The second time Kaiden hit the ground that week, it wasn't because someone had stabbed him.
They were just crossing a narrow service lane — a cracked stretch of stone between two sagging warehouses that smelled like damp grain and rust. No patrols. No artillery. Just the steady murmur of a wounded town trying to pretend it wasn't dying.
Rein walked ahead, checking corners.
Sylen took rear, eyes on rooftops.
Mara and Jex argued softly in the middle about conduit angles and failure loads.
Kaiden was between them, trying to focus on the feel of his steps instead of the hum in his chest.
His Core had been running hot since dawn. Not in crisis. Just… heavy. Each beat felt like someone dropping a stone into a metal bucket under his ribs.
THUM.
…thum.
THUM.
He ignored it.
He'd been ignoring a lot lately.
They were halfway down the lane when the bottom dropped out of his world.
No warning.
No spark.
Just a hard, invisible hand wrapping around his lungs and spine.
His chest locked.
Air froze in his throat.
His eyes flew wide, staring at the cracked stone in front of his boots — then past it, through it.
The lane vanished.
He was back on the train platform.
Fluorescent light buzzed overhead. Yellow safety tiles glared up at him. The air stank of metal and spilled cheap alcohol.
He saw himself thirty steps away: suit wrinkled, tie crooked, bottle dangling from one hand. His own face, tired and angry and so sure the universe owed him something.
The train screamed into the station.
Kaiden tried to move, to shout, to change anything.
He couldn't.
He wasn't in his own body this time.
He was watching from somewhere above, a passenger in his own death.
His old self stumbled. His foot caught the yellow line. His manager flinched back. The edge of the platform vanished under him.
The impact never hit.
The world jerked sideways.
The screech of steel became the scream of metal tools. Fluorescent light stretched into runic glow. The platform cracked apart, pieces twisting into pipes and stone and glowing sigils.
The forge.
He lay on a slab again, body in pieces, iron where bone should be. Demons leaned over him, voices echoing.
"Weapon K-01. Awaken."
Pain lanced through every nerve, real enough that his current body flinched.
Or tried to.
He couldn't feel his limbs.
He couldn't feel the alley.
Only the hammering of the Core.
THUM-THUM-THUM-THUM—
The forge fell away.
He shot through a tunnel of raw light — no walls, no floor, just a ripping sensation along his soul. Colours he didn't have names for shredded past him.
He felt pulled.
Not called.
Not summoned.
Yanked.
Off track. Off life. Off everything.
His mouth opened in the alley and finally obeyed, dragging in air with a ragged, wet sound.
He still saw nothing but the tunnel.
He gasped again.
No air.
His lungs burned.
Hands grabbed him — distant, muffled.
"Kaiden!"
Sylen's voice.
The tunnel flickered.
Arvan's face flashed in front of him. Calm. Annoyed. Eyes like someone reading a chart, not a person.
"You weren't meant to be here," that familiar voice said — not from outside, but inside the memory.
The Core slammed against his ribs one more time—
THUM—
—and reality snapped.
He hit the cobblestones on his side.
Hard.
Stone bit into his shoulder. Sparks crawled up his spine. His fingers clawed at the ground, digging grooves without meaning to.
He sucked in air like he'd been underwater.
This time, it stayed.
Sound came back in layers.
Sylen, close and sharp: "Kaiden. Hey. Look at me."
Mara, pitched high: "Core spike— I felt that in my teeth."
Rein, somewhere above him: "He breathing?"
"Yes," Kaiden rasped.
His voice sounded wrong in his own ears. Too thin.
His eyes were still too wide.
He forced them to focus.
The train was gone.
The forge was gone.
Just a damp alley, three familiar faces, and a ceiling of swollen clouds above narrow roofs.
"Talk to me," Sylen said. She was crouched by his head, one hand braced against his shoulder, the other hovering near his chest like she wasn't sure she was allowed to touch the Core housing. "What was that?"
He swallowed.
"Core… overloaded," he said. "Or got dragged. I don't know."
"Dragged where?" Mara asked.
"Back," he said. "Forward. Sideways."
Cryptic. Useless. True.
His human eye burned. His lens flickered once, then steadied.
"Can you stand?" Rein asked.
Kaiden flexed his fingers. Toes. Knees.
Everything responded. Some parts complained.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm not that fragile."
Rein offered a hand.
Kaiden took it and let himself be hauled up.
His legs wobbled under him. He planted a palm on the wall until the shaking stopped.
"Eyes were wide open," Sylen said quietly, watching him too closely. "You weren't blinking. You were gasping like someone was choking you and staring at nothing."
"Not nothing," he said.
"What, then?" Mara pressed.
He met Sylen's gaze.
"Train. Forge. Whatever was between," he said. "Like something is replaying how I got here in my head. Whether I want it or not."
No one had an answer for that.
They moved.
Slower.
Kaiden could feel Sylen's attention on his back the whole way — not the usual watch-my-commander-in-case-of-ambush stare, but something sharper. Calculating, worried, angry, all at once.
The gate square was quieter than yesterday.
The last breach had cost them bodies.
It had also convinced commanders that pressing humans harder here would break something they didn't want broken just yet.
