Sarge Miller stared at me, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated confusion. His mustache twitched.
"Aggro...?" he repeated, as if the word was a foreign object in his mouth.
He didn't have time to ask what it meant. The sky screamed.
The first dragon—a creature of black scales and impossible size—let out a roar that wasn't just a sound. It was a pressure wave. It rattled the tools on the walls of the motor pool and shook the fillings in my teeth. It was a primal, territorial, I-am-a-god-and-you-are-meat kind of sound.
"TO COVER! NOW!" Sarge bellowed, his training finally kicking in. He grabbed the front of my camo jacket and bodily threw me behind a concrete blast barrier.
The base erupted.
"CONDITION RED! AIRBORNE HOSTILES, BEARING ZERO-NINER-ZERO! THIS IS NOT A DRILL, REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A DRILL!"
I risked a peek over the barrier. The sight was impossible. A flock—no, a swarm—of at least thirty dragons was pouring from the Anomaly. They were massive, winged reptiles, something straight out of the concept art for a high-fantasy RPG.
...Except they weren't pixels. They were real. And they were diving.
"Where are the jets?! Where's the air cover?!" a private shrieked, fumbling with his rifle.
"Shut up and stay down!" Sarge roared. "This ain't our fight!"
He was right. This was an Air Force base. Our job was ground support, logistics, and... well, latrines. Their job was the sky.
And the sky, it turned out, was pissed.
The dragons roared, but a new sound joined them. It wasn't a roar. It was a shriek. A clean, high-G, technological howl of a Pratt & Whitney engine hitting afterburner.
"Get some!" a voice yelled from the flight line.
Two F-35 Lightning IIs—our apex predators—climbed vertically into the sky, their blue flames cutting the desert air. They didn't climb to "dogfight." That was the movies. They climbed to get altitude and distance.
I watched, holding my breath. This was it. The ultimate clash. Magic vs. Technology.
This is going to be epic, I thought, my gamer brain lighting up. They'll get into a swirling dogfight, breathing fire, dodging—
"Fox Three! Fox Three!" a voice crackled over the base-wide comms.
The jets were still miles away, barely visible specks. The lead dragon—the big black one—seemed to spot them and let out another defiant roar, opening its mouth. Fire, hot and orange, streamed into the sky.
It was majestic. It was terrifying. It was also completely pointless.
The dragons were breathing fire at an empty patch of sky where the jets used to be. The AMRAAM missiles, fired from beyond visual range, traveled at over Mach 4.
The dragons never even heard them coming.
There was no "epic clash." There was only math.
The first missile struck the lead dragon. It didn't explode in a cool fireball. The 50-pound high-explosive-fragmentation warhead detonated, and the dragon... disintegrated. One second, it was a mythical beast. The next, it was a red mist and a rain of black scales.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
The F-35s' auto-cannons opened up. The 25mm rounds, firing at 55 rounds per second, tore through the smaller dragons like they were wet paper. Wings were severed. Heads were vaporized.
It wasn't a battle. It was pest control.
In less than ninety seconds, thirty mythical monsters—creatures that could have ended civilizations in another world—were reduced to chunky salsa falling on the Nevada desert.
The two F-35s did a casual victory roll over the base, their engines screaming in triumph, before heading back toward the Anomaly.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. Sarge climbed to his feet, dusting himself off.
"Well," Sarge grunted. "That was... something."
I just stared, dumbfounded, at the red-stained sand. My inner gamer was horrified.
"That wasn't a boss fight," I muttered, shaking. "That was a spawn-camp. They didn't even let the mobs leave the starting zone."
Sarge was about to tell me to shut up when his radio crackled to life.
"Sarge, this is Command. We've got ground hostiles emerging from the Anomaly. Looks like... Roman soldiers? And some... pig-things. We're setting up a forward observation post at Sector 12. They're screaming for supplies."
Sarge looked at the smoking wreckage of the dragons. He looked at the shimmering, impossible portal.
Then... he looked at me.
And he grinned. It was the most terrifying smile I had ever seen.
"Rogers!" he barked, his voice full of cruel, beautiful purpose.
"Sarge?" I asked, my blood running cold again.
"You said you're the 'main tank,' right? Well, guess what. You're not on latrine duty anymore."
He pointed to my Humvee. The one loaded with MREs and water bottles.
"You're on a supply run. To the front line."
I looked at the portal. I looked at the Humvee. My "Guide to the New World" was writing itself, and the first chapter was apparently: "The Worst Escort Quest Ever."