Kyra reappeared beneath a maddening, bloody sky.

A few things became immediately apparent to her. The first was that she had come through this teleporter intact and armed. The second was that she was facing two zombies with their backs to her. They were growling and muttering incoherently to each other, or to themselves. Either way, she cut their conversation short by putting a bullet into the backs of their skulls.

And promptly woke up half of Hell.

Kyra felt her whole body go cold as she heard a symphony of monstrous voices roar, scream, shriek, and wail. She was standing on a raised wooden platform. All around her she could see more walls of wood and stone bricks. A small flotilla of flying skulls was off to her left, and about ten feet below her, mainly in the other directions, was a vast expanse of wood that was host to about two dozen fiends and zombies that had suddenly become aware of her presence. And promptly opened fire on her. There were a lot fireballs, but she noticed a fair amount of lead being hurled at her, too. The zombies were armed.

And apparently knew how to use their arsenal.

Definitely bad.

But those flaming skulls were worse, and the fireballs were easy enough to dodge. Though really it was luck with the bullets and occasional shotgun shell being hurled at her. She really needed some damned armor. Kyra took aim and counted targets. Half a dozen. She squeezed the trigger as she zeroed her sights on the first skull. A three-round burst hit it hard and popped it into a spray of charred bone. It fell into a bubbling collection of lava below it. There seemed to be a river of the stuff dividing the local area.

Great. She'd have to find some way across that probably.

Kyra fired and popped the rest of them, emptying a magazine and then barely managing to avoid another pair of fireballs as she slapped a fresh one in. The fiends were getting impatient, shrieking wildly at her as they kept trying to hit her. She moved fast, strafing as she flipped to single-shot and began popping targets with extreme prejudice. A fiend went down. Then another. Two more. A zombie bit the dust as old blood sprayed out of its ruined cranium. Kyra's heart pounded harder, her blood pumping like fire in her veins, her head crystal clear and screaming with battlelust and the pure, unfiltered thrill of combat.

She split skulls and spilled demon blood. Alien blood. Whatever the fuck it was, by the time she'd emptied a second magazine, the wooden platform below was awash with the damned stuff. Two dozen corpses lay sprawled out and Kyra realized she was laughing. Only this didn't feel like 'I'm-losing-my-shit' laughter, this was the semi-crazed but still coherent laughter she'd had to bury deep and hard inside of her when she was sometimes in the thick of battle. Only here she didn't have to hide anything. There was just her and the inhuman monsters that would kill her at the earliest possible convenience. And there was something liberating about that.

There were no moral quandaries, no ethical debates, no hesitation, no uncertainty. No rules of engagement, no war crimes.

She had serious doubt the Geneva Convention covered literal goddamned monsters.

"You're enjoying yourself, you crazy fuck," Kyra whispered to herself as her laughter died away. Distantly, something howled.

She looked up at that bloody sky, then around her at the fortress of wood and stone she'd come to. Well, if she intended to keep fighting this war and get back home, she was going to have to keep her head on straight.

Something much closer growled.

Well, on a swivel, anyway.

The first thing she noticed was that there was a bridge on the platform with her, and it was apparently the only way across the lava river, and...it was in a cage of black metal that looked old, but sturdy.

And it was locked.

"Shit," she whispered, studying it closely. Finally, she found a little slot next to what might be called a handle. Well...was it some kind of keyhole? Kyra looked around, surveying the area. Where could a key be?

Well, she wouldn't find it just standing around.

She marched briskly across the platform she was standing on, checking its periphery. There was a platform with a very old lever attached to it. Frowning, Kyra stepped aboard and, after making double sure nothing was in the immediate area, she pulled the lever. She gasped as the platform shot down. Who'd built this? Who'd built any of this? She stepped off the platform and began checking the corpses of the zombies she'd killed.

They probably had at least some ammo on them, and maybe a working shotgun. She knew someone had been firing a shotgun during that assault. It was hard not to keep looking up at that red sky as she checked the corpses. It was so...alien. It was probably the single most obvious clue that she was in a completely different dimension. It didn't look natural was the thing. It looked like...CGI, special effects, like some impossible optical illusion. Why was it that way? Was she on a planet? What else was there? Inside a planet? A universe where there were no planets, just an infinite landscape? Was that possible?

Technically speaking, in a reality where there could be not only an infinite universe, but infinite alternate universes, everything was possible.

"What's that?" she whispered to herself, spying something poking out from beneath another zombie corpse up ahead. She hurried over to it and flipped the ugly bastard over, then felt her heart skip a beat. "Oh I missed you," she muttered as she picked up the shotgun. She never thought she'd be so grateful to see a damned shotgun.

She checked it over. The thing had definitely seen better days, but looked basically functional. It was empty, though. She continued her search. Looking over the bodies, she felt an unhappiness settle over her, tinged with a bit of guilt. All these humans...so many of them Space Marines. All of them taken over by those damned flying skulls. Most of them probably didn't deserve this. Were they aware? Was there any humanity left in there? Anything left of who they had been before? God, she hoped not. She couldn't imagine the absolute hell it would be to be trapped in a rotting body with no control over it, a passenger in your own corpse, undying until someone blew your head off. If that was true, it just made her want to kill them more.

