The world fell away from her.

A void of pure, abyssal obsidian didn't so much consume her vision as it did engulf her very essence. She thought there would be pain, but there was just cold, a sapping, draining cold that seemed to suck the very life from her. Cold was its own kind of pain. She was tumbling, flipping, twisting through a negative space.

Kyra would have screamed, but she was paralyzed.

Things chattered around her. Things she could not see. They muttered and screamed and bellowed and panted and spoke in a language that felt like icy black spiders crawling across her brain to hear. Kyra Morgan didn't know how long she flew through that inky, midnight abyss, only that at some point, some small quantum of mercy was delivered to her, and she lost consciousness.

Something groaned.

What might have been a few seconds or a few minutes, or even a few hours, passed.

It groaned again.

Kyra slowly came to realize that she was the one making that noise. Then it occurred to her that she was still alive enough to make a noise. That got her to open her eyes. A roiling crimson sky awaited her, and she screamed when she saw it. Or she tried to, anyway. Her throat was painfully dry. Coughing, she jerked and tried to get to her feet. Wherever she was lying, it was hard and painful and cold. Her body was stiff and unresponsive, protesting the request for action. She ignored the vague pain and the numbness, letting her frustration (and fear) fuel her body. Kyra sat up and tore her eyes away from that endless bloody sky.

She surveyed the place she found herself in.

Unless she missed her mark...this was clearly not Obsidian Station.

She was on a peninsula of dark, pockmarked rock. Ahead of her and to either side…

An ocean of bubbling, boiling, noxious green liquid. It reeked like toxic waste. And there were other reeks too, she realized, buried in that stench: blood, shit, piss, sweat, decay, death. And...sulfur. Sulfur like…

Brimstone.

As in fire and brimstone, as in burning skies, as in…

"Hell," she whispered. Henderson's words came back to her in a rush: You're going to have to go through Hell to get there and she felt her control slip. Trembling, breathing heavily, she turned slowly around, praying that this plot of land she initially took for a peninsula was not, in fact, an island, leaving her stranded in a sea of toxic sludge. No, she realized as she turned around, it wasn't quite that bad.

Though it almost was.

The land spread out and pressed onward ahead of her. A lot more dark, mottled rock that was cut through in some places by rivers of more of the bubbling, toxic sludge. In the distance, to the right, most of the view was taken up by jagged black mountains. A red mist curled around their peaks. To the left, the landscape dropped away at a shallow grade. There were strange rock formations dotting the land, big, misshapen boulders that looked like they were covered in red or blue glowing veins. And she saw stands of dead trees, too, with barbed branches that thrust up through the rock. Further on, she saw what might have been a swamp.

And there were more mountains in the far distances, always more mountains.

She could see structures, as well. Huge stone structures of bizarre design.

What held her attention, however, were two things. The first was one such structure, dead ahead of her, maybe half a football field's length of distance away. It was made of blocky, pale green, almost gray stone bricks. It looked a little like an old fortress or a castle from medieval days. It didn't seem particularly large. There were rusted iron bars serving as windows and what might have been torches were stuck to the walls, burning with a malignant green light. Kyra stood there staring at it for a long time.

Then realization began to dawn on her and she looked down at herself.

She was naked.

That seemed to finally jar her out of the stupefied, shell-shocked state she now fully realized that she was in. Her first thought was: Well, there goes those fucking PDAs and all my ammo. Her second notion was to mutter "Fuck me."

She laughed suddenly. God, wouldn't that be nice? What she wouldn't give for a good, hard fuck right now, with a killer orgasm. A long, hot bath afterwards…

Kyra laughed again, louder this time, and couldn't seem to stop. She fell to her knees, gasping for breath as she kept laughing, shaking all over.

Suddenly her laughter was cut violently short as she hunched and puked. An ugly spray of bile and intestinal fluids splashed the dark rock beneath her and she moaned miserably, dry-heaving a few more times, then spitting repeatedly, trying to clear the taste from her mouth. She shivered violently, then forced herself to stand up again.

