-Stranded Outpost-

"Ah, Fredrick, good to see you. And you too, Ms. Onyx. I'm damn well happy to see you're up and at 'em." Brendan smiled as he stood among his fellow survivalists in what appeared to be a control room of some sorts. The Stranded were working with what they could, which wasn't so bad.

Though half the screens were cracked and most of the keyboards were either broken or had missing keys, Ashley saw that they were working hard on... Something. The Onyx Guard made sure to take mental notes on everything she saw.

It would be helpful once she was reunited with the rest of the COG on the Sovereign.

"We've discovered what the Onyx battalion was doing here on the island; apparently there's some sort of structure buried below the mountain on some underground lake." Fredrick explained as he gave the geobot to Brendan. The Stranded leader saw the flickering holograms of the island, and the massive machine that sat inside. Brendan stared at the hexagonal structure of the machine, wondering how something could exist on the island under his nose for so long.

"And it's never occurred to you people to explore where you live?" The Onyx Guard popped up and Fredrick turned to glare at her.

"And end up like your friends? Thanks but no thanks. Better to be oblivious than dead." Fredrick quipped and the Onyx Guard nearly slugged the man in the jaw but was held down by two burlier stranded. If she had her former strength, she could have taken everyone in this dump, but granted she survived a massive gunfight a couple days ago, she wasn't feeling top notch.

"Easy, woman." Brendan warned. "Fredrick, is the chopper ready?"

"Oh it is, hopefully we'll be able to fly without coming to pieces in the air." Fredrick mumbled. The chopper itself was heavily rusted but most of the parts had been replaced over time. Even then, Fredrick was still uneasy about flying in the "airborne garbage can". He still had a life to live, even if it was a simple one.

The Onyx Guard shrugged off her restrainers. "We should get going immediately. We merely scouted the outer perimeter and didn't encounter any sort of Locust resistance. We were attacked by a tribe of savages, unlike typical Locust armies."

"So you're saying that you were all killed off by shit luck?" Fredrick asked. "When the boys came back with you, they saw a couple dead brumaks."

"Some survived the flooding, so what?" Ashley said to him, "And if they did manage to hang onto a couple of those massive monsters, there's bound to be more."

"We'll go for it then." Brendan clutched a fist and readied a rusted boomshot. "If there are brumaks and leftover locust down in the cave, we'll deal with them."

"Well then. Let's head out."

"What a view." Fredrick said from the cockpit, eyeing the scenery of the massive forest that decorated the entire mountainside as the Raven flew over the lands. The ride would be long, but their target would be easy to find.

"It should be just behind that peak," Ashley pointed her returned lancer at the second mountain, where there seemed to be a systematic removal of trees around the top.

"Looks like someone's been doing a little logging. Could use the trees for lumber." One of the other stranded said. Brendan had brought along others along with Ashley and Fredrick. Fredrick had protested, since he clearly thought that riding this helicopter was going to be the death of him.

"I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it was the locust." Fredrick said mostly to himself, but also to answer the stranded's question.

"We should land there, it'll be a quick walk towards the caves and from there we can secure the structure." Ashley spoke up and pointed towards the large open area.

"Speaking of which, just what the hell is that giant hexagon?" Brendan turned his attention to the Onyx Guard standing behind him. Everyone was curious to just what was the real purpose behind the structure, or what it might serve a purpose for.

"Some time ago, Command picked up a massive read-up of energy from the mountain years before Jacinto sank. We thought it was just the stranded doing something with imulsion, but we began to realize that whole locust armies that had been crawling on our asses for some time, just vanished in thin air." Ashley explained, no longer caring about protocol. This was a whole new world and a whole new situation. "So even after the COG had all been dismantled, Prescott decided that he had to send down an Onyx platoon, the last of us, down into that damn mountain."

"Looks like the locust had the same idea." Fredrick said as the helicopter descended.

"But it doesn't make sense. We ran into that locust army by accident. We had no idea what forces we were going to fight. A boomer and a couple drones, sure. But a pair of brumaks and a siege beast? Half of us were dead before the battle started." Ashley gripped the side of the helicopter tightly, those memories coming back to haunt her.

"Man, that sucks." One stranded, some stringy boy with a boltok sighed out. "We could use more badasses like you."

Ashley looked back at the boy and smiled through her helmet. At least someone here treated her with a little pride, even if it was a stranded kid. The helicopter lowered itself into the massive hole where the device was seemingly located in the mountain lake. The sunlight allowed the stranded and the Onyx Guard to see inside the cave, where a small flat outcrop of rock was big enough to support the helicopter.

