The light was so bright the sky looked blue for a brief second. The cities were illuminated; the stars dimmed in the face of the bright, giant orb.
Henrik's cigarette dropped from his lips, forgotten. It hit the rooftop floor with a hiss, the ember dying in a sizzle of leftover rainwater. The concrete beneath them was cracked and weathered, with patches of green moss growing between the expansion joints. An old satellite dish sat rusted in one corner, its face turned toward the sky like a metal sunflower. The HVAC equipment hummed quietly in the background, its industrial bulk casting long shadows across the hotel's rooftop.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. They just stared at the inferno consuming the horizon, the heat of it reaching them even from this distance.
And then it left just as quickly as it came. Then the shockwave followed.
It started as a deep, bone-rattling rumble that seemed to come from the earth itself, then built into a crescendo of sound that made Rhett's teeth ache. The building beneath them swayed, chunks of concrete and debris raining down from nearby structures as the blast wave rolled over the city like an invisible tsunami.
The fires were pushed away from the eye of the explosion into the surrounding buildings, setting off a kind of firestorm. Even though they were about fifteen miles away from Rhett's estimations, they could still feel the rise in temperature. The air itself seemed to shimmer with heat, and the smell of burning concrete and melted metal began to drift toward them on the wind.
Rhett looked at Henrik in the fading red light, absorbing his gaunt features, the way his expression fractured, and how the last dregs of resistance in his eyes faded in the red glow. Henrik's hands were shaking now, not from the cold, but from something deeper—a tremor that seemed to come from his very core.
Eventually, the fireball faded, but some of the fires remained, illuminating parts of the city in hues of crimson. The smell of smoke and ash in the air became heavier, meanwhile, the stormy rain clouds had cleared, and the night sky came into view, a few sparkling stars and a full moon present, a sort of ironic paradox, where the world was burning while the heavens remained indifferent.
"Your base," Rhett said finally, his voice barely above a whisper. "That's where the explosion came from, isn't it?"
Henrik was silent for a long while, his breathing shallow and irregular. Rhett could see the precise moment when the reality of it hit him—the way his shoulders sagged, the way his face went completely blank, like someone had just turned off a switch inside his skull.
"That was my ticket out of here," Henrik said, his voice hollow. "My food, my medical supplies, my ammunition. The only safe path through the villain-infested sectors." He laughed, but it was a broken sound, like glass grinding against concrete. "Weeks of preparation. Gone in fifteen seconds."
Rhett wondered what he should do. Say sorry? But that wasn't going to cut it. That was Henrik's lifeline, and now they were both stranded in the wasteland that was Brookside City, with no clear route to safety and no supplies to sustain them.
In the place of the explosion, a black cavity had been carved into the earth, still smoldering hot. The crater was massive, easily several city blocks wide, and the edges glowed with residual heat. What kind of explosion was it? Was it a bomb? If it was nuclear, would they have to think of how to survive the radioactive fallout?
"What do you think caused it?" Rhett asked, breaking the silence. "A villain? Some kind of weapon?"
Henrik stared at the distant crater, his jaw working silently. "Could be anything. The King's got weapons that can level city blocks. Or maybe it was one of the S-class villains having a tantrum. Hell, could even be the heroes, cleaning house." He spat into the darkness. "Doesn't matter who. What matters is that whoever did it might not be done."
The implication hung heavy between them. If it was a villain, would they be coming for this part of the city too? Even if Rhett couldn't die, that wasn't something he wanted to face. And Henrik... Henrik was just human, quirk or no quirk.
"We need to move," Rhett said, but Henrik wasn't listening anymore.
Henrik stared for a while longer, and then he turned away back toward the center of the rooftop. His movements were mechanical, like a marionette with half its strings cut.
"Fuck this," he said, but there was no anger in it. Just exhaustion. "I'm going to sleep." Henrik finally said as he ungracefully set himself down on the concrete floor next to the HVAC equipment of the roof. The metal unit provided some shelter from the wind, and Henrik curled up against it like a wounded animal seeking warmth.
"Wha-?" Rhett said, shaken and dumbfounded. Out of all possible reactions, going to sleep after that shock was the last thing he expected Henrik to do.
Won't he tell us to investigate? To survey the area and find another temporary base? At least lash out that his previous base has been destroyed in the blink of an eye? Instead, Henrik just lay there, staring at nothing, his breathing slow and deliberate.
As if he could read Rhett's thoughts, he asked, "Are there any signs of more explosions? More threats? Any dangers?"
