Sleep had been a black, dreamless pit—and for that small mercy, if mercy it was, he remained grateful. Waking proved itself a slow crawl back to pain, each sensation announcing itself with deliberate cruelty. First came the aches, a dull throb that settled behind his ribs like some patient parasite, then blossomed into fire across his shoulders. The air carried scents of dust and dry grass, innocent odors that should have comforted but instead seemed to mock.
For one disoriented moment, his treacherous mind supplied the familiar walls of his studio apartment: the stale air of a life gone sideways, the ghost of his marriage haunting every corner, the dead-end but well-paid job that had slowly consumed his sense of worth. The man he used to be—a Ranger—faded into a story that no longer belonged to him, if it ever had.
He raised a hand to scrub the memory from his face, and the rough scrape of unfamiliar leather against his skin shattered the illusion with brutal efficiency.
Ethan Kai shot upright. A gasp tore from his throat as fire raced along his spine, reminding him that his body had not forgotten yesterday's trials, whatever else his mind might choose to believe or deny. The barn materialized around him through the haze of pain: a cavern of darkness pierced by slivers of moonlight that slanted through the thatched roof like accusatory fingers. With the sight came the memory of the day before, slamming into his consciousness like a physical blow—beyond insane, almost impossible to have survived.
The prologue to The Eye of the World. Elan Morin and Lewis Therin. The cell. The dream. The mall filled with the walking dead. The clown with chainsaws whose laughter still echoed in the corners of his mind. I was just in the Dead Rising universe? The thought carried its own weight of impossibility.
A cold certainty settled in his gut like lead. None of it had been a dream. But what if it was? What if this elaborate construction was nothing more than his mind's final, desperate attempt to make sense of madness before the end claimed him entirely?
He had to know. With trembling fingers—and he despised the tremor, despised his body's betrayal of fear—he tore the glove from his right hand. He almost did not want to look. If the mark was gone, it would mean he was truly insane, lost in delusions that felt more real than reality itself. If it was there...he did not know what that would mean, but the uncertainty terrified him more than madness.
He held his palm up to a sliver of moonlight, forcing himself to look.
It was there. Not a burn, not a scab, but a knot of raised, scarred tissue that spoke of permanence. An ancient key bent into a perfect, impossible circle, branded into his flesh with precision that no earthly tool could have achieved. He closed his fingers around it, the gesture both protective and grateful. It was real. Whatever reality meant in this context, it was real. And he was still within it, for better or worse.
Something hard pressed into his back—the sling of the hunting rifle digging into a bruised shoulder. The discomfort sparked memory. The gear. The chaotic flight from the mall, weighed down by supplies he had barely managed to salvage. Still surrounded by the pitch-black quiet of the barn, he groped blindly through the hay until his fingers met the rough canvas of the duffle bag. He dragged it toward him, every movement stiff, his muscles screaming their protest at being asked to function again.
His hands, guided by touch alone, moved with practiced economy. First, the weapons—because in a world where the impossible had become routine, weapons represented the only constant he could trust. The long-scoped rifle was already accounted for, slung across his back where its weight had become a familiar burden. The two Berettas were secure in their holsters, one on his chest, one on his leg. The shotgun...he remembered its weight slipping from his grasp as exhaustion had finally claimed him.
A brief, frantic search followed, his hands plunging back into the rustling hay. For a second, cold fear lanced through him—the fear of being incomplete, inadequately armed in a situation that had already demonstrated its lethal unpredictability. Then his fingers met the cold steel of the receiver, and relief washed the fear away like cool water. He pulled the shotgun free, worked the slide with a brutal shk-shk that was somehow both threatening and comforting in the stillness.
In the dark, he practiced the motions, drawing each weapon in turn. His hands moved with practiced silence that ignored the screaming protest of his muscles. The draws had to be clean—no snagging on a jacket flap, no fumbling for the grip, no hesitation that could mean the difference between life and death. They were clean. His body remembered what his mind sometimes doubted.
As he worked, focusing on familiar rituals, the chaos of the previous day receded incrementally with each item he identified and verified. This was a language he understood, had always understood. The weight of gear, the logic of its placement, the promise held in each tool—these things made sense in ways that walking corpses and interdimensional travel did not. It was a catechism of survival that pushed back against the impossible, creating small islands of sanity in an ocean of madness.
The ritual would not be complete until the gear was properly stowed. He began with what he would carry on his person, items that needed to be immediately accessible. His thumb cracked the blister pack of the multitool, the plastic shell splitting with a sharp sound that seemed overloud in the quiet barn. He unfolded the pliers, tested the resistance of the joints—solid, reliable—then clipped the heavy steel tool inside the waistband of his cargo pants, just behind his right hip. Accessible when needed, but out of the way.
