The first thing Jack saw upon snapping into existence was a corpse.

And he recognized this corpse. "Oh shit," he whispered to no one as he stepped off the pad and took a quick look around. He was in a relatively small, octagonal room, the walls made of gritty, cracked masonry, the floor made of white stone. Though most of it was covered by bodies. There had to be over a dozen of them in here, all of them Space Marines. There were weapons, a lot of them actually, scattered among the bodies.

Although there were four doors out, they were all closed and he couldn't hear anything in the immediate vicinity. He moved back over to the corpse he recognized and crouched, frowning deeply, staring intently. Whatever had happened, Watts had apparently been subjected to fire. Half his skull was blackened, most of his hair singed off. His armor was pitted and blackened in several areas, his helmet missing. He'd died sitting with his back to one of the walls. Jack looked around as another green flash occurred.

This place felt like a bad place. Why were there so many corpses here specifically? "What happened?" Jennifer asked.

"Not sure," Jack replied. "But we seem to be secure."

She stood beside him. "That's Watts," she murmured.

"Yep."

"Goddamnit."

"Yep."

Well, the guy was a hardass survival type, he probably had some very useful supplies on him. It was probably what he would have wanted. It's sure as hell what Jack would want, if he died. For whatever he had on him to go towards someone else's survival. He reached out and opened the first of several compartments on the green security armor the man was wearing. Empty. He moved over to a second one. Oh hey, two magazines of-

Watts's eyes shot open.

"Fuck!" Jack snapped, falling back.

"Who're you?" Watts croaked. There was another flash.

"Oh shit," Green said, immediately moving to join them.

"Ward," Jack replied. "I'm Ward. What happened? We've been following you, Watts. We got your messages."

He laughed weakly, then coughed, spraying Jack's visor with a thin haze of blood. "Wondered if anyone was gonna see those fuckin' things." His face hardened. "Listen," he wheezed, "it's out there." He reached up, weakly gripped Jack's armored shoulder, causing a bolt of pain to shoot through it as the armor rubbed against his burned flesh, but he ignored it. "Got one weakness...I think." They waited, listening.

"Backpack," he whispered, then his hand fell away and his breath left him in one long, wheezing exhalation.

He didn't inhale.

"Fuck," Stratton snapped.

Jack hadn't even realized the final member of their party had joined them, he'd been so focused on Watts.

"What was he saying?" Green asked.

"Something's out there and apparently its weakness is its backpack...whatever that means," Jack replied quietly.

With a sigh, he finished his search. "Gather up whatever you can," he said quietly. "Obviously there's something really nasty out there."

He imagined that it was something they hadn't seen yet. No real clues as to what, but it was what his gut was telling him, and so far, on this adventure, his gut had been pretty dead accurate. Watts didn't have a whole lot. Just some magazines for the SMG and some shotgun shells. Jack began to stand up, then hesitated.

Something silver was poking out from behind Watts's corpse. Frowning, he pulled the man carefully aside and revealed the hidden treasure.

"Damn," he whispered. The man had been laying against a rocket launcher. Jack checked it out. Fully loaded, too. Two rockets, ready to go. "Thanks."

He stood up and began looking around, hunting for spare rockets. It'd be nice to have some more. The others were gravely silent as they searched the corpses. As he hunted among the dead, he realized that all of them hadn't actually been killed in here. They'd crawled in here. And whatever it was outside hadn't followed them in, apparently. And they were all scorched or burned in one way or the other. What the hell did that mean? He mulled over it as he continued his search, and he actually managed to find a handful of little silver rockets. These things really packed a punch, given their size, he thought as he pocketed them.

"Now what?" Stratton asked as they finished their search.

"I guess we go out there and...deal with whatever it is. We should search the immediate area for another gateway, but I doubt we'll find it," Green replied.

Jack went to one of the four silver-white doors and hit the big, square button next to it. The door slid up into the ceiling. He held the shotgun at ready. The door opened to reveal...an empty room about the size of a garage. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all made of that same silver-white metal. There was another door, this one larger, at the opposite end of the room. There didn't appear to be any other way into or out of the room.

"Huh," he muttered, stepping aside so the others could see after he was sure it was clear. "I guess we should check the others."

They did so, opening the final three doors one after the other, and found apparent carbon copies of the original room. What the hell was this place? What was it for? What was its purpose? It didn't matter, he supposed. None of this really mattered. He hadn't really had to understand this nightmare dimension to survive it.

So far, at least.

"Let's open one of these doors," Green said, and set off.

Jack and the others followed after her. Their boots echoed hollowly in the silver-white room. She reached the door first, reached out to hit the button next to it, hesitated, then punched it. The door slid open, letting in that familiar crimson-tinted light. She stepped up to the threshold, took a quick canvas of the area, then stepped out.

