Active deployment was no excuse to skip the gym.

  Sweat cut trails through the chalk dust on Master Sergeant Logan “Ace” Blackwell’s forearms as he lowered the barbell with his final rep. He let out a low sigh of relief once he finished, and he closed his eyes as his muscles screamed at him.

  The makeshift workout area reeked of watered-down disinfectant and rubber, undercut by notes of gun oil and the ever-present coppery tang of desert sand. Their M27 rifles lined the wall, ready to grab in case shit went down. Nearby, Martinez counted reps in a low growl that barely carried over the creak of their jerry-rigged pull-up bar—a tent pole that threatened to snap under each rep, wedged between barriers like an improvised gallows.

  Through the open door, the afternoon sun hammered down through air thick enough to chew, heat ripples distorting the horizon into a shimmering mirage. Ace's shirt clung to his back like a second skin, already soaked through despite the dry breeze that tasted of diesel and burnt metal.

  But a Marine didn’t complain. People like them didn't survive three deployments by bitching about minor annoyances.

  “Look at Sleeping Beauty over there,” Walker said, loud enough for Ace to hear. “Sarge, want to let anyone else use that bench today, or do you need a nap?”

  In answer, Ace cracked one eye open and smirked. “Maybe if you spent less time running your mouth and more time working out, you wouldn't still be lifting like a boot.”

  Martinez snorted from the pull-up bar, his biceps trembling as he ground out another rep. “Damn, Walker. Need me to report Sarge for bullying?”

  Laughter rolled through the squad of Marines in the makeshift workout area. A barbell hit the rubber mat as Castillo finished his set of deadlifts. Andrews and Fischer took turns with the mega tire, while Beck, Grant, and Callahan lounged by the exit with towels thrown around their necks.

  A collection of loveable idiots any sergeant would be lucky enough to command—though Ace would never admit that out loud.

  Their egos were massive enough as it was.

  “Walker, tell me this isn’t about that damn photo,” Castillo said with a shake of his bald head. The man was built like a tank that had eaten another tank, and his biceps strained the sleeves of his off-white shirt. “Your girl back home hearted Sarge’s picture, what, three months ago? And you’re still afraid he’s going to sweep her off her feet.”

  “Hit the gym more,” Andrews shouted from the other end of the room. “Maybe you can do that yourself for once.”

  Another round of laughter bounced off the steel walls, and Ace wiped the sweat off his brow as he sat upright.

  “She only did that once,” Walker said as he grabbed a dumbbell from off the floor.

  “Nah, man, don’t lie.” Fischer dropped the loaded weight bar he’d been lifting and brushed the grip dust off his hands. “I heard you two on your last call with her.”

  “Don’t—”

  “‘How’s Sarge, honey?’” Fischer interrupted, his voice as high-pitched as he could make it. “‘Did you get those workout tips I asked for?’”

  The squad erupted in laughter, and after flipping Fischer the bird, even Walker joined in.

  In the midst of open warfare and the chaos of a battle zone, these moments felt significant. Important, somehow, or even sacred. They were fragments of the life they would’ve been leading back home—and reminders of the lives they’d flown all this way to protect.

  Out here, gallows humor and iron therapy were sometimes the only things keeping them sane.

  Walker sighed in defeat. “In all seriousness, she does want—”

  The crack of gunfire cut through the air like a whip, so distant that Ace almost missed the sound entirely.

  Ace's body moved before his mind registered the threat, his muscle memory overriding conscious thought. The gunshot echoed in his thoughts, a death knell splitting their slice of normalcy.

  His M27 was in his hands before his next heartbeat. Pure reflex—each motion drilled into muscle memory through countless hours of training, repetition carved so deep it had become instinct.

  More shots crackled through the air. Closer now. The sound carried snippets of screams beneath the gunfire.

  “Contact!” Ace barked, his voice carrying the weight of command.

  The crack of gunfire grew louder. The familiar burn of the workout still coursed through Ace's muscle, mixing with a sudden surge of adrenaline until his entire body hummed like a live wire. The gym's industrial fans whirred overhead, their rhythmic beating now a countdown to whatever horror awaited beyond those walls.

  The gym's easy atmosphere didn't just evaporate—it transformed. Like a switch being flipped, the space morphed from a haven of controlled aggression into a tactical staging ground. The scattered machines and weight plates became potential cover. The shadows cast by the setting sun through open doors turned into threat indicators, each one harboring potential danger.

  His squad moved with the synchronicity that came from years of shared danger. No wasted motion. No hesitation.

