The limbo was a meat-grinder of dead timelines, the ceiling a choked canopy of suspended embers and inverted mass graves. Every step Mari dragged forward left a thick, black smear of rotting blood on floorboards that had burned to ash a thousand damn years ago. The blade she’d driven into her own sternum had sheared straight through the intercostal muscle, carving her chest cavity open; bitter, zero-degree air slammed into exposed, slick organs every time her lungs fought for a shallow gasp.
Across the fractured void, her mirror image tilted its head with a sickening, joint-popping crack. The entity’s skin vibrated with the wet, static hum of a dying heart monitor, its translucent torso revealing a tangle of writhing, phantom viscera pulsing beneath the surface.
“You’re going to bleed out through your torn chest wall before your boots hit my shadow,” the creature purred. Its voice carried the cold, clinical certainty of an executioner counting down the dropped axe. “You severed the anchor, Mari. You’re drowning in your own thoracic cavity right now. Just like Cassian drowned when the ice crushed his ribs and filled his throat with black sludge. Just like Sera died when three feet of rusted iron tore through her gut and she choked on her own steaming bile. Just like you died, and bled, and fucking screamed—thirty thousand goddamn times.”
Mari didn't break stride. She tightened her slippery fingers around the hilt, her thumb jamming into the warm, clotted gore caking the crossguard. “I’ve been dying my whole bullshit life. At least here I don't have to listen to your useless jaw flap about it.”
The entity flickered violently—its silhouette ballooning into an explosive, terrifying skyscraper of torn muscle, smoking tendrils, and thousands of thrashing, glossy eyes—before violently snapping back into Mari’s battered form.
“You think this is bravery? Butchering yourself? Carving through skin, fat, and cartilage like a pig in a slaughterhouse?” It lunged forward, closing the gap in a heartbeat. “I am the only fucking thing that kept your brain from liquifying under the weight of a million screaming corpses! I carried every gut-spilled death you walked away from! I saved you from them!”
“You didn't save me, you sickening piece of shit,” Mari snarled, her vision swimming with crimson spots as she closed the last five feet. “You hoarded the meat. You sat in the dark and gorged yourself on my trauma like a fucking leech!”
“Because they don't love you!” The creature’s throat ruptured into a deafening chorus of thirty thousand dying shrieks, shattering the floating headstones around them into blinding shrapnel. “They love the fucking savior! They love the martyr who spills her guts so they can sleep at night! Ask Cassian if he gives a single fuck about you when he remembers your fingers wrapped around the blade tearing through his windpipe!”
Mari didn't argue. She lunged, driving her entire weight behind a savage, upward thrust aimed straight for the creature’s throat.
The entity didn't dodge. It grabbed the steel mid-air with a bare hand. Black, sizzling blood sprayed across Mari’s face as metal sheared through the creature's palm down to the white bone. It yanked Mari close, its human face melting into a jagged void of swirling, furious static.
“Forty-seven times, Mari,” it hissed directly into her ear, the stench of ozone and rotting intestines choking her lungs. “Do you want to watch the forty-eighth, you stupid cunt?”
Mari gathered the dark blood pooling in her mouth and spat a thick, crimson wad directly into its open void. "Eat shit."
The creature shrieked, a sound like tearing metal. Mari didn't hesitate. She ripped the knife sideways—slicing through the entity’s fingers and spraying hot, black bile—and drove her steel-toed boot straight into the creature’s knee.
CRACK.
The joint snapped backward, bone splintering through skin. As the entity buckled, Mari whipped the heavy iron pommel upward, smashing it into the creature’s face. Jawbone shattered. Teeth exploded across the dirt like thrown dice.
The mirror image slammed into the earth, vomiting thick, tar-like blood over a patch of scorched grass. It scrambled backward on ruined, double-jointed wrists, staring up at her through a crushed face of splintered bone and black jelly.
Mari loomed over it. Her chest was a open wreck of torn muscle and exposed ribs, every breath a wet, rattling gasp that spilled fresh gore over her leather vest. She dropped her weight, driving the point of her blade through the soft tissue right under the creature’s jaw until the tip bitten hard into its spine.
