Disclaimer: FoZ is not mine, anything you encounter and recognise is probably not mine. I have totally stolen elements and the idea of a Forever War from Expeditionary Force by Craig Alanson. Please, for the Love of God, read that series, or better yet, listen to the audiobooks read by RC Bray.

"Has everyone summoned their familiars?" Professor Jean Colbert asked the crowd of students.
"I don't think Zero has summoned hers yet!" Kirche Augusta Frederike von Anhalt-Zerbst said, a grin on her beautiful face.
Chuckles rang out from the rest of the class.
"Assuming she can even summon one," grinned a fat blonde boy, Malicorne de Grandple.
"Be quiet!" The Professor barked. "Miss Vallière, if you will."

A short, pink-haired girl nodded and stepped forward. She took a deep breath and began the ritual.
"My powerful servant that exists somewhere in this vast universe, my divine, beautiful, powerful servant, please heed my call! I wish from the very bottom of my heart that you heed my summons, please appear!"
Instead of a summon, a large explosion came out of her spell. Students were pushed and thrown back, a student started shouting in pain as he landed wrong and fractured his arm. Immediately his friend came to help him.
As the smoke cleared, a tall humanoid figure stood in the epicentre of the explosion. Armour that blended in well with the background, rendering itself virtually invisible to the inattentive eye.

Five minutes before...

I raise my M25A5 rifle to my shoulder and poke out of cover. Using my left ring finger, I activate a trigger on the handguard, firing a rocket from the underslung rocket launcher just under the speed of sound on this planet we had been tasked to seize. The tiny rocket spat out of the underslung railgun of my rifle, directing itself to striking a one story house that a pair of local militia were hiding inside. The warhead reconfigured itself during flight to fragmentation and deployed fins to guide itself into one of the windows, allowing itself to use its kinetic energy to penetrate the extremely tough see-through material that acted as glass. It detonated inside the house twenty two milliseconds later, killing the two armoured Rats instantly and damaging a significant portion of the house.
I reach over to my left hip and take a lipstick sized rocket, before placing it into the underslung chamber of the highly advanced rifle.

Planetary invasions suck. Somehow, the navy miscalculated the extent of the enemy's strategic defences in this star system, and we managed to lose the Assault Carrier UNS Hotel California from a plasma cannon cluster on the ground. The Battleship UNS Gotterdammerung promptly deleted an entire extensive forest on the southern continent where the plasma cannon cluster fired. I had friends on that carrier. They are likely now KIA. That ship had only managed to spit 30% of its dropships and fighters out to the planet when it was struck. We would mourn our losses later. We had a job to do.

We had to kick these assholes off our planet.

Damone 3 was ours ninety years ago. During a wormhole shift, we lost access to it while another wormhole within Fudan territory twenty light years away opened up. The resulting offensive by the Fudan resulted in a lot of civilian and military deaths, since pretty much everyone did their best to resist them.
They responded with railguns on major population centres. So fuck these guys. We couldn't get after them. We couldn't access the sector.
So we went after some of their planets we could access instead.

I'll tell you a little bit about these dudes we're fighting. The Fudan are basically these big humanoid rats, about as large as a baseline human with two arms, four fingers and two legs. Oh, and don't forget the rat tail. These guys are biiig assholes, as all members of the Kondang Coalition are. They're a Tier 2 species like us, but they don't have a client species under their control. They recently figured out unsupported interstellar travel two centuries ago, breaking free of their own oppressive patron species and becoming direct clients of the Kondang. So far, they've been running a mainly defensive posture as they work to desperately upgrade their ships to oppose us.

We have been fighting this war in the Andromeda Galaxy for over twenty thousand years now. They're just another small problem for us.