  Walker automatically took the left, his broad shoulders tight with coiled energy as he swept his sector. Fischer, for once without a smirk, took the right while maintaining perfect spacing. The rest of the squad filled the gaps, creating overlapping fields of fire that would make their combat instructors proud.

  Sweat still glistened on their skin from the workout, but this was different now. This was combat sweat—cold and sharp, carrying the metallic tang of determination. Desert heat bled through the walls, boiling the tension in the room and forever marking this moment in Ace's memory.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, their harsh glare catching the carbon-black finish of their weapons. Each man's breathing had shifted unconsciously into the controlled rhythm of combat —four count in, four count hold, four count out. The same pattern they'd used in a hundred firefights before.

  But something was different this time. The air felt wrong—heavier, like the moment before a storm breaks. Except this was Afghanistan, and storms here didn't feel like this. This felt... ancient. Vicious. Like something from the depths of primal memory had suddenly awoken and was now stalking toward them.

  Their boots made no sound on the rubberized flooring as they headed toward the door in perfect formation, years of experience culminating in perfect discipline. Each step was measured, each position calculated for maximum coverage with minimum exposure. They were no longer just Marines—they were a single organism, bound together by training, trust, and the shared certainty that whatever waited outside was going to change everything.

  The roar of fighter jets whizzed past overhead. Two choppers cut to life, and the shouts of men giving orders filled the air beyond the gym as Ace paused by the open doors. He scanned the immediate area, but there was nothing.

  Not a fucking thing.

  No one running. No one rallying off-duty soldiers. Not even a damn announcement to explain what the hell was going on.

  Great.

  The screams outside grew louder. Desperate. Not the controlled chaos of a firefight—this was raw terror, the kind that lived in humanity's darkest nightmares.

  “Something's wrong,” Walker muttered, his grip tightening on his weapon. “That's not insurgent fire.”

  Nope.

  Sure wasn’t.

  The pattern was off. Sporadic. Panicked.

  This wasn't an attack—it was a massacre.

  A new sound cut through the cacophony. Something inhuman. A howl that didn't belong in this world, let alone a forward operating base in the ass-end of nowhere.

  “The fuck was that?” Fischer whispered, his usual bravado replaced by something darker.

  Ace's finger settled against his trigger, his discipline warring with a deeper instinct—one that screamed at him to run. To hide. To do anything but face whatever was making that sound.

  But running wasn't what Marines did.

  “On me,” he ordered, voice steady despite the primal dread clawing at his spine. “Weapons hot. Whatever's out there, we put it down.”

  As a team, they stalked out of the gym and into the merciless desert sun. The base sprawled before them—a maze of concrete barriers, connexes, and makeshift structures that had become home over the past year. The compound's familiar layout had been carved into Ace’s muscle memory after countless patrols: the way sound echoed off the motor pool's corrugated walls; the subtle grade changes that could twist an ankle if someone wasn’t paying attention; the blind spots behind the fuel depot that had to be cleared systematically.

  But now…

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  …now it felt like someone had taken their tactical playground and twisted it into something from a fever dream.

  The Afghan sun hammered down with its usual brutality, but the shadows it cast were wrong. They pooled too deeply in corners and moved against the light like oil on water. The familiar stench of diesel, dust, and spent brass still hung in the air, but underneath them lurked something else—like the air before a lightning strike.

  Even the concrete barriers seemed different. The surfaces that had baked in the sun for years, accumulating layers of dust and grime, now appeared almost organic. The shadows crawling across them left traces like frost on a window, patterns that hurt Ace’s eyes if he looked at them too long. The usual sounds of the base—generators humming, vehicle doors slamming, radio chatter—had been replaced by an oppressive silence broken only by those distant, impossible screams.

  “I don’t like this,” Martinez said under his breath.

  “Focus,” Ace ordered, his eyes scanning every possible hiding place as his mind raced to figure out what the hell was going on.

  Their boots crunched on gravel that seemed to shift unnaturally beneath their feet. The air itself felt thick, resistant, like trying to walk through sludge. Each breath carried a metallic taste that coated the tongue and left an aftertaste of static electricity.

  This wasn't their FOB anymore. This was something else wearing their base’s skin and doing a poor job of hiding the monster underneath.

  The only familiar things in Ace’s life, right now, were the weight of his rifle and the presence of his squad. But even that couldn't completely banish the whisper of warning that crept down his spine, warning him that whatever was happening here was about to fundamentally change everything they thought they knew about the world.

  “Movement, ten o'clock!” Walker shouted.

  The entire squad pivoted in unison, weapons snapping to their shoulders with practiced precision.

  But there was nothing. Just empty space between the motorpool and the comm center. Heat waves distorted the air like a mirage.