“I don't give a single fuck about the forty-seven times,” Mari whispered, her voice dropping into a razor-thin, lethal edge. “I care about the one where I chop you into fucking bait.”
Up above, the freezing night air hit Cassian’s split, bleeding knuckles like liquid fire.
He was on his knees in the dirt, maniacally clawing at a three-hundred-pound slab of jagged limestone. His fingernails were torn off to the raw, weeping quick. Red streaks mixed with gray soot ran down his forearms, but his nerve endings were dead to the pain.
“Cassian, fucking stop!” Sera roared. She lunged into his peripheral vision, sword drawn, her posture taut as a pulled bowstring. “The lower vault didn't just collapse—it atomized! If you shift that keystone, you’ll trigger a secondary cave-in and flatten whatever's left of us!”
“Help me move it!” Cassian screamed, his voice cracking violently as he spat blood onto the rock and heaved another stone aside. “Vesper, bring the breach charges! We blow the upper arch—”
“There’s nothing down there to blow!” Vesper screamed back, her fingers trembling so hard she nearly dropped the fresh mag she was jamming into her rifle. She stared at the crushed cavern mouth, her teeth grinding until her jaw popped. “You saw the floor shear off! You saw her plunge six inches of cold steel straight into her own fucking heart!”
“She’s not dead!” Cassian snarled, spinning on his knees, his eyes bloodshot, wild, and utterly unhinged. “She’s not goddamn dead until I dig her fucking body out with my bare hands!”
“She did it to save your useless ass!” Sera lunged forward, grabbing Cassian by the throat of his tactical vest and yanking his blood-streaked face an inch from her own. Tears were cutting clean, white tracks through the soot on her cheeks. “She cut her own chest open so that abomination wouldn't drag us into the abyss with it! If you go back down there, you make her tearing her own lungs out mean fucking nothing!”
“It is nothing if she’s dead!” Cassian screamed back, slamming his elbow into Sera’s collarbone and shoving her back so hard her boots churned up gravel.
He scrambled back toward the choked gap, hyperventilating, his heart hammering against his ribs like a panicked animal in a cage. The entity’s voice was still scraping against the inside of his skull: I’ve watched him die forty-seven times. In thirty of them, your hands were on the knife.
He looked down at his trembling hands. Caked in her blood. Slick. Crimson. Fuck.
“Kaelen,” Cassian choked out, his voice breaking as he looked toward the scholar, who was desperately trying to restrain the hyperventilating old woman. “Tell me there’s another way in. Tell me right now!”
Kaelen didn't answer. His face went completely ash-white as he stared at the center of the crushed collapse.
“Kaelen!”
“Look at the dust,” Kaelen whispered, his voice trembling.
Cassian snapped his head around.
The heavy gray powder hovering over the cave-in was no longer falling. It was rising in jagged, needle-like spirals, violently defying gravity.
A low, sickening thrum vibrated through the rock under their boots—not the thud of falling masonry, but the screech of reality being torn apart like wet paper. Deep inside the choked throat of the collapsed shaft, a thick, pitch-black light bled through the splintered stone, smelling violently of ozone and fresh gore.
Sera whipped her blade up with a ringing shklink. Vesper slammed her rifle stock into her shoulder, her eye glued to the optic, sweat dripping off her nose.
“What the fuck is that?” Vesper gasped, backing up a step.
Cassian didn't reach for a gun. He dragged himself forward on his hands and knees toward the glowing fissures, his lungs burning, his chest tight enough to snap.
From the suffocating depths of the dead vault, past the broken lock and the shattered dimensions, came a sound that made their blood run cold: the wet, heavy drag of iron-shod boots pulling through crushed bone and gravel.
A hand slammed out from the pitch-black gap, white knuckles locking onto the jagged edge of a fallen pillar. Black, viscous gore oozed from under the fingernails, dripping onto the ice with a heavy, wet splat.
Cassian stopped breathing entirely, his heart leaping into his throat. “Mari?”