Riley's voice cracked like a whip.
"YOU WHAT!!!!"
Rudra didn't even flinch.
"I tried to blow up Israel," he repeated, his tone disturbingly casual—as if confessing he'd jaywalked.
Riley blinked at him like a man waiting for the punchline.
It didn't come.
Rudra kept walking, hands in pockets.
"The Holy Lands are… holy. Obviously. But there are places in the world that aren't just important—they're thin."
Riley squinted. "Thin?"
"Where the line between the Material and the Shadow is blurry," Rudra said, ticking them off on his fingers. "Jerusalem. Giza. Rome. The Aztec capital ruins. Tokyo. Tehran. Sindh. Kurukshetra. Constantinople."
"You mean Istanbul."
Rudra shook his head immediately, visibly uncomfortable.
"I get this… wrong feeling calling it that."
"Right," Riley muttered. "Totally normal. Continue."
Rudra's voice dropped, rougher, darker—
Like something ancient was vibrating in his ribs.
"The Cult of Yaldabaoth. The Material God."
The hatred in the way he said the name made Riley instinctively take half a step back.
Rudra's hand clenched until the leather of his glove groaned.
"After Operation Rat-Eater… I snapped," he said quietly. "Five years ago. I spent three whole years hunting the cult. Tracking their nodes. Their priests. They're flesh-warpers. And I didn't just kill them—I slaughtered them. Every cell I found."
Riley swallowed hard.
He was used to seeing Rudra annoyed, irritated, murderous even—
But this wasn't anger.
This was trauma sharpened into a weapon.
Rudra kept going, voice low but steady, like a confession he had rehearsed in nightmares.
"And then I found out Yaldabaoth's cult got its claws into Jerusalem. Because it's a thin point. A crossroads between the worlds. So I invaded."
He paused.
Something flickered behind his eyes—not pride, not shame… something in-between.
"And something happened in that crossover. I lost myself. Went amok. Wiped out the IDF unit that tried to stop me. Killed thousands in the haze. When I came to… Handpump captured me. Put me in a sealed cell at Kala Pani and I thought I would never see the sun ever again."
He finished walking.
"But they needed me yet again."
Finished talking.
And the quiet that followed wasn't peaceful—it was suffocating.
Riley stared at him with a mix of fear, disbelief, and the dawning horror that he had severely underestimated what kind of creature his best friend actually was.
"...Mate," Riley finally whispered. "You're fifteen."
Rudra didn't answer.
He only stared up at the night sky—jaw locked, shoulders rigid—like he was bracing for some ancient, unseen thing to peel itself out of the darkness.
Riley waited, then nudged."Mate… You okay?"
Rudra finally spoke, voice flat."You're fairly new to Handpump, aren't you? Because everyone inside knows what I did. Outside, they think I was just a serial killer."He paused."Technically, maybe I was."
"I joined last year," Riley admitted. "And—uh—I mean, I'd use the word 'terrorist' more than 'serial killer'—"
Rudra stopped.Not walking.Not breathing.
"Don't. Fucking. Move."
Riley froze instantly.
Rudra's eyes swept the grasslands, sharp and predatory.No drop in temperature.No frost in the air.
"Not Nicole," he murmured. "So she really was just a dream."
But then something flickered in his senses again—that same suffocating dampness in perception, that feeling like someone was stuffing cotton into the gears of his brain.
He lowered his head slowly…and saw it.
A wasp.
Sitting on the inside of his forearm.Its stinger buried deep.Drawing blood.
"Red…" Riley whispered, voice going thin. "That's a hornet."
"She's drawing blood," Rudra said quietly. "And now I feel the pain. But why now? There's a trail of blood back along my arm. So why didn't I notice it earlier?"
His voice tightened."Something's messing with our perception again."
So Nicole wasn't a dream…?No. Impossible.But the thought wriggled like a worm in his skull.
Riley stepped closer, worried."Mate, are you alright?"
Rudra plucked the hornet free and let it fly away.
"Let's get you some treatment," Riley said, reaching for him—
—but the wound burned itself shut.Seared clean.No blood left.
Rudra flexed his hand."I can regenerate smaller wounds."
Riley blinked.Then blinked again.
"Well," he said slowly, "that's not bloody normal."
Rudra didn't look at him.
Rudra stopped mid-step.
Riley nearly bumped into him."What now—"
Rudra lifted a finger."Look. Over there."
By a crooked fencepost a man stood—local clothes, local boots, local weather-bitten face—but nothing else about him matched anything alive.
