When he finally turned around, a few people were climbing out of the plane, sliding down ropes and cables to help the others. About half the passengers in total, most of them showing impressive survival instincts, stayed inside. The two air marshals, both armed and allegedly brave, made the wise decision to remain seated.

  After a few minutes of frantic hauling and shouting, they managed to drag him back inside. He staggered down the aisle through a wall of faces—relief, pride, fear, confusion, and the deep disapproval usually reserved for someone who microwaved fish in an office kitchen.

  The few flight crew members among them started shouting over one another about procedures, safety, and insurance liability. Theo, the kid with the torn backpack, grinned and said he was “kinda cool,” which likely meant “I’ll tell everyone about this and forget your name.” Mara, the woman who’d sat near him, murmured something reassuring that he couldn’t quite hear over the noise. Harris, the businessman from the portal debate, slapped his back and announced that he had “balls the size of meteors,” while another man declared he was the dumbest bastard he’d ever seen. Both statements felt accurate.

  He nodded. He agreed with everyone. He tried to smile, but his face didn’t cooperate. So he kept nodding instead, which seemed to satisfy them. Nobody rushed to talk to the bloodied guy who chased a demonic imp the size of a compact car armed with two metal sticks and poor judgment. He failed to see their point.

  One of the marshals stood a few feet away, gun hanging low, face unreadable. “You got a death wish or something? Charging that thing barehanded with sticks?”

  He blinked at him. “No. I’m not suicidal. Kind of a rude question though.”

  He nodded once, eyes scanning him like he was still half-expecting the imp to crawl back. “Fair. Just trying to understand what kind of person decides that’s a good idea.”

  “Desperate one,” said the second marshal, the older of the two. “Though credit where it’s due. You distracted it long enough for us to get a clean shot.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was the plan. Sort of.”

  The older woman he’d pulled away from the thing sat on a nearby seat, foil blanket crinkling around her shoulders. “You saved my life,” she said quietly. “I owe you more than I can say.”

  He tried to smile. “Yes, it hurt a lot.”

  She gave a short, shaky laugh. “You’ll live. That’s what matters. Thank you.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I just thought I had to. Guess instinct’s a bad strategist.”

  Soon, a crowd surrounded him, which, after fighting for his life, felt like being placed in a new kind of hell dimension. At some point he dissociated and answered on instinct.

  A guy in a rumpled hoodie leaned over from a nearby seat, phone half-raised like he couldn’t decide whether to record or just stare. “Man, that was wild. You looked like you were in a movie. Straight-up hero stuff.”

  “Yeah,” he said, voice flat. “My new hobby.”

  He grinned. “So… are you like, trained or something?”

  “Sort of,” he said. In poor decision-making.

  A young guy a few seats down turned around, his torn backpack slung over one shoulder. “That was insane. You just went at it. I thought you were dead for sure.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

  He grinned. “Still, that was metal. Everyone saw it. You’re kinda a legend already.”

  “Great,” he said. “Every apocalypse needs one of those.”

  They laughed. He kept nodding, saying the things that made them relax. Acting harmless seemed wise. He figured they weren’t getting back to Earth anytime soon, so it wouldn’t hurt to make allies—preferably the useful kind.

  The second marshal, calmer but with the same you’ve-made-my-day-harder expression, muttered, “We’ll need your statement later. Preferably when you’re not covered in blood.”

  “Sure,” David responded. “I’ll pencil it in after my mental breakdown.”

  After a few minutes of questioning, David began to feel cornered by the crowd pressing in around him. The constant noise wore him down faster than fighting a demonic imp from an ominous-sunned planet full of things that hated the concept of oxygen-sharing.

  He wasn’t good at this part—the talking, the thanking, the “what just happened” panic circle. Still, he made an effort to look social enough to avoid suspicion. He answered a few questions, offered some vague advice, and tried to smile in a way that didn’t suggest existential exhaustion.

  Then he mentioned the word “status.”

  That did it. The talking stopped. Thirty people turned into statues, staring a few centimeters in front of their faces like they’d all been unplugged from reality.

  He watched them, slumped against a seat, and thought, finally. For once, the apocalypse had gifted him some peace and quiet.

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  Harris, the businessman, was the first to break the silence. He still had streaks of dust on his sleeves and a wild look in his eyes, the one a man gets when the universe stops pretending to make sense.

  "What the hell was that?" Harris said, staring at the greasy smear on the floor that used to be an imp.

  David glanced up from where he sat slumped against a seat frame. "You'll have to be more specific. We're spoiled for options."

  "I mean the thing that just tried to eat my face," Harris snapped, his composure frayed. "The one you just turned into abstract art. Where did it even come from?"

  "Yeah," David said. "That's the question, isn't it."

  "I was just trying to get some air, and then that... that thing drops outta nowhere. It wasn't on the plane. We wasn't anywhere near a forest. Nothing here was on, or even close to the plane." Harris ran a hand through his hair, his boardroom calm utterly gone. "This isn't some remote island. The sky is wrong. The trees are wrong. This is... something else."

  David didn't answer. He stared past the cracked windows at the red sky, the dark fiery sun glaring down on a world that had no business existing. Trees the size of skyscrapers pulsed with a faint, fiery light. The sight should have broken him by now. It hadn't.

