The world did not break when they arrived.
It smiled.
The dark side of the Free Abyss welcomed them with open quiet—no screams, no fire, no obvious threat. Just a vast, endless openness that felt almost merciful. Beautiful, even. A false gentleness stretched across the horizon like a promise made too easily.
That was the first lie.
The Free Abyss was never hell.
It didn't need to be.
Paradise was far more efficient.
Light bled softly through impossible angles, illuminating structures that resembled cities only if one squinted hard enough. Shapes suggested homes, pathways, resting places—ideas of safety without the substance. Awe pressed against the chest like gravity that wanted to be worshipped.
The devil, after all, does not arrive with horns.
It arrives as an angel that makes sense.
This was the Deep Abyss's shadow—its quieter lung—the birthplace of ghouls. A realm where distance wasn't merely bent, but story itself slithered, rearranged, contradicted. Narratives looped back on themselves. Intent forgot its origin. Meaning shed its skin and crawled away.
Any normal being would already be gone.
Not dead.
Worse.
Madness here wasn't loud. It was polite. It asked you to sit with it. To admire it. To let go of the parts of yourself that felt heavy—names, guilt, continuity.
Even those who had brushed Avia's hand had warned of this place.
Jack felt the warning in his bones.
They stood in the middle of nowhere, and the nowhere stood back.
Red-coated terrain sprawled beneath them—a pit formed of metaphysical vines, pulsing slowly like veins that didn't belong to a body. The ground breathed. The walls listened. Shadows crawled upward, not cast by light but by discarded versions of people.
Fragmented selves.
Regrets given hunger.
Ghouls emerged from them—not stepping forward, but unpeeling themselves from the scenery. Limbs twisted from memories. Faces stitched together from expressions that had once meant something to someone.
Henry was gone.
That absence screamed louder than any attack.
Jack's eyes ignited—Analysis tearing through layers, dimensions, probability bands.
Nothing.
No trail.
No echo.
No contradiction to grab onto.
"Henry…" he muttered, voice low, refusing to crack.
Nothing answered.
The Abyss seemed amused.
Sonia moved first.
Her red field snapped into existence—not defensive, but furious—and she drove it forward like a fist wrapped in resolve. Ghouls shattered against it, screaming not in pain but in recognition, as if struck by a truth they had tried to abandon.
Ian's blade sang as it cleared its sheath.
The sound alone cut through the fog—steel defining itself against unreality. He moved with purpose, severing not bodies but intent, carving space where space refused to stay carved.
Kennedy's hands traced glowing frameworks in the air, reality scaffolding snapping into place for half a second at a time before the Abyss chewed through them.
"Tch—this place keeps rewriting my rules," he snarled. "That's not fair."
"It's not meant to be," Charles replied, already coding symbols into existence, runes layering and collapsing as fast as he could think them. "I can't anchor an exit. There's no agreement here. Space won't sign the contract."
Osei didn't speak.
He never needed to.
He flowed beside Sonia, instinct moving his body before thought had the chance to get in the way. He wasn't fighting ghouls.
He was denying them opportunities.
Each step erased a possibility they wanted to exploit.
More shapes crawled out of the pit—vines tightening, personas whispering, feeding on the versions of people who had once looked at this place and said, I want that.
Jack clenched his fists.
They weren't just surrounded.
They were inside something.
A graveyard of discarded selves.
And somewhere deeper—far deeper—Henry was alone.
The Abyss breathed again.
Slow.
Patient.
Like it had all the time in the universe.
And for the first time since the training began, Jack understood something cold and terrible:
This wasn't a test.
This was what happens after you pass one.
It wasn't as if they were untested.
They had played games where the rules were laid bare and still survived.
They had stared temptation in the eyes when it wore obvious masks—power, shortcuts, certainty—and walked past it without flinching.
They had learned, over and over, how to swim in the sea of what ifs, how to keep breathing when possibility tried to pull them under.
They were not naïve.
They were not fragile.
They were not drowning.
And yet—
That did not mean charging headfirst into the waves was wisdom.
The Free Abyss understood this distinction far better than most worlds ever could.
The terrain rippled.
Not violently. Not dramatically.
Like water pretending to be calm.
The first waves came alive—mid–low level ghouls slithering forward at alarming speeds, their forms unstable, unfinished, as though the Abyss itself hadn't decided what they were allowed to be yet. They moved like urges rather than bodies, closing distance by wanting to be closer.
Sonia reacted without hesitation.
Her red field flared, sharp and decisive, snapping outward like a refusal given physical shape. The ghouls didn't even get the chance to complete themselves before they shattered—knocked out of existence before illusion could congeal into threat.
Osei was already moving.
Not running.
Not attacking.
Intercepting.
Instinct guided him through the chaos, his body slipping between trajectories that hadn't finished forming yet. Every strike wasn't aimed at a ghoul, but at the idea that it could reach them. The waves broke early, collapsing into nothing before they learned how to harm.
Efficient.
Controlled.
Almost routine.
And yet Jack barely saw any of it.
His gaze kept drifting—not forward, not toward the next threat—but elsewhere. Somewhere undefined. Somewhere wrong.
Henry.
The name echoed inside him without sound.
If Jack could have dived headfirst into the waves of temptation to reach him, he would have done so without hesitation. Strategy would have burned. Caution would have been abandoned. He would have let the Abyss tear at him piece by piece if it meant closing the distance.
Because Henry wasn't just a teammate.
He was a stabilizer.
A constant.
An embodiment of harmony that didn't try to dominate or outshine—just align. The kind of presence that quietly reminded Jack who he was when his thoughts began to fracture across too many dimensions.
Now that lifeline was gone.
And the absence felt structural, like a support beam ripped out of a building that hadn't started collapsing yet—but would.
Kennedy and Charles stood back-to-back, hands moving, symbols forming and dissolving faster than frustration could turn into panic.
"No portals," Kennedy muttered, irritation creeping into his voice. "No anchors. It's like the pit keeps… correcting me."
Charles adjusted his glasses, jaw tight. "Not correcting. Anticipating. Every framework I set up gets invalidated before it finishes existing."
He paused, eyes scanning the space around them.
"This place isn't broken," he added quietly. "It's behaving exactly as intended."
An accident formed on purpose.
That thought settled uncomfortably in the group.
Then—almost simultaneously—Kennedy and Charles looked up.
Above them, the walls of the Abyss curved inward, vast and unmistakable now. The terrain wasn't endless after all. It only pretended to be. They were standing at the bottom of something enormous, something patient, something that had let them believe they were lost in infinity when they were really contained.
A pit.
Not just physical.
Conceptual.
Jack followed their gaze, his Analysis Eyes tracing the geometry, the flow, the way narratives slid downward whether you noticed or not.
And with that realization came another—sharp, unavoidable.
If this place had a bottom…
Then wherever Henry was—
He was likely here.
Not above.
Not beyond.
But deeper.
The waves stilled for a moment, as if the Abyss itself was listening to their thoughts.
Jack clenched his fists, grounding himself, forcing his breath into rhythm.
They weren't beaten.
Not yet.
But this place wasn't trying to overwhelm them with force.
It was testing something subtler.
Patience.
Attachment.
The cost of moving too fast when the ground itself was waiting for you to make a mistake.
They had learned how to swim.
Now they had to remember something harder:
Even the strongest swimmer can be pulled under
if they forget to respect the tide.
And somewhere below, in the dark curvature of the Free Abyss,
Henry waited—
whether as a prisoner, a catalyst,
or something far more dangerous than either.