Cloud Strife. Bruised, poised, audacious you. There's nothing they could throw at you that you wouldn't face down arrogantly and lose against. You have nothing to lose; not even yourself. Nothing could make you worry.

  But still... what's happening outside? You can't see it, therefore you don't believe that it's there. But it is. You remember the view from outside the reactor; picture it again, but without you. Something else is happening.

  There were red flashing lights coming from and around the reactor base. A man with a thick brown jacket, square glasses, and dirty blonde hair in a bushy ponytail and segmented bangs was walking down the neon-lit streets of Sector 8. A military squad car sped down the road past him, and he saw the base and rushed to investigate. Troops from the Shinra army in grey uniforms were flocking around the gates. He sprinted to the nearest one and asked, "What's happening in there?"

  The trooper jolted back and aimed the gun at him. "Back off! This is a restricted zone!"

  The man pulled a wallet from his pocket and showed his ID. "I'm Diem, from the General Affairs Department. Off duty. Tell me what's going on."

  The trooper awkwardly lowered his gun. "Uh... There's been a break-in. A silent alarm went off about ten minutes ago, and we can't reach the site's security. We think there's a small task force inside that's taking the men out. Someone was about to call in to report something in the reactor, but their radio cut out."

  "They're gunning for the reactor. Shit. It might be Avalanche. Any intel on what they're after?"

  "None, sir. But we suspect they're already inside. There's already troops on the scene."

  "If they've taken out base security, then that's not gonna be enough. Tell them I'm heading in." Diem brushed past him and sprinted through the gate.

  That sounds like you'll get to have more company soon. Don't get too excited. Barret can't pay you if he dies.

  "Hi," Jessie said, unprompted. "You're trying really hard to be annoying, but you're useful anyway. So for the road, you should have this as well. I noticed your sword is built for them."

  Jessie pulled out from a pocket in her bag a second orb of materia. This one had a crackly blue energy in the middle, and was the size of a marble. And he looked back at his sword to see the two small holes in it just above the handle that were just its size.

  "Just be careful wandering the upper city with that."

  He plugged the orb snuggly inside, and felt a new tingling resonance in his body from the sword. The blade hovered about an inch from the metal floor, and little bolts of electricity pulsed between them. And then Jessie dashed away.

  They continued travelling down paths between buildings in a vague general direction until a hall took them out of the utility access chamber. They passed a hall full of stations for dormant sweeper mechs, rolling tanks with guns for arms and a grill on its face to spit fire. They must have been dusty leftovers from the Wutai war, with an untold amount of death on their hands.

  Biggs was left behind to guard there. Cloud, Jessie, and Barret raced north. At the end of a blur of hallways and rooms they blindly traversed once everyone in front of him stopped, Cloud snapped back and had forgotten the whole journey there.

  Was there anything in the halls and rooms they passed? Anything on the walls? Any decals, machinery, or equipment? And other security drones wandering that they had to dispose of? Did Barret or Jessie talk about something, or throw any question his way? Did they seek any information about his background or military training in the downtime? They were all blank questions.

  No... he remembered one thing. Barret trying to push open a door, and hitting a barricade on the other side. Some voices behind it yelped for a millisecond before quieting. Barret grunted and moved on. That must have been where employees were hiding. The drones would have killed them if they ran around outside.

  "Alright, this has gotta be it," Barret said in front of a different shut door. He stepped forward and it opened automatically to a long hallway and another door at the end. It felt foreboding. Through that last door, they entered a room with no wall ahead, and an open view of a massive chamber below.

  Barret and Jessie leaned over the railing. It was the fabled mako storage, with four gigantic pools of the glittery green liquid with metal gates between, a walkway going down the center, and a wide concrete platform in the back around the nexus point for a plethora of the pipes and machinery on the wall—the reactor core. The master command center to shut down or tamper with mako output and extraction in emergencies, and the main funnel to the mako oven up top.

  And it was dozens of feet down. Barret looked around and found no ladder nor lift. "Damn! How the hell do we get down there?"

  "There's a door to enter at the bottom," Cloud remembered. "We'll need an elevator to reach it."

  Jessie found an elevator door on the side wall, but the security panel to activate it was built into the wall. There was nothing she could dismantle or plug into. "Dammit. There's no way for me to crack the biometrics on this thing."

  Barret kept looking for a ladder that wasn't there. "Why in the hell would they put this balcony here and not have a way down?!"

