Luke reached Evangeline in the middle of the crowd. She stood out instantly, perched on the roof of a wooden house and still dressed like a ninja. Two crows circled above her, which meant Jerry was already searching for the others.

  Among the cheering, relieved faces, there were plenty of confused ones too. Luke learned that everyone had arrived at the exact same moment, even though they’d entered the portal minutes apart. He didn’t know much about physics, but he knew enough to guess the teleportation had dropped them all into the same point in time.

  And apparently all of them had experienced the same strange dream. Each had been visited by a figure calling itself a Guide.

  “So there I was, and suddenly this scarecrow appears,” Evangeline said, mid-story. “He told me he volunteered to be my Guide and even tried to recruit me into his order.”

  Guides could recruit people?

  Sigil didn’t feel like someone trying to recruit Luke into any kind of divine order.

  “Wait, you idiot. You’re not supposed to tell me about your Guide,” Luke muttered, then dismissed it. “Evangeline, I need you focused on finding Allison and the others, got it?”

  “I am focused, Snow White. Why don’t you use your rank skill on my crow?” she shot back.

  She scanned the area through her binocular skill while the two Jerrys flew overhead. Luke stayed beside her with knives in hand, half-expecting Jonathan to pop out of nowhere and fire a crossbow bolt at her while she was distracted.

  “So that Jonathan guy really was alive the whole time and actually Quinn,” she murmured as she searched.

  “I’m going to kill that bastard,” Luke said under his breath.

  Jonathan might have been angry about what happened with Angelica, maybe he’d misunderstood everything or been manipulated by Bartholomew. None of it mattered anymore. Luke would kill him. If Jonathan had only come after Luke, maybe he’d have offered a chance to talk. But Jonathan had hurt Allison. He had actually tried to kill her. And Luke would never forgive anything done to the people he considered family.

  “I found the short healer,” Evangeline said, meaning Jack. “Eleanor too.”

  The village around them was total chaos. The locals were running everywhere, trying to contain and explain the situation. From what Luke gathered, the residents were actually employees from various modern governments. This place was some kind of military settlement.

  One of the crows swooped in from afar, guiding someone through the crowd. Luke kept scanning for any sign of Jonathan—or Allison.

  “Luke.” A man’s voice called out.

  He turned immediately, throwing knives raised, ready to strike. But the moment he saw who it was, he froze. He recognized the figure standing there. Someone he hadn’t seen in… a very long time.

  “Allison?” he asked.

  It was Allison’s male form. The same young man he’d traveled with across the frozen lands during the early tutorial. And now he was back.

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  “I… used my necklace,” the male Allison said quietly. “To, you know… get out of there and come here with you.”

  Right. I invited her to come live with me in Maine.

  Luke had been moving on pure instinct when the weight of the moment finally hit him. Allison wasn’t back in her family’s estate in the New World, trapped and powerless. She was here. With him. Free. And for the first time since the portal opened, he felt the brief, dizzy spark of something close to hope.

  He jumped off the rooftop and sprinted toward her… or toward him, technically, since Allison was still in a male body.

  “You’re really okay?” Luke asked, hands running over the man’s shoulders, checking for injuries. “Really okay?”

  “I’m fine,” the male Allison replied. “Not a scratch on me.”

  Luke still inspected every inch he could without being weird about it. His pulse only slowed a little.

  “Jonathan got away. We need to stay sharp.” He shifted his stance, positioning himself between Allison and the crowd pressing inward.

  “It’s alright, Luke,” Allison assured him, calm but firm. “I’m at full mana, full stamina, and this body is Rank E. It’s not like before. I’m not going to be blindsided or helpless again.”

  A figure landed beside them with a clean, effortless drop from a nearby rooftop. Evangeline. She cupped her hands around her eyes like makeshift binoculars, her skill sharpening the gesture into something literal.

  “I found the rest of our group,” she said. “Even the two doll-women and their maids. They’re sticking with Jerry One and Jerry Two. If Jonathan tries anything, he won’t even make it halfway through a step before someone drops him.”

  Allison still carried no weapon.

  “My katana stands out too much,” the male Allison explained quietly. “And Allison Rhiannon… is supposed to be dead.”

  Luke didn’t miss the hard edge in those words. Everything around them had been ripped out of place, his home was on the opposite side of the planet, and yet… Allison was with him.

  Then came the shouting.

  “We want to go home!” Dozens of voices. Then hundreds. The words crashed together, rising like a desperate tide.

  How the hell are we going to cross an entire world? How long would that even take? Plane tickets? Magic? Walking? Luke had no answers, only questions piling on top of each other.

  “Everyone, calm down! Please!” The soldiers—government soldiers—raised their voices from the rooftops. Their armor looked medieval at first glance, but each chestplate bore the emblem of a modern nation.

  Judith wore the American crest. At least one familiar flag among all the strangeness. Maybe she could help him get in touch with an embassy, or something equally bureaucratic and comforting.

  “Whatever it takes to get back to modern society,” Evangeline murmured, “at least we’ve got enough money to buy tickets.”

  The military group tried to quiet the crowd. On one rooftop, a man in his early thirties raised both hands for silence. A British flag was strapped to his arm.

  “I ask for your attention!” he called out. His voice carried through the entire village, clear and commanding, amplified by a spell. His partner beside him held a staff topped with a glowing pearl, the magic sending the sound rolling across the rooftops like a controlled wave.

  The noise died down bit by bit. Even Luke felt the compulsion to listen.

  The New World was staring back at them, raw and unfamiliar. They were home… but not home at all. And whatever came next, it wouldn’t be simple.

  “There are a lot of people here, and I know appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a forest must be unsettling. But from what I’ve gathered, all of you expected to end up back home. We’re still trying to understand exactly what happened, but I can at least tell you this: you’re on Earth. You’re in the New World.”

  Voices of disappointment rippled through the crowd. Within seconds, it turned into a flood of questions, complaints, heartbreak, and even sobbing.

  “I want to go home!” someone shouted. “We just escaped one hell and fell straight into another!”

  “Please, calm down!” the local leader yelled, trying to rein in the panic. “You will go home, all right? We’ll help you. We have representatives here from every country of the modern world. They’ll assist you in getting back. Honestly, that might even be why we were stationed here in the first place.”

  “And how are we supposed to get home? By plane?” someone called out from the crowd.

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