Good.
Less noise around the circle meant more space for their own poison.
Mara took them to a sheltered angle of the square where they could see the gate without drawing eyes. The once-grand stone ring lay half-buried in rubble and artillery scars, runes flickering weakly under the dirt like dying stars.
"Outer channels are still leaking," Mara muttered. "Good. That means they haven't managed a full stabilisation. Bad for them. Good for us."
Human soldiers patrolled the perimeter. Fewer than before, but more focused — they glanced at the circle just often enough to prove they were afraid of it. Demon rebels kept their distance, pretending to be just more civilians hauling rubble.
Near the edge of the ring, propped against a low wall, sat a wounded human mage.
Kaiden recognised him.
Same bandaged arm he'd patched the day before. Same cracked focus crystal at his feet. Dark circles under his eyes had deepened, and sweat plastered his hair to his forehead.
He was staring at the gate like it was the only thing left in the world that made sense.
"He's still alive," Mara said. "Stubborn."
"Or stupid," Rein muttered.
"Or both," Sylen added.
Kaiden said nothing.
He remembered the way the mage had grabbed his sleeve yesterday, asking if he was rebel, asking for help, trying to hold the wards.
He remembered saying, I'll come back.
He hadn't remembered meaning it.
"Any other stabilisers?" Kaiden asked.
Mara scanned the circle.
"Two more ward workers," she said. "Older, standing. He's the only one that looks like he might try something desperate."
"Desperate breaks things," Rein said. "We have enough broken pieces."
"We need the circle shaky, not shattered," Mara said. "If someone blows it by accident before we're ready, we're just buried with everyone else."
Kaiden didn't look away from the mage.
"How long until the next push?" he asked.
Sylen sniffed the air, listened.
"Artillery cadence is slowing," she said. "They're conserving. My guess? A few hours before someone decides to test the wall again."
"That's our window," Mara said. "We can't keep delaying. Every day we wait, more eyes turn toward the engine."
Kaiden exhaled.
"All right," he said. "We start tonight. Small splices. No visible changes. If anyone looks too closely—"
"We stop," Mara said. "We're not trying to make a scene yet."
He nodded.
He turned away from the square.
Sylen stepped with him.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Walk," he said.
Her brows drew together.
"You just collapsed," she said. "And your solution is to wander off alone?"
"My solution is to not seize up in front of the gate," he said. "If the Core throws another fit while I'm standing on those runes, we're all ash."
She hesitated.
"Fine," she said. "Ten minutes. Then I come find your corpse."
"Give me twenty," he said.
He left before she could argue.
He kept to side streets.
The town felt tighter after the episode. The walls seemed closer. The sky seemed lower. Every shout sounded like it came from the tunnel between worlds.
He needed something solid.
He found it in the form of noise.
Near one of the inner barricades, a small skirmish had broken out — not demons this time, but humans arguing with rebels over supplies. Weapons were half-drawn. A young human mage stood too close to the argument, bandages peeking from their sleeve.
Not his business.
Not their mission.
He walked past.
Later, cutting back toward their new hideout, he almost tripped over Jex.
The younger soldier sat on an upturned crate in a narrow lane, staring at his hands.
"You're supposed to be asleep," Kaiden said.
Jex jolted.
"Couldn't," he muttered. "Every time I close my eyes I see… that girl." He swallowed. "Sylen's friend. The runner."
Kaiden leaned against the opposite wall.
"Dreams?" he asked.
"Worse," Jex said. "No dreams, just… moments. Her laughing when we got her that extra ration. Her pointing out guard rotations. Then… nothing."
He looked up.
"You know she trusted you," he said.
"Sylen?" Kaiden asked.
"Both of you," Jex said. "Thought you'd get her out. Thought you'd get all of us out."
Kaiden didn't answer.
Jex's mouth twisted.
"You spared that mage," he said. "You tried to be… I don't know. Better. And because of that, the circle had just enough control left for him to grab the surge and aim it wrong."
He laughed once, bitter.
"Feels like the universe punishes you every time you try to be decent," he said.
"It does," Kaiden said.
Jex blinked.
"That's it?" he asked. "No argument?"
"No," Kaiden said. "You're right. It does."
They sat in silence for a moment.
Then Jex said, very quietly, "If it comes down to her or the mission again… what do you choose?"
He didn't specify who "her" was.
It didn't matter.
Kaiden thought about Sylen's face when she found out. About Zarkus's leash. About Arvan's curiosity.
"I don't know," he said.
It was the only honest answer.
Jex nodded, like he'd expected that.
"Try to know before it happens," he muttered.
He slipped off the crate and walked away.
The town kept grinding forward.
By the time night fell, Mara had mapped their first access point: a section of the outer ring partially covered by rubble, close enough to a broken building that they could work from its shadow.
They moved in pairs.
Rein and Jex on watch, one each direction.
Sylen handling anyone curious.
Mara and Kaiden at the stone.
Up close, the gate felt worse.
The runes shivered under his touch like the surface of a pond about to freeze. Residual mana buzzed in his teeth. The Core thrummed in response, eager and uneasy.
Mara passed him a twisted strip of salvaged conduit.