  Cloud approached the railing. He saw small pipes going down the wall to the side, a network of larger pipes below traveling throughout the chamber's upper half, levels of catwalks closer to the bottom, and the trappings of a path downward for him to take.

  Barret shouted, "Hey!" as Cloud leaped out, slid down the wall pipes, and jumped and slid and swung down the infrastructure with such casualness it could only be seen as showing off.

  They both scoffed at it. Jessie, holding a coil of rope she had pulled out, said, "Alright, I guess that works too."

  Cloud dropped onto the top level of catwalks, from a high distance how he likes it. A locked door was behind him, and a path along the edges of the room with stairs and ladders would lead to the walkways over the mako pools. Meanwhile above, they tied the rope around the railing and threw it down, reaching just a few feet above Cloud. Jessie came down first, and Barret had to slowly grind his way down with his one good hand.

  As they followed the catwalk path around and down another two stories, Barret's eyes were fixed on the reactor core on the opposite side of the chamber. A manic grin was creeping onto his face. "Man... I've waited a long damn time for this. Y'all have no idea."

  "Hold your excitement," Cloud griped, "or you'll fuck us up in the moment."

  "I ain't lettin' one thing go wrong. Not tonight."

  Diem pressed his ID against the door reader and rushed in through the reactor's side entrance. He found the room by the main elevator he was directed to, and Shinra troops inside. Four murdered MPs lied around spatters of their own blood; one with a bludgeoned head in a puddle of water, one slashed through the chest against the wall, one with their head beaten to a cracked pulp, and one shot several times with a radio in their hand.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Diem looked at the MP holding a radio. A trooper told him, "We think he's the one who tried to call in."

  "No shit." He closely scanned the four corpses, taking care to avoid getting blood on his shoes. "This one has a fractured skull and a snapped jaw; met hands that were far more durable than average. Something was smashed into this one's head; with the water, I would wager a block of ice from materia. And that one indisputably has a sword mark. You're right, we're dealing with a SOLDIER down here."

  The guard complained, "How the hell are we gonna kill a SOLDIER?"

  Gunfire broke out in a distant room. Diem told the troops, "You handle that. I'm going down." They scampered away, and he raced to the elevator.

  Jessie stopped at the last ladder down. "Alright. I leave the rest in your capable hands." Barret grinned at her and slid down, followed by Cloud.

  Their feet slammed against the grates, suspended twenty feet over the titanic mako storage pools. There were control panels to regulate individual pools on either side of the platform they stood on, but it was the core straight ahead, the reactor's beating heart, where they were aiming.

  The mass of bright green liquid beneath them glowed over the edges of the walkway, and the humid, pungent atmosphere almost choked them. "Look around," said Barret. "All of this, pumped straight out of the planet. And there are dozens more reactors like this the world over. But not anymore."

  As he walked, Cloud looked around at the profusion of tiny green particles glittering the air. The mako tingled in his nose and down his throat. The taste was repulsive, but for the first time in memory, he could feel the fog and disorder in his brain start to clear. His eyes were no longer shivering and blurring; he was no longer being harassed with distracting thoughts from different times fighting for prominence; his nerves calmed, no longer twitching or shuddering. He could see and focus on what was right in front of him, and grip his sword with newfound conviction and agency.

  The whole platform around the core was empty. Nothing and nobody guarding it, this long after the alarm activated. He looked around the walls for any sign of a door or depot for something that would pop out to defend the reactor, but nothing obvious was showing. Not even cameras.

  They arrived at the core, a window in the giant contraption beaming bright green onto them from burning mako. One strike against this, and all the pipes and tubes connecting, would render the entire monster defunct; one belch of fire where it hurts would hollow out the shell entirely.

  Barret turned around to Cloud. "Hmph. Let's see just how 'different' you're really willin' to be." He dug into his satchel and unveiled their bomb, an underwhelming black brick with a timer mechanism on its face, only big enough to fit proportionally in his oversized hands. He held it out at Cloud. "Go on. You do the honors."

  He stared uncaringly at it. "It's your bomb."

  "The blood spilled in the reactor this day's on both of our hands, merc. This's your bomb as much as mine."

  "Not how that works. You're not dragging me deeper into your conquest against Shinra. Once the job is finished, I'm out."

