The rain hadn't stopped for three days.
Private First Class Lin Night pressed his spine against the sandbag wall and watched the water cascade off his helmet brim in a steady curtain. Camp Osan hummed with the usual grey monotony of a Tuesday morning—boots squelching through mud, the distant bark of a drill sergeant losing his patience with a fresh rotation, the clatter of mess trays from the chow hall. Ordinary sounds. The last ordinary sounds any of them would hear for a long time.
He was cleaning his K2 rifle for the third time that morning, not because it needed it, but because his hands needed something to do. Twenty-two years old. Eighteen months into his mandatory service. A linguistics student from Busan who could disassemble a 5.56mm assault rifle in fourteen seconds and reassemble it in nineteen, but still flinched at thunder.
The first Gate opened in São Paulo.
---
It happened at 0347 hours local time—0547 Korean Standard. Lin heard about it the way everyone heard about everything: someone's phone buzzed in the barracks, then another, then every screen in the building lit up simultaneously.
Corporal Dae-jung held his phone out with a trembling hand, the screen cracked across one corner. The footage was shaky, filmed from the twentieth floor of some apartment building. Below, Avenida Paulista—one of the busiest streets in the southern hemisphere—had split open. Not cracked. Not cratered by some underground explosion. *Split*, like a wound in the fabric of the world itself, a vertical seam of light so white it burned out the phone's camera sensor every few frames.
Then the seam widened.
And things came through.
"*Mãe de Deus*—" the person filming whispered, and the audio distorted as the first creature shouldered its way into reality.
It was an insect. That was the only word that applied, and it applied poorly. Imagine a centipede the length of a city bus, its carapace the color of dried blood, with mandibles that spread wider than a man was tall. It moved with a horrible fluid undulation, hundreds of legs clicking against asphalt in a sound like hail on a tin roof. Behind it came another. And another. And behind those, something worse—a bloated, lumbering thing that resembled a tick swollen to the size of a delivery truck, its translucent abdomen sloshing with dark fluid.
The centipede-thing reached the nearest car—a white sedan stopped in traffic—and its mandibles punched through the driver's side door like the metal was wet paper. The scream was brief. What came out of the car afterward wasn't recognizable as a person anymore. Just red. Just pieces, dragged across pavement, stuffed into that churning maw while the legs kept ticking, kept moving, reaching for the next vehicle.
The footage cut out twelve seconds later when the person filming started running.
Within the hour, similar Gates tore open in Nairobi. In Manchester. In Osaka.
By noon, the death toll had passed sixty thousand and was climbing in lurching, incomprehensible jumps—ten thousand here, fifteen thousand there, each number representing a district or neighborhood that had simply been *consumed*.
Lin sat on the edge of his bunk and watched the world end on a six-inch screen.
---
"Listen up! I don't care if you slept, I don't care if you ate, I don't care if your mother called you crying—you are *soldiers* of the Republic of Korea and you will act like it!"
Master Sergeant Kwon Jae-sun had a voice like gravel being fed through a wood chipper. He stalked the length of the briefing room with his hands clasped behind his back, his jaw set so tight the muscles in his neck stood out like cables. Behind him, a projector threw grainy images onto a pull-down screen—satellite photography, mostly, marked up with red circles and annotations in Hangul.
"As of 0900 this morning, seventeen Gates have been confirmed worldwide. Three are within the Asia-Pacific theater. The Osaka Gate is the nearest to our position—approximately seven hundred kilometers across the Korea Strait." He paused, letting that distance sink in. Seven hundred kilometers. Close enough that it mattered. "No Gate has yet appeared on the Korean peninsula. Command's position is that this changes nothing about our readiness posture. My position is that Command is full of shit and we need to be ready yesterday."
A nervous ripple of laughter moved through the room. Kwon didn't smile.
