Jake stared at her, the phantom ache of the Aberrant's passing still vibrating in the air. The words Liora had used — Limbus Arcanae, The space between worlds — didn't sound like a destination. They sounded like a definition of doom.
"You're insane," Jake whispered, his voice tight with controlled horror. He pushed himself back against the damp concrete wall, trying to create distance between himself and her terrible idea. "You just saw what that place spits out. It tried to tear us apart. We survived by luck, Liora, and whatever... whatever that was." He gestured vaguely toward the empty spot where the Aberrant had dissolved.
"We survived because I knew what I was fighting, and you were scared enough to trigger an uncontrolled, spontaneous time-negation field," Liora countered, her voice low and steady. She didn't look mad; she looked ruthlessly practical. "But the survival window is closing."
"Closing? We're fifty feet underground, we just fought a monster, and you're proposing we jump into its apartment building!" Jake argued, scrambling to his feet. "You said yourself those tears are random! Untamable! What happens if it closes on us? What happens if it sends us to the bottom of the ocean, or fifty feet up in the air?"
Liora sheathed her blade, the clicking sound final and dismissive. "It sends us nowhere the Ordo can follow. That's the point, Jake. Every move we make, every tunnel we choose, every hiding spot—it's all part of their geographic model. They are tracking the flow of residual mana, the energy trail left by my wards and your Suspensum. But the Limbus? It's noise. It's static. It's the one thing that fries their tracking matrices instantly."
"So we become untraceable ghosts for two seconds before we get eaten by a worse monster!"
"We control the jump," Liora insisted, stepping closer. "We don't go deep. We clip the edge. A second. Maybe two. Just long enough for the jump itself to become a variable they cannot calculate. It gives us a new origin point, a random exit coordinate, and buys us weeks, maybe months, of clear air."
Jake shook his head, desperation turning into an angry, terrified pleading. "What if it goes wrong? What if you can't open the door again? Are you really willing to die for this? For me?"
Liora met his eyes, the light of her lumen charm illuminating the fierce, almost painful resolve in her gaze. "I made my choice in that warehouse, Jake. This isn't about dying. This is about making sure we don't end up locked in a sterile white room being picked apart by the Tower of Judgement. We either take a catastrophic risk or we guarantee a catastrophic capture. I choose the risk."
As if to punctuate her grim calculus, the temperature plummeted again. This time, it wasn't just a sudden chill—it was a vicious, bone-deep cold that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air.
Wumph. Wumph. Wumph.
The rhythmic, wet pulsing returned, but it was closer this time, and louder. It wasn't the wall beside them; it was the entire tunnel, humming like a colossal, dying subwoofer. The sound was accompanied by the faint, high whine of stressed stone.
"Too late for cold calculation," Liora muttered, her eyes darting frantically down the tunnel. "It's opening up ahead. And it's big."
A hundred feet down the rail line, the darkness fractured. It wasn't the slow, oozing wound of the last tear. This was instantaneous. A horizontal line of blinding, pure white light split the concrete of the ceiling, the floor, and both walls simultaneously. The line widened instantly into a gateway of churning, chaotic colour: greens that shouldn't exist, purples that tasted like electricity, and shadows that moved independently of the light source.
The air pressure dropped violently, pulling dust and debris toward the gateway like a vacuum cleaner.
"That's not just a tear," Jake yelled, shielding his eyes from the glare. "That's a doorway!"
"It is," Liora confirmed, her voice now sharp with adrenaline. She gripped his arm, pulling him forward. "It won't last more than thirty seconds. Ready?"
Jake didn't answer. He couldn't. His throat was locked. He saw the gateway, vast and pulsing, and felt that awful, cold tug in his chest again—the one that wasn't Suspensum, the one that was purely The Hanged Man, calling him toward surrender and chaos.
"Ready or not," Liora bit out, and she dragged him toward the rupture.
They sprinted, boots pounding on the gravel, the wind from the void whipping their hair and clothes. Just as they reached the edge, the whole tunnel groaned—a sickening sound of structure failing.
Liora threw herself and Jake forward, plunging into the shifting, luminous void.
The sensation was not a fall, nor a jump. It was a shredding.
Jake felt his sight dissolve into pure colour, his body becoming weightless. Every axis of motion was meaningless. Up was down, forward was backward, and the sound of his own breathing became a screaming, metallic howl. It was the absolute, chaotic negation of geometry, a place where reality was merely an optional filter.
He felt Liora's grip, tight and absolute, the only anchor in the storm of elsewhere.
One second.
Two seconds.
Liora screamed a word, sharp and frantic, a Latin command against the entropy: «Exeo!»
And just as suddenly as they had entered, they were violently expelled.
They hit the ground hard, tumbling onto damp earth and crushed concrete, coughing dust and air back into their lungs. The light was gone. The cold was gone. The only sound was the frantic echo of their own gasping breaths.
They were in a new tunnel, identical to the last one, yet subtly wrong. The air smelled of rain, not rot. The graffiti was in a language Jake didn't recognise.
Liora rolled over, clutching her side. "Don't move," she ordered, struggling to sit up. "We need to stabilise. Where did we land?"
Jake pushed himself onto his elbows. The tunnel was silent, peaceful, and blessedly, entirely whole. He looked at Liora, then at his trembling hands, the memory of the sheer unreality of the Limbus sickeningly fresh.
"Liora," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "What did we just do?"
"We went dark," she said, leaning back against the wall, utterly drained but victorious. "The Ordo has no idea where we are. We're completely off the map."