Rafie Ortiz woke up to the sound of someone whisper?yelling his name.

  “Rafie. Rafie. Rafie—”

  He peeled his eyelids open.

  Cho’s big eyes were hovering inches from his face, worry and irritation doing a weird duet. Behind her, the world had gone from night and fog to an oversaturated morning, with fat snowflakes drifting over the now-quiet cemetery.

  “You’re awake!” she said, immediately too loud.

  Rafie winced. “Volume...”

  “Right, right.” She scooted back, dropping onto the edge of the cot he was lying on. A thermal blanket scratched at his chin. He was inside a hastily erected medical tent at the cemetery edge.

  Outside the open flap, he could see the cemetery proper—rows of stones, a few charred patches, clean?up crews moving like exhausted ants. Snow was already attempting to pretend last night had never happened.

  “We… survived?” Rafie croaked.

  “Barely,” another voice said.

  Vasso limped into view, arm strapped in a sling, head bandaged like the world’s angriest dumpling. John followed behind, jacket off, shirt torn and one side of his face purpled.

  “Team 8A, all present and ugly,” Vasso announced, dropping into the folding chair near the cot. “You,” he jabbed a finger, “missed the finale.”

  Cho rolled her eyes. “Please don’t encourage him.”

  John propped a hand on the cot rail. “You scared us half to death,” he said, which was rich considering half of him was taped together. “We thought your brain had been scrambled for good.”

  Rafie gingerly touched his nose. The dried blood was gone, but his throat still felt like sandpaper. “Last thing I remember—lamppost, snake, teeth…”

  “Right.” Vasso leaned forward, eyes lighting. “So. After you face?planted, there was this gigantic golden bell that dropped over the whole main gate. Like—” he traced a dome shape with his good hand, “—boom. Out of nowhere. You ever seen a Class?S exorcism ritual on SpiritTube? It was like that, but better budget.”

  Cho snorted. “You watch too much SpiritTube.”

  “Says the girl who live?texted the Realm?Barrier Games,” Vasso shot back, then turned to Rafie again. “Anyway. Agent Lin—Eathan Lin—golden boy from Area 001? He was standing right in the middle of the rift crack like it was a puddle. Snake monster over him, jiangshi all around, and he just… stood there.”

  John nodded slowly, gaze going distant. “Every time that gold wave came off him, the jiangshi burned. The snake shrank. Our people stopped trying to walk into fog. Half the UR units swears they saw a glorious descent of some deity.”

  Rafie swallowed, antler silhouettes flashing in his memory.

  “Area docs are calling it a localized purification field,” Cho said, hugging her knees. “The official report’s going to say: ‘Advanced Force under Commander Li neutralized a Class?A+ aggregate rift with support from Area 001 liaison Agent Lin and Agent Jiang.’”

  She mouthed the phrasing, already memorized from the prelim draft.

  “Casualties?” Rafie asked.

  John’s jaw worked. “Four critical,” he said. “No deaths.”

  He let that sink in.

  “Considering what that charm field was doing to people, considering how close we were to this cemetery turning into a permanent Class?S anchor…” He exhaled, a short, disbelieving thing. “We got off light.”

  “If nobody stopped it,” Vasso said quietly, “they’re saying half the dead in New York would’ve been walking by dawn.”

  Rafie stared at his hands.

  They shook once, then stilled.

  He risked a glance past them, out through the flap. The cemetery looked almost… normal. Snow smoothing the worst scorch marks, lampposts inert, gates closed. If you’d missed the night shift, you’d call this just another winter morning in Queens except—

  “…”

  He could still see it. Agent Lin in the center of that golden dome with eyes gone alien, the cold weight of that gaze.

  A shiver climbed his spine.

  “He looked… inhuman,” Rafie murmured before he could stop himself.

  John followed his gaze, then lifted his chin toward the far end of the cemetery.

  “Speak of the not-human,” he said.

  Rafie turned.

  Near the main gates, a cluster of Advanced Force uniforms stood in a loose knot around Commander Li. The commander looked like he’d chewed the same cigarette three times—coat open, scarf crooked, tablets hovering at his shoulder. Beside him:

  Agent Jiang, with arms folded and half her face buried in a fluffy pink scarf.

