David stayed close to the wreck, deciding distance could wait until certainty existed. Thirty survivors clustered near the torn fuselage, some sitting, some standing, all trapped in the same slow confusion. He counted them, including himself: nineteen men, eleven women, every age bracket represented, from a crying toddler to a man who looked old enough to have retired twice.

  Near the center, a small girl sat cross-legged beside a teenager who seemed to have claimed responsibility for her. The younger one clutched a pink backpack so tightly it looked like an extension of her torso. A Scottish Fold cat poked its head out from the bag, then jumped free, padding through the grass and weaving between legs before returning to her lap as if assessing the worth of humanity and finding it questionable. The teenager beside her tried to comfort her while hiding her own unease, eyes flicking between the forest and the tilted fuselage.

  A girl with green earbuds still hanging from her neck searched a suitcase for bandages; a man in a sweat-streaked suit argued about rescue frequencies with a cluster of businessmen. A pair of students rummaged through luggage, claiming they were looking for medical supplies, though David noticed they pocketed snack bars first. Two elderly women shared a bottle of water, whispering prayers over its cap before taking turns sipping. The pilot sat on a rock, pale and exhausted, trying to look authoritative while avoiding everyone’s eyes.

  David assessed the scene. Passengers in the front of a plane had the lowest survival rates in a crash. The rear was safer. He had checked before the flight and found all those seats already booked, so he had settled for what he called “close enough.” Now the front section of the plane rested half-buried ahead of them, and the rest of it had vanished. It looked as if something had gripped the aircraft midair and wrung it apart.

  By all logic, none of them should have survived. A fall from thirty thousand feet ended in fire and scattered metal. Even the pilot, who should have been pulp, was intact. David watched him wipe blood from his lip and thought, statistically speaking, they were all tofu that had somehow miraculously dodged the frying pan.

  David heard the outburst before he saw the man.

  “Look around! You call this Kansas?!” The voice rasped with disbelief and strain. An elderly man stood near the wreckage, shoes blackened, shirt half-buttoned and streaked with ash. His hands trembled as he pointed toward the warped horizon, where fire blurred the distance. His expression teetered between amazement and fury.

  “We’re wasting time! Nobody’s flying in to scoop us up,” he went on, his volume climbing. “Half the plane’s gone and we’re breathing fumes. We need height, a ridge, a clearing—anything that isn’t here.”

  He wiped his brow with a shaking hand, then jabbed a finger at a few dazed passengers. “You, the tall one—can you walk? Good. Grab whoever’s still moving. We’ll start that way before this place cooks us alive.”

  A few murmurs of half-hearted agreement passed through the group. Most stayed frozen, staring.

  David watched the man’s frantic leadership attempt unfold with mild detachment. The old man’s energy reminded him of people who took charge during fire drills and then fainted halfway down the stairs. He gave it another minute before tuning him out.

  He studied the clearing.

  Enormous redwoods rose above a lower forest of smaller, magenta trees with colorful foliage. The sky was a distant, broken thing seen between their highest branches. The bark of the redwoods was split by deep crevices. A soft heated light glowed from within those cracks, something simmered there. David postponed checking what, and decided whatever caused the trees' cracks to simmer would be some dumber, Darwin Award candidates problem.

  David looked at it. Then to the sky, and back again. The thought of Earth formed in his head. The thought immediately fell apart. Nothing in this place matched that word. He dropped the thought. What remained was the simple, solid reality in front of him. Around him, the others reacted the same way—confused but aware that disbelief was pointless. This was real, not a hallucination—they could see it too. It was a solid, breathing reality. He could see the same understanding settling into their expressions. The idea that they were somewhere else had already rooted itself in him.

  He exhaled and admitted it to himself: it appeared that Earth was irrelevant. It wasn’t a factor here.

  “Is this some kind of joke? Is it one of you guys? Are you in on this?” Someone said.

  Another replied, “No chance. We were thousands of feet up. You can’t land that fast.”