Was this what cracking up, flipping out, and losing your fucking mind felt like?

"I need clothes," she whispered, and her mind latched onto that. "And a weapon." Her lack of firepower made her feel more naked than her actual nudity. But it was cold here, and that was going to become a real problem fast.

Seeing as it seemed like her only real option, Kyra set off towards the stone structure, rubbing her biceps rapidly, trying to get some warmth. Could this situation possibly be any worse? What had happened? Obviously the portal had not functioned as it was supposed to. She was...where was she? That other dimension, she remembered slowly. The alternate realm that the UAC had discovered, this place of blood and terror. Of evil. And this place was evil. Kyra thought she had seen evil before, and she had, but this…

This was different. This was just…

She didn't really have words for the way this place felt, or how it made her feel. She kept walking, suddenly glad for how numb her feet felt, because she could feel only the distant pain of the rocky, barren, sometimes jagged ground pushing into her bare feet. Alone, stranded in Hell, naked in every way that counted…

Could this possibly be any worse?

Well, she could be paralyzed or sick, she supposed. Or maimed. She could be surrounded by monsters. Had she been fighting demons? Like...real demons? As she looked around again, Kyra could immediately understand why Henderson had said what he'd said. But had he known, she wondered suddenly. The fucker must've known! He had to have known that the gateway wouldn't work properly. Bastard…

But, wait. "Hold on a minute," she whispered, then turned back around. Besides being depressed with how little ground she'd covered so far, Kyra looked back at the peninsula she had awoken on, and a question presented itself: how in the unholy fuck had she gotten there? There was no receiving gateway there. There was, she realized as she looked harder, a spot that was darker than the rock around it. Some kind of energy discharge? So what had happened? Maybe...the wormhole or matter stream or whatever form of sci-fi bullshit method of travel the gateways used had malfunctioned and spit her out somewhere in this dimension.

Like jumping out of a plane and landing wherever you fell, instead of the plane landing like it was supposed to at an airport.

But why had it stripped her of everything?

She sighed, shook her head gently, then turned and resumed her journey.

As she kept walking, Kyra realized that she'd missed something up ahead. A shape, low to the ground. A corpse? She hurried up, trying to coax her body to go faster, but at this point it felt like she was walking on stilts, more guiding her body than controlling it. She made it to the corpse and discovered that it was a fiend. The fiend had been shot full of holes. Bullet holes. What did that mean? She grew excited, then felt it fade some. Zombies, she thought. Zombies had guns. Then again, they were pisspoor shots, in her experience at least, so maybe not. The corpse looked old, several days old, so maybe someone had come through here?

She searched the nearby area, finding more evidence of a skirmish. Spent shell casings. Spilled blood. Another pair of fiend corpses. She was just about ready to give up and submit to the fact that she was going to have to fight anything she came across with her bare hands when she almost tripped over something silver and shiny.

"Well," she muttered, bending and grasping a handle, then picking it up and studying it, "I think I could do worse."

It was a fire ax. More of a hatchet really, but it was very sturdy and very sharp. She made a few chopping motions with it. Her reflexes were still a bit sluggish, her body complaining and unresponsive, but it would have to do.

She walked on.

The simple act of walking to the building had at least brought her muscles back online a bit. And the hatchet felt good in her grasp. There was a large entryway into the structure, but it was closed off, a big door of that same, ugly brown dead wood, and she ignored it anyway. No sense in kicking down the front door if you could find a side entrance. She could hear grunts and groans floating over the walls of the gray brick fortress.

Her old friends, the zombies.

If nothing else, one of them would have clothes at least. She found the side entrance she was looking for, an empty doorway that led up a narrow, darkened stairwell. She crept to the top, as silent as she could manage, and froze when she got close, hearing something shifting, then another empty groan. Yes, zombie. Close by.