The two hunting knives came next. He threaded the sheath of the larger blade onto his belt, positioning it for a strong-side pull that would feel natural under stress. The second, smaller knife he strapped horizontally to the small of his back, its handle angled for a left-handed, reverse-grip pull. A last resort, hidden and unexpected—the kind of surprise that had saved his life more than once in the past.
Only then did he return to the duffle bag. He repacked with a logic born from years of field-stripping his life down to essentials, reducing existence to what could be carried and what could be left behind. Bedding and the tent went to the bottom, forming a solid base that would not shift during movement. Rations, the mess kit, and the water filter sat above them, centered against his spine where their weight would be most stable. Ammunition—after making sure all his firearms were loaded, chambers ready—and the first-aid kit filled the top of the main compartment, positioned to be accessed in seconds if the need arose.
He cinched the straps tight, ensuring the contents were secure and silent. No rattling, no shifting, no sounds to betray his position when stealth might mean survival.
When he rose to his feet, he was no longer simply a man who had survived impossible circumstances. He was an armed man with modern steel in a forgotten barn, carrying the tools and knowledge of a world far more advanced than this one appeared to be. The hunting rifle was slung across his back, the familiar weight a comfort. The solid heft of the shotgun in his hands promised swift resolution to close-quarters problems. He was a Ranger again, prepared for the next fight, whatever form it might take. In the absolute darkness of a world not his own, he was as ready as mortal preparation could make him.
But readiness brought its own burden of choice. What should come first? The question hung in the cold, dusty air of the loft like an unresolved chord. Reconnaissance or rest? His body screamed for rest, for another hour of oblivion in the hay where pain could not follow. But his training screamed louder, insisted with the voice of drill sergeants and hard experience that a position was never secure until it was known, mapped, understood.
He considered climbing down the ladder to explore what lay beyond the barn, but a sound from outside stopped him with the finality of a blade against his throat. It was the rhythmic, clopping beat of shod hooves on hard-packed road, accompanied by voices that carried poorly on the night air. Not the low murmur of peaceful conversation, but the boisterous shouts and harsh laughter of celebration—or perhaps drunken carelessness. From the sound of it, there were at least four riders, possibly more.
Then a flickering yellow light began to flash through the cracks between the barn's rough-hewn logs, painting shifting patterns on the opposite wall like some primitive shadow-play. Torchlight. In a world of electric illumination, torchlight meant either primitiveness or deliberate choice—and neither option filled him with confidence.
Instinct seized control of his actions. Ethan moved from his crouch to a low crawl, silent as shadow in the deep gloom of the loft. Years of training compressed into muscle memory guided him to the wall, where he pressed his eye to one of the wider cracks between the logs. He kept one eye on the approaching light and the other squeezed shut—a soldier's trick to preserve night vision. He would need to be ready for the moment the light passed, when darkness would return and reveal what it chose to hide.
As the riders drew nearer, details sharpened in the wavering torchlight, and a strange, nagging familiarity began to prick at the back of his mind like a thorn he could not dislodge. Their armor was a patchwork of dull, blackened steel that seemed designed to swallow light rather than reflect it—practical gear for men who valued concealment over display. They wore surcoats of mottled gray and dirty brown, colors chosen for ambush rather than ceremony. The lead rider carried a shield, and on it was emblazoned a symbol that made his breath catch in his throat: a silver-white, mailed gauntlet, clenched so tightly that its own spiked knuckles pierced the metal of its fingers, drawing stylized drops of blood.
For a wild moment, his mind insisted this had to be some elaborate jest—die-hard medieval reenactors, dedicated cosplayers lost on their way to a convention where such attention to detail would be admired and rewarded. But the thought died as soon as it formed, strangled by observation.
No costume possessed that kind of authentic wear. The grime under their saddlebags was not theatrical dust applied by a makeup artist; it was the real, accumulated filth of hard travel and harder living. The tarnish on the lead rider's shield bore the patient work of neglect and weather, not paint designed to simulate age. The way they sat their horses, the unconscious competence of their movements—this felt less like witnessing a performance and more like looking backward through time itself.
If not costume, then what? Time travel? Had he stepped not only between worlds but stumbled backward a thousand years into his own planet's history? The possibility carried a certain logic, but the symbol on that shield stopped the speculation cold. He knew it. The certainty sat in his mind like a stone, solid and immovable. He was certain he had seen it on a page somewhere, in one of the countless books that had shaped his understanding of stories and their meanings. It did not belong to any history he had ever studied, any culture he could name.
His exhausted mind refused to provide the connection, but the familiarity was a sharp, insistent ache that would not be ignored. Something about that fist, something about the way these men moved with predatory purpose through a landscape that felt torn from fantasy...