It's a low level Cold War between our patrons and the Kondang. If they fight, they'll fight it out with Elder Weapons. If they use Elder Weapons, Sentinels will come from throughout the galaxy to beat the crap out of everyone. You want to know what Sentinels are? I'll tell you. They're basically these big fuck off autonomous robots built by the Elders, the first species to evolve in the galaxy. They throw planets out of orbit, crush starships like tin cans, make stars go supernova, that sorta thing. When the Kondang hit the Mandcar with Elder weapons, our patrons, Sentinels showed up and sent them all back to the stone age. It took them hundreds of years to recover before they were back up fighting, this time with starships and mechsuits. The war just escalated to involve other species being enslaved to fight it out, letting our patrons sit back and relax while we do the fighting and dying.

Fuck them all.

"1-3! Take your squad and move on top of that ridge! 1-1 and 1-2 will cover! Get us some crossfire on these assholes!"
"Roger 1-6, we movin' now." I heard my squad leader say over the platoon net.
As we prepared to move, the rest of the platoon started lighting up the village that the enemy had taken refuge in. There weren't any other combatants for another eight kilometres. Modern warfare requires that armies have to split up into platoons or risk being destroyed by enemy starships in orbit. Spaceborne Cavalry doctrine calls for platoons of fifty one soldiers, three squads of infantry, a weapons squad consisting of two anti-air fireteams and a mortar fireteam. Add the Platoon Commander and the Platoon Sergeant, plus combat medics and EW specialists and we have some pretty sizable platoons.
We were assaulting a small village in a valley where over a company of enemy reservists were held up defending it. While we could take them all out with a single railgun slug, there were civilians hiding inside the rubble - and we wanted prisoners to exchange for our own who had been captured.

Yeah, the future sucks. What can I say?

"Team, activate chameleon-ware. We're moving about four hundred metres east up to that other ridge on the right flank of the squad.. Semi-autonomous mode, fast. Got it?" My fireteam leader, Sergeant Lee Xiong said.
Semi-autonomous mode was a setting where the suit would use its own weak active sensor pulses on the ground to build a terrain map directly in front of you, allowing the operator to move forwards autonomously. The suit would also control movements, allowing the operator to move much faster than if they were to run themselves.
We sped away, a cacophony of chemical propellant and rockets firing away as Third Squad manoeuvred to the better position. As we ran, a green portal opened a metre to the front of me. Within one microsecond, my suit AI figuratively gaped as it analysed the portal. In the second microsecond, it remembered that it had to direct its human away from the portal before something bad happened. It directed the artificial muscles to jump to the left in order to clear the portal, simulating the jump.

The AI did not realise that my fate was already sealed.

"Oh SHI-" I thought instinctively.
It was too late. The momentum prevented me from diving away, and I was sucked into the portal to God knows where.
The rest of the fireteam's sensors caught sight of the phenomena and in the microseconds that the suit AIs noticed the phenomena, they gaped as they analysed the wormhole.
"What the shit? Bannon?!" Xiong yelled on the fireteam net. The wormhole closed - and my signal shut off.

I stared at the crowd of primitive baseline humans around me. Smoke rose above before dispersing.
"What the fu…" I murmured, turning my head around to look at the crowd.
These looked like schoolchildren. I turned to regard the short pink-haired girl standing in front of me. Around us, the crowd started murmuring to each other. Some laughed.

"Suit… what the hell happened? Give me an analysis of the planet's atmosphere." Confusion reigned over me. This was certainly not Damone 3.
"It looks like a green portal or something opened up just in front of us while we were moving to the new position. I tried to dodge but it appears we got caught and sucked inside by it. Need more data for more extensive analysis. As for the atmosphere, this planet is perfectly habitable for human life. Gravity is 1.03 G's. Considering these humans appear to be breathing fine, it seems good enough for you to take your helmet off." My suit AI replied.
"How the hell is that even possible? Are we in another universe or some shit?"
"I'm still struggling to figure out what happened as well. This is…" The AI paused.
"Unprecedented."

In front of me, the short girl frowned. She started to say something.

"Any idea what the language is?" I asked my AI.
"Need more data. Looks like a mixture between ancient French and Italian. Running a translation now."

The subtitles showed up in my HUD. I eyeclicked through my suit menu to deactivate my power-hungry active camouflage and my mechsuit to turn sleek white.

