Ext. Nevada Spaceport — Day 

/y//4638//

"Come on," said Shadow floating above the abandoned cars and tour buses. He had been floating around the Nevada Spaceport. One of the hundreds built during the great expanse of a commercialized Sol system. Many were used as an escape from when the Raliksi invaded. But now, they were all empty. Only rust, decay, and dead dreams laid scattered.

Shadow's bright blue eye shot a light down onto a rusted car, scanning its exterior and interior. After a minute, he shook his orb body in disapproval. From there, he floated to another vehicle and then another and then a bus. Scanning as he moved through the highway. It looked as if everything was rushing towards the center of the Spaceport, where seven towering rockets stood. Each with sphere compartments stacked on top of each other, like lollipops with stacking bulbs. The ships were large enough to be known as arks for the mass exodus during the days of the Raliksi Invasion but never used. Now without power, they stood alone. Shadow glanced over to the rockets. "Maybe. Maybe there," he said before something caught his eye.

He glided over the cramp roads till he found a bridge. A skeleton was perched over the edge like it was running from something from underneath. Shadow scanned the bones and decided it wasn't what he was looking for. So he moved over the bridge and lowered himself onto the dried river. It was once a beautiful source of water, but now it was nothing but piles of mud and trash. Shadow spun around, hoping that whatever the skeleton was running from would be enough to surprise him. And he was.

Underneath the bridge was bones, but it wasn't all bones. A being stood in front of a group that Shadow counted to be fourteen. There was more, but the rest didn't petrify like the fourteen. Which were turned to dust, stone, ash, and melted metal. Their limbs were frozen in place with the atoms shifted that you could no longer tell if they were female or male. The petrification had a rough and brittle texture but strong enough to last the test of time. There were small beings that Shadow assumed to be children among those petrified, but it was the being that stood in front of the group. The feeling it gave snatched Shadow’s attention in a way that not even he could comprehend. An unconscious feeling that one could say was fate.

Shadow floated above the bridge and looked back to a massive wall opposite the seven rockets. Above the wall, blotting out the sun and casting an everlasting shade, was the Wayfarer.

Shadow moved back below the bridge, hovering in front of the being. There was an old sewage tunnel with its grate melted off. The shadow didn't need a map to tell him that it would lead him back to the Wall and then to the Last Bastion. "Good," said Shadow. "This is the one." He scanned the being standing in front of the group, confirming his decision. "Such a strong light." Shadow unravelled himself, exposing his eye. His body, now rings of stone, started to spin around the eye. As the ring gained speed, a translucent energy began to form from the eye, reflecting all the colours of the rainbow. He let out a pulse of light enveloping the being. A roar from behind sent Shadow back to his normal form. He turned down the dry river trail and noticed a small squad of Raliksi. Two Ints and a Warrior. 

"Oh no, oh no, oh no. Please wake up," pleaded Shadow. He could sense the three Raliksi rushing his way. "Anytime now." The petrification started to crack as light poured from the wounds. Shadow bounced up and down in the air, "Just break out already!" He bounced faster as the cracks spread as more light began to leak out. "Now is not the time to have a dramatic entrance—," a hand snatched the shadow from the air. "The sewage," order Shadow ripping free and leading the way.

The new human followed behind, tripping over the bodies of the people it once protected. Unchained from the memory of its deed.

Once inside, Shadow lead the way with his eye lighting up the corridor.

"Hurry, they'll be on us soon. I would hate for you to experience death so soon. Just a couple of miles now, and we'll reach the Wall!" Without even asking, the human followed behind. Surging with new strength. It didn't get tired or feel sore as its sliced-up feet bled behind it from jagged stones. It just needed to follow the light to the end of the tunnel.

1

Int. The Wall — Day

The three Raliksi emerged from the sewage tunnel into a room with pillars of metal and stone reaching up to sixty meters into the air. Above them was no ceiling but the open sky with the metal wall reaching twenty meters higher than the pillars. They could see a part of the Wayfarer floating above. The Raliksi wore leather and metal armour in the way of the samurai of old. The Warrior gripped his flame sabers with two of his four arms while he suggested with his free arms to the Ints to scan the room. They followed suit, searching around abandoned storage containers. The room was vast and curved. It was part of the Wall which encircled an air force base from times before the Golden Age.

The Ints search for hours before giving up. Finally, together with the Warrior, they went to one of the many massive steel doors and slid it open. The Warrior made one more glance back at the room, adjusting his respirator over his mouth inhaling a large amount of aether. The fur on its head started to vibrate as the aether surged throughout its body before flickering his eyes blue and then returning to a muddy yellow. With a final grunt, he turned away into the Wall.