The ultimate mercy killing.

By the time she finished her sweep of the area, she managed to find enough shells to load the shotgun, and another two magazines for her pistol. After a moment's consideration, she switched to her sidearm. Not really enough ammo for the shotgun or rifle right now. After finishing a sweep of the area and the corpses, Kyra found just a pair of doors. Everywhere else led to a wall or the lava river. With a sigh, she selected one of the doors and opened it up. Another descending stairwell, although this one was made of wood and didn't seem to descend quite as far. Holding the pistol firmly, she moved slowly downwards.

The stairs came to an end into a broad, low room, again made of wood hammered in with old, rusty nails. It was totally empty, just a square of space, lit again by those electric lights installed in the ceiling. They also looked old. The air was thick with tension. Kyra moved slowly into the room, her footsteps cautious and hesitant. Was she missing something? Why did this place even exist? Maybe it had once held something or-

Something slammed hard behind her. She whirled around and saw that a panel had fallen across the exit, effectively sealing her in. Her heart turned to ice in her chest and a loud grinding sound began to fill the room. Spinning back around, Kyra saw that the far wall was raising up into the ceiling. A forest of pale pink legs was slowly being revealing.

"Oh fuck the hell out of me," she whispered in stark terror.

This was going to be difficult.

She immediately snapped up the shotgun as she counted off the horrors she was now trapped with. There were seven of the bastards. How was she going to get out of this one? Kyra shouldered the pump action and got to work, firing before the wall finished raising. The first shell was good: it went right into one of the big open mouths of the first ugly pink bastard. The back of its head blew open and sprayed the others with demon blood. She fired off another two shells as the wall finished grinding into place. One turned one of the golden eyes of a second pinky into a cloud of gore and the other hit it right in its ugly forehead, spraying its brains across the area. It dropped. Then the others were charging her, roaring and slobbering.

She began backing up, counting her steps automatically, as she pumped another shell out. It blew the horn off of one of the uglies. A few seconds later she had emptied her shotgun and hadn't managed to bring down a single one, though she'd damaged several of them. They were bleeding a lot but it just seemed to piss them off more than anything. The shotgun was drained and she let it hang by the sling, snatching up the rifle and flipping to full auto. She squeezed the trigger, aiming into the raging stampede that was rapidly closing in on her.

She managed to get through half the magazine before they were too close. One of them let out a furious roar and collapsed, falling into a twitching mass and bleeding out rapidly. Three down, four to go, and not nearly enough room. Kyra sprinted away, off to the right, listening to them snap their jaws and snort heavily as they gave chase. They were, at least, kind of slow. She spun around, dug in her heels and emptied the rest of the magazine into the face of the closest ugly demonic bastard. Blood sprayed as a dozen nasty wounds opened up. One eye turned into a geyser of gore and three of the shots went into its big mouth.

As the gun clicked empty, the pinky fell, momentarily tripping up the others. It gave her just enough time to run deeper into the room, towards where they had initially come from, and frantically shove another magazine into her rifle. She aimed and fired again, hosing the next ugly thing down with as much concentrated fire as she could. The good news was that her bullets turned its face into chewed up, smoking meat and toppled it as well, leaving her with just two of the nasty things still stomping around.

The bad news was that she'd forgotten that was her last magazine.

"Shit! Shit! Fuck!" she screamed as she fumbled for her pistol, abandoning her rifle. The two remainders kept on moving towards her. She got the pistol and began firing as she continued backing away from them, keeping the dimensions of the room and her position within it firmly in mind as she continued this miserable skirmish.

It took about ninety seconds to kill the last two things, but it felt like ninety minutes. In the process, she had to empty her pistol three times, and she killed the last one mainly by luck. It was coming for her, and she'd let herself get boxed in by corpses. In a fit of desperation, with the big thing breathing down on her (its breath smelled like a square mile of carrion and sewage) she'd pulled out her hatchet and drove it as hard as she could into one eye. The thing began stumbling around, squealing like a pig, and she finished it off with the remainder of the bullets currently in her pistol. When it died, she stood there for several minutes, trembling with terror and raw adrenaline, not believing that it was truly over.

But eventually her military mind reasserted full control, and she silently began the process of searching the room again, as a new portion of it had been opened up, and retrieving her weapons. She found two things: a lever that opened the door that had shut behind her, and what could only be described as a skull keycard. It was flat, in the shape of a skull, and red.

It looked just about the right size to fit in that slot.

Kyra walked stiffly back upstairs. Another fiend had wandered into the area from somewhere else and she put two shots into its head automatically.

"Well..." she whispered to herself, glancing back the way she'd come, "I sure as fucking fuck did not enjoy that."

This raised several questions. That had been a trap.

A trap made this whole situation a lot more dangerous. She honestly had not seen that coming, because something like this hadn't happened yet. How many more traps were there in this funhouse of horror? And someone had locked those seven pinkies up in that little space on...on what? The off chance that a human would come walking into the room? What if it had been a fiend walking in? She hadn't stepped on anything as far as she had been able to tell, there were no sensors in that room from what she'd been able to find.

