Chapter 358: 358 | Protocol Says
The Void Gate notification burned in my peripheral vision like a neon sign advertising my own funeral.
The original text contains approximately 160 words. Here is the expanded version:
I’d encountered Void Gates exactly once in my reading: a throwaway Chapter in "Hunter Academy: America’s Elite" where the author had used one as backstory for a tertiary character whose name I couldn’t even remember. The passage described what happened when dimensional sensor readings failed catastrophically and spatial boundaries inverted. Teams entered gates expecting routine mob clearing. Standard protocol. Standard risk assessment.
Those teams became cautionary tales filed in locked archives.
The Federal Gate Response Authority kept meticulous records of every confirmed Void Gate event since the first Fracture tore reality open seventeen years ago. The survival statistics existed somewhere in their database. They just weren’t included in any academy recruitment materials or guild orientation packets. Funny how numbers that uncomfortable had a way of staying classified.
Dante registered the dimensional seal before anyone else. His Void Eater ability probably felt the shift the way earthquake sensors detect tremors hours before the ground starts moving. He was already in motion while the rest of us stood there trying to understand why the jungle had stopped screaming at us, his academy-issue boots chewing through topsoil and rotting vegetation as he ran full sprint toward the space where our exit had been.
"No no no no no."
His hands hit the empty air where reality had stitched itself shut. Fingers clawed at nothing. Dante pressed both palms against the space like he could pry the dimensional fabric apart through sheer desperation, his Void Eater ability flaring in visible pulses of dark energy that dissipated uselessly into the humid air. The jungle had eaten our exit the way it apparently intended to eat everything else.
"It’s gone." Dante turned back toward the group with eyes that had gone too wide, whites showing all the way around irises the color of old moss. "The gate closed. That doesn’t happen. Gates don’t close from the inside. That’s not how dimensional mechanics work. The boundary membrane maintains itself until the core entity is neutralized. That’s physics. That’s fundamental physics."
Jordan’s shadow tendrils retreated another six inches toward his boots.
"It’s a Void Gate," I said.
The words landed on the group like a physical weight. Belle’s grip on my arm tightened to the point where I was genuinely concerned about structural damage to the bones in my forearm.
Naomi’s staff flickered, the blue-white energy at its tip sputtering once before she forced it steady through what must have been an act of raw willpower. Charles’s face went through seven distinct phases of denial in approximately two seconds, his jaw working like he wanted to argue with the classification itself.
Dante rounded on me with the specific fury of someone who needs a target for fear that has nowhere else to go. "A Void Gate! What the hell are you talking about? The sensors said C-rank. The FGRA cleared us for deployment. They scanned the dimensional pressure readings and stamped their little form and told us the hostile count was between forty and sixty territorial pack hunters."
"The sensors were wrong."
"THE SENSORS WERE WRONG?" Dante’s voice cracked on the last word, climbing into a register that would have been funny under literally any other circumstances.
Sweat poured down his temples and darkened the collar of his tactical suit. His hands wouldn’t stop moving, fingers flexing and clenching like they were trying to grab onto something solid in a world that had just proven itself fundamentally unreliable.
"That’s your analysis? The multi-billion-credit FGRA sensor array that the entire hunter economy relies on was just wrong? Like it made a little oopsie? Like it forgot to carry the one?"
"Calm down."
"Don’t tell me to calm down!" Dante took three steps toward me and jabbed a finger at my chest. The finger shook. All of Dante shook, a continuous low-amplitude vibration that started in his shoulders and radiated outward through every extremity. "We are trapped inside a Void Gate with no exit, no extraction window, and no backup. The recovery team doesn’t even know the gate sealed because they’re sitting in a staging area monitoring coordinates that no longer register a dimensional signature. We’re going to die here. All of us. Every single one."
I looked at Dante Pope, Elite Ten Rank Ten, the kid who trained eighteen hours a day and still couldn’t sleep because he knew his position was temporary and the vultures circling below him got hungrier every month. The kid who worshipped Bella Cortez and feared Marcus Steele and owed Maria Santos for healing injuries he couldn’t afford to explain. Dante was nineteen years old and genuinely believed he was about to die in a jungle that shouldn’t exist inside a dimensional space that every textbook said couldn’t seal itself.
He might have been right.
"You are top ten, man."
That stopped the spiral for exactly one second. Dante blinked. Then the anger came back hotter.
"Top ten?" He laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that people make when the alternative is screaming until their vocal cords rupture.
"Top ten means nothing in here. You think a number on a leaderboard scares whatever is living in those trees? Even top-ranked professional hunters wouldn’t walk into a Void Gate alone. Platinum-tier veterans with decades of experience and abilities that could level city blocks wouldn’t enter a confirmed Void Gate without a full coalition response team and three redundant extraction plans. And none of us are even out of our first years!"
Javier put a hand on Dante’s shoulder. Dante slapped it away without looking.
"The FGRA has protocols for Void Gates," Dante continued, his voice gaining a manic quality that suggested the words were flowing from a memorized textbook Chapter rather than rational thought. "Protocol says flag for secondary assessment. Protocol says no personnel enter without top-ranked hero leadership and dual agency authorization. Protocol says if a gate presents as dark on initial sensor sweep, it gets held for independent verification before anyone crosses the threshold. We had none of that. We walked in here because a professor told us it would be educational."
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