Chapter 29: First Gate Expedition
Tom held his ration pack against his chest with both hands. Lena had wedged hers under one arm. Edgar was trying to fit his into a side pocket of his bag that was already too full. Kira clipped her crystal to her uniform collar and held her rations down at her side.
I held my hand out.
"Hand them over."
Tom blinked at me. "What?"
"The rations give them to me."
Tom passed his over. Lena hesitated, then handed hers across.
Edgar pulled his out of the side pocket and gave it to me without a word. Kira didn’t hesitate passing it over.
The packs dissolved into the ring’s pocket dimension one after the other in soft flickers of pale light. Tom’s eyes followed each one. Lena’s mouth opened a fraction. Edgar looked at the ring for a second, then looked away.
None of them asked.
The storage ring on my hand was an E-rank piece, expensive but not unheard of, given the fact that I had an S-Rank step sister.
"Don’t slow yourselves down carrying things in there. Move clean. If you need a ration, I’ll hand it to you."
The team nodded their heads in understanding.
"Let’s go."
We crossed the access path together. Mira watched us from the edge of the clearing. The lead guard at the perimeter raised one hand. The barrier in front of the gate parted on a single pulse of blue light, and the tear in space waited.
I stepped through first.
The nausea hit the same as before. The world tunnelled, my ears popped, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.
Two breaths and the feeling rolled away.
~Crunch~
I opened my eyes, and stared at my boots.
The cavern I’d half-expected was not there. Rather, we were on a mountain pass.
White peaks rose on either side, the slopes streaked in dark pine, the sky overhead a thin pale grey that promised more snow within the hour.
A wind cut along the pass at knee height, lifting fine powder off the surface in long thin curtains. The cold hit my face on the first breath and stayed there.
Behind me, the other four appeared in a stagger.
Tom stumbled forward and caught himself on one knee, gasping.
Lena emerged with her arms wrapped around herself before her boots had landed, already shivering.
Edgar was the last through. He dropped to all fours, heaved twice into the snow, and pushed himself back up.
Kira was on her feet beside me. Her hair lifted in the wind. Her dark eyes moved across the pass, the slopes, the sky, in a slow sweep that took ten full seconds.
Her face darkened.
"This isn’t how it’s meant to be."
I looked at her.
"What?"
"Ashwood Hollow." Her voice had gone flat. Her gaze stayed on the peaks. "It’s meant to be a forested zone. Mid-altitude. Broken cavern terrain with low-canopy beasts and a tri-variant boss in the underground chamber. That’s the gate. That’s every record the library has on it, going back for years."
She turned to look at me.
"This is a snow-capped peak."
***
Mira watched the last of the five disappear into the gate.
She stood at the edge of the access path for a long moment with her arms crossed, her eyes on the gate, the way she always did at the start of a student expedition.
Forty seconds of patience. Long enough to feel if anything went wrong on the entry.
Nothing went wrong.
She turned and started back across the clearing toward the command tent.
She’d made it three paces before she felt a massive flux of energy.
Mira stopped mid-step. Her chin came up half an inch. The fine hairs along the back of her neck were standing on end, and the pressure on her shoulders had jumped beyond E-Rank.
She turned around.
The gate behind her was crackling red.
Pale red veins ran along the edges of the tear, branching out from the corners, pulsing in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t hers. The purple-black core of the gate had darkened to something closer to black, the depth of it gone bottomless.
The barrier ring of pale blue around the perimeter was flickering. The lead guard at the access path had taken an instinctive step backward, his hand already moving to the weapon at his hip.
Mira’s face went white.
"This... this is a gate mutation."
The lead guard’s head snapped toward her. "What did you say?"
"It’s mutating." She was already moving towards the gate. "Pull the perimeter back. Signal the association. This is at least D-Rank."
The words left her mouth before she’d finished the calculation, but the calculation finished itself a half-second later, and the answer was worse than she’d said out loud.
’Those five were dead.’
A D-Rank gate with five students from E-Class. The odds didn’t work. It didn’t come close to working. The gate boss alone would be a high-D variant in a fresh terrain neither Kira nor anyone else had studied, and the beast density that came with a mutated gate ran two to three times the standard for the rank tier.
She rushed towards the gate at a full sprint.
A gate accepted entry on a one-way valve during an active expedition. The students inside were sealed in. The outside was sealed out. The valve held until either the gate boss was killed, or those inside died.
Still, given the mutation, she might have a chance of entering if she did it quick enough.
Crash!
The impact of hitting the gate threw her backward off her feet. She went six metres through the air before she rolled twice before sliding to a stop. Pain flared down her right arm, clearly injuring her place.
She pushed herself up onto her good elbow.
"Damn it."
She spat on the floor and reached for the crystal at her collar with her good hand.
"Mira reporting from Ashwood Hollow. The gate has mutated. I say again, the gate has mutated. Rank estimate, D minimum, possibly higher. I have five first-year students sealed inside."
Mira’s eyes lifted to the gate.
The red veins along the edges were pulsing faster now. Whatever was inside the tear, it was waking up.
