Rain smeared the city lights into long, trembling rivers. Below them, in an abandoned subway terminal repurposed as a low-tier gate, six hunters moved like tired ghosts — boots whispering on cracked tiles, breath visible in the cold recycled air.
Rayan Tora was at the rear, dragging a crate of medkits. His E-rank badge felt heavier than metal. The team leader, Jace — a gruff C-rank with a scar across his left eyebrow — gestured toward the gate: two overlapping rifts, colors bleeding like oil on water.
"Double gate," Jace said. His voice held the brittle humor of someone who'd read the briefing one too many times. "Never liked multiples."
Rayan forced a smile. He'd done support runs like this for three years: setting traps, patching wounds, holding the light when stronger hunters pushed forward. He was small, unremarkable — the kind of person enemies underestimated until it was too late.
They stepped through.
The first world hit like acid and thunder at the same time. The air smelled of iron and static. Shadowed silhouettes moved between broken pillars — creatures with too many joints, eyes like broken lanterns. The hunters split, practiced motions of blade and gun and rune, and the fight unfolded with mechanical brutality.
Rayan kept to his role. Sling medkits, throw down a patch-glow, check the runic stabilizer on Jace's shoulder. He watched, always watching, cataloguing how the light fell across muscles, how death came cleanly when it came. He preferred observation to glory.
Then the other gate pulsed.
It was not a second set of enemies; it was a different world stacking on top of the first. Gravity stuttered. Sound smeared into a long, low keening that crawled under bone. Monsters from both sides bled into one another — shapes merging, spawning something new and wrong.
"Split!" Jace barked. "We go left and right— Rayan, fall back!"
Rayan stumbled as the ground bucked. He saw Miri, a B-rank, fall as a tendonized arm split across her chest. He heard Kento scream, then nothing. Time dilated; each breath took years. The team's formation disintegrated like puppets with cut strings.
Rayan reached for a medkit and his hand closed on empty air. The world narrowed to a tunnel of sound and a singe of white-hot pain in his chest. He tasted copper and realization at once: they were trapped between two realities. A double gate was not supposed to overlap — the Association's manuals scolded, warned, but did not prepare.
He saw Jace thrown against a column, eyes hollow. The leader mouthed something: "Run——"
A beast that had two faces — one insectile, one human — lunged. Jace shoved Rayan as a knife of shadow stabbed through the leader's side. Rayan hit the tiles and saw, above him, the ceiling seam blink open like a wound. Light fell through that seam and into him.
For one awful heartbeat the world peeled. Then everything stopped.
Silence folded like a closed book. Rayan lay on his back staring at the ceiling's graffiti, chest heaving, the taste of blood and ozone on his tongue. Bodies groaned around him. Smoke curled from torn flesh. The double gate's overlapping colors dimmed to a sickly gray.
A voice, impossible and metallic and intimate, whispered in his head.
Rayan jolted, panic flaring — but the voice was not in his ears. It sat behind his thoughts, placing a cool hand on a fevered forehead.
"Host: Rayan Tora.""Status: Alive.""Parameter: Undefined.""Mission: Survive. Complete tasks to stabilize."
He tried to speak aloud, but words failed. All he could manage was a ragged inhale. He saw, as if projected on the inside of his eyelids, a window of text — sharp, clinical, impossible:
[SHADOW PROTOCOL — HOST INTERFACE] Name: Rayan Tora Level: 1 Class: None Health: 12/12 Stamina: 8/10 Shadow Data: 0.0% Active Quest: Survive the Double Gate Dungeon Reward: SYSTEM INITIALIZATION Penalty: TERMINATION (If Host Dies, Protocol Fails)
The medkits next to him blurred. A familiar hand — Miri's — fumbled for his shoulder. "Rayan?" she breathed. Her face was pale, eyes wide with a horror that did not match a human's fear; it was the blank look of someone who'd witnessed impossibility.
"Get up," Jace croaked, blood foaming at his lips. His voice was irrelevantly steady. "We leave. Now."
They tried to move as one ragged unit, but the monsters re-formed as the gates tried to unlink — claws where wings had been, teeth made of clock-hands. Hunters fell like splinters. Rayan felt the protocol's window pulse warm against his skull.
It offered a single option.
Rayan's fingers twitched. He had no right to choose. He didn't even know what choosing meant.
But someone — some small, animal part of him that had kept breathing through every support run, every empty paycheck, every dark corridor — wanted to live.
He pressed Y.
A sound like glass breaking inside his chest. The smell of cold soil. The world contracted to a pinpoint of blackness where all pain pooled and rewove. He saw hands — not his own — reaching up from the floor. They were the shadows of things that hadn't yet finished dying. They coalesced into a silhouette behind him: a figure that belonged to no race but to the pattern of movement itself.
It moved with the fluid certainty of a hunter. It struck the nearest beast and tore through sinew like wind through paper. Rayan's knees locked as waves of borrowed knowledge flooded him — the weight of a blade in a hand that wasn't his, timing that belonged to someone else's reflexes.
Jace looked at him, eyes widening in a way Rayan had never seen. "What— what did you—"
The darkness behind Rayan bowed slightly, like a soldier acknowledging a commander. It had no face, and yet Rayan felt an echo of a voice that the protocol had not spoken aloud.
Five minutes. Enough to stagger out. Enough to survive, maybe. But as the shadow moved, something else rippled through Rayan's mind — a warning he couldn't parse.
Rayan staggered to his feet. Around him, the battlefield re-sketched itself. Hunters who had been dying before now breathed with frayed lungs. The Recluse moved with him, as if part of his body but somehow apart.
They escaped the gate. They spilled into the cold drizzle of the city, every step a small victory. The Association teams arrived like vultures, shouting orders and sealing the rift with practiced motions. Cameras flashed. Radios crackled. Jace clutched his wound and met Rayan's eyes with an expression that tasted like both accusation and awe.
"You're alive," he said. It was not a question.
Rayan could not answer. The protocol's window lingered behind his vision like a scar.
[LOG] Host: Rayan Tora Event: Double Gate Survival — System Active Notes: Unknown class activation. Shadow data acquired: 0.4%
He should have felt triumph. Instead he felt hollowed, like someone had carved a room inside him and left a humming machine.
Somewhere, beneath that hum, the protocol watched — patient, hungry, and already planning its next move.
Rayan let the rain wash the blood from his hands and wiped his mouth with the heel of his palm. He thought of the face of the woman who waited at home — a sister whose treatments ate what little money he scraped. He thought of the way the shadow had moved, of the ease with which a stranger's skill had become his own.
He had wanted to just survive that week. He had wanted nothing more than another paycheck and a chance to sleep.
Now the system had chosen.
Outside, the city thrummed oblivious. Inside him, something ancient and digital unfurled. He would have to learn to live with it — and the price it demanded.
The first thing it demanded was that he never, ever be the same again.