  The spiky-haired agent he now recognised as Agent Brook from the Advanced Force, checking a holopad with one hand while covering a yawn with the other.

  And Agent Lin.

  The kid’s cap was off now, eyes back to amber and black hair ruffled by the wind. The golden glow had faded, but something clung to him like snowlight caught on skin.

  He was listening to Li Wei in stillness.

  Vasso whistled under his breath. “Told you,” he whispered. “You should’ve been awake to see the magic. That snake thing? Ended up shrivelling like someone put it in a microwave. Went from skyscraper horror to—pfft.” He pinched fingers together. “Dried noodle.”

  “It’s not magic,” Cho muttered automatically.

  “With qi manipulation at that level,” Vasso said, “it might as well be.”

  Rafie swallowed again, throat tight.

  He watched as Li Wei finished whatever he was saying. The commander clapped Agent Lin’s shoulder once, sharp, then turned to the medic team. Agent Brook started barking orders. Agent Jiang was already drifting toward the nearest Transfer Gate, swinging a fishing?rod over her shoulder like it was just another shift gone overtime.

  Maybe it was, for them.

  Agent Lin turned his head, as if sensing eyes, and his gaze swept the field.

  It snagged on Rafie.

  For a heartbeat, Rafie panicked. His body moved before his brain caught up. He threw the blanket aside and swung his legs off the cot, bowing from the waist so fast he almost toppled.

  “Th?thank you for everything!” he blurted, voice cracking. “For—uh—for earlier. Sir.”

  Behind him, Vasso and Cho scrambled upright and followed his lead, bowing in ragged unison. Even John, with his bruised everything, dipped his head in something between respect and awkward gratitude.

  On the far end of the field, Eathan visibly startled.

  Rafie took in his reaction and blinked twice. For someone who’d just punted a Class?S origin around like a soccer ball, he looked bizarrely off?guard at junior agents bowing at him.

  Eathan raised a hand halfway—uncertain, like he wasn’t sure what to do with the gesture.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Chewie latched onto his wrist.

  “Gate,” she barked. “Now. Before Captain Spreadsheet changes his mind and makes us do debrief here.”

  “But—”

  “Nope,” she said, already dragging.

  The Transfer Gate behind them flared open, humming in a blinding white light. Eathan shot one last, mildly panicked look back across the cemetery, then vanished into light with Chewie and the rest of the Advanced Force.

  The Gate sealed with a soft thunk. A breath later, the only thing left was disturbed snow and a faint smell of ozone.

  Cho stared, then huffed. “Must be nice,” she muttered. “Advanced Force gets Gate clearance on tap. We have to file three forms, two incident justifications, and a report about footwear to get a single jump approved.”

  From the next cot, Vasso groaned, rotating his free shoulder. “Where d’you think they went? Another rift already?”

  “Either that,” Rafie said, “or the HQ office to get yelled at. One or the other.”

  John smacked the back of his head lightly. “Less gossip, more reports. Incident debrief isn’t going to write itself.”

  Vasso groaned louder. Cho laughed. The tent filled with the low, ridiculous noise of people who were bone?tired but alive enough to complain about paperwork.

  Rafie listened, then found himself smiling too.

  He tilted his head back, looking up at the tent’s canvas roof, at the pale morning seeping through. Somewhere beyond that sky was Area 003’s main HQ, and somewhere in there, the kid whose eyes had gone gold and inhuman was probably getting an earful.

  He wondered, not for the first time, if he’d ever see Eathan Lin again.

  He hoped the answer was yes.

  ***

  HQ. AREA 003.

  The headquarters smelled like burnt coffee, disinfectant, and sleep debt.

  Screens ringed the operations floor, each showing some version of Queens Cemetery from rift projections and seismograph squiggles to a live feed of snowplows trying not to run over evidence markers. Staff moved in controlled chaos—shirts untucked, hair pinned up with whatever was within reach of the hand.

  Inside Debrief Room 2B, the mood was… narrower.