  David thought, Yeah, that adds up. Real or fake, this hurts enough to count.

  He studied the landscape for danger or any sign of civilization and saw none. The possibility of an elaborate assassination crossed his mind. Unknown technology, maybe. China had those supersonic missiles that could circle the planet in minutes, and no country could stop that. If that was true, then maybe someone here was the target. He looked back at the passengers. They were still “discussing,” arguing in circles about what had happened. He let his eyes move over each of them again. Nobody looked high profile, important, or wealthy enough to justify something so costly.

  He considered the missing sections of the plane. Maybe the target had been seated there. He left that option open, though the odds were thin. Outside of a few oblivious high-profile individuals who ignored basic safety, people valuable enough to justify assassination rarely sat in the back. The front cabins held the types whose lives invited plots and expenses of that scale.

  The primary and most convincing explanation was far worse. They were on another planet. The terrain supported that conclusion. The sky burned red, the trees carried glowing veins, their trunks faintly fiery within, and the ground radiated warmth through the vibrant alien grass. Above it all hung one massive sun that was too close, and looked like something straight out of a horror movie’s ‘ancient cursed book that kills everyone’.

  If David were superstitious, or even religious, he would have started praying.

  But he wasn’t, so instead, he scanned the horizon again.

  Nothing looked fake.

  The sky was red, but the rest of the world stayed normal in color. Just as on Earth, a blue sky didn’t mean everything looked blue; this red sky only belonged to the air above. Still, it stood out. It was bright, the color of fresh blood mixed with water. Or pink roses, occasionally streaked with blood red lining. The clouds were white and looked ordinary, except for a few black ones far away, heavy and strange.

  It was almost beautiful. Freaky, but beautiful, he thought.

  The heat made sense, he thought. The temperature felt close to tropical. There was a black sun visibly aflame with colored streaks, and it looked closer than a sun should be, almost too close. By all rights, that should have roasted everyone alive. Maybe it was a trick of distance or reflection, something similar to what he vaguely remembered hearing about in travel documentaries—how in certain places, in parts of Africa, the sun could appear enormous due to its angle and atmosphere. But if that were the case, it should have lasted only a short time. He decided to wait and see. If the large sun shrank back to normal size after a day, then they probably wouldn’t burn to death. Although, logically, that should have already happened. And there was still the issue of a somewhat evil-looking sun in the sky.

  David thought through the possibilities one by one, each more ridiculous than the last. Abduction? A hoax? A prank show? Was he asleep?—He tested the dream theory and discarded it; His memory flowed clean. Whatever this was, it had happened awake. So… did he have brain damage?

  He paused and mentally filed half of the theories under “technically possible but clinically insane,” along with a few of his other ideas.

  David reached a final possibility and almost laughed at how stupid it sounded. Maybe he was dead. Maybe the flash had been the plane tearing apart midair or exploding. Maybe this was whatever waited after. It even made a kind of sense. The landscape was wrong in too many ways to belong anywhere on Earth—the black sun that was somehow bright with yellow and red painted the skyline in streaks of similar colors. Everything felt unreasonably specific for something that should feel dreamlike.

  If that theory held, it was a lazy one that placed him in some stripped-down afterlife, free of clouds, harps, and basic customer service. Everything was too bright and no one had shown up to tell him anything useful. The idea carried weight only because he had nothing else. He found that insulting. If he had actually died, he would have expected something grander.

  Still, the thought clung to him because at a glance, it worked on paper. Plane crash, flash of light, end of consciousness, then this. Perfect sequence. Logical. Too logical. It irritated him how neatly it explained things.

  In the end, he dismissed it because it leaned too hard on perspective. The whole thing depended on definitions that no one could actually prove. Who decided that life on Earth counted as death, and this counted as living? For all anyone knew, the categories had always been mixed up. It was stupid. The sort of argument people threw around to sound profound after two drinks. Something everyone pretended made sense, like the Tenet movie. Unless someone split one of them open and found disco balls instead of organs, or unless they somehow discovered they could not die, he refused to give the idea credit.

