The portal spat them out like it was done with them.
Alice hit the ground and this time it wasn't stone. It was smooth, almost like polished marble, and the difference alone made something in her chest loosen just slightly. She straightened up slowly, her whole body still aching in ways she was going to have to ignore for the next few hours, and looked around.
Neutral City.
She had only been here once before but she remembered the feeling of it. That strange mix of relief and wrongness. Like your brain knew you were safe but couldn't fully commit to believing it. The streets were wide and clean, lit up by lights that floated above the buildings in long glowing strips, white and pale blue, casting everything in this soft futuristic glow. The buildings themselves were tall and glass-like, some of them hovering slightly above their foundations for no reason that made any sense, just floating there like gravity was more of a suggestion than a rule. There were NPC sellers lining the main street, their stalls full of weapons and bottles and items that Alice still didn't fully understand, and the whole place had this low constant hum to it. Not loud. Just present. Like the city itself was breathing.
She turned around. The others were coming through behind her one by one.
CJ landed clean like he always did, already standing before most people would have found their feet. David stumbled and grabbed the side of a wall, muttering something under his breath about teleportation being genuinely evil. Miriam came through with her spear in hand out of habit even though there was nothing here to fight, and she looked around slowly with those calm eyes of hers, taking everything in the way she always did, like she was reading a book the rest of them couldn't see.
And then Ace.
He stepped through last and just stood there for a second. Not looking at anything in particular. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders were pulled in slightly, like he was trying to take up less space than usual. The old Ace would have walked through that portal like he owned whatever was on the other side. This one just stood there, blinking slowly, and Alice felt something twist in her chest looking at him.
She looked away before he could catch her staring.
"Okay," David said, finally recovering from his landing. He straightened up and looked around the street with wide eyes. "Okay. We made it. We actually made it."
"Did you think we weren't going to?" CJ asked.
"Honestly? After watching Ace get—" David stopped himself. Glanced at Ace. "After Level 6, yeah, I had my doubts."
Nobody filled the silence that followed that.
They started walking.
The street was busier than Alice remembered. Not crowded exactly but there were people moving around, NPCs mostly, going through their routines with that slightly off quality that all NPCs had, like they were real until you looked too closely and then something about the way they moved or the blankness behind their eyes reminded you that they weren't. A few of them called out from their stalls as the group passed. One was selling what looked like armour upgrades, another had rows of small glowing bottles lined up on a cloth, another had weapons hanging behind him that Alice couldn't even name.
David slowed down immediately at the weapons stall.
"We are not stopping," Miriam said without even looking at him.
"I'm just looking."
"You said that last time and spent two hundred Spades on a knife you've never used."
"It's a good knife."
"David."
He kept walking but he kept looking over his shoulder at the stall until they turned a corner and it disappeared from view. Alice almost smiled.
They found a spot near the edge of the main street where there were these wide flat steps leading up to one of the floating buildings, and without anyone really deciding it they all just sat down. All five of them. In a row. Like they needed to be close to each other without having to say that out loud.
For a while nobody spoke.
It was CJ who broke it eventually. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking out at the street, and he said it quietly like he wasn't even really directing it at anyone.
"We need to talk about Ace."
"I'm right here," Ace said.
"I know you are."
Another silence. Ace was sitting at the end of the row, still with his hands in his pockets, still with that pulled-in posture. He was looking at the ground between his feet.
"I'm fine," he said.
Nobody argued with him. Nobody agreed either. They all just let it sit there, that word, fine, hanging in the air between them, and everyone knew it wasn't true and everyone knew that pushing him right now wasn't going to help anything.
It was Miriam who moved. She shifted along the step until she was sitting right beside him, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching, and she didn't say anything. She didn't try to fix it or explain it or wrap it up in something useful. She just sat there next to him.
Ace looked at her sideways. Something moved across his face that was hard to name. Not gratitude exactly. More like the particular relief of someone who was expecting to be left alone and wasn't.
He looked back at the ground.
"It hurt," he said quietly. So quiet Alice almost didn't catch it. "Like I thought dying would just be nothing but it wasn't nothing. It was everything all at once and then I came back and I could still feel it. Like the memory of it was sitting inside my chest." He paused. His jaw was tight. "I keep thinking it's going to happen again."
"It might," Miriam said.
David looked at her sharply. "Miriam."
"He knows that," she said calmly. "Pretending otherwise doesn't help him. What helps him is knowing that when it does, we're here. All of us."
Ace didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he nodded once, small and stiff, like it cost him something.
Alice was about to say something when a sound cut across the street and made all of them go still at once.
It was a seller's cart. One of the NPC vendors rolling a heavy metal trolley along the stone ground, and one of the wheels caught a crack and the whole thing lurched sideways with a sharp metallic bang that rang out across the quiet street.
Ace was on his feet before the sound had even finished.
His hands were out, his whole body rigid, eyes wide and scanning. He was breathing hard. His head was turning left and right looking for something to fight, something to defend against, something that wasn't there.
The street was completely normal. The NPC vendor righted his cart and kept walking like nothing happened.
Slowly, slowly, Ace's hands came down.
He stood there for a second with his back to them, and Alice could see the tension going through his shoulders as he tried to pull himself back together. Then he sat back down on the step without turning around, and when he finally faced forward again his expression was closed off and flat.
"I'm fine," he said again.
This time David didn't even open his mouth.
CJ just reached over and put a hand on the back of Ace's neck briefly, the way you would with someone you'd known your whole life, and then took it away again. Simple as that.
Alice stood up. She needed to move, needed to do something with her hands or she was going to sit here and feel everything too hard and that wasn't going to help anyone.
"I'm going to check the stalls," she said. "See if there's anything worth buying before we have to go back in."
CJ stood with her. Naturally, without being asked, the way he always did.
They walked side by side down the main street and for a while neither of them said anything. The glow of the stall lights passed over them as they walked and the low hum of the city filled the quiet between them and it was the most peaceful Alice had felt in what seemed like a very long time. Which was a strange thing to feel in a place that existed inside a game that was trying to kill them.
"You okay?" CJ asked.
"I was about to ask you the same thing."
"I asked first."
She thought about lying. She was good at lying to the group when she needed to, the kind of lying that was really just putting on a steady face so nobody else fell apart. But this was CJ and he had a way of looking at her that made the usual lies feel pointless.
"Not really," she said honestly. "I keep thinking about what Sahira said. About not all of us making it."
CJ was quiet for a moment. "You think she meant Ace?"
"I don't know who she meant. That's the problem."
They stopped at one of the stalls. Alice looked at the items on display without really seeing them, just needing something to do with her eyes.
"I'm not going to let that happen," CJ said. His voice was steady in the way it always was when he meant something completely. "To any of them."
Alice looked at him then. He was looking at the stall too, not at her, but there was something in the set of his jaw and the way he said it that felt like it was about more than just the group and she wasn't sure what to do with that so she just nodded and looked away.
"Neither am I," she said.
They stayed there a little longer than they needed to, standing next to each other in the pale blue light of Neutral City, before heading back to the others.