The thing coming at us did not care about my identity crisis.
It shoved off the ground, limbs coiling and releasing in one smooth, ugly motion. Gray body stretched. The blank bulb where its head should've been pointed right at me.
For half a second, all I could think was:
New body, same target.
"Down!" I snapped at Arlen.
He didn't argue. He barely had the air to flinch. I shoved him sideways anyway, away from the line of attack, my shoulder screaming as his weight dragged at it.
The creature's shadow washed over us.
The instructor moved.
She threw herself between us and it, boots skidding on tile, podium shard whipping up. Even with everything frozen inside me, I registered a stupid thought:
She's fast.
The shard met gray flesh with a sound like hitting wet sand. The impact knocked the creature off its perfect line but not off its feet. It twisted mid-air, limbs bending at angles joints weren't supposed to achieve, and came down sideways instead of straight.
Claws scraped along the stone where my head had been a heartbeat ago. One limb snatched at empty space, missing my jacket by inches.
The air it displaced felt cold.
The instructor didn't let it land.
She drove her shoulder into it like she was body-checking a drunk out of a bar. The thing staggered, limbs splaying, then slammed into the ground with a bone-vibration thud.
"Ren!" she barked. "Stop making yourself interesting!"
I very nearly laughed purely out of hysteria.
The creature rolled, limbs folding under it again, faster this time. Dents from her earlier hits still marred its side. They were smoothing out. Healing.
It wasn't going to keep obligingly falling on its face forever.
I needed to move. I needed to help. I needed to stop standing there being a bright, screaming anomaly in the middle of the courtyard.
My brain, unhelpful as usual, chose now to notice details.
My center of gravity really was different. My hips dragged my balance a few centimeters off from where years of walking had trained me to expect. When I shifted my stance, my weight settled in a new pattern.
I didn't have time to fully process it. I just filed it under later and forced my body to cooperate now.
I slid sideways, putting myself between Arlen and the thing, the way the instructor had just done for me. My legs felt longer than they looked. Or maybe they looked longer than they felt. Hard to tell with adrenaline eating all the adjectives.
The creature got its limbs under it. It lurched upright with that same ugly grace, like someone had taught a crash-test dummy choreography.
Its head turned toward the largest spike of wrongness in the yard.
Me.
Of course.
"Pick on someone with fewer problems," I muttered.
It took a step. Another. The tiles bent around its feet and snapped back.
I could feel it—something in the space between us tightening, like the Domain itself wanted this to happen. Wanted the weird thing to go after the weirder one. Better story that way.
That thought came in, sideways and too neat.
Story. Script. Cause, effect.
The backpack trick hadn't been luck. Not really.
The line had appeared in my head—if it attacks me, something stupid will trip it—and the Domain had… accepted it. Bent around it. Then charged me a little piece of my past.
The circle, the clap, the frozen moment, the body rewrite… that had felt like the same force, just louder. Bigger. Like I'd hit some kind of "scene change" button too hard.
The thing in front of me took another step. The instructor circled, trying to angle back in. She was good, but the creature was learning. It kept her at the edge of its awareness and me dead center.
I could try again.
I didn't know what that would cost.
A neat little bargain presented itself anyway, clear and tempting.
If it reaches me, the instructor gets the opening she needs to kill it.
That felt… right. Like tugging a thread that was already there instead of inventing one. The Domain liked roles. Hero. Monster. Bait.
I'd just been shoved into one of them.
The creature crouched.
I didn't have time for a committee meeting.
Fine, I thought. You want a line? Here.
If it reaches me, the instructor gets the opening she needs.
The sentence slid into place like it had been waiting.
The air flexed. A soft nudge, not the full stop of the clap, but enough that every hair on my arms lifted.
The creature launched.
It didn't feel like it slowed. It didn't feel like anything around us changed. It just—committed to a path the Domain had apparently already decided on.
I didn't move. Some deep part of me whispered that flinching now would ruin the scene.
The thing's limb scythed past my face, close enough that I felt the where-a-mouth-should-have-been breathlessness of it. It dug into the stone just behind me, claws punching deep. Its momentum carried it farther than it had meant to go.
For a beat, its flank was wide open.
The instructor was already there.
She drove the podium shard down into the exposed section of its neck with everything her body had left. The sound was a sickening crunch and a wet rip combined.
Gray flesh split. Something inside that wasn't bone broke.
The creature's limbs spasmed. Its body convulsed, then slammed down onto the tiles and stayed.
The shriek it made as it died went straight through my teeth and rattled around the back of my skull. It cut off mid-wail, leaving a silence that felt heavy.
The smell hit a second later: damp, rot, and something like burnt ozone.
The air trembled.
I braced for another spike of pain, another neat little piece of memory being cut out and filed away as payment.
It came, a sharp sting right behind my eyes, but smaller this time. Less spike, more needle.
This time, I watched what it took.
