Chapter 128: Nobody Moves
The city had not calmed down by the time Kai found a seat in the guild cafeteria.
If anything it had gotten worse. Every broadcast was covering the same topic from different angles. Every guild board in the building had clusters of hunters standing around it not doing anything productive, just reading and talking and reading again. The noise in the cafeteria was the noise of people who had received information they did not know what to do with yet.
Sera sat across from him with her own coffee.
Kai was reading through the public response on his phone. The predictions and assessments were coming in from multiple directions simultaneously and none of them were encouraging. Current clear probability estimates running somewhere around eleven percent.
Casualty projections labeled high without specifying further, which was its own kind of answer. Recommended response from several analysis sources was to avoid engagement until stronger hunters emerged.
Which said nothing useful about where the stronger hunters were supposed to come from or how long that was supposed to take.
One forum post had simply been titled WE’RE ALL DEAD.
Dorn had apparently responded to it positively.
Kai turned the phone around.
Sera read the title. Then laughed, short and genuine. "Okay. That’s a little entertaining."
The city spent the afternoon waiting.
Waiting was worse than bad news.
Bad news had answers.
Nobody had answers today.
The system had spoken once and then gone silent. That silence scared people more than the announcement.
Then the sky changed without warning.
One moment Mythal looked like it always looked in the evening, the familiar light quality of a city settling into its later hours. Then blue spread across the clouds from above, the same blue as the first announcement, the same quality of light that had been present the morning the system initialized.
Everything stopped.
People mid-conversation stopped talking. Cars at intersections held. Kai watched through the cafeteria window as the street outside went completely still, every person on the pavement looking upward at the same moment.
The system text appeared across the sky, large enough to be visible from anywhere in the city.
[One Month Has Passed Since The Completion Of The Mythal Dungeon.]
The cafeteria around Kai was silent. Around the city, from what he could see through the window and hear through the absence of traffic noise, the city was silent.
[Dungeon Progression Requirements Fulfilled.]
Then the sky cracked.
The first beam came down from above as a solid column of blue light that crossed the city’s northern skyline and impacted somewhere beyond the residential districts, the ground registering it as a vibration that reached the cafeteria several seconds after the visual. A second beam followed from a different point, then a third, then more, each one landing somewhere within Mythal’s boundaries, spaced across the city rather than concentrated.
The cafeteria windows shook from the accumulated impacts. Outside, people who had been standing still in shock had started moving, some toward screens to see where the impacts were occurring, some toward exits, some simply in directions without apparent purpose.
[B-Rank Dungeon Generation: Initiated.] [B-Rank Dungeon Classification: Confirmed.] [Recommended Level Range: 50 to 70.]
The cafeteria took several seconds to respond to the final notification.
Then everyone started talking at once.
Fifty to seventy.
Kai immediately understood the problem.
He was level fifty-two.
Raze was fifty-seven from what he last heard.
Lily was fifty-four.
Mythal’s strongest hunters barely qualified. Close enough to enter. Not close enough to clear comfortably.
Sera was beside him at the window. She had been quiet since the notifications appeared, reading the same numbers he was reading.
"People are panicking," she said.
"They should be," Kai said.
She looked at him. "You rarely say that."
"The level range is wrong," he said. "Not impossible. Wrong. Every previous jump between tiers had a smaller gap. This one is designed to push people in before they’re ready."
Sera looked at the sky where the beams had come from. "Or designed to see who enters anyway."
That was probably the more accurate read.
He didn’t argue with it.
They made their way through the city to one of the public display screens near the guild district because the cafeteria had become too loud with too little signal in the noise. A crowd had gathered around the display already, several hundred people looking at the live coverage of the new gate locations appearing on the city map one by one.
The comment and broadcast feeds running alongside the map were not hiding anything about the collective mood.
"50 to 70? That’s insane."
"My guild isn’t touching that."
"Who is supposed to clear these?"
"We’re barely handling C-rank as a city."
Sera folded her arms looking at the feeds. "Nobody’s going first."
"Not yet," Kai said.
Nobody hesitated during C-rank.
Everyone was hesitating now.
A rumor was moving through the crowd around the display screen. Someone had claimed one of the B-rank gates was larger than the Mythical gates had been. Someone else claimed monsters had been visible through the gate barrier before it fully sealed. A third rumor claimed the gates were already affecting the area around them.
None of it was confirmed.
All of it was spreading.
Kai had seen this pattern before. The first day the system announced the Mythical gates, the same cycle had run. Rumors filling the gap where confirmed information should have been, each one less verified than the last, the anxiety producing its own supply of content.
The difference was that everyone in the city had now been through the Mythical phase. They knew what Mythical gates had required. The B-rank recommendation range sitting above the level that had cleared the Mythical phase told them something direct about what was waiting inside the new gates.
During the Mythical phase, people were afraid because they didn’t know.
This time they were afraid because they did.
By nightfall a public announcement came from the city coordination office. It was phrased carefully but the core message was clear. Information was needed. The city could not respond to a threat it did not understand. Volunteer scouting teams were being requested for preliminary entry attempts. The goal was information, not clearing. Even a short entry and exit with basic environmental data would allow the coordination office to begin building a response strategy.
The announcement went up and sat there.
An hour passed.
Two hours.
The strongest hunters in the city had received the same announcement. The highest-ranked guilds had received it directly as an official request rather than a public posting.
Nobody responded publicly.
Not one.
Kai stood on the building roof in the late evening looking toward the northern district where the nearest blue pillar was still faintly visible against the dark sky, the gate it marked not visible from this distance but present in the way that things that were significant became present even when they were not in direct view.
Sera came up beside him.
"You thinking about it," she said. Not quite a question.
"Yes," he said.
"Planning to enter."
He did not say anything immediately.
Sera seemed to arrive at the same silence from her own direction.
"Not yet," she said.
"Not yet," he said.
Both of them smiled and walked away.
The strongest hunters in the city were silent.
The city was waiting for someone to move first.
Nobody was moving.
