The world went white, Heat roared past Jace’s face like the breath of a collapsing sun. The sound wasn’t just loud, it was inside his bones, rattling him apart.For one impossible moment, he thought this was it, that his story ended here, under a torrent of fire and shrapnel. But the blast never hit.Something slammed into him from the side, a blur of motion and force. He and the briefcase were yanked violently behind a fractured vault column. The heat seared the metal inches away, warping it into glowing, dripping shapes.When his hearing snapped back in ragged pieces, he heard the suited man’s voice, low and urgent. “You’re welcome. Now move.”Jace blinked, disoriented. “Why, why save me?”“Because,” the man said, shoving him toward a still-intact service hatch, “I can’t open that case without you.”The briefcase. Jace’s grip tightened instinctively. “You mean you don’t have the code?”The man’s jaw flexed. “I had it. Then you changed it.”Before Jace could reply, the armored creatu

One moment, his fingers were brushing the briefcase. The next, there was nothing. No shadow, no sound, no ripple in the air. The dust motes where he had stood continued floating as if his body had never displaced them.Jace’s chest tightened. The figure’s voice still echoed faintly in his head: The world will adjust as if they never were. And it did.The suited man’s footprints in the dust smoothed over. The half-buttoned collar of Jace’s shirt, which the man had grabbed minutes ago, was now perfectly straight. Even the memory of the man’s presence began to blur at the edges in Jace’s mind. “Jace!”The other Jace tackled him just as the monster’s core erupted into a silent bloom of light. The impact knocked them both backward into the vault wall.The detonation came, not with fire, but with absence. Everything the light touched turned into nothing. No heat, no sound, no debris, just blank, perfect emptiness.Jace could feel it gnawing at the wall inches from his head. The other Jace’s

The first thing Jace noticed was the silence, No scream from the other Jace. No sound of tearing flesh. Just the unnatural quiet of something being erased so completely that even the air refused to carry the memory.The threads around his limbs loosened just enough for him to stagger forward. The place where the other Jace had stood was now an empty void, no body, no shadow, just a shape in reality that seemed to reject light.“Anomaly neutralized,” one of the faceless figures intoned. Jace’s throat worked, but no words came out.“Proceeding with reclassification,” another said, stepping toward him. Its movements weren’t threatening, but they radiated the kind of inevitability that made running pointless.The Execution Key in his pocket thrummed like a heartbeat. “What do you want from me?” Jace finally forced out.“To correct imbalance,” the lead figure said. “A vault cannot function with two keys. One has been removed. You remain.”It reached for his chest, not with claws, but with

The darkness swallowed him whole. It wasn’t the absence of light, it was the presence of something vast, cold, and infinitely patient. A void with weight.The kind that listened to your thoughts and pressed them back into your skull until you couldn’t tell where your mind ended and the dark began.Jace’s lungs burned. He kicked out, expecting to feel gravity or ground, but his foot only sliced through the emptiness. His heartbeat became the only sound, until he heard a second one. Not his.It pulsed in the black, slow and heavy, each thud rattling his bones, Then a whisper slid into his ear.“This is what they chose for you.”Jace spun around. Out of the dark, shapes emerged, not solid, but impressions. A child’s room, his mother’s laughter, the smell of rain-soaked concrete… all dissolving as if the void was erasing them piece by piece.“My world…” His voice was barely a breath.“Was never yours to keep,” the whisper said.A hand, too cold, too strong, closed over his shoulder. He wh

The glass gave way with a sound like a church bell shattering. Jace’s stomach lurched as the ground vanished beneath him.There was no wind, no rush of air, just the sickening weightless drop into nothing. Beside him, Evelyn’s figure flickered between solid and translucent, her outline pulsing like a heartbeat.Older-Jace didn’t flinch. He simply fell upright, hands in his pockets, as if gravity was optional for him.Below them, there was no bottom, just an ocean of black ink, shifting in ways liquid shouldn’t. It pulsed in rhythm, almost breathing. Every so often, something vast moved just beneath its surface.The sound came next, A deep, resonant thoom that Jace felt in his bones more than in his ears. It came again. And again. Louder each time, Evelyn shouted over the sound. “Don’t let it touch you!”“What is it?!” Jace yelled back.“It’s not water,” she said, her voice shaking. “It’s”Splash.A column of the black substance shot upward, moving like a whip. Jace twisted mid-fall, b