The first thing Benjamin Gillman noticed wasn't the pain, though his body felt like it had been put through a meat grinder. It wasn't the acrid smell of smoke and burning earth that filled his nostrils, or even the way his enhanced hearing rang like a church bell after Sunday service. No, the first thing that truly registered was the silence where there should have been noise.
No helicopters. No distant hum of traffic. No radio chatter crackling through his comm unit.
Just... nothing.
Ben's eyes snapped open, and he immediately regretted it. The world spun like a carnival ride operated by a drunk carnie, all blurred greens and browns swimming together in a nauseating kaleidoscope. He groaned, the sound echoing strangely in the thick air around him, and tried to push himself up on his elbows.
"What the fuck..."
The words came out as a rasp, his throat dry as sandpaper. As his vision slowly cleared, Ben found himself lying in what could only be described as a crater. Not a small one either, this thing was easily twenty feet across, with blackened earth steaming around him like some kind of hellish hot tub. The smell of ozone and something else, something wrong, hung heavy in the air.
Trees surrounded the crater, but they weren't the neat, managed forests he was used to seeing in upstate New York. These were wild things, ancient and imposing, their trunks thick as small buildings and their canopy so dense that only scattered beams of sunlight managed to penetrate to the forest floor. Everything was green, aggressively, almost unnaturally green, and alive in a way that made his skin crawl.
Ben sat up fully, his head spinning, and took inventory. His helmet was gone, probably vaporized in whatever clusterfuck experiment Vought had been running. His uniform was scorched and torn, the green fabric blackened around the edges but still mostly intact. The eagle-headed knife was still strapped to his thigh, and his shield...
He looked around frantically until he spotted the familiar pentagonal shape half-buried in the smoking earth a few feet away. Ben crawled over and pulled it free, running his hands over the vibranium surface. Not a scratch on it, naturally. The thing had survived a nuclear blast; whatever had happened here wasn't going to leave a mark.
"Okay," he said aloud, his voice steadier now. "Okay, think. What's the last thing you remember?"
The memory came back in fragments. The laboratory. Those fucking scientists in their pristine white coats, scribbling notes and muttering about "dimensional rifts" and "quantum entanglement." They'd strapped him to some kind of machine, pumped him full of God knows what, and then...
Then everything had gone to hell.
There had been light – more light than any human should ever see – and a sound like reality itself tearing apart at the seams. Ben remembered screaming, though whether from pain or rage, he couldn't say. Then nothing.
"Those sons of bitches," he growled, pushing himself to his feet. His legs felt steadier now, the enhanced metabolism that kept him alive and fighting already working to process whatever they'd done to him. "When I get back, I'm going to tear that fucking lab apart brick by brick."
He reached for his radio, muscle memory taking over, and pressed the transmit button.
"Soldier Boy to base, come in. Soldier Boy to base."
Static.
"Hello? Anyone out there? This is Benjamin Gillman, call sign Soldier Boy, requesting immediate extraction."
More static.
Ben adjusted the frequency, tried again. Nothing. He cycled through every channel he knew, military and civilian, but got nothing except the soft hiss of empty air.
"Figures," he muttered, clipping the radio back to his belt. "Probably fried the electronics. Fucking Vought and their half-assed experiments."
He looked around the crater again, really taking it in this time. The burn pattern was wrong – too symmetrical, too clean. It looked less like an explosion and more like... well, like something had just appeared here with enough force to displace everything in a perfect circle. The thought made him uncomfortable in a way he couldn't quite articulate.
Ben climbed out of the crater, using his hands to pull himself up the steep sides. The earth was still warm beneath his palms, and more than once he had to pause as another wave of dizziness washed over him. Whatever they'd done to him, it had taken more out of him than he'd initially thought.
At the top, he stood and stretched, working out the kinks in his muscles. The forest stretched out in all directions, an endless sea of green that seemed to go on forever. No roads. No power lines. No signs of civilization at all.
"Great," he said. "Just fucking great."
A sound made him freeze – the creak of wood and the jingle of metal. Ben spun around, his hand instinctively going to his knife, and felt his blood run cold.
A man sat on horseback about fifty yards away, watching him with undisguised suspicion. But this wasn't any man Ben had ever seen. The rider wore what looked like medieval armor – actual medieval armor, not some Renaissance fair costume – complete with a surcoat bearing a coat of arms Ben didn't recognize. The horse was a massive destrier, the kind of warhorse that had gone extinct centuries ago.
The knight was speaking, but the words that came out of his mouth were gibberish. Not Spanish, not French, not any language Ben had ever heard. It sounded almost like English, but wrong, like someone had taken familiar words and twisted them into something alien.
"Hey!" Ben called out, raising his hands to show he wasn't immediately threatening. "I don't suppose you speak English?"
The knight's response was to draw his sword, a long, wicked-looking blade that caught the filtered sunlight. He spurred his horse forward, shouting something that sounded like a battle cry.
"Shit," Ben muttered, grabbing his shield and bringing it up just as the knight's sword rang against the vibranium surface. The impact sent vibrations up his arm, but the shield held firm.
The knight wheeled his horse around for another pass, and Ben got a better look at him. The man's face was visible through the slits in his helmet, and what Ben saw there was pure terror. The knight wasn't attacking him out of aggression or duty – he was attacking out of fear.
"Look, buddy," Ben said, backing away slowly. "I don't know what your problem is, but I'm not looking for trouble here."
The knight charged again, this time swinging his sword in a wide arc aimed at Ben's head. Ben ducked, letting the blade pass over him, and came up with his fist aimed at the horse's flank. The punch connected with a sound like a gunshot, and the animal screamed, rearing up on its hind legs and throwing its rider.
The knight hit the ground hard, his armor clanging against the stones. Ben advanced on him, shield raised, expecting the man to yield or at least try to negotiate.
Instead, the knight rolled to his feet and came at Ben with his sword raised high above his head, screaming something that might have been a prayer or a curse.
Ben sidestepped the downward swing and brought his fist up in a brutal uppercut that connected with the knight's jaw. The man's head snapped back with a sickening crack, and he crumpled to the ground like a marionette with cut strings.
For a moment, Ben stood over the fallen knight, breathing hard. The man wasn't moving, and Ben could see blood seeping from beneath his helmet. A lot of blood.
"Fuck," Ben said quietly. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
He knelt beside the knight and carefully removed the helmet. The man's face was young, maybe twenty-five, with the kind of idealistic features that belonged on a recruiting poster. His eyes stared sightlessly at the canopy above, and his jaw hung at an unnatural angle.
Ben had killed him. One punch, and the kid was dead.
"I'm sorry," Ben said, though he wasn't sure why. The knight had attacked him first, had been trying to kill him. It was self-defense, pure and simple. But looking at the young man's face, Ben couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just crossed some kind of line.
He stood and looked around. The knight's horse had fled, but his sword lay nearby, still gleaming in the dappled sunlight. Ben picked it up, testing its weight. It was well-made, better balanced than he'd expected, with a razor-sharp edge that spoke of quality craftsmanship.
"Might as well," he said, sliding the blade into his belt. "Going to need all the help I can get."
Ben looked down at the dead knight one more time, then turned and walked away. There was nothing he could do for the man now, and standing around feeling guilty wasn't going to get him any closer to figuring out where the hell he was.
The forest path was narrow and winding, clearly made by foot traffic rather than vehicles. Ben followed it, his enhanced senses on high alert for any sign of danger. The trees pressed close on either side, their branches forming a tunnel of green that blocked out most of the sky. Every now and then he caught glimpses of birds or small animals, but they all looked wrong somehow, like someone had taken familiar creatures and twisted them into something slightly off.