"We're right over the portal now," Estelle said. 

     "Ready to drop?" Noel asked. 

​     He touched the back of Shawnacy's skull so he could feel her nod. 

     "Go," he said. 

     The first few thousand feet of their descent went smoothly.

     Once they got near the surface, though, they found themselves surrounded by hovering plants the size of jumbo jets.

     Trevor whistled. That was one more thing he never imagined he'd see in his lifetime. (That happened to him a lot since he'd joined the Azure.) At first, he felt these plants couldn't have any heft to them, the way they hovered. Then he realized that it wasn't a lack of weight that allowed them to fly, but some sort of internal hovering mechanism. They didn't seem weaponized, outside of the fact that they, themselves, were being used as weapons.

     There were thousands of them, tens of thousands.

     The more the van dropped, the more of these hovering plants appeared.

     They surrounded the van...

     then grew to such a number that they began to crush it.

     With a hundred yards still to drop before they reached the portal, they found they could drop no further.

     "Everyone get a grip on me," Noel said. "There's no reason for anyone to get hurt."  

                                                    CONTINUE