On a platform on one of the pillars, our shadow hovered with the being next to him.

"That was a close one. Good thing most Raliksi don't bother to look up," said Shadow. He turned to finally face the creature he brought back from the dead. It was a woman with short black hair and eyes of emerald green. Her skin was soft pink with a hint of Asian descent. She wasn't beautiful or perfect, but she had a certain charm with how she gazed at Shadow. "Oh no," Shadow proclaimed as it hovered down to her feet which were infected and still bleeding. It took him less than a second to pulse out a wave of healing, returning the woman's feet back to normal. "There you go, good as new. But we don't have a lot of time. I'm sure those Raliksi will come back through here sooner or later. There's nothing in there for them. Quick, climb down and find what you can to get dressed."

The woman leaped from her platform, making a hero's landing, and then stood up. She was fine, and without a single second missed, she rushed to a storage container and peered inside. Quickly she found clothes. She grabbed what she needed and then glanced over to Rangruff 4k-70, which laid on the ground against the furthest most wall the way they came in. After getting dressed, she snatched the rifle up and slotted in an empty magazine as if it was instinct.

"Don’t worry about bullets,” said Shadow. “The light will provide,” and almost as if it was on cue, the magazine was filled with ethereal light. “As long as you’re connected to the light, the Wayfarer will help. There should be a door—,”

The woman fired a couple rounds in the room that the Raliksi had entered. The two Ints from before fell out dead.

“What? They were waiting?” Asked the Shadow before turning to the woman. Her gaze still on the room. The blazing sabers ignited, casting light on the Warrior's face. He roared and rushed into the room. The woman’s rifle rang as more shoots soared out of the barrel, the sound bouncing from the metals wall. The Warrior, with ease, dodged a few rounds, but when the Rangruff went full auto, he activated a solar shield. The bullets dispersed on impact, and the shield dimmed in strength. The rifle didn’t have enough time to pop the shield, and it didn’t take long for Warrior to reach the woman.

He swiped at her with one blade, and she rolled towards him just off to the Warrior’s left. Another blade came in swinging, on its way to cut the woman, in mid roll, in two. She fired a couple of shots launching her up just a bit for the second blade to sweep right underneath, singeing some hair. She went into a dash. Now out of the Warriors range, she headed for the exit. Firing back at the Warrior blindly.

“Are you trying to wake the whole place up?” Questioned Shadow following close behind. Once in the room, they were met with a dark hallway. Shadow flew ahead, lighting the path. “Follow me!” And the woman obeyed, leaping over boxes and steel beams that had fallen from the Wall.

The woman glanced up to see a spider web of metal crisscrossing from the walls that made up the hallway. She could see more paths and closed doors hidden away among the web. All rusty and painted over with logos and sigils of a time before.

“Watch out,” Shadow warned as Ints began crawling from holes in the floor. The woman fired quickly, head-shotting one Int barely out of his hole. It exploded, geysering black blood onto the walls. She glanced down where it had emerged from and found that it went down deep. Yet she didn’t have time to explore, as more Ints started to emerge from above. She looked behind her briefly and saw the Warrior gaining speed. His shield recovered in strength as it glowed bright.

The woman jumped over dangers and fired blindly behind her. She needed to do everything she could to slow them down. A shotgun laid rusty on a crate, and she snatched it up, immediately firing a buckshot into an Int that had caught up. Blasting its body into chunks, blinding her pursers. They roared in disgust, wiping pieces of their friend from their faces. The woman’s rifle dematerialized into thin air.

“It’s not gone! Just placed into your dimensional inventory. you’re fine. If you think, it will appear,” said Shadow. The woman reached behind her and pulled the Rangruff from thin air, swapping it with the shotgun. She swapped back and forth a couple times. “Stop playing with it!”

Above in the rafts, hidden away, sleeping, a man peered down at the ruckus below. He watched as the woman fought for her life.

“I didn’t expect to see another Sentinel in the Wall,” said another shadow floating by the man.

“She fights like she knows what she’s doing. How would you rate her, Stacie?” Asked the man.

“I’d give her slightly above average. She’s doing a lot better than most of the trainees,” said Stacie. Her design was different from Shadow, with her shell more like a frozen comet with shards of ice pointing behind her like hair. “You going down?”

“Not yet,” said the man as he watched the woman run beneath him.