They called him Cerberus. He was pretty sure it had something to do with the voices in his head. Normally there were three, but sometimes there were four, and they were all a great pain to deal with.

The first three were mean and bloodthirsty, always calling him names and trying to start fights.

The fourth didn’t have an opinion, it only told him what to do.

The first three were always wanting him to hurt himself and other people, but if he did, he’d get punished with greater pain.

The fourth only wanted him to hurt other people, and if he didn’t, he’d feel the greatest pain.

So he listened to the fourth and did his best to ignore the three.

That day was the same as any other.

The three voices were noisy with nonsense. He didn’t listen.

The fourth voice told him to go. So he went.

It told him to work with the six like masked strangers to track a bio frequency and retrieve the source with minimal damage; so as a group, they set off aboard a large rune car towards the wilderness.

Although he wanted to interact with his temporary peers, the three voices were barking out at the sudden strangers so loudly that he paused with a grimace. They were growing louder. A battle of wills to silence the distractions took his entire attention throughout the ride.

As their instruments drew them closer to their designated target, a strange sight befell the approaching raiding party and their handlers, who watched safely from their command positions.

The Jaws of Madness had been broken.

The silhouette had been altered where a strange, misplaced light seemed to blaze.

It was warm and soft, and it made Cerberus feel nice. The voices had gone silent.

Closer and closer they drove, the more visible the anomaly became, the more suffocated everyone felt.

Two colossal stone guardians valiantly held the breach between the mountains, with a massive illuminating torch raised high to hold off the all-consuming darkness.

The light reflecting off the adjoining mountain sides contrasted against the surrounding black and highlighted the new doorway through the dark, stony range.

Just the presence the giant stone figures emitted felt like a pressure was weighing on their chests like they’d never seen anything truly impressive before. Cerberus was awash with the same sense of awe he felt the first time he saw the vastness of the outside or the first time he felt someone embrace him, accompanied with a massive growing trepidation. What was it they were heading towards?

The signal was cut.

Not the bio frequency they were chasing, but the signal in his head with his handler.

There had been no notification or dramatic indicator of the signal being cut. He just felt it.

For the first time that he could remember, he knew that no one was watching from his eyes, or listening through his ears, or speaking straight into his head.

<BARK! BARK! BARK! STUPID HUMAN! RUN!>

<IDIOT! IDIOT! IDIOT! MOVE! GET AWAY!>

<ARNG! ARNG! ARNG! WE’RE TOO YOUNG TO DIE!>

The three voices being the eternal exception.

But unlike the mere annoyances they were before, this outburst was the worst he’d ever endured and he literally staggered, his very vision blanking and his consciousness threatening to go out.

“-St-stop screaming!” he shouted aloud, startling his teammates, but perhaps not surprising them.

What was truly shocking was that the voices actually relented.

With softer and gentler tones, the three united in their pleas and urged his ugly ass to run in the opposite direction. There was no fourth.

It made him pause. He’d never had the fourth voice fall silent instead of giving the next command. He wasn’t sure how to handle it.

Cerberus looked around at the others in the vehicle and saw that they too had experienced similar phenomenons and were feeling similar unease.

They were now within a few miles of their target, which, according to their direction, seemed to be either at or beyond the flame bearing giants, and was exactly where his voices didn’t want him to go.

<Turn around, you stupid fool!>

<It will come for us!>

<How can you be so useless? You’re actually driving us towards the death?!>

As the designated leader of the operation, it was his call to make. Commanding the AI to stop the rune car, he looked at his temporary teammates and wondered what they should do.

“B-b-b-b-boss,” the largest of the group stutteringly called out with a surprisingly timid voice for the heavily muscled six-foot frame.

“Th-thi-th-th-this i-i-is my la-last o-op be-f-fore I ge-get to re-t-t-t-t-tire. I ca-ca-can’t screw th-this up m-man.” He begged. And with good reason.

Retirement.

The place that they all dreamed about.

The place where they could have all their heart’s desires.

The place that each and every one of them went after doing a good job.

Everyone looked at the masked figure with envy and understanding. As far as they knew, they still had a long way to go, but for this guy, the holy land was within sight. A failure here could jeopardize his chance. Voices be damned. There was no way he’d risk doing a bad job.

“You take point,” Cerberus relented. He also wouldn’t want his chance for retirement jeopardized by cowardice when his time came.

Minotaur nodded heavily, his body shaking with excitement. This would be the last time. Then, he could finally rest.

They were going to do things as they’d been initially instructed. Strike like lightning and eliminate everyone besides the target. Beware of potential awakened S-Rank combatants.

Each unit had their own personal bio-frequency tracker and short range coms for communication.

Three feminine masked forms were arming themselves to the teeth in the latest runetech equipment, including body armors, vribro blades, rune rifles, micro explosives and portable rune shield generators.

The four male masked forms differed in height and frames from small and skinny to tall and savage, but they were all dressed in similar black combat clothes and boots and held no weapons besides themselves.

Cerberus looked interestedly at his female peers and their interesting assortment of equipment and grew excited to see The Sisters in action. He’d long heard of the Big Sisters and how they differed from the Big Brothers, but he’d never met a Big SIster till that day. If he wasn’t so freaked out about how freaked out the voices were, he’d have gone over and started a conversation. But as it were, they were freaking out.

<If you go over there, then we will all die!>

<Can’t you feel the danger? Are you that stupid? Are you that useless?>

<Turn around! It’s not too late!>

The voices that were always encouraging self harm that he’d trained extensively to ignore were pleading for self preservation.

