The Great Belligerency [Round 4: Static]

Originally posted on MSPA by Dragon Fogel.

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Fortune, it seemed, had a sense of humor.
Cole had been knocked out in the ruins of a stadium under a darkened sky, and when he woke up again, he was in the ruins of a stadium under a darkened sky. He had completely missed the shift between dimensions, and so had not heard the message that might have told him what had happened.
Of course, the stadium he awoke in was not identical to Eternity Stadium. For one thing, it was decidedly more modern in design, although this was only apparent after a close look at the piles of rubble that had once been its walls. The damaged scoreboard was less subtle - Cole recalled that it had been intact, still displaying the scores. But now it was broken. The entire upper half had fallen off, leaving no trace of the team names, and what remained was drained of power. There was no sign of the final score.
Under normal circumstances, Cole would have been fairly sure it was a different stadium. But the rapid changes Eternity Plateau had undergone left him decidedly unconvinced. What if this was simply another such change?
He had been mere seconds away from killing Balance. Now he had no idea what had happened...
The sword was gone.
That explained the attack, he supposed. Someone had been after the god-killing blade.
Had they killed Balance with it? And if so, what if they were a native rather than a contestant?
Then the sword would still be in the Eternity Plateau. Beyond his reach.
He paced around the remnants of the stadium, lost in thought. A closer glance at the floor revealed rectangular lines on the field; it appeared this was a football stadium, rather than baseball. Of course, given the changes he had already seen over the course of the game, this proved little.
That was the worst of it, Cole realized. He had no idea of the situation. He might still be in the Plateau, or in another world which he knew nothing of. If this was a new round, he had no real idea which of his competitors had died. He had no idea where the sword was, or if he still had any hope of retrieving it.
As he wandered the ruins, lost in thought, a dozen or so roaches scurried onto his body, only to be stunned as they touched him. He barely noticed. His main concern right now was information.
If only he had some idea of where to find it.

***

They called themselves the Rebuilders. They had only been active for a few months, but the dozen or so buildings they had reconstructed and converted into shelters had given them a strong reputation in the city.
Initially, there had only been four of them. But their numbers grew with their popularity. After they rebuilt City Hall, twenty men and women signed up to help with the next project. Inside of a month, they had rebuilt three more buildings, and their numbers had triples.
Then the first Outsider came. They soon discovered that they needed the numbers.
The damage from the battle had been severe; three Rebuilders dead, seven severely wounded, and four civilian casualties. They were baffled at where the creature had come from, and even moreso when a different creature appeared two weeks later.
That was when they shifted their focus to defending the city from the Outsiders. The rebuilding became more strategic in nature, ensuring there were command centers throughout the city.
One of them was a restaurant not far from the stadium.
"Picking up an Outsider, ma'am," the radar technician said to his commander. "It just popped up in the stadium."
The commander nodded.
"Only a couple blocks away. We'd better move quickly." She grabbed a megaphone from a nearby table.
"ATTENTION EVERYONE!" she declared. "OUTSIDER ALERT! ARM YOURSELVES AND GET TO THE STADIUM, ON THE DOUBLE!"
The men rushed off to the makeshift armory that had once been a kitchen. The commander smiled.
"About time we got the drop on one of these bastards," she said, half to the technician and half to herself. "This one's not getting a chance to hurt anyone."

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SpoilerSo, to clarify some things there: there's a local military that also works as a construction crew. They have some way of detecting the arrival of "Outsiders", which are basically beings brought here from other worlds by the machine; they've had the bad luck of only running across dangerous ones.
They don't necessarily have enough units to scan the whole city, feel free to use this as an excuse if you don't want to be immediately detected.