  On any rational level—philosophical, biological, or simply not silly—he was alive. Which meant this was life, however absurd it looked. David threw out the afterlife theory entirely and felt slightly better for doing so.

  David looked between the two beside him—the girl he had spoken to before, both on the plane and after the crash, and a younger guy hovering nearby.

  David figured the girl was alright. But in all honesty, he didn't give a shit about anyone on the plane. At best, they were walking toolkits or meat shields. At worst, they were slightly slower than him. If he were to forgo all of society’s false civilities? David wasn't and wouldn’t be winning any humanitarian awards. He was working on his whole 'paranoid pessimist' vibe, but if a genie offered him a lifetime supply of canned peaches in exchange for using everyone in this flight as a blood sacrifice, he'd be asking if the genie preferred check or cash.

  But that was only if they were useless. People usually had some function—everyone did. There could be hunters, or scavengers, or someone who knew first aid. Hell, he'd take a guy who knew how to make prison wine.

  David had a solid bastard streak, but he wasn't a mustache-twirling ‘bad guy’. He was just a survivalist with a very specific understanding of math. In a real emergency, ethics were a luxury item, like an in-flight magazine. You read it when you're bored, but you don't pack it in your life raft.

  His psychiatrist had told him to practice trust. He decided to start by using them for information, and asked, “Did anyone actually see how we got here?”

  The girl frowned, eyes still unfocused. “I was looking out the window. We were still in the air, flying fine. Then it all twisted. Like the sky folded in on itself. Then we hit the ground.”

  The younger guy shook his head. “I saw something else. Everything stuttered. Like a glitch. Then everything outside just… changed.”

  Someone behind them spoke up. “I swear I saw a portal. A hole in the air. We went through it and bam, new world.”

  Another voice added, “Everything blurred. Then we were just here. Instant teleport.”

  David listened, eyes darting from one speaker to the next. “So what, the whole plane jumped and buried itself? Like part of it got pulled through something and landed in the dirt?”

  Nobody answered. The idea hung there. It made more sense to him than portals or divine transport. Whatever had happened, it felt mechanical, forced, like a system failure on a scale too big to comprehend.

  David turned toward the man behind them. The stranger brushed dust from his sleeve, his movement tidy despite the dirt. Early thirties, tanned, wearing a dark suit that had survived in better shape than most people. His composure looked deliberate, as if boardrooms had trained it into him.

  “I’m Harris,” he said. “Seat 3C. The captain said turbulence, then everything flipped. I saw something ahead of the wing. Round. Bright. We went straight through it.”

  The woman beside David—the same one he had spoken to on the plane and again after the crash—shifted her weight, still holding one arm close to her ribs. Mid-twenties, sharp-featured, hair tied back with a broken band. She spoke flatly. “You think that hole is what dragged us here?”

  Harris gave a small nod. “That’s what it looked like.”

  The younger man, maybe nineteen, gripped his torn backpack strap. “Theo,” he said quickly, noticing David’s look. “I didn’t see a hole. Everything blurred. It was like the world switched channels.”

  David turned between them. “That matches what everyone’s been saying. The sky twisted. Reality warped. Then we were here. All minor details aside.”

  Theo frowned. “Minor details? The sky folded in on itself.”

  “Memory does strange things under pressure,” David said. “People remember what fits. The rest gets patched over.”

  The woman’s tone hardened. “You’re saying we imagined it?”

  “I’m saying you didn’t,” David said. “But the version in your head’s already different from what happened, I’m David, by the way.”

  She gave a short nod. “Mara.”

  Harris adjusted a cufflink still faintly polished.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  No one spoke for a moment. Metal wires and plastic ropes shifted in the dirt behind them. Harris looked back toward the wreck. Mara crossed her arms. Theo just stared at the horizon.

  David had already dismissed the death theory. At the very least, this ruled out reincarnation—thank god. If he’d come back as anything, he would have preferred a trust fund baby or something equally overpowered.