  “Damn it, Walker,” Fischer said under his breath. “Scared the shit out of me.”

  “I saw something,” Walker insisted, his glare never faltering from the stretch of road at the end of his rifle.

  “Snap to,” Ace ordered.

  In an instant, everyone fell back in line.

  More screams ripped through the desert air, each one closer than the last. Boot strikes thundered across gravel, the footsteps bouncing between buildings like a demented game of marco polo. The noise painted a picture of pure chaos—soldiers running. Fighting.

  Dying.

  But there wasn't a single living soul in sight.

  No muzzle flashes. No targets. Just the audio track of a massacre playing out in surround sound while the visual feed got wiped clean. Like some cosmic editor had decided to fuck with reality's source code, deleting sprites while leaving the sound effects untouched.

  The screams changed pitch. Went from human terror to something... else. Something that made Ace's lizard brain sit up and take notice, whispering ancient warnings about predators in the dark. The kind of sound that reminded him that, once upon a time, humans weren't at the top of the food chain.

  Through his periphery, Ace caught flickers of movement. Patches of darkness that seemed to drink in the desert sunlight rather than being cast by it. They writhed at the corners of his vision like living ink spills, vanishing the moment he tried to track them directly.

  His combat-trained senses struggled to process the wrongness of it—like trying to aim at a target that existed in more dimensions than his brain could handle.

  Ace had been in firefights before. He had played this deadly game of hide and seek with insurgents who knew the terrain. But this was different. This was like reality itself had decided to go off its meds, leaving them to deal with the psychotic break.

  And somewhere in that chaos, something was watching.

  Something ancient.

  “Listen up,” Ace ordered, his voice carrying the steady authority that had kept them alive through a hundred patrols. “Walker, Castillo—head left. Martinez, Beck—”

  The first rounds came out of nowhere.

  Tracer rounds sliced through the air like angry fireflies, their paths all wrong—too erratic, too few to do any real damage, all of them coming from impossible positions where there were no visible shooters to so much as point a gun their way. The familiar crack-snap of incoming rounds mixed with that otherworldly howling, created a symphony of pure chaos.

  “Contact right!” Martinez shouted, dropping to one knee as rounds sparked off a barrier beside him. “No visual on the shooter!”

  Everyone dropped to the ground as the bullets whizzed by. Sparks rattled off the concrete barriers protecting them from the gunfire.

  Ace's training kicked in, his mind cataloging threats even as his body moved on autopilot. The shots were coming from multiple directions, but there was something off about the pattern. Like the rounds were being fired from places that shouldn't exist—angles that violated the basic laws of physics.

  Fuck it. They needed better cover before he could figure this out.

  He peered around as best he could without shoving his head into the death zone. To his relief, a hangar door stood open nearby. Sunlight cast long rays across the Black Hawk inside, and his mind raced with ideas.

  Yep.

  That was a better bet than waiting out here to get shot.

  “Hangar!” he barked, already moving. “Stay low!”

  His squad moved like a well-oiled machine, muscle memory overriding the surreal horror of their situation. Each Marine knew their role, covering sectors as they bounded backward in practiced movements.

  Another howl split the air, closer this time. Through his peripheral vision, Ace caught a glimpse of something that his brain refused to process—a shape that twisted in on itself, all angles and edges that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space.

  As soon as it appeared, it was gone.

  “What the fuck was that?” Fischer's voice carried an edge of panic that Ace had never heard before.

  “Move!” Ace snapped, his own weapon tracking the impossible movements at the edge of his vision.

  About halfway toward the hangar, the world around them darkened. The hangar remained much the same, like a beacon of light in a storm, but the sunlight around it shivered. The shadows between the buildings surrounding the hanagar began to tremble. The darkness reached out with tendrils that absorbed light, creating patches of absolute nothingness.

  “Keep moving!” Ace's voice cut through the chaos. “Martinez, Beck—go! Walker, Castillo—covering fire! Fischer, on me!”

  The hangar loomed ahead, its massive doors standing open like the jaws of some mechanical beast. Inside was darkness, sure, but at least it was normal darkness—not the living void that seemed to be hunting them.

  More shots cracked through the air, and Fischer cursed as a round caught him in the shoulder. The impact spun him halfway around, but he kept to his feet.

  “Fischer!” Ace grabbed the man’s good shoulder and pulled him down as gunfire rained overhead.

  “I'm good!” Fischer shouted above the chaos, his voice tight with pain.

  Ace nodded, a surge of relief hitting him despite the man’s injury. “Go!”