  Harris followed his gaze. "You think someone... moved us? Dropped us here? For what? Some kind of game?"

  "Maybe," David said.

  He went silent after that. The thought pressed at the back of his mind, slow and heavy. If they were brought here, then someone or something was responsible. Could it be one of the passengers? He looked at Harris's panicked face. Wouldn't that be something. He kept his face still, his voice steady. There was nothing to gain by saying more.

  Harris excused himself to "check on the others," which probably meant trying to feel useful. David didn't stop him. He just nodded, muttered something that passed for agreement, and waited until Harris was gone.

  Then he slipped down the aisle toward the front of the cabin. The metal was warm under his palms, heat rising through the hull from the alien soil below. Through the cracked windshield, all he could see was dirt, heated, with glowing flecks like embers.

  He stopped by the cockpit and slid down against a panel. Nobody followed. The others were busy arguing about priorities and moral superiority. A survival situation on an alien hellscape, and people still needed democracy and were complaining about caffeine withdrawal. Even on another world, the hardest species to work with remains human.

  A few minutes later, he felt steadier without their noise. He lifted his T-shirt, dried blood sticking slightly to a scratch across his back from the imp's claws. It wasn't bleeding anymore. Less bad than it had looked in the fight. He pressed the shirt back against it. Could have been worse.

  He could probably find a first aid kit somewhere in the cabin, but something else mattered more.

  The part that bothered him wasn't the scratch. It was the sheer, impossible fact of where they were. This wasn't a crash landing in the Andes. This was a relocation. A kidnapping on a cosmic scale. This place, whatever it was, had rewritten everything. The rules of reality were different. The sky was different.

  He looked over the rows of passengers and marshals still trying to act functional. Someone, or something, had put them here. The "why" was a luxury. The "who" was a threat.

  One of them? Unacceptable.

  With a steadier mind, he tried to piece it together. He rewound the fight from the beginning. The plan had been basic let the imp get distracted, then step in and stab it. Efficient, low effort. Heroism had nothing to do with it. But the sheer, alien wrongness of it all—the way it appeared, the way this world felt—it lit a different kind of fire. Focus tightened until movement felt pre-programmed. For a second, he'd almost admired the brutal simplicity of it. Survive. Then he remembered he shouldn't be here.

  How did they all get here? What placed them here… Who placed them here?.

  He guessed it could be some "skill," if that word meant anything here. Not Energy Affinity—that had come later. Battle Sense, probably. It sounded neat enough for a death planet to hand out. More testing required, though preferably without blood loss.

  The uglier theory stayed at the edges. What if the thing that brought them here was watching? Maybe this was all a test. Or a lab experiment. Either way, someone was responsible.

  He stared into nothing and smirked. "Perfect. Can't even trust the ground under my feet anymore."

  But hey, it wasn't all bad. That one fight had done more for his situational awareness than a lifetime of city living.

  It had made him sharp as hell.

  There was a chance the imp was just local wildlife, but judging by how it appeared, subtlety clearly was not the M.O. of whatever was in charge here. If it could pluck a plane from one reality and dump it in another, it wasn't messing around. That narrowed it down to a few very terrifying possibilities.

  He sighed and looked up. The sky looked about as helpful as everything else. He needed more. More information. More testing. More time. Before something else dropped out of the ceiling.

  He had fought hard for something that resembled a normal life. The idea of some external force treating his existence as a plaything filled him with an anger that promised collateral damage. His life was his. End of story.

  For now he decided to watch everything. Without the Calm Mind skill, he might already have been spiraling, hallucinating, or giving motivational speeches to corpses. One mistake could kill him, so overanalyzing everything qualified as survival.

  David was going to deal with this in the most efficient way possible.

  A psychiatrist would've called it paranoia, said he leaned too far into extremes. Thanks to the imp and the impossible dimension, they would have been wrong, but that had never stopped David before.

  He planned to find out what caused this. If it was useful, fine. If not, it would serve as stress relief, and he would kill it.

  "Good plan," he muttered.

  Time passed—not long, just enough for people to stop trembling—David climbed back through the torn fuselage. The air cooled, smelled of metal and nerves.

  Theo hurried up to him, eyes bright with youthful excitement, words tumbling before he stopped moving, eyeing the scabbing wound on David’s back. “Man, that’s a lot of blood,” he said, half impressed, half worried.

  “It’s fine,” David said. “Dry blood. Just a scratch. I’ll patch it up in a minute.”

  Theo grinned then, energized by proximity to survival. “Still, that was insane out there. You actually killed it.”

  David nodded once. He brushed past, his thoughts turning to the fight.

  Battle Sense had turned him into a sort of combat expert, which sounded impressive until he realized the skill didn’t care if his body could keep up. His movements sharpened, his brain cut a few corners, and his muscles filed complaints through pain. He could even copy techniques after seeing them once, maybe, though the attempt left him with bruises deep enough to count as lessons. The wording of Energy Affinity still bothered him. It said “energy,” not “mana.” That meant the world ran on more than one kind of power, which was interesting in a mildly horrors-from-the-abyss way. What he’d taken from the imp might not be mana at all. He had stolen something important and hoped it wasn’t contagious.

  “Status.”

  David sat and opened his status window, and let the numbers do their small, indifferent celebration.