  Li Wei stood at the head of the table, sleeves rolled up, cigarette unlit and clenched between his teeth purely for something to grind. The wall holo behind him replayed snippets of the cemetery fight, stopping at a scene of a stylized snake spiralling around a cluster of red nodes.

  In front of him, slouched in their chairs like guilty students, were Eathan and Chewie.

  “This,” Li Wei said, tapping the holo hard enough to jitter the projection, “is the part where you explain to me why you thought it was a good idea to light yourself on fire.”

  Chewie snorted under her breath.

  Eathan stared at a very interesting spot on the floor. “It was a controlled ignition,” he tried.

  Li Wei’s eyebrow climbed. “Oh good,” he said, voice flat. “For a second I was worried it was an uncontrolled one.”

  Chewie failed to smother a laugh. Li Wei’s head snapped toward her.

  “And you. Don’t think I didn’t see you, Agent Jiang, not stopping him.”

  “In my defense,” she said, “if he didn’t do the big stupid, we’d be using that cemetery as a Class?S reference case in training vids for the next fifty years.”

  Eathan flinched slightly, then sighed. “Captain, we were on a clock.”

  He lifted his wrist, and HeavenOS bloomed into the air as a hologram, expanding until it filled half the wall.

  Li Wei stared at the numbers for a long beat. Then, he stabbed a finger at the bottom row of the first chunk.

  “Forty percent.”

  Eathan opened his mouth. Closed it.

  “That,” Li Wei continued evenly, “should not be your new normal.”

  “I know,” Eathan said quickly. “I know. But it rebounded. I hit thirty?three at the lowest—”

  “That makes me feel so much better,” Li Wei said. “Truly. My heart is at ease.”

  Eathan grimaced at the Captain’s tone as he kept his gaze down.

  “You almost face?planted into Judgment Drive,” Li Wei continued to say. “If [Humanity] keeps dropping, that skill stops being [Auspice Ignition] and starts being [Indiscriminate Kill Aura]. You’re aware, yes?”

  “I checked the numbers,” he said. “I thought I had more buffer.”

  “The enemy was rewriting the buffer,” Li Wei said, jabbing at the charm frequency graph. “That snake spirit wasn’t just a big bitey ribbon; it was running a subharmonic self?harm loop through every mortal head in range. You do not try to do math on paper in a hurricane.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, then dropped his hand and pointed at the rest of the activity log. “Explain, from the top, what goes on in that mind of yours in activating Ignition.”

  Eathan straightened in his seat, fingers lacing together.

  “The minor rift cluster was already pushing Class?A,” he said. “[Ledger Tap] had the karmic debt graph climbing exponentially. If the snake completely docked onto the cemetery node, we’d be looking at a stable Class?S origin sitting inside city limits.”

  He flicked his fingers, and a segment of his own [Calamity Radar] from earlier appeared—a map of Queens cemetery painted in aggressive red. The main gate glowed like a black sun, charm frequencies spiking.

  “Each [Node Imprint] anchor node kept one squad safe,” he continued. “That’s it. There were three others, but all perimeter and collapsing fast. Half the response teams were already edging toward self?harm behaviours. If that charm had kept reinforcing, we’d have had agents walking into graves on purpose.”

  Chewie’s mouth tightened. She’d seen those too.

  “And the snake was eating everything we did,” Eathan said. “Every minor seal, every suppression array—by the time we’d interrupt one pattern, it had re?threaded charm on three more.”

  He tilted his head back, remembering the way the qi flows had looked through Qilin’s lens. It was like a nightmare lake trying to form on top of post-modern civilization.

  “It felt like the Ridge,” he admitted quietly. “Like the Commander’s Nightmare, but… local. Same pooling pattern. Same pressure at the edges. If it finished, this place wouldn’t just be a rift; it’d be a permanent door.”

  Li Wei’s jaw flexed once at the mention. He didn’t comment.

  “So I used a soft version of [Auspice Ignition],” Eathan said. “It was just enough to overwrite the charm frequencies, not enough to hand the wheel over entirely. Then I fired [Soul Anchor] as soon as my HUD told me I was slipping.”

