly hostile. "I know how to load a gun, Jay. Even though I traditionally use other weapons considering that I'm the Guardian of the Nether and you just happen to be some lucky soldier from Earth…"

"You need to learn to take this seriously, Herobrine! We don't have much time!"

"Seriously? SERIOUSLY? You're asking ME to take things seriously, even after all of the mistakes your race has made? You are nobody, Jay Richter. Nobody…"

My body shook without me telling it to, reacting to bolts of electricity surging through it. This wasn't supposed to happen. I knew that I was different after I had spent time in Minecraftia, but this, I didn't know what this was. Everything in my vision was tinted blue, and then a blue aura surrounded just the edges of my eyes, and suddenly all I could see were electrical frequencies, bolts of blue lightning dancing in front of me.

"Hawkeye!" Cobalt yelled, but the electrical nature of the amplifiers made my body shake more. Electricity surged through my veins, like a machine or a computer. A human was not supposed to have this happen to them. A human under this could… a human could die.

I was far away from Cobalt now, though. The lightning was gone, and instead of laying on the ground aimlessly, I was instead lying on a bed. That somehow seemed to have more purpose, or rather, I just knew that it was normally to be in that position rather than being sprawled on my stomach on a concrete floor.

My muscles ached, but there was no pain like the lightning from before. As I looked at my hands, however, I discovered that the colors, instead of being solid, looked like they were being animated in some sort of way, pulsing with electrical light. So too did my clothing, and the blankets on my bed. That electrical reaction that I had had, whatever it was, it had led to this.

Now that I sat up, the room seemed familiar. It was my bunking room underground from my stay with the Enders, and I wasn't alone. The cobblestone walls held all of my main utilities, along with Sydney and Tyler staring down at me from opposite sides of the bed.

"Guys!" I exclaimed sitting up and wrapping my arms around Sydney to my left, pressing our mouths together lightly and then turning to Tyler on my right. He raised a closed fist and I bumped mine to his, and they both sat next to me on the bed. "Is this a link, or what?"

"Yeah, unfortunately this is a link in the First Realm. It's kind of messed up for some reason, something about electrical frequencies," Tyler confirmed, scratching his head as he thought. "Or at least that's what Notch said in a link we had with him just now."

"Neither of us, nor Prae and Alex have any idea what any of this stuff means. Your machinery is so hard to understand, really. Complicated circuitry instead of just piecing redstone together. It doesn't make sense to make it so hard to understand," Sydney commented, pushing some of her dark brown hair out from over her eyes. I had missed the two of them so much in the hours in my interrogation room that cut me off from them and the others.

Tyler was about an inch taller than me at six foot eight, and he was built athletically like me. In fact, we were alike in many of the same ways except for facial features that it almost was like we were half twins, however that might work. Our light skin was basically the same color, and I had already mentioned our height. He had black hair, though, and it was cut short as opposed to my dirty blond color. He had brown eyes as opposed to my green ones, as well, and his nose stuck out a little bit more. I believe that that last feature was just because of my years in a combat helmet, not because of genetics.

Sydney, on the other hand, was shorter than me by about three inches, and her skin was a bit more tanned than Tyler and mine. Her eyes were a stormy gray, like dark clouds in the middle of a hurricane, and her hair spilled out behind her shoulders and over her face as well. We had a joke how in order to see who she was talking to in calm situations, she constantly had to push it out of her eyes or tuck it behind her ears. Her hair, however, seemed to have an undying wish to obstruct her vision. She swept the right side of her face again while I surveyed her, cracking a smile as she was obviously thinking about the joke like me.

I got out of the bed and walked over to the desk next to my crafting table. "Well, since this link isn't exactly as clear as one is supposed to be, I'm going to assume that the electrical frequencies are interfering with this as well," I wondered, writing down some algorithms on a piece of paper with a feather pen. The equations had to do with how the electrical frequencies in the air could interfere with other signals. I hadn't realized that I had known so much about this subject until Notch tested me, but in high school I had been taking advanced physical science classes. This, though, I was pretty sure that this was out of proportion. Once I finished, I gave the paper to Tyler. "Explain to Notch what's on this," I told him, standing from my desk again.