"Here's what we know." He clicked a remote. The image changed to a still frame from combat footage—actual military engagement, not civilian phone cameras. Chilean army, based on the uniforms. A column of armored vehicles faced off against a swarm of the centipede-creatures in what looked like a suburb of Santiago. Muzzle flashes strobed from mounted .50 caliber guns. "Conventional firearms are effective. These things are not bulletproof. They are not magic. A 5.56 round will punch through their carapace at standard engagement range. A 7.62 will drop the smaller ones. Confirmed kills on the larger variants require heavy caliber—twelve-seven millimeter minimum—or explosive ordnance."
He clicked again. A different creature now. This one looked like a wasp, if a wasp were the size of a German Shepherd and had six wings instead of four, each one veined with something that pulsed a sickly bioluminescent green. It was pinned to the ground by a steel rod, clearly dead, being examined by someone in a hazmat suit.
"The fliers are a different problem. Small-arms fire works, but their exoskeletons have a layered chitin structure that can deflect standard ball ammunition at oblique angles. Armor-piercing is recommended. AP or incendiary." He looked out at the rows of young faces before him. "Shotguns with tungsten slugs have also been effective at close range. Don't let it get to close range."
Another click. The tick-creature. In this image, it had been killed by what appeared to be a direct hit from a tank shell, its abdomen ruptured across a wide radius, the dark fluid inside it staining the earth in a perfect circle. Wherever the fluid touched, the ground looked *wrong*—discolored, pitted, like acid had been poured over it.
"The bloated ones. Designation: Gorgers. Do *not* engage at close range under any circumstances. The fluid they carry is a corrosive compound—pH somewhere below battery acid. One of these things pops near you, you are dead. Engage with vehicle-mounted weapons, RPGs, or directed air support. If none of that is available, run. That's not a joke. That is a tactical recommendation. You run."
Kwon set the remote down and faced them.
"Draw your assignments from your squad leaders. Full combat load. AP rounds will be distributed from the armory—first come, first served until the next supply shipment. Dismissed."
Chairs scraped. Bodies moved. Lin stood and felt the weight of the moment settle across his shoulders like a physical thing.
Beside him, Private Yoon So-ra—the only person in their squad who could outshoot Lin on the range—shoved her chair back and blew a breath through her teeth. "Bugs," she said flatly. "Giant bugs. That's what kills us. Not North Korea. Not China. *Bugs*."
"We're not dead yet," Lin said.
"Key word being *yet*."
---
The Gate opened over Camp Osan at 1647 hours on a Thursday.
No warning. No seismic activity, no atmospheric disturbance, no useful preamble whatsoever. One moment the sky above the eastern perimeter was nothing but grey cloud and rain. The next, reality peeled apart like wet cloth and that terrible white light bled through, so bright it triggered the base's automated alarm systems before a single human eye had even registered what was happening.
Lin was in the motor pool when the sirens started screaming.
He moved on training before his brain fully caught up—rifle off his shoulder, magazine seated, charging handle racked, safety off. The muscle memory was there. The calm was not. His heart was a fist beating against the inside of his ribs. His mouth tasted like copper.
He sprinted out of the motor pool and into chaos.
The Gate hung above the eastern fence line like a wound in the sky, maybe forty meters up, roughly oval, its edges rippling and distorting the air around it the way heat rises off summer asphalt. Things were already falling out of it. The centipede-creatures—Command had designated them Myriads—hit the ground in coils and immediately began to unravel, their hundreds of legs finding purchase on mud and concrete alike. Five. Ten. Twenty of them, pouring out in a grotesque cascade.
And behind them, descending on buzzing wings that made Lin's teeth ache, the fliers. Dozens of them, spiraling down in wide helical patterns, their bioluminescent veins painting the rain green.
"EASTERN PERIMETER! ALL UNITS TO THE EASTERN PERIMETER!"
Kwon's voice erupted from every speaker on base. Lin was already running toward it.
He reached the defensive line just as the first K6 heavy machine gun opened up. The sound was enormous—a deep, ripping *BRRRRRRT* that shook the air in Lin's chest. Tracer rounds streaked across the grey afternoon in bright orange lines and punched into the leading Myriad just as it crested the perimeter fence. The effect was immediate and savage. Chitin exploded outward in shards. Pale ichor sprayed in fans from exit wounds the size of fists. The creature's front third simply *disintegrated* under the sustained fire, and its remaining body sections thrashed wildly, legs scrabbling at nothing, before it collapsed into the mud and was still.