She raised the hatchet and got a little closer, then waited. A footstep. Another. Two more. Coming from the right, getting closer. A shadow fell across the entryway. Kyra waited, eyes wide, adrenaline pumping. This she understood, at least. To a certain degree. Finally, the zombie came in front of the opening and before it had a chance to even recognize her presence, she brought the hatchet down with all the savage fury her abused, half-frozen body could muster, burying it in the thing's skull. As she ripped the blade out, the zombie collapsed, dying without a sound beyond its body hitting the floor. She waited, bloody hatchet raised again.

Nothing.

Well, so far, so good. She moved forward and checked out the room beyond. It wasn't very large, and there was an opening off to the right that led into a larger, open-ceiling area, but the way seemed clear for now. She began patting down the zombie. He didn't have a weapon, of fucking course. She muttered angrily to herself as she checked his pockets. He'd probably been a technician in his past life, either that or he'd dressed as one after. She wondered where he'd come from, if he'd been stationed on Europa or Io.

Or somewhere else, maybe.

Somewhere, a door opened. Kyra felt her heart skip a beat and began searching more frantically. Come on, there had to be something she could use. But no, no holsters on his hips, no gun tucked down his boots or a shoulder holster or even down the back of his pants. There were footsteps now, a lot of them, too many. Getting closer.

Grunting, growling, groaning.

Zombies.

Nothing! Screaming a curse, because they obviously knew where she was, Kyra snatched up the hatchet and surged to her feet about the same time a zombie first appeared in the open archway that led deeper into the structure.

Well, at least he was a Marine, and had a uniform. Unfortunately he also had a pistol. Kyra dashed forward, intent on taking the bastard out first and fast. He aimed at her and fired. Kyra screamed again, this time in pain, as she felt the bullet wing her right shoulder, cutting a burning line of pain across her flesh, then she sidestepped and brought the blade down hard on the fucker's wrist, chopping right through it.

The gun, hand and all, hit the floor, but there was no time to grab it because now there were another half dozen bastards coming in after her, including the initial one she'd chopped. Kyra let out a battle cry of bloodlust and rage and pain and threw herself at the monstrous horde. A pure rage swept over her as she brought the hatchet down again, lopping off some zombie fuck's reaching arm up to the elbow. She brought the bloody blade around in a tight arc, completely decapitating another. Coagulated blood flew as she worked.

It felt good.

She didn't want to fully admit that to herself, but it was liberating to cut these sick bastards up. She'd done most of the murder in her life with a gun in her hand, but she'd had to do hand-to-hand and up-close-and-personal combat before. Close quarters combat. She'd broken three men's necks and stabbed a man and a woman in the throat before with her combat knife. But never like this. The way they didn't stop, their reaching, cold, grasping, clammy hands kept coming for her ceaselessly just enraged her even more.

"Just fucking leave me alone! Fuck!" she shrieked, shoving another feral, pale creature back, its mouth smeared with old blood, eyes empty of any and all humanity. She buried the blade in another's skull again, ripped it out and decapitated two more.

She wasn't sure how long the killing went on for, or how many she killed, but when the blood haze finally lifted Kyra found herself gasping for breath, covered in old blood, standing among a small sea of corpses, heads, and limbs.

"Fuck," she whispered, looking around. Well, she wasn't cold any more. As she looked around at the bodies, she groaned. Of course cutting off so many limbs would mess up the uniforms or jumpsuits they were dressed in. And now she was covered in blood. The first order of business was to grab the pistol, which she did, although she had to take a moment to pry the dead man's pallid fingers off of it. She checked the magazine and found it half dead. Well, it was a start. Kyra took a moment to determine whether or not she was really alone this time, padding slowly over to the only other exit where all the zombies had come in through, and looked out.

A strange, square chamber awaited her inspection. In the dead center was a square sunken pool filled with that same green toxic crap, bubbling and hissing and spitting. The periphery of the room had wooden walkways. There was a door to the left and a door to the right, both of them big and wooden, although they had the strange design of being like the doors she was used to: the ones that lifted into niches in the ceiling.