  Barret's face twitched in rage at still not being able to brute-force his way through Cloud. He pushed the bomb in his face. "Then do the damn job! Earn that paycheck you care so much about, 'stead of gettin' your ass kicked by a bunch of robots!"

  All of that excitement from Barret at getting to singlehandedly make history by blowing up the reactor, and his adamance to make a revolutionary trooper out of Cloud still overpowered.

  He looked at that tiny bomb with contempt, but wrenched it from Barret anyway to get rid of it. It didn't matter whether it succeeded against the reactor.

  "You would be dead without me," he reminded Barret. "Just so we're clear on the score."

  Standing in front of the core, he didn't know whether to put the bomb on the floor, on top of the control terminal, on the keyboard, or to sandwich it between pipes, or toss it on top of the machinery the pipes connected to.

  With all the humid fog in his mind dissipated, a wide clear space was left open. He felt something pulse to life in the center of it.

  Barret said, "Peel the back and stick it right in the middle."

  There was film on the back of the bomb sloppily covering an adhesive pad. Peeling it off almost removed the pad with it.

  Cloud's head tingled, and he started blinking uncontrollably. A new, darker voice was slithering in around the crevices of his brain. Something whispering to him, They're coming, Cloud. You know they're already here. The others will die. But you don't have to.

  It spoke deep and methodically, every word another tendril stretching out and piercing his thoughts. He thought time was frozen, though there was nothing in his eyesight that would normally be moving. Let them take you. All you have to do is wait. You can come back to your home—the place you belong.

  It was sifting around in him, wriggling its fingers in every crack, violating everywhere it touched. It was nestling there—closing in, enveloping him in its closed hands.

  Mother is waiting. Answer the call.

  His vision twisted back to normal, to see from the corner of his eye the ominous, harrowing shape of a black feather drifting down from above. He stared down directly at it, his retinas burning bloodshot. He dared not look up. It fluttered to the ground, disintegrating into a breath of smoke on impact. There and gone in a blink.

  His hand shot to his sword hilt, like it would protect him. His eyes stayed fixed on that spot on the ground, like something would arise from it. He breathed, and waited, and breathed, but he couldn't hold onto the air. He couldn't stare anywhere but down. This was worse than anticipation. It was... fear.

  His breath crawled back into his lungs, lifting his chest back up. His posture reaffirmed. He was ready. He fought through the feeling, and started to pull out his sword, and...

  He forgot why he was looking there. It was just steel and concrete. Nothing there, nothing around him. There was still a bomb in his hand.

  "The hell is you doin'?" Barret griped. "Somethin' wrong?"

  He shook his head and said, "Nothing," and he believed it.

  "Ain't getting cold feet, are ya?"

  He flicked off the film sticking to his hand and slapped the bomb in the middle of the core behind the terminal.

  "Now flip the switch and push the red button."

  He did. The timer turned on, and displayed "20:00."

  "Now the green button to activate it."

  This was stupid. Cloud didn't need to be the one pushing the damn buttons. He looked back at Barret staring eagerly at him, then at Jessie in the background. He wanted to blow them off and walk away. His part of the job was already done.

  "C'mon, merc!"

  The echo of distant clanking sound from above came just in time to interrupt the button-pushing. It was big. The sound multiplied into a rhythm like the tapping of the legs of a walking insect.

  Barret looked around aiming his gun frantically to find it. "Where the hell is that comin' from?!"

  It stopped, then came the sound of a huge crash, much closer. Cloud was almost relieved to hear it. He grabbed his sword with both hands, more primed to use it than ever before. The blade crackled with his new lightning materia.

  The clanging rhythm began again. Jessie shouted from afar, "Look out!" as a gigantic red Shinra mech shaped like a scorpion came crawling down the wall from the ceiling.

  Barret exclaimed, "Aw shit, here it comes!"

  The mech leaped off onto the catwalks above Jessie. Its six legs pounded into the metal and smashed through the catwalks, and it bounced off to land on the walkway opposite Barret and Cloud. They locked in a standoff with a 10,000-pound twenty-foot-tall juggernaut.

  It had the head with an ominous glowing eye and the long coiled tail with a laser and grip claws at the end, but instead of pincers, it had two arms with cannons. Surely Barret could sense the familiarity. Whether it was a leftover weapon of war or a faulty prototype, it was more than Cloud had wagered, and he assumes the rest of the team too. It wasn't going down easy.

  But it was going down.