  From what the others said, the ones who had been looking outside all described the same sequence of events: reality warped, and they ended up somewhere else almost instantly. The details varied, but only slightly. Some mentioned seeing the sky twist, others claimed everything blurred, and one insisted on a portal.

  People often tried pinching themselves to test if they were dreaming. David found the idea absurd. David never had lucid dreams. Ever. Not once in his life. He had heard of them, however. He didn’t know why, but his dreams could only copy pain, sound, even memory, but never awareness—at least not for long. That wasn’t to say he never realized he was dreaming, but the moment he did the dream would end. Realization itself usually forced a him awake. That was what had always worked for him.

  He focused on the thought and waited to wake. Nothing shifted. He tried again, repeating the wish with irritation building under his breath. Still nothing.

  He noticed that unconsciously, his fists were trembling. Theo noticed and asked if he was alright.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t even notice. Guess I’m still high on adrenaline.” But he thought, What’s it to you if I’m fine?

  He finally noticed the pain of his balled-up tension and overexertion—he had used way too much strength doing that. It felt real and undeniable.

  David had no real answer for any of it—not the crash, not their survival, the trees, or even the freaky sun in the sky. He had never been an astrophysicist or anything close. His grasp of that sort of thing stayed at the level of general trivia taught in school and forgotten soon after. He let out a short sigh, more from habit than frustration. Then a voice cut through the heat. Someone called out, asking a kid if he was alright, but the words broke off halfway, swallowed by a stammer that came from pure disbelief.

  David’s gaze was drawn to a flash of wrongness at the edge of the clearing, a stillness that didn’t belong among the trees. There was a shape there, hunched and waiting.

  For a second, he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him. His mind stalled.

  Between two smaller trees crouched two tall, wiry figures. Their skin had a greyish white tone, thick and leathery, stretched over corded muscle that shifted when both moved. Even hunched, their head came close to the height of the standing humans. Their arms and legs looked too long for their bodies, bent in a way that made them seem ready to spring in any direction. The hands and feet of both ended in claws that dug into the dirt.

  David didn’t openly stare or even alert anyone. He simply let his weight settle onto his back foot, then began a slow, deliberate, almost casual retreat toward the torn metal skin of the fuselage, each step measured and quiet, placing solid wreckage between himself and the thing in the shadows. The moment everyone else noticed, it would be a mad scramble, and David wanted no part of that, or the thing that caused it.

  The first’s face had a narrow jaw with small, jagged fangs. One ear was missing, the other torn, and a dark scar crossed what might once have been a nose. The eyes glowed a dull red, fixed on the clearing. A thin, spaded tail moved behind it, the tip twitching with small, restless motions.

  Above its head, faint text appeared in the air:

  [Imp – Level 1]

  [Imp – Level 2]

  The second was nearly identical.

  David stared. “What?”

  David questioned his sanity at first. The thought hit fast and without drama. The thing crouched ahead looked too absurd to exist outside a fever dream, and yet everyone around him had corroborated and confirmed they were no longer on earth. That previous collective panic ruined the comforting theory that this was another psychotic blip.

  He ran a quiet checklist in his head. No hallucinations in years. Meds taken daily. Maybe a little too much paranoia sometimes—fine, a lot—but the medication kept things smooth, if flat, if somewhat unbearable. That stunted calmness he usually despised now served as an unexpected anchor. While others scattered, unaware, his brain stayed cool enough to think.

  Imp? As in demons? And levels? David blinked at the words floating above both creatures, a bad label and an even worse omen—and felt that he had reached his limit for the day’s nonsense.

  Yeah, no. I’m done. Thanks, and also—sincerely—fuck that.

  He stopped shambling, he was close enough already. He turned on instinct, sprinting toward the ropes and makeshift rigging they had set up. By the time the first creature shifted its weight, he was already halfway up. Within seconds, he threw himself through the opening of the plane and spun to peer at those who remained before the imps had even decided who to attack first.