Her mere presence was enough to set it off.

So that meant she was going to have to be even more careful, which made this place somehow even more horrible to be in. Kyra debated with herself for a little while about whether or not she should just cross the bridge, or check out the second door in the area. Ultimately she made herself do it, because there might be something useful in there and leaving any stone unturned just didn't feel right in this place.

As cautious as ever, she slunk carefully down the steps and found herself in a small crossroads. Three alcoves moved away from the central room, and…

"Holy shit," she whispered, relaxing slightly.

This had apparently been a human outpost. Each of the alcoves had something in it. One was an impromptu and very small infirmary, with a single examination bed, a workstation hooked up to it, and a medical cabinet. Another was some kind of work area where a pair of chairs sat before a complex console, maybe running scans on the area or storing data of some kind. And the third area...was her current favorite area.

It looked like a makeshift armory.

Although it seemed like most of the equipment had been smashed, especially the consoles and medical equipment, and a lot of the useful supplies had been cleared out, something extremely, painfully useful to her had survived intact. It was inside of a sealed locker that she had to break into, and it looked pristine and untouched.

A suit of green security armor.

It wasn't that special, tough-as-nails blue combat armor, but this would absolutely do the job right now. She almost felt like weeping in joy as she pulled on the armor. She had been needing this ever since she'd hit dirt in that pod. As she finished putting it all on by securing the helmet and then running a check on it with the little screen built into the right wrist, she felt a palpable sense of relief...and of power.

She felt powerful.

Kyra put a clamp on that: feeling too powerful made you do stupid things. She fully intended to survive this mess. The suit check came back positive: it was powered up, atmospherically sealed, and ready for all sorts of combat. She didn't tap into the reserve of oxygen, just in case she needed it, (although she'd like to, this place fucking reeked, but at least the filters built into the vents would help somewhat). On top of that, she managed to find enough fat red shells scattered around to refill her shotgun.

The assault rifle was still dead, though.

So she let the two bigger guns hang by their slings, and went back to her pistol. After checking to see if there was anything else that was useful, and finding that there wasn't, she returned to the surface, rode that odd little lift back up to the platform she had initially appeared on, and returned to the locked cage.

She slipped the skull-key into the slot and, lo and behold, it unlocked. The door opened up. Kyra moved through it and the opposite door quickly, finally crossing the river and coming to the other half of this wooden fortress.

Now what?

An already unfortunately familiar hiss sounded and Kyra twisted to the right. A pair of pumpkins had floated up over the fortress's wall and were making a beeline for her. They each belched balls of energy at her. She sidestepped one but the other smacked her right in the chestplate. It packed a wallop, but she just stumbled a bit and wheezed as the breath was knocked out of her. Sucking in air, Kyra aimed her shotgun and fired. She didn't want to use it again with such a limited supply of ammo, but these big bastards had earned it.

The first shell nailed one of them right in its big headlamp eye and burst it in an ugly shower of gore. The thing roared and began firing off balls of energy at random. Kyra ignored it, since it no longer had a bead on her, and fired at the second one, which was lining up more shots of its own, apparently blind to its partner's pain. Or maybe it just didn't care. Were these things capable of empathy? She didn't think so.

Were they even sentient?

Or was she looking at animals?

The shell went into its big mouth, but that just seemed to piss it off and it drew closer, firing more balls of energy. Another one winged her shoulder as she was forced to sidestep a lucky shot from the blind one and she fired again. That one hit something vital and popped it, spraying its guts all over the place as it fell from the air and splattered into the wooden deck. Kyra decided to save her remaining shells and instead popped the second floating thing with a full magazine from her pistol. She sighed as she reloaded.

She needed more ammo. And something with a bit more substance, a bit more firepower.

A rocket launcher would be nice. Or at least one of those big fuck-off chainguns. Now that was a gun. She'd only ever used them mounted on the backs of vehicles or on the sides of buildings, but she knew there were models you could carry around. Hell, she'd take another one of those plasma rifles. That thing had bite.

Kyra began scouting the area. The good news was that there only seemed to be a single door on this side. The better news was that it housed exactly what she was looking for: a gateway. A portal back to her own reality. It was a smaller version of the one she had traveled through to get here. And the workstation it was hooked up to was intact and functional. The place looked like it had been hit hard at some point by an intense firefight. She cleared out the area, making sure she was really alone, then set in to work at the workstation.

It didn't take too long to get the gateway fired up and linked with Obsidian Station. It was the only available option. As she approached the swirling mass of darkness, Kyra felt a chill ripple through her, and then an icy stone settled into her gut yet again. What if the same thing happened? What if she reappeared nude and defenseless? After getting this arsenal again and even the armor? What if she ended up just somewhere else in Hell?

What other choice did she have?

Right now, this was her best option. Which didn't make it a good one...really, it was her only option.

Gathering her courage, she hoped for the best and stepped into the portal.