And there it was, huge and colored a deep black. The hollow hexagon was supported on a pyramid of long, wide steps that led up to the cusp of its lower entrance. From what they could see, there was a bridge of stone connecting the outcrop and the island.

And no locust.

That sent very bad vibes in Ashley's spine. The fact that there were no locust around to try and get a headshot on them only sent worse signals to her and her group.

"Where are they?" Fredrick mumbled to himself.

"Either hiding, or waiting for us to make the first move." Ashley said, her lancer switching to full auto. "Brendan, come with me. The rest of you stay here. If anything happens, we'll need you to get out and alert the COG Remnants." Ashley ordered around the stranded, some who were none too happy to leave the massive cave. Fredrick, before heading back to the helicopter, took a final look at the two heading down to the device. He wondered just what they were going to find down there, and if it were a good idea to send only two of them down to the hexagon.

Brendan was also having worrying thoughts. Even if she was keen to go down and investigate the device, she had no idea of what she was jumping into. While she was still COG, she was a human being and he would gladly take her over any locust. She had the skills and the reliance of a real soldier. To lose her would be a waste of human life and great potential.

"Ashley. Wait up." Brendan offered, his snub pistol raised so that he wouldn't be caught off-guard by anything. Even with no locust around, Brendan wasn't taking any risks.

"Keep up." She simply responded, "I'm tired of waiting."

"But you don't even know what that thing'll do!" Brendan argued, trying to keep up with the far younger and healthier Onyx Guard. The fact that they had her out of a pile of corpses just a couple days ago clinging to life, and now she was almost running to across the bridge to get to the giant hexagon.

"Of course I don't; that's why I'm telling you to hurry up." She said, or demanded from Brendan's point of view. How someone could be this active after being pulled out of a warzone, he would never knew. For all he knew, she was part locust, or even part brumak. "I'm here because we need to know what it does, and why the locust might be using it for something."

As Ashley reached the device, she could see that right in front of the device, at the ridge of the mouth, lay a panel that stuck up from the floor, plant-like and adorned with a multitude of buttons layed out in a curvy keyboard style. The keys had a language that she had never seen, like something out of a science fiction novel, or the comics she used to read when she was a kid.

"Ashley, don't touch anything." Brendan said, like a father scolding a child. If the locust were here, then there was good reason to be caution. Ashley seemed to only care about what this giant thing was supposed to do, or even be.

"Hush, stranded. I'm doing something." Ashley scolded the caution man. While he was searching around the stony island, Ashley had decided that the keyboard needed attention, and so she walked up the pyramid.

Her lancer slung on her back, she noticed that the keyboard lit up as soon as she was about a meter away from it, further drawing confusion from her. The device seemed to be both ancient and advanced at the same time, something beyond of both human and locust technologies.

Just who or what put this here? Ashley wondered as she brushed her hand across the keys, only to realize that it was holographic, something that only the most advanced science labs had created just years before the war sent the world into a dark age. She was astounded. If only the COG found this before the locust did then it might have been the turning point of the war, or at least could have helped the COG.

A sudden crack of energy, and Ashley whipped out her lancer in shock. It came to her that it was the giant device that was making those noises. Loud, booming, and powering up for something.

"Ashley!" Brendan yelled at the Onyx Guard. "What did you do?"

"I merely flicked the keyboard, that's it! This stupid machine is probably so damn old it must've gotten confused or something." Ashley tried to find a viable answer, but was drawn to the rivers of yellow light that were snaking upwards and onto the hexagonal shape. A sphere made of darkness and thunder was growing in the middle of the device, slowly gaining size. The sounds that the machine was making was also increasing in volume, the tempo ever gaining.

"What in the world?" Brendan raised an eyebrow as the ball of lightning touched the mouth of the hexagon. As the two forms touched, there seemed to be a sudden influx of tranquility. The sounds stopped. The crackling was no more, and all that was left was the calm, blue-green sheen of light that had opened up.

"Holy hell." Ashley whispered to herself, and walked towards the flexing light, as if drawn like a moth to a candle. Her hand raised up touch it, but found that it couldn't be touched; her hand simply went through. And she noticed that her hand wasn't sticking out the other side, it had just gone through.

"It's a portal. A gigantic portal." Brendan awed at the sight of it. Ashley pulled her arm back and was relieved to see that her hand hadn't fallen off. "This is like something out of a comic book. I wonder where it leads to."

"Who knows, but whatever this thing is, the rest of us need to know. Brendan, get back to the chopper and tell them what we found. I'm going to have a look around." The Onyx Guard ordered, but was stunned to see Brendan pointing his pistol at her, his face etched in utter fear. His hand trembled, a cold sweat breaking out on his face as he readied his pistol at her. As she reeled her lancer to blow away Brendan before he did something stupid, she realized that with growing horror, that he wasn't pointing at her.