Across from her she saw more square holes cut into the walls and more green torches burning beyond them. No bad guys, though, so she moved back into the original room and began searching all the corpses she'd just made. After several minutes, she managed to come up with one more magazine of ammo for the pistol and an at least semi-decently intact uniform, from the second zombie she'd killed, as it turned out to be the only Marine still properly dressed. She managed to gather up enough non-bloody scraps from the others to, with some degree of success, wipe the blood from most of her body, but she'd need a real shower at some point.

Kyra dressed quickly, so very grateful for even the basic comfort of a uniform, boots, holster, and all. As she finished lacing up the boots tightly and slipping the hatchet into a loop on the belt, she winced at the pain in her shoulder. Nothing she could do about that right now. For the moment, she needed to do some recon. She moved back out into the central room. The way to the right just ended, leaving a gap. The way to the left, however, offered stairs that led down to the door in the left side, then back up to the recessed room on the other side of the area. As she moved over there, Kyra finally got a good look at the architecture.

It didn't make sense.

The walls were that same gray-green stone brickwork, which seemed appropriate...inasmuch as anything in Hell seemed appropriate. But the doorway that she had to pass through to get in here was made of like...iron girders or something. That looked distinctly human. But it didn't seem like something that the UAC might have added, they looked old. Or maybe things aged or corroded faster here? And the floor was this weirdly boring brown wooden square paneling. Who the hell had designed this place?

There was an alcove of space on the other side of the room, and it didn't contain anything beyond some dirty brass candle-holders that burned that same malignant green color. Kyra headed back to the main room, considered the situation for a moment, then finally went up to the left door. Now, to figure out how to activate it…

There was a big silver square on the wall next to it, and a dark, smaller square within it. Kyra frowned, studied it, then finally reached out and pressed it. There was a loud click that made her jerk in surprise, and the inner square lit up red. What? So there was...electricity here? No time for that now, the door was opening.

She heard something as the door opened up...chewing. She hated the sound. Especially the wet snap of what had to be a bone. The door finished opening to reveal a trio of fiends chowing down on some human remains. Kyra sneered and raised her pistol. She put a shot right through the back of the head of the central one and it pitched forward onto the mound of meat and gristle and bone. The other two shrieked and began spinning. She popped off another two shots, one going wild but the other turning the side of the second thing's head into a bloody crater. The third and final fiend snapped off some return fire, missing her only by a few inches, and she bit back a cry of pain as it sailed right over her shot shoulder, burning in its passing.

She emptied the rest of the magazine into it, then hastily reloaded with her last magazine. After clearing the area once more, she stared unhappily at the pile of gristle and meat. There were at least a few corpses in there, and she could see the shredded remains of uniforms. There might be some useful stuff in there. Resigning herself to the miserable, disgusting task, she wasted five whole minutes searching through the pile of dead flesh and ultimately came up with nothing. Not even one extra spare bullet or a knife or anything.

Her shoulder was bugging her and her head was hurting and she was still fucking thirsty. Getting more frustrated, Kyra finished checking out the room, found nothing worthwhile, and left. Coming back to the main central area, she went up to the last remaining door and opened it up the same way as the first door. Another open-ceiling area with a toxic pool in the middle, bigger than last time, awaited her. This time, however, there was another room in the middle of the pool. She moved along the peripheral walkway, checking for more doors or supplies or hostiles, but found nothing beyond the front door she'd initially passed over.

And made an unhappy discovery.

A moat of the green glop separated her from that central room. It wasn't a particularly broad moat, maybe two feet, and she could jump it. Hell, the entrance was even about five feet lower, so she'd be jumping down, too. There was nothing blocking her way. It was just...one screw-up and she'd get to go swimming in…

What was that? Toxic waste? Acid?

Something that was unique to this dimension?

