I tear off in a sprint for the nearest Fracture. I dig out huge holes in the grassy lawn, flinging mud and pulped grass everywhere. My boots shatter the sidewalk, crush the curb, and crack the road. I absolutely rip through the city, taking each turn so fast I leave gouges in the road as it gives away before me.

  One step I take rips a pothole in the asphalt, and I go tumbling down, denting and tearing up the road as I half roll, half slide. I scramble to my feet, I take off again, the tips of my boots digging in and flinging small pieces of broken off asphalt behind me in a fan.

  Fuck! Goddamn it, shit! What the hell am I doing!?

  As I’m tearing off through the city in a near panic without a plan, another part of me is currently scrambling to come up with a plan, a third is worrying about the damage to the roads. A fourth is frozen in fear of what happens when the strange spatial, multidimensional formations called Fractures rupture.

  It’s a good thing I’m absolutely fantastic at multitasking, as I’m not sure which one I would have done had I been forced to pick just one. Probably frozen in fear, if I’m being honest.

  Plan, yes. Well, as for the plan? I’m big, I’m heavy. I’m pretty sure I’m exceptionally durable, considering how often I’ve fought various kinds of rocks today and won. I must be strong because again, I’m super heavy and extremely fast. So, fuck it. We ball. That mentality almost got me through college. It should be good enough for the laws of physics breaking down, right?

  Oh good, now there’s a fifth part of me panicking about the laws of physics breaking down.

  A weapon would be nice, but I’m not sure a weapon can fix a possible hole in the space-time continuum. As I turn the last corner, I come across the Fracture I was effectively hypnotized by on the way in. A scene of visceral violence greets me.

  The Fracture is no longer beautiful. Instead it’s a twisted, grisly wound in the universe. It pulses, and with each pulse it changes shape, things rotating into view from nowhere. The oddly warped structures inside make a little more sense each time. More importantly, with each pulse actual monsters are pushed into our world.

  These monsters are huge hordes of rats the size of dogs, and they race at the soldiers with a palpable fury and hunger. Already dozens of them lie gutted and pulped in the streets by rifles and heavy machine guns.

  The armored vehicles thunder out their defiant, mechanical cry against the magical chaos. The thudding of the machine guns would normally have drowned out the smaller, lighter rifles the soldiers are using, but not to me. I pause for a microsecond, before diving into the realm of radio signals and data.

  It’s so cold, like this. It’s not so bad, though.

  I take in a million, ten million data points. Everything from internet connected CCTV cameras to using public wi-fi signals as bootleg radar. I tear into military radio channels, and listen to a hundred different channels simultaneously. Dozens of soldiers fill my awareness. Some are panicked, others, confused. All of them desperate for reinforcements.

  The command post is demanding updates, confusion dominating the airwaves. It takes me less than thirty seconds to collate all this data into several coherent reports. My awareness ghosts over the command center, and I find an array of computers being used to pull in reports for analysts to make sense of. They are, of course, heavily secured with state of the art cybersecurity protocols and encryption algorithms.

  I breeze through them like they’re not even there, grab hold of the computers, and dump the collated status reports into their hard drives. I can tell the analysts are frozen in shock, as I can see through their webcams. I put a tiny version of myself on their screens waving at them. It seems to help, and I catch a glimpse of Captain Hwang looking over one analyst’s shoulder. My little digital avatar waves at her.

  The officer in charge of this Fracture’s defense sprints over to me, and I tear most of my awareness away from the command center.

  I hope they use the reports.

  He screams over the gunfire, though I would have been able to understand him if he had whispered. During my first digital blitz learning the Korean language, I picked up how to read lips.

  Fuck, that was less than three hours ago. How time flies when the universe fundamentally changes.

  “MISTER RYANS! WHAT HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE!?”

  “I came to help! I think I can?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The Fracture pulses again, the feeling of breaking glass grinds uncomfortably across my chassis.

  When did I start calling it my chassis?

  More rats come pouring out. None of them make it closer than ten yards from the Fracture before being ripped apart by gunfire.

  The officer looks at the Fracture before looking back at me and grimacing.

  “I HATE TO SAY IT, BUT I THINK WE’RE GOOD HERE!”

  He points off to the north.

  “THERE’S ANOTHER FRACTURE THAT WAY! TWO KILOMETERS! THEY’RE IN ROUGH SHAPE!”

