"Y'know," Nicole said, brushing back a strand of white hair, her voice lilting with amusement, "you two argue a lot. Not that I'm complaining."
Rudra looked down at the bullet in his hand—
It pulsed.
Clicked.
BOOM—FSSHHHHH—
It exploded into a cloud of instant frost.
Rudra didn't even scream. The entire right half of his body—shoulder, ribs, arm, part of his jaw—froze solid in an instant, encased in white, glacial ice.
Riley's face drained of color.
"RED—!!!"
Rudra's frozen lungs felt like snapped glass organs lodged in his chest, each breath a silent implosion. Ice flowers were blooming along the threads of his veins, jagged petals slicing the pink walls of his heart. When one shard scraped the inner lining, agony detonated through him in a white flash—but no sound escaped. His vocal cords were sealed in frost, brittle as sugar sculptures that would crumble if he even tried to scream. His body could do nothing. His mind, however, refused to die.
It clawed for patterns.
And in that half-conscious fog, the wrongness finally pushed through.
Riley and He were still yelling at each other—nothing new—but they were doing it in the middle of a battlefield, standing out in the open while the enemy stands infront of them. Not dodging. Not taking cover. Just…bickering. Loudly. Pointlessly. Not the kind of thing either of them would ever do if they were truly here.
Then another crack in the curtain.
Nicole.
Nicole had a mole under her lip. He had never noticed that. Not once. Not even in that dream any conversation, any moment. But now it was right there on her skin like it had always existed, a quiet black planet orbiting her mouth. His heart kicked in confusion, freezing fluid sloshing against the crystalline walls of his chest.
His gaze dragged downward.
Yaks.
There were yaks.
Huge shaggy bodies grazing as if the battlefield were just some Himalayan meadow. Steam rising from their nostrils. Their manure soaked into the grass—real, textured, pungent. Too detailed.
Too deliberate.
Something touched his mind—the sensation of a veil snapping, just a little—and every hair on his body prickled as he realized the shape of the deception.
For the last twenty-four hours, something had smothered his senses, softened the edges, blurred perception, dulled questions before they could reach his tongue. It had been choking his attention, damping his memories, steering his perception like invisible hands turning his head away from the wrong things.
And now that his heart was being pierced from within, that pain—the raw, primal pain—had cracked the spell enough for him to truly see.
Nothing fit.
Everything fit too well.
Almost like someone—something—didn't want him to notice anything weird about this place.
Rudra's thoughts—already splintering under the frost gnawing through his body—sharpened in a single, violent instant.
Riley and Nicole.
They were supposed to be side by side. They always were. But here—Riley was fighting through her like she was some monstrous stranger. Nicole's movements were wrong, delayed by a half-heartbeat, gestures too smooth, too mirrored, as if learning her mannerisms from a reflection rather than a memory.
Then he caught it.
A tiny shimmer in the air behind her.
Not heat. Not dust.
A ripple—like a bad rendering glitch on reality's surface.
"That's a doppelganger," Rudra breathed, or tried to, as the frost cracked deeper into his ribs. His brain lit up in terrified clarity. "He's fighting a doppelganger."
The thought triggered everything at once.
A weight pressed against his right temple—soft at first, then firm, then inevitable, like a thumb pinning an insect to a board. His pupils contracted in primal fear.
"Mist—coat—" The words scraped his freezing throat. His body convulsed with the instinct, mist beginning to curl off his skin like panicked breath.
His heart lurched. His spine arched. Every nerve screamed.
"SHIT—NO—"
Bang.
A sound ripped the world open.
Cold swallowed him instantly, a tidal wave collapsing over his consciousness. The battlefield flickered like a dying bulb and went black—not the black of night, but the black of a shutter slamming down over reality itself. No sound. No sensation. No falling. Just an abrupt, total severance.
And Rudra vanished into the dark.