  They reached the hangar in bounds, each Marine covering the others as they fell back into the relative safety of the structure. The massive space swallowed them up, their boots echoing off steel walls and concrete floors. The afternoon sun cut sharp angles through the dust-filled air, creating islands of light in the cavernous darkness.

  Ace took up position just inside the entrance, his rifle scanning for targets as the rest of his squad moved deeper into cover. The shadows outside seemed to pulse with malevolent intent, and that otherworldly howling grew closer with each passing second.

  Whatever was out there, it wasn't done with them yet.

  Not by a long shot.

  And somewhere in the back of his mind, in that place where pure instinct lived, Ace knew that this was just the beginning. The world as they understood it was ending, one impossible shadow at a time.

  “Someone find a radio,” he ordered, his voice steady despite the chaos. “Whatever's out there, it's coming for us next, and I want backup.”

  Another one of those void-patches flickered at the edge of his vision, larger this time. Moving fast.

  Too fast.

  Heading straight for—

  “Walker, on your six!” The warning tore from Ace's throat as the shadow-thing lunged. He caught only a glimpse of it as it barreled toward them.

  The thing that lunged at Walker defied classification. It moved like oil through water, but darker—as if someone had found a shade of black that made regular darkness look pale in comparison. Its form warped and twisted, a fractal nightmare stretching and compressing in ways that made Ace's mind scream in protest.

  One moment it was a hundred meters out. The next, it had crossed that distance and thundered toward them, as if reality itself had hiccupped. The creature's body rippled with writhing shadow. Appendages that might have been tentacles, might have been claws, might have been concepts that human language had no words for, charged at Walker with predatory grace. It moved like smoke, leaving faintly glowing tears in reality.

  Walker opened up with his M27, the rounds disappearing into the creature's mass like stones dropped into an endless void.

  Each impact seemed to make it larger.

  Hungrier.

  “Get down!” Ace barked, already squeezing his trigger.

  His rounds joined Walker's, turning the space between them and the creature into a killzone that would have shredded any earthly target. But this thing—it drank in their fire like it was dying of thirst. Each bullet that disappeared into its mass seemed to add to its substance, like they were feeding it tiny pieces of the reality it was trying to devour.

  And somewhere in that writhing mass of impossibility, Ace swore he saw something like eyes—gaping holes that led to places where light itself went to die.

  In seconds, it would reach Walker and bite the man’s head clean off.

  At that thought, Ace’s body made the choice his mind couldn't process fast enough.

  He ran toward his squadmate. His boots slammed into the ground, as fast as he could go, and his shoulder slammed into Walker’s just as the beast reached them. The man’s gunfire stopped. The rifle clattered to the floor, and Walker went flying.

  Ace now stood alone in the killzone.

  The beast bared its razor-sharp teeth, and Ace raised his rifle in a last-ditch effort to kill the fucking thing—a plan he figured probably wouldn’t work, but if he was going down, he would go down fighting.

  Its jaws snapped together. Pain exploded across his chest, not like a bullet or a blade, but like liquid nitrogen injected straight into his soul. The world spun. He lost all sense of up or down. He couldn’t feel the rifle in his hands, anymore, or the rhythmic recoil of its fire. An impossible cold spread through his veins, thick and suffocating, as all light faded from his world.

  Someone yelled his name. Familiar voices joined in, his squad's shouts now sounding very far away. The vibrations of their words distorted, as if they were all underwater.

  Within the shadows, he caught snippets of movement. Castillo laid down covering fire—at what, he couldn't tell. Martinez and Beck dragged Walker to safety. Andrews had gotten Fischer back in the fight.

  They were still functioning as a unit. Still watching each other's backs. Still Marines, even when reality itself had gone sideways.

  Good.

  They would be okay.

  His mind went fuzzy. He could barely think. The dread faded. His tethers to the world slipped away, and he had trouble keeping a straight thought.

  Funny.

  He had, without a doubt, not expected to die this way. Death by discount Lovecraftian horror in the middle of Afghanistan.

  Who’d have thunk.

  As consciousness faded and that ancient presence filled his dying thoughts, Ace couldn't help but appreciate the cosmic irony. Three combat deployments, countless firefights, and what finally got him? Saving Walker's ass from something that looked like a black hole had hate-fucked a Picasso painting.

  His last thought, as reality collapsed around him and that amused voice echoed in his skull, was simple:

  At least no one could say he died like a boot.

  The darkness swallowed him whole, and Ace ceased to exist in any way that made sense to the universe he'd known.

  But sometimes, death was just the beginning.

  And, somewhere in the vast nothingness between worlds, something ancient smiled with far too many teeth.