He was pointing behind her.

"ASHLEY!" Brendan screamed, but it was too late.

A gargantuan human hand had slipped out of the portal. This thing, whatever it was, had taken both of them both by such shock that Ashley did nothing as the hand's thick fingers coiled around her, and dragged her towards the portal! Ashley tried to move, or start her chainsaw bayonet, but it was to no avail. She neared the swirling portal of myriad colors and ducked as bullets whizzed around her and looked back to see Brendan firing his pistol like a maniac. She knew that those bullets wouldn't be able to save her.

"Brendan!" Ashley cried out mere meters before the portal. "Don't waste your ammo, just warn the others!"

"What about you?!"

"Forget me, just make sure you get the geobot to Fenix! The codes are Echo-4-Sunder-Nine!" Ashley grunted, the thumb of the massive hand pressing against her spine. "That's an order!"

And with that, she and the hand were gone.

Brendan watched, with sudden fear, as the portal's mouth began to flex and bubble, sending the whole chasm into a quake. And taking Ashley's words to heart, Brendan ran as fast as he could as the portal began to destabilize, crossing over the stone bridge as the hexagon began to collapse in on itself, drawing closer and closer together until there was nothing but a small hole.

Brendan has just made it out of the cave before the portal erupted in a flash of white, blasting him away towards the Raven and the crew that waited him. They too seemed startled by the sudden explosion and the lack of a certain black-armored woman. Fredrick was the first to get to the winded Stranded leader as the explosion died down.

"What happened? Where's Ashley?!"

"Something took her!" Brendan said, after a series of coughing fits. "And then the whole fucking thing exploded!"

"What do you mean," Fredrick pressed, "something TOOK her?!"

...

Ashley was-IS an Onyx Guard. Years of fighting the Locust and their terrible beasts of war had taught her that the world is a brutal place, and that surprises were things that got you killed in the battlefield. And yet, as she was dragged through a tunnel of white by a giant human hand, of course she was taken by surprise! This had been one of the last things that she had expected, right next to unicorns and dragons coming alive.

A flash, and she was suddenly being hoisted upwards, and opened her eyes to see one of the most grotesque things she had ever seen; a massive, fifteen-feet tall human, utterly naked and with a mouth that almost went from ear to ear. It's head covered in tattered brown hair, the massive thing's eyes were tiny, as if the face had made up space on purpose for the giant maw. It also had a rather nasty case of beer belly, almost spherical.

"Um. Hello?" Ashley tried communicating, as if this monster had intelligence.

It responded by lifting Ashley above it's mouth, and opened.

"NO, AH FUCK!" Ashley screamed as the creature placed her in its thumb and forefinger, but gave Ashley a chance to escape. She gripped her lancer and fired at the creature's face. The bullets made quick work, slicing through it's hot flesh, and dropped her right into it's mouth and swallowed whole.

Acting quick, she slammed the razor-sharp teeth of her lancer right into the creature's throat and slid down towards the stomach, leaving a gaping internal wound that vented a thick, hot steam. Ashley, covered in blood, coughed some out and fell into the digestive juices of the creature's belly. She stood up, and thanked herself that it was quite shallow to begin with, but noticed that to her horror she wasn't the only person in the gut of this beast; a young man, already partially digested, eyed the black armored woman. This only seemed to anger the Onyx Guard even further.

"I didn't come this far to become fuckin' BREAKFAST!" She roared, and fired her lancer wildly at the gut, causing little pockets of blood to gush out and fill the stomach cavity.

"You'll... die..." The eaten man said softly, and she heard it. She turned to see that he had spoken just before sinking into the abyss of the stomach, a sad sight indeed.

A snort, "Maybe, but I'm making sure I go down- huh?" The glow of red that the stomach gave allowed the woman to notice that not only was there more humans, but also more weapons. Through the disgusting mess, she saw what looked like to be a double-barreled shotgun floating on a melted torso and a frag grenade stuck to the creature's gut by hardened juices. If she wasn't panicking about being digested, she would have wondered just how these weapons got here. But for now, all she did was crack a smile.

Maybe she wasn't going to die here after all.

...

"YAHOOOOOO!" Sasha Braus screamed at the top of her lungs as she whizzed through the forest at speeds no creature in the walls could hope to achieve. And while she knew that zipping around at such speeds would have a chance of getting herself killed, and make Instructor Shadis beyond infuriated, but right now she just wanted to have a little bit of fun, like she did back at her village. Connie Springer, the poor sap who was paired with the endless bundle of energy that was Sasha, was barely keeping pace. He knew that Shadis would tear him a new one if he was caught walking back to camp with empty canisters.

