My decision, last night, to bury Katya's body in the woods next to Aunt M's cottage had robbed me of much opportunity to properly think about my situation. Traitorous as he may be, but Griff's long-standing advice on timely corpse movement still held true: "Body disposal first, recriminations after." That had been one of his tidy little maxims that I'd pretended was dark humour until I'd lived through it three or four times.

So, first things first, I'd need to get my attempted assassin safely stowed away.

I'd carried her broken body beyond the tree line and dug down deep under a tangle of nettles and the last of Aunt M's compost heap. I'd wrapped her in an old tarpaulin I'd found in the shed and sweated far less through the whole thing than I'd have expected. Especially when tunnelling down ten feet.

The hardest part, to be honest, wasn't the weight or the digging. It was when I realised how easily I'd done the whole thing. I'd not really hesitated. I'd not gone through a period of grim reflection on my life choices. I'd just got on with it. Somewhere, that part of me - the bit that once flinched at dealing with death - had gone quiet.

9 strength and 52 Stamina for the win, I guess.

I'd then spent most of the rest of the night forensic-proofing the attic. Not cleaning. Cleaning is for amateurs and YouTubers. I undertook the subtle and lost art of turning something that definitely happened into something that probably didn't.

Aunt M had a linen cupboard full of aggressively floral horrors that hadn't seen sunlight since Thatcher. I used those to soak up as much of the blood as I could, both Katya's and mine. The key to such things was to press down into the liquid, not smear it all around. Smearing turns spatter into narrative. Pressing, on the other hand, whispers plausible deniability.

I'd got pretty lucky that the assassin had returned to Earth at a helpful angle. Gravity had done most of my work for me, and most of the blood had pooled around her, rather than spraying out and up. I'd take these small victories where I could. By the time I was finished, the attic smelled like damp carpet and old iron, but I figured it wouldn't raise too many questions if someone with gloves and a UV light came sniffing.

By sunrise, it wasn't clean. But it was, crucially, forgettable. And that, in my line of work, was much better.

Oh, and just in case you ever find yourself in a situation like this, let me tell you that bleach is loud. I know everyone thinks they understand Body Disposal 101 from watching Netflix, but trust me on this, if you ever use it, you're basically just admitting there's something to hide. You might as well leave a note that says, "Please investigate me, I've watched too much true crime."

Fortunately, Aunt M's cupboards had a veritable treasure trove of vinegar and soda crystals, the old kind in paper boxes with a faded wartime font on the label. Combined with plenty of elbow grease, I reckoned the attic would scramble through a luminol pass.

Katya's phone went in the sink with its battery removed and, for good measure, I'd microwaved the SIM. Twice. I then wrapped it in foil - twice again, because paranoia isn't just for Christmas - and dumped it in the compost. Despite all of that, Griff's name was still glowing on the screen.

I figured I'd let it fade on its own.

I clipped the bullets out of the wainscoting. Fun fact, I'd thought Katya had double-tapped me clean, but it seems one round had gone wide and lodged in the roof. I felt a moment of disappointment that I hadn't had the chance to rag on her for the sloppiness, then realised that -having pounded her to death on the battlefield outside of Anchorfall - that was probably being a touch churlish.

I carefully retraced her forced entrance into the cottage and wiped down the obvious contact points with polish, leaving them grimy, streaky and unsuspicious. Not clean - no one trusts clean. Clean means something happened. Plus, I didn't need to hide my own presence here, it had been left to me in Aunt M's will, after all.

Katya'd been wearing rubber soles with no tread, which helped. I just took a wet rag and blurred the edges of her tracks, then scattered a few handfuls of dust over them to make it look pleasantly undisturbed. Then I opened the window for six minutes. Enough for air turnover. Not enough to make it obvious.

And then I waited, stock still, for an hour. Just to see if she'd had any backup that might come looking for her. I didn't expect there to be, but I was resolving to be a bit more careful in my second life.

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Nobody did

By then, it was 4 am, and while I didn't think I'd pulled off the perfect clean-up, I figured it was good enough to hold up under local scrutiny and I could get a bit of kip.

Griff used to say: "Leave a room so clean it makes the truth look fictional."

Nailed it.

