The fall didn't feel like falling.
There was no wind, no rush, no sense of down just the sudden absence of everything that had been holding reality together.
Then
impact.
Not hard.
Not soft.
Just… there.
Dante's eyes opened slowly.
For a second, nothing made sense.
Light existed again but it wasn't blinding, wasn't artificial. It stretched across a wide, open sky that actually felt like a sky, not something constructed to behave like one.
He pushed himself up.
The ground beneath his hands was solid.
Real.
Not shifting. Not correcting. Not reacting.
Just ground.
"…We're out," he said under his breath.
A groan came from a few feet away.
Victor rolled onto his back, squinting up at the sky. "If this is another layer, I'm quitting."
Dante let out a quiet breath. "It's not."
He could tell.
There was no pressure here.
No underlying system trying to optimize or resolve.
Just space.
Normal, unforced, uncalculated space.