  At that, Chewie leaned forward, eyes bright. “So,” she said, “what were the anchor options this time?”

  Eathan’s ears went red. “We’re focusing on the wrong line.”

  [Soul Anchor] was a skill he’d gained three months ago, when he completed his 100th-day entry streak for the Identity Log. On activation, it could "lock" his sense of self around so-called "memory anchors" (randomised his log entries), slowing or reversing [Humanity] drift for a short window and giving resistance to mental distortion.

  Given the nature of the skill, it was the first that didn’t require any Qi Tokens and purely ran on Karma. That said, even with his current stash, 1000 Karma points was not a small number, and he’d always been wary about spending Karma due to what Taeril White had said to him in the past about karmic effects.

  “This,” Li Wei said, “is not your emergency brake for every time you decide to press the big red button. I told you to develop it as a last resort. Not as your ‘oh well, I can always journal it off later’ card.”

  Chewie coughed. “To be fair, the skill did work pretty well. The charm tried to eat him and he didn’t dissociate into divine apathy this time. That’s progress.”

  “Thank you,” Eathan muttered.

  “That wasn’t a compliment,” Li Wei told him.

  “And in case everyone forgot the important bullet point—no one died.” Chewie met his stare, unblinking. “Sometimes ‘big red button’ is the right one.”

  Li Wei stared back. His shoulders lost a fraction of their wire tension.

  “Talking back, I see,” he said. “But if you keep making calls like this without looping your team, you’re going to wake up one day and realize you’ve started thinking like Bai Hu before he got into coffee. That is… concerning.”

  He said it lightly. It didn’t land lightly.

  Eathan’s fingers tightened. “There wasn’t time to ask,” he said. “By the time I explain my idea to you or Chewie, we’re knee?deep in undead.”

  “Then you call it on comm with one sentence,” Li Wei said. “Like: ‘Li, using Ignition, cover me.’ Not complicated. You’re not alone out there, intern.”

  Silence stretched.

  He wasn’t an intern anymore, but the Captain still called him that at times. Eathan didn’t mind.

  Chewie shifted in her chair; her gaze flicked sideways at him, then away. The line of her mouth said she agreed with Captain Spreadsheet more than she liked.

  “...Okay,” Eathan said at last. “Next time I’ll yell before I light myself up.”

  “I would prefer there not be a next time for a while,” Li Wei said. “We are on Extended Dormancy Protocol Day 346. We need your skills and [Humanity] going up, not sideways. That journaling habit of yours is slowing the drop, but it’s not a miracle patch.”

  “Identity Log streak is at two hundred something,” Eathan mumbled.

  “And I’m proud of your diary,” Li Wei said dryly. “I am less proud of the fact that forty percent feels ‘fine’ to you now.”

  He let that sink in a heartbeat, then flicked to another holo.

  The tombstone appeared, taking on a system representation. It was a node outlined in angry color, threads snarling around it like wire.

  “Now,” he said, “tell me about the anchor.”

  At that, Eathan’s eyes focused. “When we’d sealed the three main feeders and the minor tears, there was still a tug,” he said. “[Calamity Radar] passive wouldn’t clear the map. So I ran Deep?Scan.”

  The wall flickered, showing the cemetery in wireframe. Most stones were a soft wash of green. One near the center, half sunken flared in a shade that did not exist in the normal palette.

  “The colour on the radar…” He grimaced. “It wasn’t the normal rift risk shades. Felt like—”

  He searched for a word and settled on, “Coin?coloured.”

  Chewie tilted her head. “Coin?coloured?”

  “Yes. And while [Auspice Ignition] was activated, I kept seeing things at the edges through Qilin's vision,” Eathan said slowly. “Drifting paper boars, rolling pennies on the railings, weirdly shaped ticket stubs that didn’t look like they belonged to any train line in this world…”

  Li Wei’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not rift behaviour,” he said. “That’s—”

  “Bleed from somewhere death?adjacent,” Chewie finished. She didn’t say the Realm’s name—didn’t need to. They all felt the shape.

  Realm of Passing.