He did not know who they were, or what age they claimed as their own. He knew only two things with the clarity of absolute certainty: they felt like something ripped from a story he knew too well, and their movements—suspicious, predatory, deliberate—set his nerves jangling with warnings his conscious mind could not yet articulate.
Behind the four riders came two more horses, but these were straining against their harnesses to pull a large, brightly painted wagon. The vehicle was a spectacle of bold, contrasting colors that spoke of a life spent traveling from place to place, trading goods and stories with equal facility. The vibrant display formed a grim counterpoint to its current driver—a fifth armored soldier who snapped the reins with brutal, unnecessary force that spoke more of cruelty than urgency.
Beneath the soldiers' loud jeers and laughter, another sound reached Ethan's ears, faint and desperate enough that he had to strain to hear it over the noise of hooves and voices. It was the sound of weeping—quiet, hopeless, human.
The four riders and their captured wagon pulled up twenty yards from the barn, close enough that Ethan could see individual details of faces and equipment, but they paid the structure no attention. Their focus lay elsewhere, on purposes that made his skin crawl with anticipation of violence.
The leader—the man with the fist emblazoned on his shield—barked an order. The language was strange, guttural in ways that English was not, yet somehow Ethan understood the raw sound of it as a command even if distance and wind stole the specific words from his ears. The driver leaped down to the hard-packed earth, drew out a long, rust-stained blade, and began prying boards from the side of the very wagon he had just been driving with such care.
They're destroying it, Ethan realized with growing unease. Not planning to leave with it.
The other three riders dismounted with the easy competence of men accustomed to violence, tied their horses' reins to nearby trees, and moved to assist in the wagon's destruction. They worked with the efficiency of practice, as if this was a ritual they had performed many times before.
One of the soldiers stomped to the back of the wagon and threw open its doors with theatrical force. He shouted something—a coarse joke from the sound of it, accompanied by laughter from his companions—and reached inside. By the wrist he yanked out a woman of middle years, still attractive despite the grime that marked her face and the exhaustion that bent her shoulders. Her clothes were a riot of yellow, red, and green that seemed to mock her current circumstances.
Following her, more reluctantly, came three others: a small boy of perhaps nine years, thin and wide-eyed with the particular terror of children who understand that adults are no longer to be trusted; an older man who might have been the boy's father, his face bearing the hollow look of someone who has watched his world crumble; and a young woman, perhaps in her twenties, pretty in a slim and almost innocent way that made what was obviously about to happen seem even more obscene.
They were all dressed in the same strangely colorful style, and all bore the marks of prolonged confinement—matted hair, stained clothing, the peculiar grayness of skin that spoke of fear and poor treatment.
As boards came off the wagon with the sound of splintering wood, the soldiers heaped them into a rough pile. One of them touched his torch to the dry timber, and it caught with a greedy whoosh that sent sparks spiraling up into the night sky. In the growing firelight, Ethan could see the larger devastation that surrounded them—a shattered farmhouse in the distance, its stone foundation split and blackened by some violence he could only imagine. The structure was surrounded by fields that stretched away into darkness, an entire crop of something forgotten, some green left to rot on the stalk, unharvested and abandoned.
Once the fire was roaring with sufficient intensity to serve their purposes, two of the soldiers moved toward the captives with the deliberate pace of men who had done this before. They yanked the four travelers' hands behind their backs, binding wrists tightly with rough cordage that cut into flesh already abraded by previous restraints. One by one, the prisoners were shoved forward and forced down onto their knees in a neat line, facing the heat and light of the improvised bonfire.
The leader stepped into position in front of them, his silhouette dark and menacing against the flames. He looked down at the kneeling family—for family they surely were, bound together by more than shared captivity—then turned to address his men. His voice carried clearly across the night air, sharp with cold, righteous fury that chilled Ethan's blood even as he found he could understand every word with perfect clarity.
"Let the Light burn the Shadow from them!" the man declared with the fervor of absolute conviction. "Let the fire cleanse these flaming Darkfriends!"
The words hit Ethan like a physical blow, and suddenly he knew exactly where he was, exactly what story had claimed him again. The Fist on the shield, the archaic speech patterns, the casual brutality directed toward those deemed servants of the Shadow—he was witnessing a scene from Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, but these men did not seem to be Whitecloaks or Children of the Light, as they called themselves. The symbol of the Fist kept clashing with what he knew about the story. It was something else. Something older? He remembered no Fist symbols in the books.
His hands tightened on the shotgun, and for the first time since awakening in this barn, he felt something approaching clarity. Whatever cosmic force had deposited him in this place, at this time, had given him a choice. He could remain hidden, safe in the loft while innocent people died below. Or he could act, knowing that intervention would announce his presence to a world that might well consider him as much an enemy as these victims.