The extraction was messy.

  One moment, I was standing in the heat of a kill zone. Next, I was skidding across the cold white marble of the Inventory.

  I didn't stick the landing. I tangled in the heavy rug—the mundane one we’d bought to furnish the Void—and slammed into the leg of the leather armchair.

  My body screamed. The adrenaline that had been holding the wreckage together in the real world evaporated instantly in the clinical stillness of the Void. My ribs ground together like a bag of broken porcelain, sending jagged spikes of white-hot agony radiating through my chest. A wet, bubbling sensation deep in my left lung told me I was drowning on the inside.

  I lay there, staring up at the churning Indigo Sky, gasping for air that refused to fill the tank.

  ‘Murphy?’ I projected, my mental voice echoing into the hollow cathedral of our shared skull. ‘Murph? Report.’

  Nothing.

  I was alone at the helm.

  "Murphy!"

  Footsteps pounded on the marble. Grace skidded into view, her face a mask of soot and terror. She dropped to her knees, her hands hovering over my mangled chest as if she were afraid that touching me would cause me to disintegrate.

  "You... you’re alive," she stammered, her eyes darting from my blood-soaked armour to the empty air where the portal had snapped shut. "How?"

  "A small miracle," I wheezed.

  I tried to sit up. The room spun in a lazy, clockwise circle that I found deeply offensive. I collapsed back against the armchair, clutching my ribs.

  "My stamina surged. I can’t explain it," I rasped, the lie tasting like copper. "I immediately created a smoke screen and summoned the double with a small Persian rug. He jumped on the container to keep the Prime busy while I dove into the Inventory."

  I couldn't tell her that I seemed to have a separate stamina pool from Murphy. I couldn't tell her that the 'Murphy' she knew was currently in a spiritual coma while an ancient consciousness piloted his meat-suit.

  "Maybe the gods were just looking out for me today."

  Grace didn't look convinced, but the sheer volume of blood I was coughing up distracted her from the magical arithmetic. She grabbed a linen cloth from the workbench and pressed it against the worst of the rents in my armour.

  "We’re safe," she breathed, her shoulders sagging. "He can't reach us here. The Prime is outside, and we’re..."

  "Trapped," I finished for her, closing my eyes against the spinning ceiling.

  "What?"

  "We are inside... a locked box," I explained, fighting the urge to pass out. "The portal is closed. The anchor—the rug I used to get in—is currently sitting in the middle of a kill zone. If I open the door now... we step out directly under the Prime’s boot."

  Grace went pale. "So we wait?"

  "We wait," I confirmed. "My clone... Sir Plunge-alot... has the other key. Until he rings the bell... we are guests of the Void."

  I lay my head back, listening to the silence. It was peaceful, in a terrifying sort of way. Somewhere outside, a clone was fighting a god with a gramophone and a bad attitude.

  "Argh!"

  It didn't take long. Maybe forty seconds of silence before the first signal hit.

  I jerked forward in the chair, hissing as a sharp, phantom pain stabbed through my left shoulder. It wasn't my physical injury; it was a ghost sensation, sharp and hot.

  "Murphy?" Grace hovered over me. "Your ribs?"

  "No," I gritted out, rubbing a shoulder that wasn't bleeding. "A clone just died. He lost one."

  I squeezed my eyes shut as another spike of pain—a crushing sensation in the back—hit me ten seconds later. Then another.

  "He's trading them," I hissed, realising the tactic. "He’s sacrificing pieces to buy time."

  A flash of genuine anger cut through the agony. The clone outside was acting with the cold, callous efficiency of a general who didn't have to watch his men die. He was throwing bodies at the problem because he wasn't the one connected to the spiritual tether.

  "He's spending lives like copper coins," I growled, clutching my head as a phantom blade severed a limb. "He forgets that I am the Anchor! He doesn't feel a thing, so he keeps feeding them to the grinder, and I’m the one paying the toll for every single death!"

  Two minutes passed. Two minutes of agonising silence where I sat in the chair, trembling with rage and pain, waiting for the next hit.

  Then, the sky tore open.

  .It didn't break; it screamed. A sound like tearing metal echoed through the infinite space of the Inventory, drowning out the phantom pain of the dying clones.