"What are you?" Pinkie said.
"I am Specialist Michael Bannon, United Nations Spaceborne Cavalry. Who the hell are you?" I said, the loudspeakers on my armoured helmet translating it in very basic terms.
"A commoner? Zero summoned a commoner?! Oh, this is rich! Hahaha! How pathetic!" The crowd started jabbering away in their native tongues, laughing at the very concept. I glanced at them, noticing the animals among them. The largest was a large blue dragon the rough size of an elephant. I do a double take at the dragon, before turning my head left and right to observe the rest of the crowd. Owls, moles, dogs, cats, even a... is that a charmander?

I turn my gaze towards the teenage girl. I needed answers. I took this opportunity to take a good, long look at her. She looked around 15 or 16. Long pink hair. Pink eyes. Petite. She wore a white blouse and a pleated grey skirt. She also wore a long black cape.

"Professor, please can I summon something else? I don't want this… thing… as my familiar." Pinkie whined.
"Miss Valliere, you have summoned this… person as a Familiar. You must seal the Contract and complete the Ritual."

Holy shit. They're cultists.

"I am not taking part in this weird-ass ritual. You're going to return me back to where you plucked me off from, immediately. My platoon needs me."
"I'm afraid we can't do that, Sergeant. You have been summoned as a Familiar by Miss Valliere. You must participate to finish the Ritual or I will force you to.

"You? Force me? Bullshit." I snorted. The crowd stared in shock, then laughed. Professor Colbert sighed, held out his hand, and summoned a rather large fireball over his left shoulder. I stared at the Fireball, then at Colbert. He stared at me back, raising an eyebrow, as if he's asking if I'm stupid enough to do oppose him. Holy fucking shit.

My mind raced. Magic? How the fu- I need to ask my suit.

"Suit, analysis."
"I have one thing to say. What the actual fuck. Our sensors are picking up a force that's floating around the bald dude. This is… energy. I need more time to analyse this. It's definitely real."
"Now that… that is interesting. Maybe I'll stick around for this. What does being a Familiar entail?"
"It's a long story, but the short version is that familiars are summoned by Nobles to provide companionship and defence. It is a life-long relationship between the Summoner and the Summoned."
"Okay… interesting… Give me a second."
"Suit? What do you think of this?"
"Dude, I really want to see more of that Magic. If we're able to bring this energy back to the UN, it could give us a big advantage in the Forever War." Suit said.
I mulled over the idea, toying with it, making a tentative plan.

"Alright. I've decided. We'll finish the Ritual."

"About time you came to your senses. Take off your helmet and kneel." Pinkie said, rather rudely.
I gave her the side eye, but did so anyway. We would talk about that later. The faceplate flew up revealing sharp blue eyes, a dark brown crewcut, and a rather handsome face if I say so myself. Pinkie blinked, before regaining her composure.

"You should be grateful, a noble such as myself would never do this to a mere peasant. My name is Louise Françoise le Blanc de la Vallière. Pentagon of the Five Elements, Make this noble and humble Being my Familiar."

She kissed me on the lips.

Almost immediately, my left arm began burning as something burned itself onto me. I gasp in shock as the nanobots in my bloodstream immediately suppress the nerves, reducing the incredibly sharp pain to a mild tingling.

I remove my gauntlet and stare at the mark formed on the back of my hand.
"Fuck me..."

"Excuse me, Mr Bannon. May I see your runes?" Asked Professor Colbert, rather politely.
"Sure thing, but I'll be needing a full brief on this world when we're done here." He strides up to me and I allow him to look at the runes on my arm.
"Interesting." He says, taking a primitive notebook and copying the runes exactly.

After he's finished, the crowd disperses, heading back to the castle.

"Familiar! Come with me." My so-called master calls out, as if I'm a pet.
"We're gonna need to talk." I say. We walk to the castle.

End of Chapter One.

AN: First serious story ever (ignoring the cringe I posted on Wattpad in 2015), please review and give me pointers (i will totally ignore it and may take months to update with a new chapter :P)