A picture rose in my mind: my uncle's kitchen. Me, twelve years old, standing on a chair, reaching for the top cupboard where he kept the "good noodles" and pretended he didn't.
I could see the bowl. The chipped edge. The steam.
I couldn't remember how it had smelled.
The scene hung there, detailed and wrong, with that one piece missing. The more I tried to recall it, the more my brain just… skipped.
The Domain had shaved off a sense.
I swallowed hard.
Okay. So that's how this works. Cause, effect, cost. No free miracles.
The dead creature's body twitched once, then started to come apart.
Not rot. Not decay. It broke down into fine white dust, collapsing in on itself like a sand castle losing shape. The dust didn't drift; it sank through the tiles and disappeared.
The courtyard shuddered.
For a second, I thought it was another quake. Then I realized it wasn't the ground moving so much as… the rules.
The dome-sky flickered. The walls faded, came back, then faded again like a bad overlay. The fog beyond the edge of the tiles churned faster.
Beside me, Arlen let out a long, shaky breath. "Is it… gone?"
"For now," I said. My voice sounded higher in my own ears. It startled me more than the corpse did.
I checked him over quickly. Still breathing. Still conscious. Still hatefully alive, which was the target.
Around us, cadets stared.
At the evaporated creature.
At the instructor, chest heaving.
At me.
The look in their eyes was the same expression people wore when they watched Rift footage on their screens and told themselves they were glad it was happening to someone else.
"You," the instructor said.
I flinched, then realized she was looking right at me.
She walked over, boots leaving no mark on the impossible tiles, and stopped just out of arm's reach. Up close, the cut on her forehead looked worse, but her gaze was sharp as ever.
"Ren," she said. No change in how she said my name. No hesitation on the syllable. "Report."
That was… weirdly comforting.
I swallowed. "Courtyard. Domain. One entity. I—"
No good way to phrase I told reality to slapstick it and it listened.
"I thought something," I said instead. "And then that bag was just—there."
Her eyes didn't blink. "You gave it a line."
The back of my neck prickled. "A… what?"
"A condition." Her tone said we'd be having a much longer conversation later. "And then you clapped and reality decided you'd look more interesting this way."
The fact that she could say that sentence out loud without flinching did not make it less surreal.
"You've seen this before," I said.
"I've seen versions," she said. "Not that exact… presentation."
Her gaze flicked over me in a quick, clinical sweep, taking in the new distribution of mass, the way my clothes hung, the way I was standing.
"Look at me," she said.
I did.
"Do you feel dizzy? Blurred?" she asked. "Any echoing voices in your head, power impulses, compulsion to rearrange the local geometry?"
I managed a thin, incredulous noise that might have been a laugh. "No. Just the usual existential panic."
"Good." She nodded once. "We can work with that."
From behind her, a shaky voice piped up.
"Instructor?" someone said. "Ren is… I mean, he's—"
"Alive," she cut in. "Which puts him ahead of some of you."
The kid shut up so fast you could hear the click.
She turned, raising her voice enough for the whole courtyard.
"Listen," she said. "What you saw just now is not something you gossip about when we get out of here. You do not tell your friends you watched a Domain reshape a cadet. You do not try to describe it on the feeds. You especially do not mention it in front of Concord priests unless someone in a Corps uniform tells you to."
That pulled their attention off me faster than anything else could have.
Murmurs rippled through the group. Somebody whispered, "Why?" like they couldn't stop themselves.
"Because you know stories about Bearers," she said. "You've heard how few come back. You've also heard how much the Concord likes having their fingers on anything that bends Law."
The word Bearer hung in the air like a new gravity.
I'd heard it too. People touched by Rifts and Domains who came back wrong in useful ways. The ones who could step into broken places and make it out again. The ones you didn't meet in person unless something had already gone badly for you.
She didn't say I was one.
She didn't have to.
Her eyes came back to me. "You hold it together now, Ren. You fall apart later when we're not in a pocket of reality that eats hesitation."
The idea of being allowed to fall apart later sounded almost luxurious.
"Yes, Instructor," I said.
My voice still sounded strange in my own ears. Like hearing yourself on a recording in another room.
The courtyard shivered again.
This time, it wasn't the subtle wrongness of small glitches. It was wholesale rearranging.
Lines of light appeared along the edges of the tiles, racing outward from the place where the creature had died. They drew a pattern across the floor, connecting, splitting, tracing shapes that refused to settle into anything my brain liked.
The walls blurred, their perfect surfaces rippling. The fog beyond the drop seethed, then pulled back like a tide.
"This isn't over," the instructor said quietly.
As if in response, the Domain obligingly changed scenes.
The far wall—intact a second ago—dissolved.
The stone softened at the edges, then smeared outward, leaving an opening where there had been none. Beyond it, a corridor unrolled itself, lit from nowhere, stretching into hazy distance.
