Ethan's finger hovered over the trigger. Just squeeze. The command was a frayed rope in his mind. His hand trembled—a ghost vibration, but enough to make him curse. Three tours, kills he had not bothered to even count, and now his body pulls this traitor act.
The Barrett felt bolted to the rock, an extension of the cliff itself. The cold of it seeped right through his gloves.
Sarah's voice drifted through his memory: "You're not the same. Did you actually kill people over there?" Who could be the same after all that? What was left of the man whose wife had called him a killer before she left?
He squeezed.
The rifle did not just fire, it detonated. A bone-shaking crack that slammed his shoulder with the force that felt like a car crash. A bloom of white fire bleached the cliffside for a half-second, then vanished.
Match-grade .50 BMG, tungsten core. A six-inch promise that nothing in this world was indestructible. It screamed through the dreamspace, ripping the silence into ragged shreds.
Fifteen hundred meters. Two seconds.
Ethan's breath hitched. Time stretched thin. The rifle's roar was still echoing off the impossible slopes of Dragonmount, a sound that had never existed here. The air warped in the bullet's wake.
What if this changes nothing? What if—
Below, Elan Morin stood motionless. Head tilted to the mountain. He did not turn. Never even flinched. Of course not. How does one react to a sound they have no name for?
The bullet struck. Not the clean headshot he had practiced in his mind. Wind, nerves, some ripple in this twisted reality—the round hit low, just below the clavicle.
And kept going.
The impact was not a neat hole. A chunk of the man's shoulder simply ceased to be there. One moment, black coat and solid flesh; the next, a cavity spraying a fine, dark mist. The force shredded muscle, turned bone to jelly, and punched out of his back in a shocking spray of red and black.
His arm hung uselessly, all string and torn meat.
The man's coat flared, then—impossibly—it began to smolder. As if the bullet had ignited something inside him. He stumbled.
For the first time, his perfect posture shattered. Blood poured, hissing on the scorched stone at his feet. Elan Morin's face showed a kind of shock. A profound, violated confusion.
He turned, stumbling slowly. Not toward the mountain, but up toward the cliff. Toward Ethan.
Their eyes met, and for the first time, the Betrayer truly saw him. Not a whisper in the Pattern. Not an intruder. A threat.
Sarah's voice again, What kind of man does this make you?
Ethan's eye never left the scope. The tremor in his hands was gone. The cold was gone. There was only the work. He knew what kind of man he was. His ex-wife's voice slipped back into the dark. The bolt slid back with a slick, heavy ratcheting sound. A cigar-sized shell casing spun out, catching the dreamlight before it clattered on the stone.
He loaded the next round.
Far below, a howl tore from the Betrayer's lips—a sound of pure, shocked agony. He struggled, trying to lift his other arm.
Ethan worked the bolt, the motion so ingrained it felt like breathing. The bolt locked home with a solid, final chunk.
"YOU ATTACK ME? YOU DARE! YOU ARE HERE AT MY WHIM!"
The scream was not just sound; it was a hook in Ethan's mind. But there was no time for an identity crisis. Through the scope, he watched the Betrayer's hand rise. The air around the black glove buckled, light bending inward toward a core of brilliant white that pulsed like a newborn star.
Ethan had read the books. He knew what that light meant. It was more than hostile intent. It was another finger on a trigger of erasure.
Different war. Same goddamn rules. Well, I got my own Balefire.
He settled the crosshairs, not on the chest, but lower. A memory surfaced, unbidden—Sarah, complaining over a bottle of beer. "You're so… different now." she had said. "Deliberate. Even when you're making coffee."
He was being deliberate now. He aimed for the foundation. The second shot was an echo of the first, another brutal shove from the Barrett that jarred his teeth.
Downrange, the target did not just get hit. The man's left leg simply came apart.
One moment, braced on stone. The next, a violent tilt as his support vanished. He crashed in a heap of black cloth and what was left of his dignity. The blinding light in his palm sputtered and died.
Ethan held his breath, watching the aftermath through the glass. The man tried to push himself up, his movements clumsy, broken. He looked down, and his eyes bulged.
His leg ended in a mangled stump. The rest of it lay a few feet away, a useless piece of meat on the rock.
A new sound escaped the Betrayer's lips, not a howl of pain, but a dry, rattling gasp. It was the sound of a man seeing a ghost. The sound of a man realizing the world, even a dream world, did not work the way he thought it did.
Through the scope, Ethan saw the fury in the man's face curdle into something else. Something hollow. Something that looked almost like dread.
A thought, sharp and vicious, cut through Ethan's focus. Bullets hit harder than fists, asshole.