"Sasha wait!" Connie cried out, hoping to get her attention. "We're supposed to be practicing our Maneuver Gear back with the others!"

Sasha hooked a tree and came to jarring stop that she rode with style, swinging upwards, back and then pressing the release of her gas to make sure she stopped just before inertia caught her. She turned to see her friend stop right next to her with sweat and a couple of leaves on his face.

"C'mon Connie, those guys know we're not going too far! Besides," She leaned in close, pressing herself to Connie's smaller body, "we could do some hunting, get some meat..." Sasha drooled at the thought of having delicious meat in her mouth again, the savory goodness enough to make her forget her (almost) endless hunger. Connie rolled his eyes.

"And have Shadis take it?" Connie snarked, only for Sasha to grab his collar and bring his face close to her's.

"NEVER! It's mine. Mine! My shiny!" Sasha was frothing at the mouth as she slobbered all over Connie's face, who had tried to back up as far as he could from her vicious raging, only to realize that there was something moving behind Sasha. If his memory served correctly from their anatomy classes, the thing that was waltzing over to both of them was a-

"TITAN!" Connie screeched like a frightened ferret along with Sasha, the two holding each other as the Titan doubled over and vomited a waterfall of blood. The two must have noticed that this titan, however it got here, was having some sort of internal problems. A horrible groan came from it's mouth as more blood began to pool and bubble from the lips, swaying back and forth like a drunkard through the streets of nighttime. Sasha noticed that the skin near the bulging belly was pocketed with little splotches of red, like internal wounds of some sort.

"What's wrong with it?" Connie asked Sasha, both of whom wanted to get away from the titan as far as possible.

"I-I-I don't k-know!" Sasha whimpered as she gripped Connie harder, and he did the same. "I'm not a fucking titan whisperer!"

The titan fell against a tree, trying to stand upright. Its legs seemed to have nearly given out from beneath its hideous body and turned its head to the two trainees, who both let out an "EEP!" as the titan noticed them. And right before it could have done anything-

KRA-POW!

-the titan's gut exploded. Torn muscle and blood oozed out like a landslide from the dying titans body, as it slowly slid down to the earth, let out one last gasp of air, and died collapsing on its side. Sasha and Connie had no idea what the titan had done, or where it came from, but the fact that this strange series of events was only getting stranger, the two decided that they should at least watch and see if the titan was really dead.

After all, the nape hadn't been touched.

But when the skin began to disintegrate, the both knew that the titan was a goner.

"That was odd." Connie said, lowering himself so that he was on the ground and unhooked his grapples to get a closer look at the dead titan and was mindful of the cascading blood and guts. Sasha landed behind him, who seemed to be saddened about how the titan died. Connie noticed this with a grain of salt.

"Oh c'mon, don't tell me you feel sorry for this monster!"

"I can't help it!" She cried out, "You know how horrible that must be, drowning in your own blood?"

"It's a hell of a lot better than what the titans do to us!" Connie argued, to which Sasha noticed something moving in the decomposing gut of the large titan.

"Ohmygosh Connie, someone's still alive!" Sasha pointed to the gaping hole, and much to his and her unbelief, there was indeed a person climbing out of the steaming corpse of the titan! By the looks of things, the person was still in one piece and very much intact! Connie's eyes glimmered with hope as he launched himself to the person crawling from the horrible wound. He made sure to get a good spot, as the person seemed to be a little on the weak side, probably the horrible aftermath of being eaten alive.

"Don't worry, I'm here to help!" The first thing Connie noticed about this person was that it was a woman, based on the curvy figure, and she was covered head to toe in a strange set of black armor, and wielding a weapon both on her back and in her hand that neither of them had ever seen. As she turned her head upwards, what greeted the young lad was a pair of bright blue eyes, like that of an insect. The steam billowing on her body seemed to calm down, but Connie had trouble lending a helping hand with all the gross blood on her. The woman stood up slowly, revealing that she was indeed taller than him, and maybe even taller than Shadis! Those burning blue eyes locked down on his far smaller body, her own body tense and the strange weapon clutched in her hand.

"Um, hello?" Connie said to her, waving a hand to her. "T-The name's Connie, Connie Spring-!"

That was as far as he got before she socked him dead in the mouth, sending him flying from the corpse and the seemingly estranged woman. Connie was out like a light the moment he hit the ground.

