He spent an hour writing the announcement.
Then he deleted it and spent another forty minutes writing a different one.
Then he deleted that too and stared at the blank text field for a while.
The problem, he had found, was not knowing what to say — the facts of the situation were clear enough. The problem was tone. Every version he wrote either sounded insane or sounded like a government PSA, and the situation was too strange for either register to survive contact with actual human beings.
He didn't want to frighten people unnecessarily. He also didn't want to understate the degree to which the situation required immediate action. He didn't want to sound like he was panicking. He also didn't want to sound calm in a way that would make people think it was a hoax.
In the end, he wrote six sentences. Then he looked at them for a long time and decided they would have to do, because the countdown was now at twenty-nine days, twenty-one hours, and he had been sitting at this kitchen table since seven in the morning.
He did not send the announcement yet.
Instead, he put his coat on, walked down the six flights of stairs to the street, and opened a portal.
He picked a location carefully: the large pedestrian plaza two blocks from his building, the one with the concrete benches and the permanent food stalls and the mural on the parking structure wall. It was nearly noon. There would be people around. He wanted people around — not because he needed witnesses, but because the whole point of what he was doing was to get people through the portal, and a plaza was better than a side street.
He stood at the north end of the plaza, in the open space near the mural, and spread his hands.
The portal opened in the air in front of him.
It was larger than the one he'd made in his apartment — roughly three meters tall, two meters wide, the edges softly luminous, the through-view showing the stone floor and warm torchlight of the Neutral Zone. It made no sound. It emitted no heat. It simply existed, serene and impossible, in the middle of an ordinary city plaza on a Tuesday in October.
Kael stepped back from it and waited.
It took eleven seconds for the first person to notice.
A man in his fifties, eating a takeaway lunch on one of the concrete benches, looked up from his phone, looked at the portal, looked back at his phone, and then looked at the portal again with the expression of someone whose brain is performing emergency software updates.
A woman walking past with a shopping bag stopped mid-step.
A pair of university students coming from the direction of the coffee stall walked directly toward the portal and then slowed, and then stopped, standing close together the way people stand when they're trying to decide if they're frightened.
Within two minutes, a crowd of roughly thirty people had gathered at a radius of about four meters from the portal, close enough to see through it clearly, far enough to feel like they had not fully committed to any particular reaction.
Kael stood to one side.
"What is it?" someone asked. Not to Kael specifically — to the air, to the crowd.
"Some kind of screen," someone else offered.
"It's not a screen. You can see through it — look, the light moves."
A child, maybe seven or eight, walked directly up to the portal's threshold and stuck his hand through it. His hand disappeared on one side and reappeared in the Neutral Zone — Kael could see it, a small arm extending from the air into the stone antechamber — and the child yanked it back immediately with an expression of pure delight and terror.
"It's real," the child reported loudly to the crowd.
The crowd received this information with some difficulty.
Kael checked the system window that floated at the edge of his vision. The portal was stable. The Neutral Zone was empty — no one had gone through yet, no demons could come out. He looked at the assembled faces: confused, frightened, curious, already reaching for phones to film.
He cleared his throat.
"My name is Kael Duren," he said. He had not prepared a speech for this moment. He discovered, at this juncture, that he probably should have. "I know this looks — I know what this looks like. I need you to listen to me for about two minutes before you call anyone."
The crowd's attention, to his mild surprise, appeared to be available. People filming him continued filming, but they were listening.
"There is a dungeon," he said. "It's inside my body. It connects to something called the Infernal Plane — twelve floors. Demons. Each floor has a timer, and if the timer runs out before the floor's boss is killed, the demons come through into this world and —" He paused. He had promised himself he wouldn't lead with the apocalyptic part. "And things get very bad, very fast."
Silence.
Someone in the back said: "Are you having some kind of episode?"
"I'm not," Kael said. "I understand how this sounds. The portal is right there. It goes to a Neutral Zone — it's safe, no demons can reach it. You can go through and come back. You'll get assigned a class, and you'll be able to —"
"A class?" the woman with the shopping bag said.
"Like a character class. Warrior, Mage, that kind of thing. You get it automatically when you enter. The system assigns it based on — I don't fully understand the aptitude assessment, the documentation wasn't specific about the mechanism."
More silence. More filming. A man in a high-visibility jacket had appeared at the edge of the crowd, presumably having been alerted by someone, and was speaking into a radio.
Kael looked at the portal. Through it, the Neutral Zone waited — vast and quiet and torchlit.
"I'm going to open more of these," he said. "Across the city, across the country, eventually everywhere. I have twenty-nine days. I need people to go through. I need a lot of people to go through. Because the demons don't care how many of us there are, they're going to keep coming regardless, and more people means more fighters, meaning a better chance that we —" He stopped himself again.
The child who had stuck his hand through the portal was now tugging on his mother's sleeve. She was looking at the portal with an expression Kael couldn't read.
"I'll go," said a voice from the back of the crowd.
Heads turned. The speaker was a young woman, maybe twenty, in a university sweatshirt, backpack on both shoulders, dark braids pulled back. She was looking at the portal with an expression of focused consideration, not fear.
"I'll go through," she said again, louder. She pushed through the crowd to the front. She looked at Kael. "Is it really safe?"
"The Neutral Zone is safe. You can come back the same way you went in."
She nodded. She turned to face the portal.
She stepped through.
The crowd watched. For a moment she was visible on the other side — standing in the stone antechamber of the Neutral Zone, looking around at the space, her head turning slowly as she took in the scale of it. Then a second system interface appeared above her head — faint, the way they appeared for non-Guardians — and Kael could see, at a distance, the text:
CLASS ASSIGNED: SCOUT
She turned around and stepped back through the portal.
"There's a huge stone room," she reported to the crowd. "And I got a class. It says Scout." She looked down at her hand, where the system had apparently generated a character status window visible only to her. "My name is on it. I have stats."
She looked up. She was smiling, slightly, in a way that didn't fully match the seriousness of the situation but was, Kael thought, probably more persuasive than anything he'd said.
The crowd began, cautiously, to move forward.
Kael stood to one side of the portal and watched people go through — one at a time first, then in pairs, then in a steady stream. Some came back immediately. Some didn't come back at all, which meant, he assumed, they had decided to stay. The man in the high-visibility jacket had stopped radioing and was now standing at the portal's edge, looking through at the Neutral Zone with an expression of careful, professional assessment.
Kael checked the contribution counter in his system window.
It read: 0.
No demons had been killed yet. The floors hadn't been engaged. The counter was still at zero.
But there were thirty-seven people in the Neutral Zone, and more coming every minute as the crowd grew, and somewhere in the city there were cameras filming the portal and sending the footage to servers and the footage was moving across the internet and Kael's phone was ringing with a number he didn't recognize.
He let it ring.
He watched the portal.
He thought: this is how it starts.