Whatever it was, she had absolutely no intention of touching it. Already the fumes were making her nauseous and lightheaded. She looked into the shadowy chamber beyond, but couldn't see anything save for a stairwell rising up out of sight to, presumably, a second story. It was the only way to go, unless she wanted to head back out the way she came in, or through the front door, and Kyra didn't want to leave empty handed. Well...she did have the uniform and the pistol, but still. She had to check the whole area out. Something was telling her to.

So she took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Took another, then forced herself to run across the little bit of space she had available to her. Hitting the edge, she leaped and sailed through the opening. Landing with a heavy grunt, she made it into the area beyond.

Hands as hard as steel locked onto her right arm.

Kyra shouted in surprised, jerking and twisting away, but the creature, what she realized was a goddamned fiend, had an iron grip. Working fast, she snatched the pistol from her right hand and, as the thing shrieked in rage or some kind of alien triumph, stuck the business end into its mouth and pulled the trigger twice.

That killed it, but she was jerked to the floor because it still had a death grip on her. And it saved her life. A fireball scorched by overhead, barely missing her head, as she hit the floor with a grunt of pain. Kyra snapped the pistol in that direction and wasted five shots before putting the thing down. Aiming with just her left hand was not a strength of hers. But it went down, and she was alone again. Fuck, she wanted out of this miserable place already. Kyra got up after prying the death grip of the dead fiend off and looked around the room. It was almost totally empty, just the corpses for company, more bare stonework floor and ceiling.

She moved carefully up the stairs in the dead center of the room and came to another, smaller rectangular chamber. This one was more interesting, and she knew her instincts had been right. There was another door in between a pair of large, floor-to-ceiling iron-barred windows, which gave a view out onto the landscape beyond. It didn't look anymore appealing than before. On the other hand, the UAC supply crates tucked away in one corner and the dead body there were very inviting. Honestly, even the godawful UAC logo was inviting in this wretched environment. Kyra quickly patted down the body of the poor bastard, a technician in the ripped remains of some kind of biohazard armor that obviously hadn't helped in the slightest.

Should've been combat armor.

One crate was cleared out, and the second almost was too, but whoever had been through here before had either not been able to carry it all, or perhaps thought to leave behind something for some theoretical other person who might come through this area. Though it was probably that first one. This place seemed pretty out of the way. In the crate was a StimPack. Not as good as a full Medikit, but it would do the job.

There were also half a dozen magazines for the pistol.

And, to top it all off, the tech had a PDA. She fired it up and was glad to see that it was in decent condition. She set the audio logs to run as she took the time to patch herself up, dealing with the gunshot wound and a few cuts and scrapes that she'd endured so far that needed some attention. Most of the logs were generic reports about repairs the tech had made around Typhon Station, but then it changed when he'd apparently been handpicked to join a team, one of a few, that was routinely sent into this other dimension.

Kyra still didn't know if she was fully comfortable actually calling this place Hell.

That was about a month ago.

He at first seemed anxious, then excited, then that slowly petered out into anxiety again, then fear. Finally, his last log indicated that he'd been on one such expedition, where it was his job to make repairs to the equipment they had brought into this place, when his squad had been attacked. He'd gotten separated and ultimately had ended up here, and gutted, and dead. The most important facet of data, however, was a map in his PDA.

It was of the region.

After patching herself up, Kyra studied it and found her current position. The structure she was in was marked Stone Keep A7. So there were a lot of these, apparently. And there was apparently just a shitload of dead space around her, save for one other area, what was marked Subterranean A3. Well, great. Because what was better than being in Hell? Being in Hell and underground! But at the end of Subterranean A3 was apparently a portal that would take her to another location, the Dead Wood Fortress.

And in that location was, apparently, a teleportation device that would take her to Obsidian Station. It was a very loose plan, one that relied on a lot of luck, not something that she had an exact abundance of recently, but it was a plan.

And right now, it was the only one she had.

Pocketing the PDA and the extra ammo, Kyra left the stone keep.

And pressed deeper into Hell.