"Connie!" Sasha cried out, and felt something press against the side of her head.

Chk-CHK!

"Who are you?" Sasha realized that the voice speaking to her, was the same woman that knocked out Connie with a single punch. How she managed to sneak up on her, let alone get that close in that short amount of time, scared Sasha. The rifle, or whatever it was, was lined right with her temple. She managed to move her head just enough so that she could be able to look the black-armored woman in her blue eyes.

"S-S-Sasha Braus." She said very quietly, afraid that her bladder would lose control if she stood here much longer.

"Where am I?" The woman asked, her voice lined with frustration, and Sasha noticed that it was directed not at her, but to the woman herself. Sasha found herself to be in disbelief that whoever this crazy lady was didn't know where she was in the walls.

"TELL ME!" The woman thundered with startling rage, and Sasha bit back tears to try and talk to the woman without getting her head blown off.

"You're in Wall Sina! WALL SINA! P-PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!" Sasha sobbed out, her tears flowing freely. Suddenly, the woman's weapon lowered back down and locked onto her back. Sasha was too busy sobbing to notice that the woman had dropped her aggressiveness. Maybe pointing a weapon at a child was a stupid idea.

"Hey." Sasha bit back a sniffle. "Hey, kid. Look, I was just little angry, alright. I'm sorry I punched your friend, so stop crying. I wasn't going to kill you anyway." The black armored woman's voice was smoother and far more comforting than what it was but still had that tense angry edge to it. Sasha stopped crying to notice that the woman had gone over to Connie's unconscious body to try and wake him up. She shook his head a couple times, but got nothing. So she opted for the next best thing; kicking him.

whack!

"OW!" Connie sprung up to clutch his side, and then held his mouth. The lady he tried to rescue certainly had a right hook, if his throbbing lip told him anything. And seeing her loom over him, Connie yelped and tried to crawl away but she grabbed his collar and lifted him to his feet, brushed his shoulders and patted his cheek.

"Sorry for that." She didn't sound sincere.

"Y'know, you can't just go around and punch people!" Connie argued with her, and she turned around to pick up something on the ground. Her other weapon had fallen off. Rather than it being a long, blocky weapon with what looked like teeth under the barrel, this thing was short, barely long than her arm. The two barrels on the weapon was its most noticeable feature. She clicked something on the weapon and it split open to reveal that the barrels opened at the back, and then put them back.

"Still got some shots in..." She mumbled to herself.

"So, who are you?" Sasha asked, trying to get a conversation going. "I've never seen black armor like that, or guns with teeth."

The woman in black chuckled to Sasha, "You stranded sure are funny. By the way, the name's Ashley. Ashley O'Malley. I'm an Onyx Guard?" She gestured to her armor as if expecting Sasha to know what an 'Onyx Guard' was. The look of befuddlement on both of their faces showed that they were totally in the dark about what this newcomer was saying. Ashley groaned to herself.

"Y'know, the COG? Coalition of Ordered Governments? The Locust War? E-DAY?" Everything she said was going completely over their heads. It was as if they hadn't even been there, or heard of it in the first place.

"Lady, what the hell are you talking about? COG? E-Day?" Connie questioned the woman's sanity. "Maybe that titan hit your head before it ate you."

"That's what they're called? Titans?" Ashley asked, and Connie's and Sasha's mouths dropped. How could this woman not know what the titans were? "I just thought it was some form of super-lambent, or whatever. By the way, you guys got a radio, or something?" The number of things this woman was talking about; radio and lambent and not knowing what Titans were was starting to get to the two trainees. Could this woman be from beyond the walls, and just so happened to get eaten and clawed her way out? With that armor and those weapons, it seemed like a plausible answer.

Connie decided to just go along with it.

"Sorry lady, no radio, or whatever that is." Connie shrugged. "Why don't you come with us to our camp? We got food, shelter and other people you can confuse with your crazy talk." Connie said and activated his ODM Gear, launching upwards. The woman tracked every move, seemingly astounded by the device's maneuverability. "You're gonna have to walk there! It's one mile thataway!" Connie pointed left as he left his friend and the strange woman.

"Can I trust the rest of you stranded?" Sasha nodded to Ashley as the woman placed her weapons on her back and started to walk.

Many questions rang in both their minds. For Sasha, it was so odd that this woman didn't know what a titan was, or where she even was. If she had been from beyond the walls, then they must have heard about the recent attacks on their lands, had they not? And just what were those weapons, and the armor she wore? In Ashley's mind, more questions raged. Just where was she? What are titans, the walls, and how could they not know the Locust War?

Ashley vowed to get to the bottom of this.