The others followed.

Jack studied the new environment as he stepped into it. They were in a large, open, outdoors area, beset on all sides by dark gray cliff sheers. There were big, horrifying pillars stuck seemingly at random across the black sand ground. They were rectangular in nature, dark brown in color, about twenty feet tall. And carved into their surfaces was a face. A hideous, alien face that didn't look like anything he'd seen so far. It had a big bulbous skull with a huge mouth stuffed with teeth, with what seemed to be wires or tubes coming away from the mouth and going around to the back of its head, out of sight.

Its gaze held a terrifying, malignant intelligence.

It was evil.

He forced himself to stop staring at it, but the face was all over the place, on all of the pillars. He ignored it, moving out, away from the group, as not to make a big target. He had the shotgun out still, but wanted to switch to something heavier. This place felt absolutely threatening. Where was this apparent enemy that had killed so many? As he got a better view of the area, he began to see craters in the landscape.

Craters? They looked like the holes bombs made. Well, that would be at least somewhat consistent with all the burn marks he'd seen on the bodies. So what was it? He was tempted to say it was a Baron of Hell, and yet he knew the only reason that was tempting was because he'd dealt with those before. He'd killed those before.

No, this had to be something different.

He moved slowly around another one of those hideous pillars, deliberately avoiding looking at the face, and still saw nothing but the distant rock wall and the black sand. It was surprisingly solid beneath his feet, for which he was grateful. It was a bitch to run in sand in heavy-ass armor. He could feel the tension mounting on the air.

And that's when he heard it.

It was a scream, and yet it was unlike any scream he had heard so far since hitting Phobos. In fact, he wasn't entirely sure he'd heard it anywhere in his entire life, or at least not to this magnitude. It was a scream that began way up there, in power and decibels, and didn't fade away. It just kept going. It was the scream of someone who had completely checked out. The scream of someone who had been brought right to the absolute precipice of madness...and then catapulted over it. The scream of someone who had seen something that had shattered them.

It was Stratton.

Jack spun around, his whole body tensing and going frigid, his heart slamming painfully in his chest, terrified of what he would see, of this thing that had made Stratton apparently begin to scream his sanity away.

But he couldn't see it, not yet.

Only…

Only, he could hear it. Whatever it was, it let out a roar so loud that it blew out the audio on Jack's suit. He cried out, another jolt of painful terror sweeping through him and making his skin crawl, his innards squirm.

What was it!?

He barely heard a loud whooshing sound as his audio (and ears) came back online. But he didn't need to hear it, because he saw what looked to be a miniature cruise missile come sailing from behind the huge tower, (the Tower of Babel, his mind whispered feverishly), and sail straight at Stratton. It covered the distance in barely the blink of an eye.

And then, in a flash of light and a thunderclap of sound, John Stratton was no more.

There was only a crater where he had once stood, just two seconds ago, screaming his sanity away as he stared at the Unnamed Terror. Green was screaming something, but Jack couldn't make it out, couldn't process what was happening, because then he felt it, he felt the fucking thing coming towards them around the tower.

Each footfall was an earthquake.

How fucking big was it!?

And that was when he saw it. It was like the rest of the universe, the rest of reality, dropped away, and all he could see was the colossus of terror.

It had to be twenty fucking feet tall.

It was red. It was violently red. And it was a demon. An honest-to-God fucking demon if he'd ever seen one in his whole life so far. All the other things he'd seen, the Imps, the Cacodemons, the zombies, even that big spider queen bitch, all of it looked like child's play compared to this behemoth. It had hooves, although one was black and looked natural, (or unnatural, really, but organic,) and the other was gleaming silver. About half of its right leg was metal. Above its waistline, where its stomach should have been, was stringy meat, raw musculature.

Above that, its chest looked like it was carved from granite to be as muscular as possible. Its right arm also looked organic, although he could see more silver in the form of wires running along it. Its left arm, however, ended in a corroded, soot-stained silver launcher. (Where the mini cruise missiles come from, some distant but still coherent part of his terror-stricken mind warned him.) But its head...its head was huge, the size of a car. Twin eyes that burned with actual flame stared at them. It had huge, wickedly sharp black horns curving along the sides of its demonic skull, sticking out about half a foot beyond its broad forehead.

A word shrieked out of the dark depths of his mind.

Well, two words, actually, smashed into one word.

Cyberdemon.