He watched the Betrayer—this demigod, this monster from legend—stare at his own severed limb and the fragmented remains of his shoulder and arm. A small, cold part of Ethan recognized the look. He had seen it on missions that still caused him to wake with a cold sweat. It was the shock of sudden, irreversible vulnerability.
But he would not allow himself pity this time. Here, in this dream or whatever it was, he could do as he was trained to do.
Good, Ethan thought, his hands already moving, cycling the bolt with practiced ease. Now you know how the rest of us feel.
The spent shell casing spun out, a piece of brass catching the dreamlight like a falling ember before it hit the stone with a single, clear ting.
The tiny, musical ting of the spent shell casing was the last sound of Ethan's victory.
He was already working the bolt, muscle memory taking over where conscious thought had fled. His eye remained pressed to the scope, the familiar weight of the Barrett steady against his shoulder. The third shot. The headshot. The one that ends everything.
Just like Kandahar. Just like Mosul.
But the man on the ground was no longer looking at him.
Through the magnified lens, Ethan saw something that stopped his heart. Elan Morin's eyes—no longer wide with shock, no longer clouded with confusion—had narrowed with a terrifying, ancient cunning. They lifted past him, focusing on something behind him.
On the cliffside. On the shimmering, rectangular tear in reality or dream that was his only way home or well. . .. back to his jail cell.
A slow, terrible smile spread across the Betrayer's bloody lips.
Oh, shit.
The world began to unravel. It was not a tremor, but something more wrong. The solid granite beneath Ethan's stomach felt uncertain. It lost its integrity, shifting to grit, then to sand that slipped through his fingers. The legs of the Barrett's bipod slid, sinking as the rock dissolved beneath them.
"Son of a bitch," Ethan swore, scrambling for a new purchase as careful positioning crumbled away. He abandoned the prone position for a clumsy, unstable kneel.
The shot was ruined. His advantage was gone. His wife's voice echoed in his memory: "You can't control everything!" He had laughed then. "That's what the training is for, honey. Adapt and overcome."
Right. Adapt to this.
Below, Elan Morin did not move. He did not have to. With a groan that was not sound but a tearing of the world's fabric, the landscape began to move. The fifteen hundred meters between them folded like origami. The valley floor buckled upward, the far side of the mountain lurching closer with impossible speed.
He was pulling the world around him like a blanket.
Ethan's heart hammered. A primal vertigo washed over him—the sensation of falling even as he scrambled backward. He was a master of his environment, but this one had no rules. No physics. No sanity.
He raised the rifle, trying to aim freehand, as steady as a man standing on shifting sand.
Then he saw Morin's true intent.
The Betrayer's remaining hand was lifted, not toward Ethan, but toward the shimmering doorway. He was using his will to grasp the edges of the portal itself. Ethan risked a glance back over his shoulder.
The rectangle opening onto the prison cell began to shrink.
No. No no no no.
The edges frayed like burnt film. Memories of his ex-wife, of the ring he still kept by his bedside, of his failure—it all collided with the image of that closing door. To be trapped here. To be a ghost lost in this madhouse dream.
He had a choice, and a fraction of a second to make it. Finish the kill, or save himself. His training screamed neutralize the threat. His soul screamed Run.
He leveled the Barrett in the direction of the mangled figure and pulled the trigger one last time—a defiant roar, not a calculated shot. He did not wait to see it land.
For the second time today, Ethan Kai ran from the Betrayer of Hope.
Pivoting, he abandoned the rifle and sprinted, his boots finding little purchase in the disintegrating dream-stone. The doorway was the size of a window, closing fast.
Move move move.
He dove. A desperate plunge. For one terrifying instant, a crushing pressure squeezed him from all sides, and then the world vanished, replaced by the cold cement of the cell walls.
He tumbled out onto hard floor, landing badly. He gasped, rolling over, blinking at the low florescent lights of the ceiling.
Ethan lay on his back, breath ragged, his chest heaving. The ceiling above him was the same pale gray, its corners blurred—the edges refusing to hold still unless he stared directly at them.
Back to square one.
He sat up slowly, dream muscles protesting. Everything hurt like it was real. His clothes whispered against the concrete, a sound too real for dreams, too familiar for comfort. A phantom recoil still sang through his bones. His hands felt raw, though the rifle was gone.
Always gone when you need it most.
He looked down at himself. No boots. No combat gear. Just the same dark jeans and black hoodie he had been wearing when the cops hauled him in. The fabric felt real.
"Damn it," he muttered. "Must still dreaming."
His voice sounded too solid, but the telltale signs were there: the soft light from nowhere, the air thick with copper and ozone, the sensation of being watched by something that did not blink. So vivid, though, in a way his regular dreams had never been.
