The walk toward the portal didn't feel like an epic adventure. It felt like walking toward a butcher shop.
The air grew progressively colder, thick with a metallic, ozone stench that made Nex's stomach turn. Trees nearby weren't dead; they were pale, frozen mid-sway like glass statues. And right in the center of a cratered clearing stood the portal.
It didn't tear through the sky like the violent crimson portals people talked about on the radio. It sat silent, a hovering tear of pure cosmic dark filled with swirling, pinprick stars and swirling nebulae. No wind came from it. No sound. Just a suffocating pressure that hit Nexar right behind his forehead like a spike driven through his skull.
Thump. Thump.
The Third Eye Chakra between his brows throbbed violently, burning hot beneath his skin.
"Jesus," Kael muttered, his hand resting white-knuckled on his shortsword. "What the hell is that?"
"It's beautiful," John whispered, stepping forward with that fake, wide-eyed wonder he always put on when he wanted people to think he was harmless.
Captain Lena didn't say a word. She uncapped her flask, took a long drag, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the swirling galaxy wall. "There's no Mana signature. None. It's empty."
"It's not empty," Nexar thought, clutching his head under his hood, his teeth grinding so hard his jaw hurt. It's not empty at all. It's breathing.
To the Census team, it looked like a inert cosmic anomaly. But through the burning haze of Nex's Third Eye, he saw thick, invisible tendrils of raw, unfiltered cosmic force leaking from the tear, coiling around the grass, suffocating the ambient Mana of the world.
"Jerry, drop a tether probe," Lena ordered, her voice dropping all casualness. "We take samples and fall back to the—"
The portal didn't wait.
It didn't flare up or explode. It simply pulled.
It wasn't a wind; it was a gravitational vacuum that targeted the ambient energy in their bodies. The ground under their feet ripped up in giant chunks. Jerry screamed as his massive frame was yanked off his feet like a leaf in a hurricane. Kael dug his shortsword into the dirt, channeling Earth Wolf Mana, but the blade snapped like a dry twig under the raw spatial pressure.
"Fall back!" Lena roared, slamming her hammer into the stone to anchor herself, but the force tore the earth right out from under her boots.
John scrambled wildly, grabbing the nearest thing to hold onto—Nexar's shoulder.
"Help me! Nex, hold on!" John shrieked, his face pale, throwing his weight onto the five-year-old boy.
"Let go, you bastard!" Nex wheezed, his small body buckling under the strain.
The spatial gravity doubled. Nex felt a sickening pop in his left shoulder. He looked straight into the swirling abyss of stars, and for a split second, the Third Eye Manual flared crimson in his mind, flooding his vision with chaotic, unreadable symbols. The portal wasn't pulling the squad. It was pulling him. The others were just collateral damage caught in the undertow.
With a final, desperate snarl, Nex drove his small elbow straight into John's nose. John screamed, letting go as blood sprayed, but the momentum was already gone.
The void swallowed Nexar whole.
Cold. Wet. Pitch black.
Nex shot up, coughing violently, dragging thick, metallic-tasting water out of his lungs. His vision was a blur of spinning light and shadow. His head felt like it had been cracked open with a rock, a dull, agonizing pulse pounding right between his eyes.
"Hah... hah... fuck..." he gasped, shivering uncontrollably as he clutched his dislocated left shoulder.
He didn't scream. Screaming wasted oxygen, and oxygen was survival. He bit down on his hoodie's frayed collar, planted his back against the stone wall, and shoved his shoulder back into its socket with a dull, sickening CRACK.
Tears of pure pain squeezed out of his eyes, but he kept his jaw locked tight until the agony settled into a dull roar.
Only then did he look around.
He wasn't in Africa. He wasn't anywhere near the refugee shelters, the crumbling concrete, or the smell of burning diesel and blood.
He was sitting in shallow, turquoise water inside an immense, cathedral-like underground cavern. High above him, the ceiling curved into a massive dome, but what caught his breath was the shape of the island he had seen for a fleeting second through a crack in the cavern's ceiling as he fell—a vast, emerald-shaped landmass rising out of an endless sea.
And right in front of him, resting in the center of the subterranean lake, lay the monumental, glowing skeleton of a beast whose skull alone was the size of a three-story building.
A dragon.
Pure, ancient energy radiated from its bones, washing over the water, soaking into Nex's bruised, broken body like liquid ice.
Beep.
The dark screen flickered to life before his eyes, red text cutting through the gloom.
Location Identified: Maysthe Spatial Rift - Sector 0 (Emerald Isle)
Chakra Synchronization Rate: 26%
Warning: Unassisted human survival probability in Sector 0 is 0.01%.
Nex wiped the blood and lake water from his face, looking up at the towering skeleton, then down at his small, trembling hands. He was a five-year-old orphan trapped in the throat of an ancient, untamed world. No hunters. No squads. No John to hide behind.
A slow, harsh breath escaped his lips.
"Point zero one percent," Nex muttered, his voice echoing hollowly against
the ancient stone. "Better than zero."