  Grace shrieked and covered her head. I forced my eyes open.

  The indigo gloom above us was boiling. A torrent of raw, violent energy was flooding into the dimension—thick veins of jagged Gold and burning Orange mana.

  "He's draining it," I whispered, awe warring with terror. "The magnificent bastard is actually draining the Prime."

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  The foreign mana slammed into the atmosphere of the Inventory, but it didn't dissipate. The White Core mana—the native atmosphere of this place—surged to meet it. It was like watching a pack of wolves take down a stag. The White mist swirled, latching onto the heavy Orange energy, devouring it, expanding it.

  CRACK-BOOM.

  Thunder that sounded like shattering glass shook the marble floor beneath us.

  "Murphy! What is happening!?" Grace yelled, clinging to the armchair as the ground began to quake.

  "Expansion!" I roared over the noise.

  The White Mana, gorged on the power of a semi-divine construct, slammed into the floor.

  The white marble at the edge of our small "living room" didn't just crack; it exploded outward. But it wasn't destruction. It was genesis.

  Stone and rich, dark earth burst from the nothingness, rolling out into the distance like a tidal wave of creation.

  WHOOSH.

  Hills rose from the flat plane, carving valleys in an instant.

  POP. POP. POP.

  The sound of rapid-fire growth filled the air. Grass sprouted from the new earth in a wave of emerald green, rushing away from us faster than a horse could gallop. Bushes unfurled from saplings to maturity in the blink of an eye. Trees—oaks, pines, ancient willows—punched up through the soil, their canopies exploding into leaf with a sound like shaking sheets.

  In seconds, the sterile white void was gone. We were sitting in the middle of a rolling, lush wilderness that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  Then, the sky calmed.

  The violence faded, replaced by a soft, luminous hum. The White Mana, now supercharged, began to swirl high above us. It lit up the landscape like an Aurora Borealis, ribbons of pearlescent light dancing across the heavens.

  The dark indigo turned a brilliant, vivid blue. It looked exactly like a summer day on Earth, but there was no sun—just the swirling, omnipresent glow of the White Mana clouds drifting lazily across the azure expanse.

  Grace slowly lowered her hands. She looked at the trees. She looked at the grass rippling in a breeze that hadn't existed a minute ago.

  "By the Gods," she whispered, her voice trembling. "What is this place?"

  "An evolution," I wheezed, staring at the impossible sky.

  The beauty was distracting, but the pain in my chest was a sharp reminder of reality. I needed to move. The adrenaline was long gone, leaving behind a body that felt less like a vehicle and more like a crime scene.

  I rolled onto my side, a manoeuvre that rewarded me with the sensation of a hot poker being twisted into my armpit.

  "Grace," I croaked. "Parchment. Charcoal. Please."

  Grace snapped out of her trance. She looked like she was one loud noise away from a total breakdown, but the prospect of a concrete task gave her something to anchor to. She scrambled over to the workbench—which now looked absurdly out of place sitting on a grassy knoll—and returned with a single sheet of drafting paper and a stick of charcoal.

  I took the charcoal. My hand was shaking—not the tremors of fear, but the rhythmic twitching of muscle failure. I pressed the stick to the paper.

  My hand defaulted to the only script I’d used for a decade of commanding legions: a rigid, blocky military shorthand. It was the handwriting of a man who issued orders that sent men to die, precise and devoid of flourish.

  I scribbled: MAKE ESCAPE. NEED MEDICAL ATTENTION. FIND PIPPA. POST HASTE

  "What are you doing?" Grace asked, her voice tight.

  "Sending... a letter," I wheezed.

  I closed my eyes and reached out with my mind, visualising the conceptual architecture of the Inventory. I focused on the 'New Arrivals' sector—the mental inbox where items dropped when they first entered the Void.

  I placed the physical parchment onto the grass, then pushed my will into it. Store.

  The paper was wrapped in a stasis field and vanished. In the real world, that note was now sitting in the "Shared Locker" of our mind, a metaphysical inbox accessible to any active instance of the Murphy-Network.

  "Will he even see it?" Grace whispered, staring at the empty spot on the grass.

  "Yes."

  We waited.

