Garu froze.
Jake was lying flat on the floor, motionless. A cold knot formed immediately in Garu's stomach, his breath catching before he could stop it.
Wait. Please don't be dead.
Then he heard it.
A loud, rhythmic snore echoed through the quiet room.
...
Garu stared down at him. His expression moved through several stages of grief before settling on pure, unadulterated disbelief.
"Are you kidding me," Garu muttered under his breath. It wasn't a question. It was a statement about the tragic nature of the universe.
The world was coming apart outside. Adil was somewhere in the dark corridors, bleeding from a chest wound carrying poison he didn't even know about yet. An elite tracker was on the verge of death across Garu's shoulders. Monsters roamed every hallway of a facility constructed to contain something that shouldn't be woken. And Jake—Jake who had trained in martial arts since childhood, Jake who had thrown Adil through a desk that very morning with a single kick—was taking a nap.
Garu suppressed the overwhelming urge to kick him repeatedly in the face.
He stepped forward and carefully lowered the wounded tracker onto one of the pristine medical beds instead, adjusting him with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that feelings were a problem for tomorrow.
"Give me the items," the hunter muttered, fingers twitching weakly against the white sheets. "I can heal myself."
Garu reached into the loot pile and handed over a small glowing vial and a sealed medical pack. On his way back across the room, he wound his leg back and kicked Jake hard in the ribs.
"OW—what the hell?!"
Jake jolted upright, one hand flying to his side, the other rubbing his eyes with the specific indignation of someone who had been perfectly comfortable until five seconds ago. He blinked around the unfamiliar room. "Where am I?"
At least we're inside a room, Garu thought bitterly, remembering the tracker's rule. If you yelled like that in the corridor, we'd already be dead.
For one brief, genuine moment, Garu considered leaving him here.
He took a sharp breath instead. I don't have time. The hunter is patching himself up. Adil's entire sacrifice means nothing if I waste it standing here.
"Jake. Listen to me very carefully."
Jake's expression shifted—the sleepiness clearing instantly as something in Garu's voice registered. Something he had rarely heard there before.
"We aren't in our world anymore," Garu said, his voice dropping to a low, precise whisper. "We've been transported somewhere else. Adil is out there right now, fighting alone."
"What—" Jake was on his feet before the word finished. He crossed to the window in three wide strides and pressed both hands against the glass.
Outside, the college campus was gone. Entirely, completely gone—replaced by a suffocating mist that swallowed the streets whole, reducing everything beyond it to drifting shadows and the suggestion of a landscape that no longer resembled earth. His gaze dropped to the medical bed, taking in the lacerated hunter frantically applying salve to his torn chest.
Jake's jaw fell open slowly.
"No way," he whispered, turning back toward Garu. "This has to be a dream."
"It isn't." Flat. Firm. No space for negotiation. "Right now, you only need to remember two things."
Jake looked at him—really looked—the way people look when they understand that the person speaking to them is currently incapable of being wrong.
"First—go help Adil." Garu pointed sharply at the exit. "Second—stay silent. Not quiet. Silent. Do not make a single sound once you step into those corridors."
Jake opened his mouth. "Why—"
"Because it will get you killed." The gravity in Garu's eyes closed Jake's mouth for him. "I'll explain everything else later. Go. Now."
For the first time since waking up, Jake understood that Garu wasn't delivering instructions. He was delivering facts about survival.
Jake clenched his fists. Gave one sharp nod. And bolted for the door.
Jake sprinted down the corridor, his chest burning and his footsteps hitting the concrete harder than they should. He knew he was being too loud, but he couldn't make himself slow down.
You can't die on me, Adil. I still have to beat you.
He clenched his jaw and pushed his legs harder into the mist.
THACK.
Farther down the hall, Adil ripped the dagger free. Blood ran from a deep gash across his forehead, dripping off his chin onto the concrete. He stepped forward on a leg that wasn't cooperating properly anymore, moving past two Zogs lying motionless behind him.
Three down.
The wounds across his chest burned with a heat that had moved past pain into something fundamental—his body communicating that it was running a deficit it couldn't sustain much longer. He'd been ignoring it. He kept ignoring it.
His knee hit the floor.
He hadn't decided to kneel. His leg had simply stopped asking permission.
I can't die. Not yet.
He gritted his teeth and pressed his palm against the cold floor. Pushed. Got one foot under him. Then the other. The corridor swam at the edges but stayed mostly upright, which was all he was asking of it right now.
Then the mist ahead thickened, and a fourth Zog emerged from the gloom.
Adil stared at it.
A bitter, bloody smile found his face without asking. Blood dripped steadily from his chin onto the concrete.
Am I really going to die here? The thought arrived with a strange lightness, almost curious. After all of this?
Hahaha.
Then I'm taking you with me.
He forced himself to stand fully. Gripped the dagger until his knuckles went white. His eyes locked forward, and something in them went very still and very clear—the specific clarity that arrived when everything else had been stripped away and only the next necessary thing remained.
Not yet.
The Zog charged.
Just a little more.
The moment its claw reached him, Adil moved—not backward, but forward, straight into the space the creature had committed to. Finding the gap its momentum created, he drove the heavy dagger deep into its eye socket with everything he had left, using the impact to slam the corpse into the ground beneath him.
Did you think I didn't learn anything from the other three? His mind was still running clean even now, the analytical part of him that processed fights continuing to work while his body failed. The pattern. The eyes. Always the eyes.
But those claws...
The thought about poison—the one he had filed away earlier—pressed against the back of his mind with the insistence of something being proven right.
Something ruptured inside him.
Not suddenly. Just... wrong. A deep, cold wrongness starting in his chest and expanding outward with terrifying certainty.
He coughed, and thick dark blood splattered across the concrete.
He stared at it with the detached attention of someone who had run out of the energy required for panic.
So the claws were poisoned, he thought. Called it.
His knee hit the floor again, hard.
"Aghh—"
The sound escaped before he could stop it. Involuntary. Small. A single syllable that the corridor received like a detonation.
The air froze.
Every ghost in the hallway snapped its head toward him in perfect unison—that single, horrific synchronized movement. Every pale neck turned at the exact same angle at the exact same instant, hollow faces locking onto his trembling frame.
They charged.
The first spirit passed directly through his chest, and the cold detonated—worse than before, because he was already running on empty. The freezing aura found everything broken and tore it open. Static exploded through his brain, blinding and total. The corridor folded. Darkness rushed in from every edge simultaneously.
The ghosts still circled above him. Patient. Purple auras burning in the dim light, waiting with the confidence of apex predators.
Adil lay in the dust.
He breathed.
Not yet.
OBSERVATIONS
...
Subject 999 is still here.
From somewhere very deep down—from whatever was still running underneath the poison, the wounds, and the memory of a classroom door that shouldn't have opened—a single thought remained:
Not yet.
Farther down the corridor, Jake skidded to a halt.
He had heard the sound—the small, involuntary groan—and then the air had shifted violently. He rounded the corner and stopped dead, the scene in front of him freezing him in his tracks.
Ghost figures floated above a body.
A body he recognized instantly by the messy black hair, the ruined college uniform, and the particular way that even unconscious and covered in blood, Adil looked like he was about to do something stupidly brave.
Don't speak, Garu's voice echoed in his memory. Silent.
Jake's jaw locked tight. His fists closed at his sides so hard his knuckles popped.
He moved forward, taking one careful, silent step at a time toward his best friend lying face-down in the dust. Covered in blood from his forehead, his chest, and places Jake couldn't even identify yet.
Jake said nothing—because Garu had told him not to, and because no words existed in human language for what he was looking at right now.