  Yes, I can hear them desperately calling for reinforcements over the net. They’re close to being overrun by ants covered in stone. I give the officer a thumbs up, and start to jog north. I slowly speed up, keeping my acceleration slow so as not to rip more holes in the road than I already have.

  I try to slow down before curves to keep the damage to a minimum, but after more desperate calls for aid, I give up saving the roads. People over stuff. My boots once again leave craters and gouges in the asphalt. It takes only a few minutes to reach the embattled and desperate defensive line.

  Actual fucking monsters. From beyond space and time. What the fuck.

  A part of me spins off to get lost in that train of thought, and I grab hold of it and stuff it back into the rest of me. It’s… a strange feeling. Hard to describe. It feels completely natural and at the same totally inhuman. I get worried about that for a moment before I grab hold of that too.

  I have other, more important things to focus on. Fortunately for me, I spend just nanoseconds on my internal conflicts, because chaos, panic, and blood lie before me. I think I’d throw up if I still had a digestive tract.

  A dozen soldiers lie on the ground, ripped apart. One armored vehicle is covered in gray, rocky dog sized ants.

  Are they made out of concrete?

  One pokes its head into an open hatch and I hear a panicked scream. Several rounds bounce off the stone head. I leap for the ant.

  In a quarter second I cover thirty yards, ripping the offending ant off the vehicle with a crunch. I fly past the APC at .25 Mach, pulling 260Gs. Half a dozen more ants crawling over it are ripped off by the shockwave I leave behind. The building behind where I leapt from is shredded by shattered road as I impart enough force to rip a six foot deep, fifteen foot cone shaped crater in the road where I started from.

  The vehicle rocks violently from side to side, and a shaky hand reaches up and slams the hatch down. The vehicle peels out, slamming backwards. The mounted gun, a turret controllable from both inside and outside, continues to hammer out high-velocity hatred.

  Looking down at the ant I have squirming in my hand, I confirm that yes, it is made out of concrete. With a squeeze, I crush its head, concrete dust and gore staining my arm and falling to the ground. An ant bites my left ankle with a thunk. I look down and stomp it, my boot hammering through it and into the road beneath. Viscera spews out, staining more of my armor.

  The power, the strength it feels… good. The sheer physicality is intoxicating, though part of me is ashamed at the damage I’m causing. I crumple that part of me up and shove it back into the rest of myself. It’s the end times. A little collateral damage is expected.

  The screams over the radio intensify. More defensive points are being overrun. And so I move. I’m both an unstoppable juggernaut and a flowing river. Each movement is perfect, exacting to cause the most damage. I stomp on one ant, grinding it into the roadway. In the same movement I leap backwards, ripping another huge crater into the roadway.

  The shattered asphalt and dirt beneath shotguns into half a dozen ants, crushing them with the force. The armored vehicle I saved is rocked by a shard of road, but I’m busy killing.

  I twist around mid air, land feet first on an ant with both feet, and hammer it into the ground. I dump all the energy of my leap into it, and it explodes into a cloud of misted ant.

  More roadway fans out like a shotgun, and rips into another crowd of ants, braining and pulping another dozen. One road chunk flies straight up, meeting me at eye level.

  I grab it and hurl it at a couple of ants chasing the still retreating APC. The chunk punches through three before shattering a fourth into goopy, puke yellow pulp.

  Only seconds have passed and I’m still too fucking slow. I can hear Lieutenant Jang screaming over the radio, desperate for anyone, anything.

  He’s reporting more ants, and they’re so close to being completely overrun. But I can’t leave, this Fracture is still pouring out monsters. It pulses again, and another dozen ants pour forth from nowhere and everywhere all at once. If I leave now, who knows where these ants will go. There’s still millions of people in Seoul!

  I roar in frustration, and rocket forth again, firing out another wave of crushed road behind me into a strip of currently abandoned stores. Glass shatters, and a few ants exploring the shops meet a gory end.

  Good. I hope it hurts.

  The problem with perfect awareness all around you and the ability to multitask at a scale a state-of-the-art data center would be jealous of?

  I can’t look away from the mutilated corpses of two dozen young men. Because I’ve inserted myself into South Korea’s Command and Control Network, I know each and every one of their names, too.

  I was never a particularly spiteful person before today. I found it hard to become angry and quick to lose it. Today, though? Well, today is clearly a day for firsts.

  I hope every single one of you fucking monsters suffer. I wish I had the time to drag it out.