"Uh... no?" Rhett replied after a moment, scanning the horizon. There were still fires, but they were miles away from where they were. The area was deathly quiet, save the faint screams he could hear in the distance from people closer to the blast zone.
But there were no suspicious movements nearby. No shadows moving wrong, no sounds that didn't belong. Just the steady crackle of distant flames and the occasional groan of settling debris.
"Then there's no need for me to worry," Henrik responded, but his voice was flat, defeated.
"B-but, your base and-"
"Look Rhett, I don't know about you, but I'm fucking exhausted. We've been running from fight to fight, and I'm not ready to get into another one." Henrik's voice cracked slightly. "Whatever problems I'll have tomorrow are tomorrow Henrik's problems. Tonight Henrik is going to sleep and hope that when I wake up I'll realize this was all a dream."
Rhett felt the tension draining from his body as he sat down and transitioned to lying on the cold concrete. The rooftop was uncomfortable, all hard edges and rough surfaces, but somehow it felt safer than anywhere they'd been in the past day. "I haven't known you for long, hell, I literally only met you from like, a day ago? But that did not seem very Henrik-y."
"Well, maybe you're rubbing off on me," Henrik scoffed as he closed his eyes. When he opened one eye to see Rhett still awake, he spoke again, softer this time. "Get some sleep, Comrade. You'll need it. Tomorrow's just going to be another hell. Just pray your girlfriend is still in that Clocktower waiting for you."
There was something in Henrik's tone—not mockery, but genuine concern mixed with doubt. It made Rhett's chest tighten.
"Yeah, I will," Rhett said, smiling softly at the mention of Lucille as he twiddled with the gold ring on his left index finger, the silver one still in his pocket. The metal was warm from his body heat, a small comfort in the cold night. "God, I can't wait to see her again. When I meet her, I'm gonna propose with this ring. Wanna be my best man?"
"You've got to be kidding me," Henrik groaned painfully, but there was no real annoyance in it. "Just shut up."
They lay there in silence for a moment, the weight of the destroyed city settling over them like a heavy blanket. Then, as if he was thinking about something, Henrik spoke again, his voice quieter now, almost gentle.
"Didn't you tell her about the whole Clocktower plan before you got a quirk?"
"Yeah?"
"Huh." Henrik was quiet for a long moment. "She must have huge faith in you if she's actually waiting for the quirkless version of you to save her."
The words hit Rhett like a physical blow. "I guess so..." he trailed off. He knew what Henrik was trying to do, sowing seeds of doubt in his mind. But that didn't make the questions any less real, any less painful.
He wasn't going to let anything deter him. At the very least he wasn't going to let Henrik see that it got to him.
But the doubt was there now, a cold weight in his stomach. Was she really waiting for him there? He loved her, and he was pretty sure she loved him too. Right? They had both been quirkless before all this started, so he didn't think she cared about those physical properties. But what if she got scared? What if she thought Rhett couldn't protect her? What if she thought he was already dead?
The ring felt heavier in his hand, and he wondered if he'd ever get the chance to use it.
He shook his head. Like Henrik said, that was a problem for future Rhett.
They lay there on the hard concrete floor, surrounded by the detritus of the hotel's rooftop—broken glass, rusted metal, the occasional piece of debris that had blown up from the streets below. The night air was cool against their skin, carrying the acrid smell of smoke and ash from the distant fires.
Rhett laid on the hard floor and closed his eyes. Truth was, he was extremely tired. Not physically—with every death, every sort of injuries, detriments or pain were erased, bringing his body back to pristine, Rhett-y condition. But that didn't mean he didn't feel mentally exhausted.
Even though his tolerance for pain had increased quite a bit, he had died too many times today. Each death left a mark on his psyche, a weight that accumulated with every resurrection. It was taking a subtle toll on him, wearing away at something essential inside him.
"Good night, Henrik," Rhett said as he could feel sleep draping his eyes in its nightly wool.
Henrik didn't answer, either because he was already sleeping, or because he didn't want to answer Rhett. But Rhett thought he heard something—a quiet whisper, almost too soft to make out.
He felt his thoughts getting drowsy barely seconds after he had laid his head to rest. The concrete was cold against his cheek, and he could hear the distant sounds of the city settling into its wounded sleep.
Funnily, he remembered a quote from somewhere he couldn't quite recall. It went along the lines of:
"Sleep is just Death being shy."
You don't gotta be shy, Rhett smiled as his consciousness temporarily faded away. We aren't strangers anymore.
"Huh, another dream." Rhett said aloud, his thoughts already lucid as he walked in his new scenery.