A sound drew his attention. It was a harsh, desperate breathing that was not his own. The lower bunk.
Oh, fuck. What now?
Tom was there now or back from where dreams usually took him. He lay rigid, twitching violently beneath the thin blanket, legs kicking in jagged bursts. His fingers clawed the mattress, his mouth opening and closing in silent screams. His eyes fluttered madly.
Sarah's voice echoed once more. "I'm tired of you waking up with nightmares, Ethan. Why don't you go see a therapist or something?" But this was no nightmare. Something else was working on Tom from the inside.
Ethan tried to move, to shout, to do anything. He was frozen, a spectator. Then, without warning, Tom's eyes snapped open. Ethan's heart stopped.
There was no white, no pupil, no iris. Only flame. Twin furnaces stared out from the man's skull, flickering with a rage and madness that had become all to familiar to him as this day had progressed. The air around them shimmered with heat.
It's just a dream this time, Ethan thought with cold horror and disbelief.
Tom's body convulsed, then jackknifed up from the bed as if pulled by meat hooks. He clutched his head, fingers digging into his scalp. His voice came as a guttural howl—pain made sound. The sound Private Martinez had made when the IED took his legs. The sound of something breaking that was never meant to break.
Tom spun toward him, and the dream shifted.
Reality strobed. Tom's clothes changed—jailhouse colors, then black armor that drank light, then blood-soaked rags, then ceremonial robes that hurt to look at. His face morphed, flickering between himself and something inhuman, cheeks lengthening, teeth sharpening.
This is my fault. I made him a target. Ethan scrambled to his feet and stumbled back against the wall. The cold of the concrete seeped through his hoodie, a real cold that reminded him he still had a body to lose. But it doesn't matter. It's just a dream.
The thing wearing Tom's skin stepped forward, leaving brief scorch marks on the concrete floor with each step.
When it spoke, the voice was the Betrayer's. "There you are." The words dripped venom and triumph.
Different battlefield, Ethan thought, his eyes darting for a weapon, an exit. Same enemy.
"Interloper," the creature hissed, spit flying from its lips and sizzling on the floor. The smell was a hospital fire, antiseptic and flesh burning together. "Parasite. I see you now."
Ethan braced himself, the unnatural heat from the creature washing over him.
"You have done what no one has managed since this war began," the Betrayer continued, taking another step. "You hurt me." He smiled, and the fires in his eyes pulsed brighter. It was pride. The bastard was actually proud of him. "I applaud the attempt. Such precision. Such delightful arrogance. What powers did you use, I wonder? No matter. You cannot end me so easily. Only the death of time will do that."
His body jittered, no longer bound by physics. One moment he was three steps away, the next he was right in Ethan's face. The smell of burnt hair and blood was overwhelming.
This is what happens when you wound a god. You just piss them off.
"But now the hunt is done," he snarled, raising clawed hands, blackened and cracked like cooling magma. "No more doors. No more tricks. This is my dream. My domain. I will know what role you play in the Pattern."
The walls behind him seemed to pulse and char. An immense weight bore down on Ethan's skull.
"I will peel you from your soul, tiny worm," the Betrayer promised, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "Strip you down to essence. Feed you to the Great Lord bit by bit, until all that remains is the memory of your defiance—screaming inside the void. Telling me everything you know."
Think, goddammit, think. You've been in worse situations. You've—No. No, you have not.
The thing that had once been Tom raised a single blackened finger and pointed at him. Then it curled.
Ethan screamed. His spine arched backward as if gripped by cables, an invisible force pulling his chest toward the ceiling while anchoring his heels to the floor. Muscles seized. Ligaments shrieked. His jaw locked open in a silent cry, his vision swimming with sparks.
He could feel it—the breaking point. His body straining to snap in half like a brittle tree in a storm. But just before the fracture came, he saw it.
Deep in those twin infernos—those eyes burning not with power, but ego—there was a flicker. It was not rage. Not pride. Fear.
Ethan's mind locked onto it like a wire snapping taut. Even gods can be afraid.
That thought hit like a round chambered home. Sharp. Real. Unshakable.
The Betrayer feared him. Not for what he could do. Not for magic or prophecy. But for what he represented. For that other quality he could neither fully predict or control.
Reality. Simple. Brutal. Unforgiving. I need to be awake. That was his edge. His out. His only way to win. Time slowed.
But Ethan focused. He could not fight the strength. Could fight out of this. Not here, anyway. But he could count.
Three…
The fire flared in his peripheral vision.
Two…
His lungs screamed as he fought for air and the muscles in his back spasmed terribly. Spots danced before his eyes. The room shook.
One…
And then—He let go. Not of the grip of power on his body. Of everything.