And now, with two hours' rest in the bank, a lukewarm mug of tea, and a Veil between me and the last war I'd started, it seemed like the right moment to take stock of where I was at.

I sat at the kitchen table, the one with the old tea rings and the burned-in shape of Aunt M's cauldron-bottomed kettle. It was the exact facsimile of the one where she'd scared up my Ironclad subclass. Outside, birds I couldn't name were just about starting to shout at each other in the hedgerow. Possibly about territory. Possibly about existential dread. Either way, I envied them their clarity.

I blocked out the sound and tried to order the facts.

Fact 1: I'd died.

Fact 2: In death, I'd been portalled to Bayteran, another world, with a System, stats, monsters, and something that felt very much like a destiny clawing at my ankles.

Fact 3: I'd survived.

No. I'd done more than survive. I'd levelled up. I'd fought things I still didn't have words for. I'd built a village from scratch. I'd tanked dungeon bosses, insulted deities, and weaponised chaos until the System gave up and gave me my own subclass. I'd made friends, enemies, bad decisions, and worse puns. But, more than anything, I'd made progress.

And then—

Fact 4: I was back.

Back on Earth. In Halfway Hold. The attic where I'd been shot and left to bleed out beside a broken gramophone.

And I was alone.

Except, of course, I wasn't.

Because I had friends on the other side of the Veil. Scar. Lia. Dema. I had Anchorfall. And the Well of Ascension. They were all still there. And I'd left them behind.

I had no idea what time meant between here and there. No idea if a minute had passed back there since I'd left or a month. If we were still fighting the Empire and the Rebels. If they were still alive…

Although now I think about it, literally no time had passed between my exit and re-entrance to Earth, had it? I'd landed back in the attic at the moment I left it, like I hadn't just performed an interdimensional vanishing act. The blood on the floor hadn't dried. The gramophone hadn't moved. The room hadn't even exhaled in my absence.

Which was comforting. In a way. Except it raised another, far more annoying problem.

Narnia.

Bloody Narnia rules. Go gallivanting off to another world, grow a beard, start a war, punch a lich king in the jaw, build a society from scratch, and when you come back, you're still standing in your socks next to a broken chair with blood in your hair and no idea if the milk's gone off.

Which made a certain amount of sense in a children's book, but now made my temples pulse.

Because if time worked like that, if Bayteran was a speeding train and Earth was a paused sitcom, then I had no idea what I'd left behind.

What if Scar thought I'd vanished? What if Lia was trying to hold the village against attackers with no tank? What if Dema had done something wildly heretical without backup? What if Anchorfall had burned, or ascended into godhood, or gone entirely vegan?

But no. That couldn't be right.

Because the System didn't work like that. Not if what Aunt M had said was true, about Anchors and Thresholds, about equilibrium and thread-weight. If time had rewound on Earth, it was because the Veil obeyed its own rules. Bayteran wasn't a dream or a vision quest or a shared psychosis. Its existence had consequences.

Which meant it was still ticking. And if it was still ticking, then they still needed me.

And Aunt M had spent years crossing between the realms, hadn't she? She'd done it hundreds of times. Thousands. I doubt she'd have been able to do much protecting of the Veil with decade-long absences.

That made me feel better. If and when I got back, there probably wasn't going to be years of time-slip. Probably. All of this, though, made my head hurt, so I made an executive decision not to borrow trouble.

What I did know was that Earth paused when I was in Bayteran. That was verifiable. That was something. Either Bayteran matched Earth, or it didn't. And if it didn't… Well. I'd just have to fix it when I get there. If I get there. One problem at a time.

If I'd learned nothing else from Griff - damn him – it was that you don't get to solve every problem at once. You work the room you're in. You make the first mess manageable before you go looking for another.

So: Earth.

And Griff. And my nice shiny new quest.

I remember that he'd warned me, once, in a rare moment of kindness, that I scared people. That one day, that fear would cost me back-up, sympathy, maybe even the benefit of the doubt. I guess that was true. In the end, he hadn't just left me behind. He'd sent someone to put me down.

Nothing personal.

Funny, it was feeling pretty personal from my end.

So, that was the situation firmly stocked. I'd died, I'd gone away, and now I was back.

Time to get moving.

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