He knew it was a dream because he could clearly remember himself lying down and falling to sleep, and less than a second later, he was here. But it felt different this time—more real, more immediate. The transition from waking to dreaming had been seamless, like stepping through a doorway instead of falling into darkness.
"Don't you have to go through some regular sleep before entering REM, where all the dreams happen?" Rhett said to no one in particular, vaguely remembering the details from some book he read when he was younger. But even as he spoke, he knew this wasn't a normal dream. The weirdest part was that during his eighteen years alive, he never had vivid dreams like this. He never even remembered any of his dreams, in fact.
And now, he was living them like they were reality. Living them like they were more than reality.
The sky was dim, so dim he couldn't even tell if it was dusk or dawn. It was just a sick shade of grey, like it was eternally illuminated by a dying version of the sun that wasn't even in view. The light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, casting no shadows but somehow making everything feel hollow and drained.
Clouds rolled lazily in the sky. Not the thick, bubbly kind he was used to, but ones that looked shredded. Like corpses torn apart by invisible hands, their wispy remains drifting aimlessly through the grey expanse.
He was standing on a field that expanded in every direction. The grass was cut short uniformly, which he felt was strange. It was too perfect, too manicured, like a lawn maintained by someone who had never seen a real lawn. The wind was cool, breezy, and slightly depressing, carrying with it the faint scent of earth and something else—something that reminded him of hospitals and morgues.
But that wasn't the depressing part.
The depressing part was that in front of him was a graveyard.
It spread in front of him as far as even the horizon, each headstone about two feet away from the other. The headstones were blank, each just a rectangular slab of grey stone erected on the earth. They stood in perfect rows, like soldiers at attention, waiting for something that would never come.
And in front of the first line of graves was a girl.
He wasn't even sure it was a girl at first, only that the figure was wearing a pure white dress. It looked like a wedding gown, ornamental and elaborate, with layers of silk and lace that seemed to glow with their own inner light. The fabric was pristine, untouched by the dust and decay that seemed to permeate everything else in this place.
She was kneeling on the floor, soundless, her gown rustling in the breeze. But Rhett couldn't make out any features since she knelt with her back to him. He couldn't even see an inch of skin—everything was covered by the dress and a long, flowing veil that cascaded down her back like a waterfall of white silk.
There was something wrong about her stillness. She didn't move at all, didn't shift or adjust her position. She just knelt there, perfectly motionless, as if she were a statue carved from marble and dressed in cloth.
He tried moving, and made it a couple of feet before he met resistance. It was like he had walked straight into a brick wall, but there was nothing in his sight. The barrier was completely invisible, a wall of nothing that felt solid as stone. He was just about nine feet away from the girl in the wedding dress, but he couldn't reach her, and she hadn't made any sign of sensing him. Or any sign of moving really.
Rhett extended his hand to inspect the strange, invisible barrier. He raised his arm and his fingers met a surface. Completely transparent, and smooth to his touch. Like glass, but warmer, almost alive.
Before he knew it, his body stopped moving. Paralyzed with his right hand raised up, he watched as the terrifying scene unfurled. The paralysis wasn't painful—it was worse. It was like being buried alive in his own body, conscious but powerless, forced to watch whatever horror was about to unfold.
It was like watching a movie. The earth and skies, which had been completely still since he'd arrived, suddenly began moving. The air began to move, whipping his hair around. Soon the wind began to heat up too, transforming from a cool breeze into something that felt like the breath of a furnace.
As if dipped in blood, the sky began changing color from dirty grey to a deep shade of velvet. The transformation was gradual at first, then faster, like watching a wound open across the heavens.
It was like the sky was rotating instead of the earth. Soon, the lazy clouds had disappeared from the sky, dissolved into nothing, and replacing all the celestials, a single body stood in the sky.
The full blood moon.
It stood in the sky like a single, purified drop of blood, menacingly. Its surface was perfectly smooth, without the craters and imperfections of the real moon. Instead, it pulsed with a deep, rhythmic light, like a massive heart beating in the darkness. Rhett felt chills go down the spine he was unable to move.
He was in the Land of Death. The same, strange dream realm he had appeared in first when he was drowning in the Crimson Sea and ran to the sand beach. It seemed he was in a different location on this weird sleep planet, but that didn't make it any less scary. If anything, it felt more real this time, more permanent.
As if on cue, the earth began to shake. Rhett already suspected what would happen, and the dread filled him like ice water in his veins.
Like a horror movie, the headstones began to shift and crumble. The air became full of the scent of freshly dug earth as the corpses began emerging from the graves. The sound of stone scraping against stone filled the air, accompanied by the wet, sucking noise of bodies pulling themselves from the ground.