Perhaps he should have been more curious about that.

Cloaked in a visual distortion field with several special stealth recon drones scouting their surroundings and the latest in energy detection instruments at their disposal, the group slowly approached the source of the frequency with double the caution.

By the time they reached the flattened base of the old mountain that used to stand there, the group of enhanced agents could already visually confirm where their acquisition target rested.

At the center of the path of illumination that ran between the two valleys of cast shadows, lay a girl curled up into a ball on her side, right beneath to light casting torch.

The distance wasn’t considered close, but it wasn’t far. Cerberus could easily clear that distance within seconds and he was certain Griffin wouldn’t be too slow either. His major concern was the complete lack of cover upon approach. There was real danger and he didn’t know from where it would come.

“Cyclops.” He quietly called to action.

The thin framed figure shook with suppressed pain as his masked face split down the center from his brows to his chin and revealed a golden pupil that could see what was unseen. With the golden eye that became his face, Cyclops first carefully scanned the girl and her surroundings before trembling as he frantically looked in every direction from where they stood.

“What is it?” Cerberus urgently asked.

“I-,” the shivering one eyed figure tried, but he didn’t know what to say.

“What do you see?” Cerberus snapped, growing frustrated and unnerved by the optics specialist’s lack of composure.

“There are… lines,” he tried again. “Lines are… everywhere. I don’t know what they are. It almost looks like small fractures in the fabric of space but without the actual shattering, because if that’s what these lines really are, we’d all be dead by now.”

“So, are they currently dangerous?”

“Well, I hope not, because we’ve been walking through them and are standing in some now.”

The team grew visibly unnerved and Cerberus didn’t need his team beating themselves into defeat before even meeting the enemy.

None of the drones were picking up any hidden activity, and the energy detection instruments weren’t picking up anything within a five-mile radius, so the only traces they had to go on was something that only Cyclops could see and react to.

Minotaur, the retirement seeking giant, crouched down and touched the earth. Dark gray stones surged up his fingers to his shoulders and head like fluids and quickly took shape as condensed thorny stone armor and a bull horned stone helm that encased his entire head.

“I need my retirement.”

Without another perfect word, or any consideration for the group, Mino charged out.

Cerberus quickly signaled the Eldest Sister, who barely cast her counter thorn rune in time, that would act as Minotaur’s first layer of defense. She wasn’t sure if her second cast made it to Griffin before he took off into the sky with wings and claws condensed from the wind. Cerberus purposely paused to receive his, as did the Sisters before following suit.

Winded, the Eldest temporarily stayed back with Cyclops, who’d become near catatonic in his distracted explorations of the unknown lines, as she recovered.

By the time Cerberus had started to give chase, the surprisingly agile Minotaur had already come within arm’s length to the sleeping child, and when the giant had begun bending over to pick it up, Cerberus was barely halfway to being the first to reach the overexcited bull-head.

He saw it.

Minotaur’s fingers phased right through what their heightened senses told them in no uncertain terms was a living, breathing child. Children were supposed to be solid.

<Idiots.>

<Worthless.>

<Bird’s gone.>

Brief bewilderment shattered to heart clenching premonitions when three giant pairs of alert red eyes manifested above his head and still couldn’t see any signs of Griffin.

It was an illusion, and their aerial unit had vanished.

These all felt like really bad signs.

“The lines! Something’s coming through the lines!” Cyclops screamed in terror, the Eldest Sister dragging his trembling ass along as she chased after them, since his legs decided they weren’t good no more.

The world was filled with veils of falling sand, rocks, and stones. Wherever they looked, lines were now cracks in reality, spilling vast quantities of sedimentary debris. And they were everywhere.

Split apart as they were, when the world was partitioned by the anomalies, besides the lagging pair, each unit was visually and physically separated from the other.

Then there were screams.

An anguished cry came from the direction of the confused bull, while short, high-pitched screeches came in two short bursts from his back. Two of the Sisters. Minotaur.

Cerberus’s body swelled with black and red steel like fur, his hands and feet twisting into sharp and deadly claws and the three pairs of red eyes that floated above him glowed brighter and became three snarling red wolf heads with drooling fangs that were ready to devour the world.

His clawed hands slashed open the falling veils and ran over the growing mounds of earth in search towards where he estimated the last pair to be.

Smashing through one barrier after the other, Cerberus frantically called out, demanding a response, hoping that the lack of screams meant that he wasn’t alone out there. But there were no responses.

He slashed and jumped and ran, slashed, jumped, and ran. And cried.

He wasn’t sure what direction he was going, or where he was in relation to anything, but the three voices were telling him to run, and now he was going to listen. But it was too late for that.

A hand reached through a falling veil of sand and caught the passing Cerberus by the neck.

Pure terror.

He didn’t resist because he knew he couldn’t. Something in the grip that controlled his life and death revealed the insurmountable gap between them. Even the three hounds had gone silent, their apparitions faded, and all power withdrawn from their human host in complete submission.

Cerberus’s entire body hung limp and helpless from the iron grip that suspended him till he finally came face to face with the mastermind of their nightmares.

He was young and expressionless but his eyes were scary. That’s all that the captured could think as he watched the other hand slowly reach up and grab his mask. And revealed his face.

Cerberus felt the cold and biting wind across his sweat drenched face and felt the hand that gripped him falter. He saw the hollow eyes that stared into his soul widen and his stony expression lax, from murderous to shocked.

“You’re just a kid.”