He dipped a wooden bowl into a clay pot.scooped water,and poured it out onto the dirt.Then again.And again.And again.
Rudra squinted at the ground.
There were no seeds.No sprouts.No rows.No roots.
Just mud.A drowned patch of earth that should've been clotted and dead hours ago,but somehow still glistened like it was freshly poured.
"Hey, mate—HEY!" Riley walked toward him. "You're flooding your land! Stop—stop pouring it!"
The man didn't react at all.
He moved like a puppet someone forgot to oil.Arms stiff.Neck rigid.Head tilted just wrong, like his spine wasn't built for human posture.
Riley grabbed his shoulder."Oi! You'll ruin the soil—"
The man turned.
Not fast.
Just… wrong.
It was like the motion was pre-recorded on a loop and the body was catching up to the script.
He stared at Riley with glassy, too-wide eyes.
"This… is… my… harvest," he said.
Except his mouth barely formed the words. His voice was flat, monotone, and scraped raw of emotion. Rudra's pulse spiked. Riley backed up, rifle slowly lifting.
"Red… What the hell is going on?" The man dipped the bowl into the pot again. More water. More muddy splashing.
"My… harvest." Rudra swallowed hard. Nothing was growing. The man didn't blink. The pot wasn't running out of water. And every instinct in Rudra's body screamed that he shouldn't get closer. Something was wearing a man's shape. Something that wanted them to look away. To forget. To not notice. Rudra whispered, "Riley… punch him enough to draw blood""
What!!!! Why?"
"Just do it kangaroo fucker."
"Okay."
The moment Riley's fist connected with the man's cheek, a ripple went through him—not a recoil, not pain, but like reality itself hiccupped.
For half a second he stayed still.
Then the skin around the impact point twitched, shifted, as if trying to remember how to bruise.
His eyes snapped into focus.
Too fast.
Too sudden.
Too alive.
He gasped, stumbling back with a strangled cry, and the robotic flatness shattered into frantic, breathy panic.
A stream of Mongolian burst out of him—raw, terrified, rapid-fire syllables Rudra barely recognized. The man clutched his face, staring at the blood on his fingers like he'd never seen red before. His body trembled like a puppet waking up mid-performance.
Rudra's own breath caught.
Riley looked at him, wide-eyed; he wasn't expecting the dude to explode in screaming.
The man's gaze jumped from Riley to Rudra to the mud, then back to the pot—which was still impossibly, silently full.
He shouted again, more desperate, pointing at the empty, ruined land like he was only now seeing the truth of it. His voice cracked from the force, words spilling in Mongolian:
"Сая юу болоо вэ!? Би хаана байна!? Энэ газар… энэ газар үхсэн байна!"
Rudra muttered under his breath,
"…Bro didn't just wake up. Bro got rebooted."
Because now it clicked.
Hard.
When Riley punched him—the blood, the injury—it forced something to acknowledge the body it was wearing. Forced the vessel back into itself. Forced the passenger to lose its grip.
Riley whispered,
"Red I think we exorcised him."
Rudra didn't answer.
Rudra's breath caught in his throat.
The pot shuddered harder—water sloshing but never spilling, never emptying—and the man's widening eyes reflected it like a nightmare he'd seen before, like a child remembering the shape of a monster under the bed.
He doesn't know English, Rudra thought.
But he still said, "This is my harvest."
Said it perfectly.
He said it like he'd rehearsed it.
Like it wasn't him saying it at all.
His skin crawled.
He turned back toward the man—
And froze.
The "man" was motionless. Not cowering, not trembling—not even breathing. He was locked in place, stiff and wrong, like a freeze-frame that the world forgot to animate. Even the fear on his face had solidified, cracked at the edges like frost climbing glass.
Rudra's instinct roared—
Then a gunshot split the air.
A white-hot blast blew open the world and his skull in the same instant. He saw nothing—except through one remaining eye, just barely, floating in a haze of pain and cold.
Riley.
Frozen mid-turn.
A knife of ice rammed clean through his throat, pinning him upright like an exhibit.
His eyes were wide.
Already glazing.
Then a shadow leaned over Rudra—graceful, effortless, disdain curling at the edge of a smirk.
Nicole.
She looked down at him like she was looking at her favorite curse, lips tilted in satisfaction. But then her gaze drifted—lower, slower—until she saw the blood.
His blood.
Her eyes widened.
Her face broke.
A tear hit his cheek—cold, sharp, real—
And the whole world shut off like someone unplugged reality.