He slipped the paper into his toolbelt, the standard issue ones that were powered by an enchanted type of redstone that Alex had found twenty seven years before during his quest to defeat the Enderdragon. If this was my quest, then what would I discover, and what would I destroy? The ideas haunted me, but I tried not to let them get to my head. "So why are you guys here anyways?" I queried, now standing again.

"Well, Notch wanted us to test out if links would work in the First Realm or not, and it was pretty obvious who we wanted to link with," Sydney explained, standing next to me. "And we figured, since we are testing it out, why not check for an update on you?"

I put my head in my hands. "It's terrible. I know that it is the Resistance that captured me, so there's at least something positive for me to work with. But I'm trapped in one room, and it feels like there is absolutely no fresh air. Right now the interrogator is trying to get me to explain everything, and right now I'm on the day that I got into Minecraftia."

Tyler chewed his lip, thinking in that intense way that he always did. Whenever there was a problem he was trying to solve, he basically zoned out, trying to establish some sort of idea on how to fix it. "Maybe we could somehow bust you out. Do you have any idea where you're being held?" he thought aloud.

I shook my head gravely. "Most likely somewhere in North America, but I don't think it would be in close vicinity to Chicago. Remember, there was the Anonymous outpost just outside of Naperville. No, somewhere farther east most likely."

As Tyler continued to think, Sydney knit her eyebrows. "Well, they can't just be asking you to tell everything that happened without a clear motive. What do they want from you?"

"Information," I mumbled closing my eyes as I remembered the interrogation room that I had just been in. "They want me to tell them where the Enderdragon has set up its base at. And they are certain that I know because they caught me on camera back in Wrigley Field opening the folder first. I know that the memory is somewhere inside my head, but I can't remember what was in it."

"Do you want to know, because we've looked over the folder. We can't assault it without you, though. You're the key piece," Sydney confirmed.

Once more, I shook my head. This time it seemed a little bit more forced. "No, I need to remember it myself or I won't be able to live with myself. As soon as I give them the information, the sooner I have to tell them where you all are hiding out so that they can go pick you up as high value individuals," I said, declining her offer. "Or, if you're really unlucky, and I can see why they would do this, high value targets."

The two of them seemed to understand what I was proposing. "Just remember, Jay, that the longer that you stall the Resistance in their interrogation, the longer that the Enderdragon has to bide its time. And I don't want to fight it at full strength, but that's just me personally," Tyler reminded me, suddenly popping out of his thinking state of mind.

My mouth grew dry as I remembered this, and I nodded slightly. "Yeah, I'll remember that. I hope you guys are safe, though," I said, thinking. "You guys are camping out at Safehouse Bravo, right?"

Tyler nodded. "Yeah, and we'll be there until you need us. Or until you and your militarized friends come and take us by force." He smiled at that, and I forced a small grin. It wasn't funny to me because that was the harsh reality of it all.

I managed to grin, but my throat still felt unnaturally dry as I thought about the Enderdragon and how it was going to doom us. "When I figure out a way out of the Resistance camp, wherever it is, I'll come and find you guys. We'll find a way to complete the Prophecy of the First Realm, I swear to you that we will." With that, I hugged both of them, shuddering to think that I would have to live in this interrogation room until I found a way for them to rescue me or for me to reach them.

Sydney pulled up the sleeve of her purple hoodie, revealing the bracelet that I had made for her. It was made of the finest gems from Minecraftia: some pieces of glowstone, diamonds, gold, redstone, iron, and emerald. Finally, there was a bullet case I had added on Earth.

She set it down on the desk table, and I reached into my pocket. Just like that, my trusted diamond tomahawk was there, its metal sleek and shiny and the center carved out. It was deadly, with a small point sticking out of the back end as well for maximum effectiveness. The leather grip in my hand felt familiar, like it had been something missing during the time that I was in the Resistance interrogation room. "I'll see you guys later," I said, bidding them goodbye, and I brought down the weapon on the bracelet.

The pieces smashed apart, but there were no tears about that being destroyed. After all, it wasn't the real bracelet anyways, but just an illusion as part of the link. It held the link together, something that the host of the link had to have that they were emotionally attached to, and feed the source of it into the link. As it was destroyed, the room that I had lived in for a few days and that had grown on me faded away, as did Sydney and Tyler. I waved at them, but soon enough they were just white outlines, no color at all, and then they were gone.

So too was I. The thought depressed me.