The air spilling out of it smelled… normal. Or close enough to trick the part of my brain that wasn't busy cataloguing new traumas. Dust, old stone, a faint hint of something metallic.
A doorway, then. A next room. Domains, the PSAs said, weren't always single spaces. They could be chains. Sets. Levels.
"This is a structured pocket," the instructor said. "We've landed in someone's idea of a training scenario."
"Whose?" someone whispered.
She didn't answer.
I pushed my palms against my thighs and made myself stand straighter. The new balance complained, but it held. Arlen shifted behind me, still sitting, still gripping the coin like it was welded to his hand.
The instructor scanned the group.
"Roll check," she said. "Who can walk?"
Hands went up. Not all of them.
"Who can't?" she added.
A smaller cluster.
She counted. Calculated.
"Those of you who can move without collapsing," she said, "you're on carry duty. No one gets left in this room in case the Domain decides to… edit it away."
She pointed at three cadets. "You, you, and you—help Ren with him." Chin jerk at Arlen. "If his neck starts doing anything interesting, you stop moving him and shout."
Three kids staggered over. Between the four of us, we managed to get Arlen upright without folding him in half. He hissed in pain, but his eyes stayed open.
"I hate this," he muttered.
"Good," I said. "Means we agree on something."
When we were ready, the instructor nodded once and turned to face the new corridor.
"Stay behind me," she told us. "Single file. Hands off the walls unless you want to find out what they're made of."
She stepped through the threshold.
Nothing exploded. Nothing screamed. The light in the corridor didn't change.
She took another step, then another.
"Safe enough for now," she said. "Move."
We followed.
Crossing that invisible line felt like stepping between acts in a play. The air on the other side was the same temperature, the same thickness, but there was a sense of being watched more closely. Like the Domain had leaned in.
The courtyard fell away behind us as we turned a corner. No sound, no echo. Just the soft shuffle of boots and the occasional hiss of pain.
The corridor walls were the same too-clean stone, but the tiles on the floor here were rectangular instead of square. I didn't know if that meant anything. In a Domain, everything might mean something. Or nothing. That was the fun.
Someone ahead of me whispered, "What if the next room has more of those things?"
The instructor's shoulders didn't tense. "Then we practice what we just learned," she said.
"What did we learn?" another voice asked, thin and frayed.
"That you can trip monsters with bags," someone muttered.
"That improvisation keeps you alive," she said. "And that Ren has just become everyone's least favorite plot device."
A weak ripple of laughter ran down the line. It died fast, but it was there.
I felt heat creep up my neck.
Plot device. The word lodged itself under my skin in a way I didn't like.
The corridor ended in a blank wall.
Of course it did.
The instructor slowed, jaw tightening. She reached out, stopped her hand just shy of touching the stone, then pulled it back.
"Domain?" she said quietly, almost under her breath. "You got another scene for us, or are we supposed to stare at this one until we starve?"
Nothing happened.
For a moment, the only sound was the ragged breathing of twenty cadets trying not to freak out in a confined space.
Then the wall answered.
Not with words. With images.
The surface rippled. Color bled up from inside it, forming shapes: flickering silhouettes of people. Tiny, simplified, almost like games icons.
One figure glowed brighter than the rest. It was a generic humanoid outline, but the light around it pulsed in two colors, alternating, as if the Domain couldn't decide which version it liked.
The instructor's eyes slid to me.
The wall flickered again.
Text appeared above the glowing figure, written in jagged, shifting letters that refused to stay settled long enough to read. Every time I tried to focus, the shapes re-arranged themselves into something else.
I blinked. My eyes watered.
Then, for a fraction of a second, they held.
PRIMARY ROLE: PROTAGONIST
The word dissolved before anybody else could say they'd seen it.
My stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with gravity.
"Anyone else see that?" I managed.
"See what?" someone behind me said.
"Nothing." My voice came out too fast. "Probably nothing. Just more headache."
The Domain had just assigned me a label.
Like it was casting a play.
The instructor watched my face for a moment. Whatever she saw there made her expression go even flatter.
"Ren," she said quietly. "Whatever this thing thinks you are, remember this: it's not the only one that gets a vote."
It was a nice thought. I clung to it like Arlen clung to his coin.
The wall pulsed, light racing across its surface, then broke open.
Beyond it, I saw another room unfurling. Larger. Darker. Shapes hung from the ceiling that I didn't want to identify yet. The air that seeped through the gap carried a faint, ugly sound, like something metal scraping slowly along stone.
The Domain was not done with us.
"Welcome," the place seemed to whisper in the back of my mind. "Act Two."
The instructor hefted her improvised weapon again.
"Ren," she said without turning. "Stay where I can see you. If this thing keeps trying to use you as a centerpiece, we're going to use that right back."
I swallowed.
"Great," I said. "My first day in the Corps and I've already been typecast."
She stepped into the new room.
We followed her in, and the Domain closed the way back with a soft, final sigh.