Then the Cyberdemon aimed its launcher dead at him and a second whoosh sounded. His body reacted, because his mind checked out. Like before, when he had lost himself to a red haze, he totally lost it, only now it was to pure mindless terror. He dove, rolled, scrambled to his feet, and started running. The missile struck one of the nearby pillars and the shockwave sent him flying. It picked him up and threw him a good ten feet. Crying out, he rolled to a halt and once more scrambled to his feet. He wasn't sure how long he ran around screaming. Twice, or maybe more, he tripped or was thrown back to the ground.

But then he came back to some semblance of sanity when he heard Jennifer's voice screaming at him. Shaking violently from adrenaline and terror, he skidded to a halt and spun around. Still not all there, but there enough to act, Jack switched to the rocket launcher, almost dropping it. Green and Jennifer were firing at the huge beast, dodging the missiles. Their bullets and shells seemed to be doing absolutely no damage.

They needed help.

Jack aimed the launcher and fired both barrels at once, launching both rockets. They shrieked through the air and nailed the Cyberdemon's broad chest dead on, creating twin orange-red explosions. The beast roared and fired back at him, apparently undamaged. Jack barely managed to doge out of the way as he jammed another two rockets in and fired once more, this time aiming for its face. Again, they both hit dead on and again did no apparent damage. Holy fucking shit, how in the hell were they going to deal with this?

He fired another pair of rockets at its exposed stomach, at that raw meat. One missed, but the second one hit, and he saw a little bit of blood come out, but nowhere near enough. He didn't have enough rockets, they didn't have enough weapons and ammo and explosives between them to take this thing down even if they could somehow keep dodging long enough. And this thing was just going to steamroll over them.

Looking around frantically as he fed the final two rockets into the tubes, he snapped the launcher shut and saw that Green was pretty far out. Actually, she was behind it now. And then he heard a crackle on the radio.

"Jack! Backpack! The thing has a fucking rocket pack on its back! Shoot it and you'll blow that fucker to hell!" Green shouted, her voice ragged and grim.

"We'll distract it, get behind it, Jack!" Jennifer said.

He wanted to be the one to distract the damn thing, to play Russian Roulette with it, but there wasn't time to pass the launcher to either of them, this was just the way the cards fell. This was their only shot at taking this thing down. He retreated, ceasing all action against it, getting behind one of the pillars, and heard the others screaming at it, firing at it. No more missiles came his way at least. He found himself praying quietly that they weren't killed, that they could get out of this alive. Stratton was already dead.

No more, please. Please.

"Jack, now!" Green snapped over the radio.

Jack grabbed the launcher and stepped around the pillar. He felt a strange, numb dislocation settle over him, as if something had flicked the switch on his emotions. He was cold and calm as he raised the launcher and aimed at the titan. It was facing mostly away from him now, and he could see it, the 'backpack', a large, bulging protrusion of metal housing that had to be where it got its damned missile supply from.

He squeezed the firing ring.

A single rocket shrieked through the air and Jack felt a cold bolt of black fear as it missed, barely, narrowly slipping by the immense thing and sailing off to explode uselessly against the far wall. Jack took a deep breath, held it, took careful aim again. He had to make this shot, it was the last rocket. They might be able to find more among the dead, and they might be able to come up with some other way of killing or escaping it, but both of those seemed insanely unlikely. No, he had to make this goddamned shot, right here, right now.

He fired.

So did the Cyberdemon at almost the same time.

Both of their missiles connected with their intended targets.

Jack's final rocket hit the Cyberdemon's missile supply and for a split second he was terrified that it wasn't enough. But the thing roared suddenly, another earth-shattering sound that rolled across the area, and it began to tremble violently. Small explosions started to ripple all along the immense monstrosity that very quickly culminated in a miniature mushroom cloud that engulfed the entire creature, leaving nothing behind but a crater, much like its many victims. How many had it killed? Jack wondered.

One more, at least.

The Cyberdemon's missile had successfully been launched right before its death, and it connected directly with Green.

She disappeared with a scream in a plume of flame and black sand.

As the explosions died off and their sounds fell away, Jack slowly lowered the launcher, staring at the spot where Green had been.

She was dead.

They were both dead.

Watts and his team were dead.

And now it was very likely that he and Jennifer were the only two living humans in this whole realm. For a cold-gut second, he realized he couldn't see Jennifer. He looked around frantically, then saw her coming towards him from around a pillar. He slung the launcher and began walking towards her, meeting her halfway.

"Come on," she said quietly, "let's find the way out of here."

It was the only thing left to him. It took close to ten minutes of silent searching, but they finally located another gateway. This one was smaller, tucked away inside of a cave built into the rock wall they hadn't seen earlier. It was on and, as best they could tell, linked up with Mars City. Without hesitation, the two of them stepped through the portal.