No, corpses were the wrong word for these nightmares. It looked like something only a sick psychopathic doctor could come up with.
Instead of rotten, decaying bodies he expected, these bodies were fresh, but wrong. They were naked, and the skin was completely gone, the only thing visible was the raw flesh and muscles underneath. They moved with jerky, unnatural motions, like marionettes controlled by a drunk puppeteer.
With every movement they took, the tendons twisted and expanded. Blood dropped from their arteries in steady streams, pooling on the ground beneath them and mixing with the brown earth. White bones gleamed in the red light of the blood moon, and Rhett could see every detail of their anatomy—the way their muscles bunched and stretched, the way their organs pulsed with artificial life.
First ten, then hundreds, then thousands and even tens of thousands until it was impossible for Rhett to count how many there were anymore. They emerged from every grave, a never-ending parade of horror that stretched to the horizon and beyond.
The earth creaked, stone crumbled, but the bodies made no noise themselves. No moans, no screams, no sounds of pain or hunger. As far as his eyes could see, they kept on emerging like silent sentinels. But they weren't just coming out with no purpose.
They were coming for him.
And as they got closer, Rhett began to notice something that made his blood run cold. The bodies weren't random—they all had the same build, the same height, the same basic structure. It was like looking at an army of anatomical models, all based on the same template.
All based on him.
Still completely paralyzed, he had no other choice but to watch in horror as they grew closer. Unlike his last dream where he ran away from his doppelganger and the red sea, he couldn't even do that now. He couldn't even scream, couldn't even vomit. He was trapped in his own body, forced to witness this grotesque parade of his own deaths.
All the while the little bride kneeling on the floor remained completely motionless, as if she were the eye of a storm made of flesh and bone.
Soon they were within arm's reach, and Rhett braced himself, his mouth frozen in a perpetual scream, for whatever horrors these monsters were planning on afflicting on him. He could see their faces now—or rather, the places where their faces should be. Empty eye sockets stared at him with the intensity of a thousand gazes, and lipless mouths hung open in expressions of eternal torment.
Silently they came, and when Rhett thought it was finally it, they stopped.
Or more appropriately, something stopped them.
The invisible glassy barrier that Rhett had almost forgotten about came to his rescue, preventing them from getting closer. The sound of flesh slapping against the invisible wall was wet and horrible, like raw meat being thrown against a window.
The bloody zombies clawed and hit the barrier, but it didn't budge or crack. Their fingerless hands scraped against the surface, leaving trails of blood that vanished as quickly as they appeared. The monsters had no eyes, but he could still feel the gazes of their empty eyeholes peering into his soul with an intensity that made him want to scream.
Soon, from left to right, up to nine feet and climbing, the monsters piled up against the invisible wall. They pressed themselves against it like insects against a lamp, their bodies contorting and twisting in their desperate attempts to reach him. And all of them had something in common.
Not only did they all look the same, physiologically wise—lean, almost skinny stature at average height—but they all took the exact same posture.
Their right arm stretched out, their mouths open and frozen in abject terror.
All like Rhett. All mimicking his current position, trapped behind the glass with his hand raised in a futile gesture of protection.
They were all him. Every single one of them was a version of Rhett, killed and resurrected in this nightmare realm. The accumulated weight of all his deaths, all his pain, all his fear, given form and set loose in the Land of Death.
And after all that, the girl whose white gown had miraculously stayed untouched and pristine through the entire grotesque ordeal, finally turned around.
She moved slowly, deliberately, like she was performing a ritual. Her movements were graceful, almost dance-like, but there was something wrong about the way she turned—too smooth, too perfect, like she was floating instead of moving.
Her bony fingers reached out and lifted off her silky veil, the fabric falling away like morning mist. And underneath it, was a face.
Not one of skin. Not one of even flesh and blood like the monsters surrounding her.
It was one of bone. A pure white, bleached skull, polished to a mirror shine. The empty eye sockets were perfect circles, and the jaw hung slightly open, as if she were about to speak.
But there was something else, something that made Rhett's heart stop even though he couldn't move. Around the skull's left ring finger was a thin band of silver—a promise ring, delicate and beautiful, exactly like the one he planned on giving Lucille.
The skull tilted slightly, and somehow, impossibly, Rhett could see her smile. Not with lips or muscle, but with the subtle shift of bone against bone, the way the light caught the empty sockets and made them seem almost alive.
And for some reason Rhett couldn't even comprehend, Rhett knew, without a doubt—
It was Lucille.