The First Opening destroyed everything.
No warning. No countdown. Portals split open across the world one ordinary morning, monsters poured through them, and the life that existed before that day never came back.
Cities burned. Millions died in the first week. Governments collapsed trying to fight something no weapon had ever been built to stop. But the monsters couldn't hold.
Something about this world broke them down and their bodies gave out, the portals sealed themselves, and what remained were the ones that stayed open and the creatures that had survived long enough to adapt.
Humanity rebuilt around both.
Then eighteen years ago the Second Opening began. The dormant portals started pulling. Anyone who got too close vanished. Search teams vanished too.
Eventually the world stopped sending teams and started building memorials for people with no bodies.
Then the vanished came back.
Not all of them. But the ones who did weren't the same. Something on the other side had changed them — power that normal humans didn't carry, couldn't carry. They called it Awakening. The returnees built Academies, built the rank system, spent eighteen years preparing a generation for what everyone prayed wasn't coming.
Now the readings were shifting again.
***
"Listen carefully."
Instructor Moon didn't raise her voice. She never needed to.
Survivor of the second Opening. Real field work – not the cleanup after, the actual containment. She had gone into the keldran Sector with the nine people and walked out alone. The scar along her jaw was the only part of the story anyone without classified clearance would ever know.
"Those of you fall today will live civilian lives. Regular jobs, works. Regular futures." She paused. "The portals are opening again, and they don't care about any of that."
She stepped aside. Even though she was an elderly woman, her curves were stunning when she walked. smoother and sharper.
The Awakening System console sat on the raised platform.Chest-high. Smooth black casing. Two handprint panels, one vertical display screen about it – currently dark.
"Place your hands on the panels. The system scans your core energy, if you have awakened, it will respond and shows your rank and class." Se didn't finish the other half. Nobody needed her to.
Aaron sat near the middle of the hall and started at the console.
It didnt look like somthing that ended futures.
He looked at his hands instead.
"If the Third Opening comes and I still have nothing," he thought.
Months of running that thoughts. Always the same answer. No power. No rank. Practice scans last year - null every time. He'd accepted it and built the only thing available to him. Information, portal incident reports, pattern data. Analysis his ranked classmates never bothered with because they didn't needed to.
It wasn't power. But it was his best he could do.
Crane Aldis went first.
[ RANK: A – CLASS: IRONWALL ]
The room murmured. Expected.
A girl named Mira got D-rank, shaking her hands she walked back to her seat looking like someone who had just been told a wound wasn't fatal. Aaron understood that feeling without needing to name it.
Then Edrick stood at the console for fifteen seconds while the screen stayed blank.
The instructor said next. Edrick walked back with his head down and with a heartbreak. Conversations around him resumed before he even sat down.
Aaron watched and felt something cold settle in his chest.
"That's what it looks like from our here," he thought.
Marcus Hale placed his hands on the screen like he was doing the console a favour.
[ RANK:A - CLASS: BLADESTROM ]
The room erupted, Red light flooded the platform, deep and pulsing. Even Moon nodded.
Marcus walked back past Aaron's row without looking over. Not deliberately. Aaron just didn't exist in the category of things worth registering.
"Everything he wants, he gets." Aaron murmured quietly in his mind.
Aaron filled it away and moved on. That was the only thing to do with information that couldnt be changed.
Lena was four rows to his left. He'd noticed when he walked in and two years of sitting near her in class had made it automatic.
A month ago he'd approached her after a lecture. Said it straight because he'd never known how to do it any other way.
She listened. Then — "I don't think so."
Not mean. Just finished.
It was fine. It was nothing.
He almost believed that. He didn't look at her now.
More names. More results. Two more failures walked back wearing that specific stillness and people trying to take up as little space as possible in a room that had just decided they didn't count.
Something tightened in Aaron's chest watching them.
He let it sit. Didn't feed it.
"Aaron Emegrey."
He stood.
Twenty-two steps to the platform, like he counted without deciding to - his uncle's voice in the back of his head, where it always was."Count what you can control."
He stopped in front of the console.
Up close the surface had a don't pulse to it. Not visible a vibration at the edge of sensation, the kind you dismiss as nerves if you weren't paying attention.
He placed both hands on the screen.
The system hummef. A sacn-pulse ran up through his palms, itno his wrists, up his forearms.
And stopped. Like signal hitting a wall.
Come on.
Five seconds. Display blank.
COME ON.
The pulse ran again. Hit the same wall. And then – faint, barely there and somthing on the other side shifted. Not power. Not rank. Just a pressure, like a locked room that wasn't empty.
That's real. Thats–
Ten seconds. Still dark.
He heard the room give up on him before he saw it. Whispers restarting. Chairs adjusting. The Aide's pen scratching to the next name.
Behind him, not even bothered to be quiet – "Still trying."
Someone laughed
He kept his hands on the screen.
It's here. I know it's—
"Emegrey. That's enough."
The sensation VANISHED instantly. Like it had never existed.
He started at the the blank screen and for one second just one and something cracked open inside him. Hot and sudden and raw.
Not sadness. Something angrier than sadness, something that had been building for months and had nowhere to go.
Two years. Two years of this and this fucking screen didn't even flicker.
"Awakening failed. Next–"
He walked back.
Two girls as he passed, not lowering their voices:
"Third null today."
"Did you see how long he stood there?"
Don't stop. Don't react. Give them nothing.
He found his seat. Sat down with grief.
Lena didn't look at him. He had know she wouldn't. He looked at his hands anayway, like they might explain something.
The pulse reached somethinh. I felt it.
Or you felt what you needed to feel.
He didn't choose between those yet. Choosing without evidence was a mistake he couldn't afford.
If the Third Opening comes—
He let it himself finish it for once.
I'll be here. Null. No power no skills. Still standing.
It wasn't hope. It was just the only positio. Left. So he took it.
***
Theren was waiting by the south exit.
F-rank. Forty-one. Twelve years of active portal work at a rank the statistics called a death sentence. Scarred hands. Left eye slightly slower than the right.
Seven-person team. Mid-tier portal. Six dead in under four minutes. Theren had carried two to the exit before accepting they were gone. Then walked out alone.
Still here. That was the only number that mattered today.
He looked at Aaron when he came through the door. Read everything. Didn't ask.
They walked.
"It's not over," Theren said after a block.
"I know."
"Not a phrase."
"I know, uncle."
One nod. They kept moving.
Aaron didn't tell him about the sensation.
Not yet. Saying it out loud made it a claim, and he didn't have the evidence for it yet.
But he didn't stop thinking about it.
***
That night, three dormant portal sites in the east spiked simultaneously.
Pre-opening pressure fluctuations. Aaron knew the pattern memorized the behavioral data eighteen months ago when it was the only thing available to memorize.
Not open. Not yet. Just waiting.
He mapped them against six previous events from the past three weeks. Stepped back.
His stomach dropped.
Not random. The coordinates were too precise, the spacing too deliberate. A shape spread across the eastern region that automated systems had completely missed because they only measured danger levels.
He placed his hand over the center point.
The center was here. The city. The Academy.
You're not random. You're aimed.
Somewhere outside a pressure drop hit his ears like the moment before thunder. His window rattled once. No wind.
Aaron stared at his map in the silence.
Something was waking up.
And nobody else was paying attention.
**
Author's Note: If we hit 50+ collections, I'll drop a 5-chapter mass release full of the foreshadowing and reveals which you all will ask for so, Want that mega-drop? Vote for mass release!