  It figured that the same pills that drained his emotions might end up saving his life.

  David barely processed the first scream before another voice cracked behind him, high and raw, cutting through the humid air. He looked back. Several people were pointing toward the trees, their hands shaking hard enough to blur the direction.

  When they exhaled, the sound was coarse and rasping, like air forced through gravel.

  One imp shifted forward and released a low, drawn-out howl that built into a pitched laugh so wrong it felt mechanical. The other joined it a second later, their voices layering into a discordant shriek. The ground quivered under the rumbling sound. Small stones rolled and dust trembled. The vibration crawled up through David’s boots and into his ribs, setting off every survival impulse he had left.

  Yeah, that was definitely the cue. He couldn’t have left sooner.

  Chaos followed immediately. Everyone was screaming, pointing, and backing away. People scrambled for the ropes, shouting over one another. The narrow opening turned into a funnel of panic as too many bodies fought to squeeze through at once. David backed up as a few slipped and hit the floor, scrambling back up in blind desperation. Others shoved past them, including one man who threw a child aside just to reach the plane's interior first. Civilization was holding on by a thread, and that thread had frayed fast.

  In no time at all, the remaining passengers were inside the plane.

  The level two imp crept forward, its grey-white skin stretched tight over a lean frame, ribs visible beneath it. Its limbs were too long for its body, ending in hands that flexed and clicked with claws that could strip bark—or skin, scraping the ground as it moved. The creature sniffed the air in sharp bursts, nostrils flaring as its head twitched side to side, eyes darting as it searched for movement, its gaze sweeping the clearing with suspicion, like a starving predator would when unsure if it was alone. Its tail, thick at the base and tapering into a black, bladed point that could probably skewer a man. A rasping sound came from its throat, somewhere between a chuckle and a growl.

  A second imp, smaller and marked as level one, moved just behind it. Its movements were twitchier, its attention darting to every snapped twig and rustle. It mimicked the larger one’s sniffing, but its sounds were higher, more frantic.

  The level two imp paused, sniffed again, and tilted its head, teeth parting in a grin that seemed learned rather than felt.

  An elderly woman sobbed somewhere near the back. Someone else muttered a prayer that broke halfway through. David wondered how so many people could watch a creature that looked built to dismantle them and still stand close enough to count its teeth, before another voice whispered, trembling, “They’re still coming. They’re still fucking coming.”

  While the others gawked, David scanned the wreck for anything he could use. There was nothing obvious—no tools or heavy objects—he admitted to himself he wanted a long-range military explosive more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Then he saw a fractured overhead bin from the crash. Adrenaline pushed through the numbness the meds left behind, and he tore a panel free, wrenching two long lengths of metal from the wreckage, holding two long metal poles, one in each hand, the one in his right ending in a raw, sharp spike. He tested the weight with one quick move and kept his grip.

  David’s weapons drew attention. A few passengers decided that if he could arm himself, they could too. The problem was that the compartment he had ripped open had been the only one already damaged enough to access and snap the metal. The others, unwilling to sit useless, scavenged what they could. A handful of them managed to pry off seat dividers, trays, and other detachable parts, clutching them as if the gesture alone might count for courage. David stood apart, the only one holding actual poles while the rest lingered above, watching the creature below and convincing themselves that height equaled safety.

  David edged backwards into the plane proper, never letting the imps out of sight as he shuffled across the tilted floor. He stopped only once he had a respectable barricade of passengers between himself and the twisted things. It gave him a thin sense of security, one built on the hope that someone else would get eaten first. Everyone had already crammed inside, though most leaned toward the jagged breach in the fuselage, peering down at the creature as if personal curiosity would somehow rewrite the laws of survival. David considered that, in a way, it might.

  He caught fragments of speech through the noise.

  “What the hell is that…”

  “…its eyes are moving, it’s looking right at us…”

  “…level one, what the f—?…”

  David saw both imp’s pacing turn from aimless sniffing to something patterned and hungry. The pair of inhuman creatures' excitement grew as they closed in, every step measured in cruel satisfaction. The first had chosen its entertainment. The second followed. They were performing a hunting ritual. Something that existed for predators; if only to stretch out the suffering.