  The silence of the new world was absolute. Outside, time was moving at its usual frantic pace—sirens screaming, machines stomping, steam hissing. But in here, under the false blue sky, every second stretched out like taffy.

  Ten seconds. Twenty.

  Then, the air shimmered near the spot where I’d deposited the note.

  A fresh scrap of paper appeared.

  I grabbed it, my fingers leaving bloody smears on the edge. The handwriting was messy, hurried, and unmistakably efficient.

  UNDERSTOOD.

  I let out a breath that I didn't realise I’d been holding. It turned into a coughing fit that sprayed a fine mist of red onto the green grass, but I didn't care.

  "He’s moving," I rasped, dropping the note.

  "But the lockdown," Grace argued, pacing the rug. "The thermal sensors. The mana fields. Even the waterways will be locked down. How is the clone supposed to get out of a fortress?"

  I looked at the note. "He’ll find a way."

  A minute of silence passed.

  Then, suddenly, my eyes went wide, and my back arched off the chair.

  It started again, and this time it was a slaughter.

  "Guh!" I gasped, clutching the arms of the chair as the sensation of being vaporised echoed through my nervous system.

  "Murphy?" Grace stepped forward. "What is it?"

  I couldn't answer. Ten seconds later, it happened again. A distinct, sickening CRUNCH.

  I jerked violently. This time, I felt a massive steel fist shatter my spine. Then another memory overlapped—a blade taking my arm at the shoulder.

  The memories of the dying clones were flooding back to the Original.

  Murphy had lived—and died—thousands of times. His mind was a fortress, scarred and calloused, built to withstand the trauma of death. He could process the sensory data of being disembowelled and treat it like a bad phone connection.

  But I was not Murphy.

  I was a soldier. A man of iron and discipline. I had stood my ground against armies; I had looked into the eyes of beasts that drove lesser men mad, and I had not blinked. My pride demanded that I weather this storm, that I remain the stoic anchor my partner needed.

  But I did not have the calloused, infinite resilience of a soul that had been ground down by the wheel of reincarnation for aeons. Murphy treated death like a bad habit; I treated it with the respect it deserved.

  It tasted like bile to admit it—a shame hotter than the phantom pain ravaging my nerves—but I was not built for this. In the face of this repetitive, grinding slaughter, the king was breaking, and the scoundrel... the scoundrel was the only reason we were still sane.

  "Argh!" I grunted, squeezing my eyes shut as another clone died in my head only five seconds later.

  "Murphy!" Grace was shouting now, her hands on my face.

  "The backlash..." I choked out, tears of pain leaking from my eyes. "They're dying. All of them."

  It was a cascade. Every ten seconds, a fresh horror slammed into my psyche. I felt the heat of the factory. I heard the Johnny Cash song distorting as the bodies wielding the swords were torn apart by the War Machine. The sheer volume of pain was blinding. It was enough to make a man lose his mind, and I suddenly understood why Murphy always insisted on taking the lead during combat. He wasn't just protecting his body; he was protecting me from this.

  Then, the final memory hit.

  It didn't feel like a memory. It felt like reality.

  I saw the towering silhouette of the War Machine. I saw the Orange Core burning like a sun. I heard the SNIKT of the wrist-blade.

  And then, the world spun.

  I felt the blade bite. I felt the severance of the spine, the cold separation of the head from the body. For a heartbeat, I wasn't in the Void; I was a head rolling across a dirty factory floor, staring sideways at the boots of the Prime. The phantom sensation was so vivid, so visceral, that I gagged, choking on my own blood in the real world.

  The connection snapped.

  "He's gone," I whispered, the darkness lingering in the back of my eyes. "Now, it's just us."

  I fell back into the chair, trembling uncontrollably. The aftershocks of the decapitation rattled through my bones. I looked up at the impossible blue sky, my vision greying at the edges.

  "Murphy..." I thought, my mental voice weak and filled with a newfound, terrified respect. "How do you do this? How do you do this every day?"

  As I closed my eyes, the grey edges of my vision began to creep inward, swallowing the light. I was vaguely aware of Grace screaming my name, but the sound was muffled, distant.

  Just before the darkness took me completely, I recognised the small, white moth that fluttered down and landed softly on my nose.

  Then, I knew no more.