That same day—On a different plane, far below the divine corridors Elira had just shattered, Ash Lynel exhaled and lined up a kill.He didn't know someone in the Outer Bureau had already ruined his afterlife.
His finger rested on the trigger. The scope stayed steady. One breath. One target. No mistakes.
Across the courtyard, beyond the blur of misted glass, the man stepped into view. Dark suit. Polished shoes. No guards in his radius. No hint of armor beneath the collar. Just a steel briefcase and a disposable face.
Ash adjusted a half millimeter. Wind was still. Distance: 312 meters. Time to target: irrelevant.
He fired.
The round punched through tempered glass like it wasn't there. The man dropped before his coffee hit the floor. Clean shot. No scream. No warning.
Ash didn't watch him die. Didn't need to. He was already moving.
Scope down. Rifle slung. Movepack sealed. Extraction vector confirmed.
He crossed the rooftop in silence, boots barely brushing the gravel. Rappel point: southeast ledge. Route Two. No drones in the vicinity. No perimeter alert.
He checked his watch.
Twelve seconds from trigger to departure. Standard. Boring. Just another body for a ledger he'd never see.
He reached the ledge—
And the world turned white.
A flash. Then heat. Then pressure like a freight train through his chest.
The rooftop vanished in a deafening roar. Shrapnel tore past his vision. A wall of flame kicked sideways, slamming his body off course.
Then came the steel.
He hit hard. Rolled once. Cracked something. Rolled again.
Dust scraped his throat. Shoulder screamed. His side went numb. Then came the sharp, grinding cold of real pain — femur, shattered. Probably dislocated hip. Couldn't tell. Everything burned.
He blinked. Smoke choked the edges of his vision. The world buzzed in his ears.
No comms. No backup. No uplink.
No one was coming.
He tried to push up. His right leg didn't respond. He coughed. Metal filled his mouth.
Somewhere far off, alarms began to scream. A city waking to a war it didn't know it started.
He looked up.
A patch of gray sky hung between the smoke plumes. Clouded. Impersonal. Just air.
Ash let his arms fall to the side.
So this was it.
That's how they called it in.
No last stand. No warning. Just a blindside.
He should've seen it coming.
The Ghost, undone by noise and fire.
Light flared—too bright. His ears rang. The smoke blurred. Time stuttered.
Then—
Ash opened his eyes to silence.
No rooftop. No fire. No pressure in his chest. Just… white.
Endless. Still. Not clean, not sterile — just absent. No walls. No ceiling. No floor. No smell. No wind. Not even a temperature. It was like the universe had been turned off.
He floated. But nothing held him.
No weight. There was no gravity. No blood in his mouth. No pain in his ribs. Just a kind of still awareness, like his body had been stripped down to will and memory.
Wherever this was, it wasn't Earth.
He flexed his hand slowly.
Still there. Still scarred. Callused fingers. No gloves. No rifle. No watch. No heartbeat hammering in his ear.
Just him.
His breath came out slow. Cool. Crisp. Too light to be real air, too full to be nothing.
He was thinking. Processing. But his body felt more like an echo — like the shape of what had been, not something fully present.
No uplink. No mission. No objective.
So this was limbo.
"Great," he muttered, voice flat in the void. "Dead and lucid. That's new."
The space shimmered in response. Not dramatically — just a ripple, like fog under pressure. Like the concept of motion had remembered it used to exist.
Ash turned his head.
Something flickered to his left.
He barely had time to process it before impact.
A glowing figure slammed into him mid-turn, shoulder-first, and the world flipped.
They spun together — two tangled bodies in zero resistance. She shrieked. A knee clipped his hip. Her robe flared wildly, a blur of cloth and divine panic. One bare foot hit him in the ribs.
Hair whipped across his face. She smelled like ozone and moonlight and something floral he couldn't place.
Ash grunted. "What the hell—"
She clung to him as they rotated, trying and failing to stabilize midair. There was no air, but somehow her voice still echoed as she flailed.
"Oh no. No no no… This isn't—this wasn't supposed to—Elira, you absolute idiot, what dimension is this?!"
Ash stared.
She was glowing faintly. Not blindingly — more like candlelight wrapped in silk. Her hair was long, silvery-blonde, flickering like starlight at the edges. She wore a half-buttoned robe over what looked like another robe underneath, both of them tangled, backwards, and riding up.
And yes — she was barefoot.
Of course.
Ash blinked once.
"Who the hell—"
"This isn't… right. This was supposed to be solo. A corridor, not—wait. Oh gods. I dropped the Card, didn't I?!"
She froze. "The Divine Card. My anchor. My everything—"Her pupils shrank. She looked like someone had just unplugged her brain mid-spellcast.
Ash narrowed his eyes. "You always hit people on arrival, or am I just lucky?"
"You can hear me?!" she gasped.
"You're screaming in my face."
She looked around frantically — at the infinite nothing, at him, at the still-cracking robe around her knees. "No no no. This is all wrong. I—I need to recalibrate, reweave, and pray nothing noticed the sigil bleed—"
She tried to push off him. Spun instead. Her foot flailed again. Ash grabbed her wrist mid-flail.
"Start over," he said flatly. "What are you. Where are we. And why am I still talking to a barefoot firefly?"
The air pulsed.
Ash didn't know how air could pulse in a place with no gravity, no ground, and no physics, but it did — like a heartbeat with a migraine.
Elira froze. "Oh no. Oh no no no."
Behind her, the white void cracked.
Not metaphorically. It actually cracked — like glass under pressure. Light poured through the split. Something in it writhed.
"I broke the thread," she whispered. "I—okay—it's fine, it's not—well it's mostly fine—"
Ash's tone didn't change. "Define 'fine.'"
The light turned red.
Elira grabbed his shirt and yanked. "Hold on!"
The entire space shuddered. The crack widened. The pressure shifted from float to drop.
They fell.
Straight through the break — tumbling, spinning, no direction, no time. Wind roared where no wind had been. Heat surged around them. Symbols flashed in the dark — half-sigils, fragments of something older than language.
Ash didn't scream. Just braced.
Elira, on the other hand, was mid-breakdown.
"I didn't bring my shoes, I didn't anchor the veil, I LOST THE DIVINE CARD—"
They hit something.
Branches cracked. Leaves exploded. Ash took a tree to the side. Elira landed on him. Dirt greeted them both with a solid, honest thud.
Then — silence.
No glowing void. No red sky. Just forest. Cold wind. Real stars.
Ash coughed once, shifted under her weight, and muttered, "Next time you kidnap someone into another world," he muttered, "maybe skip the tree."
Then — nothing.