The bracelet on Yuna’s wrist.

The friendship bracelet. Still there. Swinging with the motion of what was being done to the wrist it was attached to.

He had made that bracelet.

With his hands.

When he was ten.

PAH! PAH! PAAAH!

"’IAAAANGHH~!! AAANGHH~!!’"

Both of them.

The chain between the two women he had spent his whole life loving pulled taut between their bodies, and the man who had spent this entire night systematically dismantling the architecture of everything Gareth had built his identity around stood between them and looked at Gareth with the warm, unhurried expression of someone who was not afraid of anything in this room.

The cold went deeper.

Something in Gareth’s blood moved.

He knew, He was weak.

He had known it.

He had known it in the garden and had filed it and had not known what to do with the filing.

The cold went deeper still.

It went past his training.

Past his muscles.

Past the accumulated physical development of twenty years of hard work.

It went to something else. Something that had always been there. Something that he had carried since before he was born, in the blood of a man he had never known, in the blood of a woman who had honey-trapped a target for seventeen months and killed him and then made Gareth out of what was left.

The bloodline.

He did not know what to call it. He did not have a word for what it was. His body knew it before he did — the way it arrived, the heat that came ’after’ the cold rather than before it, the specific, non-human warmth that started at the base of his spine and moved upward in a wave that had nothing to do with temperature.

The rope at his wrists.

He looked at it.

And pulled.

The rope did not hold.

The sound was the sound of nothing.

Not the tearing sound of material failing. Not the crack of the chair breaking. Nothing — the rope simply was not there anymore, the chair simply was not there, the restraints that had been managing him simply ceased to be relevant in the same moment that something in his blood decided they were not.

He stood.

The room looked different from standing.

The same room. The same amber light. The same stone walls. The same two women bent over the edge of the bed, the chain between them, the seed running from both of them.

The same man standing between them, who had stopped moving and was looking at Gareth with an expression that had changed for the first time since this had all begun.

Not fear.

Not quite.

Something adjacent to surprise. The specific expression of a man who was rarely surprised and was registering the experience with genuine, unhurried interest.

Gareth looked at his hands.

The rope had not broken.

It had simply — he did not have the word. Ceased. Come undone at a fundamental level that did not involve tearing.

The air around him felt different.

He felt it in the room — the mineral-dense hot spring air, the steam — moving differently around him than it had before, as if his body was occupying space in a slightly different way than it had thirty seconds ago.

He looked at Raven.

He moved.

The distance between them — twelve feet of stone floor — compressed in a way that was not entirely consistent with the mechanics of moving through space. He was there and then he was not there and then he was here, and his fist was aimed at the specific location of Raven’s jaw with every pound of force his body could produce compounded by whatever had just come online in his blood.

Raven’s eyes tracked the movement.

He moved.

Not away. ’Through.’ His body displacing sideways with the specific, non-committal ease of a man stepping aside from something that would have been inconvenient to receive — and the air where he had been standing shuddered with the passage of Gareth’s fist through it, the displaced pressure wave cracking the stone wall Gareth’s knuckles nearly brushed on the follow-through.

Gareth spun before he vanished.

The amber light. The steam. The two women on the bed, both of them still, both of them turned, both of them looking at the space where Raven had been standing with the wide, glassy eyes of people who have witnessed something their existing frameworks do not cover.

Jennifer’s hand was pressed over her mouth.

Yuna’s bracelet caught the light.

Gareth was gone.

Not the door. Not the walls. The door was intact, the walls were intact, the stone floor was intact.

He was simply not present.

The chain between the two women swung once.

Settled.

The sound of the hot spring’s water, cycling through its filters, doing the steady work of mineral water in a stone basin.

Then a voice.

Through the air.

Warm. Unhurried. From nowhere and from everywhere in the room simultaneously, the way sounds arrive in a dream, without a source.

"’It seems,’" Raven’s voice said, with the warm, privately amused tone of a man who has just watched something he has been waiting to watch, "’the portal has opened finally."

Then—

PHAAACKK!

A cry. A woman’s cry. From nowhere and everywhere.

"’AAANGHH~!!’"

---

Another World.

The space between spaces felt like nothing. It did not have the amber warmth of the hot spring, the scent of steam, or the suffocating pressure of his own helplessness.

It was a vacuum. A violent tear in reality.

And then, gravity returned.

*"YOU BASTARDDD!!"*

The scream tore through the air, carrying all the raw, bloodline-fueled fury of a strike meant to shatter a man’s skull. Gareth exploded into existence, his fist still driving forward, striking nothing but the cold, stale air of an unfamiliar room.

He stumbled, the momentum of his displaced rage throwing him off balance. His boots hit hard, etched stone.

The scent of sweat and sex was gone, replaced instantly by the harsh, metallic tang of ozone and burning sulfur.

He spun around, his chest heaving, his eyes wild.

No bed.

No amber light.

No chain.

Four sorcerers stood around him. They wore heavy, archaic robes, their hands gripping wooden wands that still sparked with the fading, crackling residue of a massive, glowing magic circle etched into the floor beneath Gareth’s feet.

Beyond them, torchlight flickered against the damp walls of a vast, subterranean basement. It was hardly fortified—cracked masonry and crumbling pillars surrounded them—but the perimeter bristled with bodies. Silver-armored knights stood everywhere, a tight ring of polished steel and nervous vigilance, as if this new world had braced itself to greet whatever monster they had just pulled through the veil.

The four sorcerers lowered their wands. They moved in unison, bowing deeply toward the center of the glowing circle. Toward him.

The leader, an old man with eyes weary from an impossible task, spoke in a trembling, reverent voice.

"Welcome, the hero of the Bahamut Titan," the sorcerer proclaimed, his voice echoing off the stone. "We greet you to the world of the Atlant. We—"

But he could not complete his words.

Because the hero was not listening.

Gareth’s eyes darted frantically, tracing the lines of the silver armor, the glowing runes, the shadowed archways. His breathing hitched, coming in short, hyperventilating gasps.

Where was it?

Where was Jennifer’s face? Where was the swinging friendship bracelet on Yuna’s wrist? Where was the wet skin, the taut chain, the unhurried, privately amused smile of the man who had just dismantled his entire existence?

He looked for them. His brain demanded them. His newly awakened blood was burning, begging to be unleashed upon the nightmare he had just left behind. He was primed to see the two women he loved being taken by another man. He *needed* to see it so he could finally tear it all apart.

But there was only silver. Only robes. Only the humming, sickening glow of a magic circle. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

A burst of latent magical energy rippled through the air, vibrating against his skin.

The disconnect was absolute. The chasm between the agonizing trauma his brain was trapped inside and the bizarre, fantastical reality his body had just been deposited into was simply too wide.

The architecture of his mind—already fractured by the sight of his mother and his girlfriend, already warped by the violent, sudden ignition of his unknown bloodline—finally gave way.

It snapped.

It shattered like glass under a hammer.

Gareth dropped to his knees in the center of the fading runes.

His hands flew up, fingers violently digging into his scalp, tearing at his hair as his eyes rolled back.

"ARRRGHHHHHHH!!!"