"Here," she whispered. "You lay this along the break. Don't push mana yet. Just seat it."
His fingers were steady.
Good.
He pressed the conduit into a crack where the original line had shattered. Stone scraped metal. The strip settled, imperfect but measureable.
"Now," Mara murmured. "Just a breath of power. Enough to weld it. Not enough to light it."
He drew from the Core.
Gently.
It fought him.
It wanted to surge. To fill the circle. To own it.
He forced it down to a trickle.
His chest hurt from the restraint.
Mana licked along the scrap, fusing it to carved stone. The runes near it brightened, then dimmed, accepting the new path like a scar.
"Good," Mara whispered. "Again. Other side."
They worked like that for an hour.
Slow.
Careful.
Kaiden's hands shook twice. He stopped twice. Each time, he backed away until he could breathe, then stepped back in.
No seizures.
No tunnel.
Progress.
They retreated before the next patrol swing.
Later, back in the loft, he sat alone by the window while the others slept in their corners.
He watched a drunk soldier stumble home. He watched a rebel and a human share a cigarette in an alley, both pretending they weren't on opposite sides of a war.
He watched the sky.
He didn't notice he'd fallen asleep until he woke up choking.
No warning again.
One moment he was staring at a cloud that looked like nothing in particular. The next his throat was clamped shut, his lungs clawing at empty air.
His eyes flew open, already wide.
The loft blurred.
The roof beams warped into the curved ceiling of the train tunnel. The cracked plaster became tiled walls. His own reflection glared back at him from the black window of a train car rushing past.
He saw everything and nothing at once.
He saw himself dead.
Alive.
Forged.
Dragged.
He saw Arvan standing in the tunnel of light, watching him fall, hands in his sleeves like this was an experiment.
He tried to breathe.
Nothing.
His fingers dug into his chest, scraping the plating over the Core.
His body convulsed.
He gasped silently, mouth opening and closing like a fish on dry land, eyes so wide they hurt.
"Kaiden."
Sylen again.
Her voice sounded like it came from another continent.
"Kaiden, look at me."
He couldn't.
The tunnel stretched.
Then, like a snapped cable, it recoiled.
Air crashed back into him.
He sucked it in so hard his chest hurt. He coughed, doubling over, Core pounding against his ribs like it was trying to break out.
Sylen's hand was on his back, steady and firm, claws careful on his coat.
"Breathe," she said. "In. Out. That's it."
He did.
Eventually.
When the shaking stopped, he leaned his head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling until the beams looked like beams again.
Sylen sat beside him.
She didn't speak for a while.
Finally, she said, "You can't keep doing this."
"Seizing?" he asked.
"Trying to be a person and a weapon at the same time," she said.
He let out a rough laugh.
"You picked a bad time to tell me I can't," he said.
She glanced at him.
"I lost her," Sylen said. No title. No explanation. Just that. "You know who I mean."
"Yes," he said.
"And my brain keeps trying to blame the mage, or the demons, or the damn circle," she said. "But every time I loop it, it comes back to you."
He absorbed that.
Didn't flinch.
"You're not wrong," he said.
"You're not shocked either," she said.
"I've been the root cause of a lot of things lately," he said. "It's not a new pattern."
She turned her head, studying his profile.
"I need you to hear this," she said. "Really hear it. Not nod and file it away next to your guilt trophies."
He closed his eyes.
"Go on," he said.
"Every time you choose mercy, someone else pays," she said. "Every time you choose brutality, someone else pays."
"That doesn't leave a lot of options," he said.
"It leaves one," she said. "Stop making this about your soul and start making it about survival. Ours. The people we decide matter."
He frowned.
"Are you asking me to be cruel?" he asked.
"I'm asking you to be consistent," she said. "If you're going to spare someone, make sure it doesn't kill us. If you're going to kill someone, make sure it buys us something. No more coin-flip morality because you saw your reflection in a scared kid's eyes."
He thought about the girl in the alley.
The guard's neck under his hand.
The wounded mage.
The dead runner.
"I don't know if I can be that clean," he said.
"Then get as close as you can," she said. Her voice cracked, barely. "Because if this keeps going — collapsing, blacking out, trying to be two people at once — one day you're going to look at me and not recognise which side I'm on."
She sucked in a breath.
"And if that happens," she added, quieter, "I'll have to make a choice I don't want to make."
He turned his head enough to see her.
Her eyes were tired.
Hard.
Scared.
"Understood," he said.
It wasn't a promise.
It was an acknowledgement.
She stood.
"Try to sleep," she said. "We have to touch the gate again tomorrow. I'd rather you not fall through dimensions mid-splice."
He smirked weakly.
"I'll pencil 'no cosmic seizures' into my schedule," he said.
She snorted.
"Do that," she said.
When she'd gone, he pressed his palm flat over the Core.
It hummed steadily now, as if nothing had happened.
"Plan B, huh," he whispered.
If this was it, it didn't feel like a backup.
It felt like a slow, calculated failure.
The weight in his chest wasn't just metal.
It was every choice he made collapsing inward — mercy, murder, all of it piling up until there was nowhere for it to go but down.