  The glowing text above the second’s head read:

  Imp, Lvl 1

  And the first was no different.

  David scanned the others. None carried that strange mark. Panic muffled reason in their faces. Screams and crashing metal filled the air, but David strained to focus on one idea clawing at him.

  “Appraise,” he whispered. Nothing responded.

  Nothing again.

  “System menu, character window. Level.” Still nothing.

  “Profile.” The same.

  He tried more. “Inspect.”

  Silence.

  “Ability sheet.”

  A woman’s grip clamped around his arm. “Now’s the time to pray,” she said.

  “I wasn’t—” He stopped. Too many eyes on him. They had heard. His muttering made him look deranged.

  He scanned the wreck again. The passengers scavenged their surroundings for makeshift weapons. A broken wine bottle from first class. A torn armrest. A dented carry-on. A plastic pipe was cracked out of a shattered panel. None of them looked ready to use what they held.

  A gasp from near the exit pulled his gaze forward. The larger imp had come within three meters, crouched and sniffing. Its breath rattled, thick with anticipation.

  David turned his attention back inward. “Skill overview,” he said. Nothing appeared.

  “Skill window,”

  “Skills”

  “Level Window.”

  “Status window.”

  No response.

  He lowered his voice. “Perfect,” he muttered. “Now we die with no tutorial.”

  The passengers surged away, tripping and clutching anything that looked remotely defensive—a bottle neck, a snapped luggage handle, a bent strip of metal. Their attempts to appear ready only made their fear louder.

  David stood half-crouched near the middle rows, watching the chaos unfold. He spoke quietly, the word meant for himself. “Status.”

  A faint chime sounded. A blue translucent screen blinked into existence an arm’s length from his face, floating in the stale air as if it had always been there, waiting for the command.

  [Name: David Carter

  Level 0

  Demonic Realm: Floor 1/???

  Difficulty: Impossible

  Time left until forced ejection: 4y 364d 23h 29m 32s.

  Primary Class: Locked

  Sub-class: Locked

  Strength: 9

  Dexterity: 7

  Constitution: 5

  Mana: 2

  Skills: Battle Sense Lvl 1, Calm Mind Lvl 1, Energy Affinity Lvl 1,

  Free points: ]

  David wasn't a gamer, but the basics were self-explanatory. You only had to play a few games, spend time with some kids, or pick up a Nintendo Switch to get it. He wasn't a pensioner. He could extrapolate.

  The stats made sense. Strength was how much force he could put behind something. Dexterity was coordination, reaction. Constitution was his body's overall resilience—a five explained why he felt brittle. Mana was for magic, which he clearly didn't have. The skills… he focused on Battle Sense. He felt no different. He tried to feel Calm Mind. His thoughts remained the same. Energy Affinity did nothing he could detect. The figures and labels on the hovering panel seemed linked to his recent behavior, or perhaps to his medication, though in practical terms the whole thing provided nothing of use. They were just words on a screen. The whole panel was an observation. Just data.

  That was all.

  The display vanished on its own accord, or perhaps it sensed his disinterest. A voice broke through the noise. “Shit, they keep coming! The big one’s getting closer!”

  The imps had closed in to within ten meters of the half-buried plane, closer than anyone wanted them to be. Up close, their frames looked stretched thin, built on lines that suggested speed over mass. Their long jaws worked as they sniffed at the air, a low rumble escaping between rows of uneven teeth. They let out pitched, irregular sounds somewhere between a hiss and a wet rasp, their breath steaming through uneven fangs. Each step left a furrow where their claws dragged through the dirt. Their tails swung behind them, the tips gouging long, shallow trenches in the soil with each sway.