"They die!" someone was screaming. "They fucking *die!*"
More guns joined in. The defensive positions along the eastern wall had been reinforced over the past week—sandbag emplacements, concertina wire, and four vehicle-mounted K6 guns covering overlapping fields of fire. They opened up in a staggered rhythm, each gunner picking targets, and the effect on the advancing swarm was devastating.
Myriads burst apart under heavy-caliber fire, their segmented bodies breaking into twitching chunks that littered the killing ground. Lin dropped to a knee behind the nearest sandbag wall, shouldered his K2, flicked the selector to semi-auto, and acquired a target—a flier banking low over the fence, its mandibles already spread wide.
He'd loaded AP. The round punched through the thing's thorax and exited in a puff of greenish mist. It spiraled, one wing crumpling, and hit the mud thirty meters out with a wet *crunch*. It tried to rise. Lin put two more rounds through its head. It stopped trying.
"Nnngh—" Yoon was beside him, prone, her rifle barking in crisp, measured shots. Every third round found a flier. She wasn't missing. She never missed. "On your two o'clock, Lin—Gorger!"
He swiveled. There, lumbering through the gap in the fence that the first wave of Myriads had torn open. Bloated. Enormous. Its translucent belly sloshing with that dark corrosive filth, its stubby legs somehow supporting its obscene mass. It moved with a slow, purposeful gait, like it knew it didn't need to be fast. Like it knew what it carried was enough.
"GORGER ON THE EAST APPROACH! RPG! I NEED AN RPG ON THAT LINE!"
Corporal Dae-jung materialized from somewhere to Lin's left, an M72 LAW already extended on his shoulder. He didn't hesitate. The rocket shrieked out of the tube with a sound like tearing silk and covered the distance in less than a second.
The Gorger detonated.
The explosion was double—the warhead's initial blast followed immediately by the rupture of the creature's abdomen. A geyser of dark fluid erupted upward and outward in a wide fan, hissing where it struck earth, dissolving concertina wire into nothing, eating smoking holes in the sandbags at the outermost positions. The stench hit a moment later—acrid, chemical, like burning plastic mixed with something organic and rotten.
"Back! Back from the splash zone!"
They fell back six meters. The acid ate its way into the ground where they'd been kneeling, turning solid earth into a bubbling, steaming soup.
But the Gorger was dead. And the gate above was thinning—its edges contracting, the white light dimming, the flow of creatures slowing to a trickle. The last few Myriads that dropped through were cut apart before they hit the ground, caught in overlapping fields of fire from three machine gun positions that had dialed in their trajectories.
The final flier took a burst from a K6 that tore it nearly in half. Its two pieces tumbled out of the air and landed on opposite sides of the motor pool roof with twin thuds.
Then the Gate closed.
The silence that followed was so sudden and so total that Lin thought he'd gone deaf. Then the rain reasserted itself—the steady hiss of water on mud, on metal, on the broken bodies of alien things that had no business existing.
He looked down at his hands. They were steady. The rifle was warm against his palms.
Yoon stood up beside him, mud streaking her face, her eyes wide and bright with something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite exhilaration. Something in between. Something new.
"Forty-three seconds," she said.
"What?"
"From the first shot to the Gate closing. Forty-three seconds." She ejected her magazine, checked it, slapped it back in. "That was the easy one, Lin."
Across the base, Kwon was already barking orders—casualty reports, ammunition counts, perimeter assessment. The machine guns were being reloaded. Medics sprinted toward two soldiers who'd caught acid splash on their legs and were writhing in the mud, their screams thin and animal.
Lin looked east, past the carnage, past the dissolving fence line, toward the horizon where the clouds hung low and dark and featureless.
Forty-three seconds. Minimal casualties. A textbook repulsion, as far as fighting interdimensional insects could be textbook.
But So-ra was right.
That was the easy one.