  The things dropped their stances lower, muscles tensing as if gauging whether to lunge or bolt. Their blunt noses dipped to the ground, snuffling at the soil. They took slow, dragging steps forward, their heads swinging left, then right. They moved toward spots where people had been standing minutes before, sniffed intently, then swerved on their long legs to track different scents, angling toward other parts of the wreckage. They continued this slow, sniffing advance, weaving paths left and right as they drew closer, heading toward different points where survivors were clustered. Guttural sounds rose and broke from their throats without rhythm.

  David caught himself tracking their paths, estimating their potential moves without meaning to. Part of him admired how alive they looked for things that by all rights should not have existed while the rest of him wondered why he was close enough to see literal monsters at all. The absurdity of it struck him: counting the remaining survivors, calculating angles and distance from the torn opening in the fuselage, as if that might translate into survival. He wondered if anyone else noticed that the monsters seemed to be thinking through their next moves too.

  Voices broke through the tense hush, uneven and shaky.

  “Someone has to do something. Throw something. Scare it away. We need to throw something! Anything! Throw… someone,” a man said. It was the loud passenger from before—the one who had spent the entire flight talking as if volume equaled importance. His words wobbled but carried through the cabin anyway. His skin had gone the color of paper.

  “Are you insane?”

  A few passengers turned toward him, their faces twisted between disbelief and disgust. Someone spat, “If you’re gonna say something so stupid, try shutting the hell up, idiot” under their breath, and another muttered a curse that vanished into the noise. No one made a move toward him. No one wanted to risk giving the creatures a reason to look up.

  David watched him out of the corner of his eye. Panic had done something new to the man’s arrogance—rather than erasing it, it had only stripped the confidence off the top and left the raw stupidity behind.

  He thought briefly about how the things hadn’t looked straight at them yet. Maybe they couldn’t see that well. Unlikely. If they had spotted them at the tree line, they could see them now. It was more probable that they hunted by scent. In that case, they were finished. No one in this plane smelled clean enough to hide.

  Assumptions killed. Observation kept you breathing. That was the rule.

  A woman near the window whispered, “Please, please just make it go away.”

  Another voice cracked, “Back up. Move from the hole.”

  Someone else rasped, “Why isn’t it leaving?”

  And then the first man again, quieter this time but still audible: “Look at them! There’s no way we all survive this.”

  No one answered him. Everyone watched with frozen breath.

  A second later, glass shattered as an imp forced its way through the opening. It lunged upward, wedging its head and shoulders through the gap.

  The sound of screams tore through the cabin as people suddenly stumbled over seats and over each other. At the shattered end of the fuselage, a hand the size of a man’s head gripped and grasped at the torn edge, claws cutting faint lines in the metal's surface. Another followed, then the imp's large head appeared in full clarity, peeking over the edge.

  The creature grabbed one woman’s leg, a younger woman. She reacted as if the devil himself had her. She shook so violently, kicking with such force, David thought she might convulse herself right out of the plane.

  An errant kick connected hard enough to make the creature shift its grip, releasing her for a moment.

  The creature's limbs moved in a jerky, uncoordinated way as it swiped its claws toward a second woman who had foolishly stayed too close.

  Unlike her companion, her reaction resembled that of someone in shock rather than combat. Instead of striking, she raised her weapon defensively. The imp’s swipe broke it apart, leaving her with splintered fragments and a rising sense of terror. Her retreat was unplanned and messy—she fell, screamed, and scrambled backwards on her hands just as the claws grazed past her, missing her leg by inches. The long-limbed creature reached in further to drag her out, but she kicked wildly, her heel connecting with its wrist. The grip loosened. She scrambled back, tumbling over a piece of wreckage and into the deeper shadows of the fuselage, barely escaping.

  The imp at the opening let out a frustrated rasp. The second imp, seeing the opening, clambered over the first, its claws digging into the torn metal edge as it pulled itself up and into the plane.

  It stood, inside the fuselage, before a group of frightened passengers.

  While the long-limbed, larger, higher-level creature reached in further to drag anyone it could reach, out.

  Or drag itself in.