I had now been in the rift for the past six months, according to my calculations.

At this point nothing in the rift scared me anymore, not the creatures, not starvation, not the thought of never finding my way back.

Cause I had the system now. And I didn’t care where it came from.

Only one thing was in my mind.

I had the ability to get home myself, I just had to evolve it.

And evolve it I did.

⸻

The gate opened on the Undersea district waterfront at 3 a.m.

Not from the outside — there was no shimmer, no guild team, no Melnos residue announcing itself to whatever monitoring systems the city ran on the industrial belt at that hour. 

It opened from within. 

A tear in the dimensional fabric approximately two meters tall, edges ragged in a way that gate edges never were, like something had been forced rather than permitted.

But let’s go back a bit.

⸻

The system had announced it three days earlier.

[“Space and Time — Stage 1, Nascent: evolving.”]

[“Progress: 87%.”]

I’d been fighting for the entire six month.

Every ability climbing through its stages in the only way Vireon allowed — through combat, through survival, through the accumulated weight of a dimension that had spent half a year trying to kill me and had nothing to show for it.

By the end of month two the Stalkers had stopped being terrifying and started being practice.

By month four I was going deeper into the Rift than I’d mapped, finding creature types that didn’t have classifications yet, pushing every ability further because further was the only direction that mattered.

[“Lightning — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

[“Wind — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

[“Fire — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

The system marked each milestone cleanly, clinically, adding them to the catalogue with the same tone it used for everything — neither congratulatory nor indifferent, just present. 

Witnessing. 

I’d come to find that quality reliable in a way that most things in my life had never been.

[“Super Strength — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

[“Speed — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

[“Iron Body — Stage 3, Forged: active. Passive durability significantly increased.”]

By month five I had stopped counting days. 

The rhythm of the Rift had become so familiar that counting felt redundant — I knew where I was by the quality of the light, by which creatures were moving, by the specific way the bio-luminescent canopy shifted before rain.

I knew this dimension the way you know a place that has tried to destroy you long enough that you’ve learned all its methods.

It had run out of new ones.

[“Verdict — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

[“Gravity — Stage 3, Forged: achieved.”]

[“Alchemy — Stage 3, Forged: achieved”]
.
Space and Time was the last to climb. 

The most expensive ability in my catalogue — two uses per day, devastating Vireon drain even at Stage One — meant I used it sparingly, strategically, only when survival demanded it.

 Short range teleportation in the middle of fights I couldn’t win any other way. 

Blinking past creature strikes that would have ended things. 

The system tracked each use with the same quiet diligence it tracked everything else.

[“Space and Time — Stage 1, Nascent: progress 43%.”]

[“Space and Time — Stage 1, Nascent: progress 61%”]

[“Space and Time — Stage 1, Nascent: progress 79%.”]

On the one hundred and seventy-third day the system spoke unprompted.

[“Space and Time — Stage 1, Nascent: evolving.”]

[“Progress: 94%.”]

[“Note: Dimensional manipulation threshold approaching.”]

[“Gate generation may become accessible at Stage 2.”]

I stopped moving.

The Rift was quiet around me — deep night, bio-luminescent flora dimmed to its lowest pulse, nothing hunting within the radius I could feel through Presence Erasure.

I stood completely still and read the notification again.

Gate generation may become accessible.

I had been in this dimension for one hundred and seventy-three days.

My mother had been alone for one hundred and seventy-three days.

I found the largest concentration of aggressive creatures I could locate within a four hour radius and I fought without stopping until the system chimed.

[“Space and Time — Stage 1, Nascent → Stage 2, Kindled.”]

[“New capability unlocked: Dimensional tear — limited range gate generation.”]

[“Vireon cost: Extreme. Daily limit applies.”]

[“Warning: Untested application. Proceed with caution.”]

I didn’t proceed with caution.

I stood on the soft ground of the Rift with my hands raised and I pushed — not physically, not through any of the other abilities, but through the Space and Time awareness that had been growing in me for six months, the sense of dimensional fabric that I’d been stretching and folding and blinking through in small ways all this time. 

I pushed at the boundary between here and home and I felt it resist, then I pushed harder and the system screamed a warning in the back of my mind—

[“Vireon capacity: 12% and falling.”]

[“Recommend immediate cessation—”]

The tear opened.

Ragged. Unstable. 

Nothing like the clean guild gates I’d walked through — this was something forced, something that shouldn’t have been possible, a wound in the fabric of the dimension that poured Eurova night air through it like a exhaled breath.

The smell of salt and machine oil.

The Undersea district.

I stepped through before it could close.

⸻

The waterfront was empty at that hour. 

The gate sealed itself behind me — I felt it go, the Vireon drain hitting like a physical blow, my legs nearly going out from under me.

I caught myself on a concrete barrier and stood there breathing Eurova air for the first time in five months and twenty eight days.

[“Vireon capacity: 3%.”]

[“Critical threshold. Rest immediately.”]

I didn’t rest.

I had a bag on my back containing more crystallized Melnos compounds than most guild teams extracted in a year. 

I had fifteen abilities at Stage Three across the board. 

I had been in a monster dimension for nearly six months and I had survived every single thing it threw at me and I was sixteen years old, and my mother was waiting.

I ran. 

Tried using super speed, but the system warned me not to use it to it’s full extent at stage three.

As I didn’t have enough vireon capacity.

I still ran, not with super speed, but something close.

With the thought of my mother pushing me.

⸻

Then finally, home.

The apartment building looked the same.

That was the first wrong thing — not the building itself but the fact that it looked the same, unchanged, ordinary, when everything else in my understanding of the world had been rewritten from the ground up. 

I took the stairs two at a time and knocked on our door and waited and knocked again.

Nothing.

I checked the handle.

Unlocked — it had never locked properly, the mechanism broken since before I could remember, one of the many things about our life that existed in the category of things we’ll fix when we have money. 

I pushed it open.

The room was empty.

Not abandoned — clean, the way my mother kept things clean regardless of what they cost or how she felt. 

The mattress was made. 

The two cups we owned were on the shelf.

Her coat was gone from the hook by the door.

I stood in the middle of the room we had shared for my entire life and listened to the silence.

Then I went next door.

Mrs. Halvern was seventy and had lived in that building longer than anyone. 

She opened the door in her nightclothes and looked at me, and the color left her face so completely that I reached out to steady her before I knew I was moving.

“Soren,” she said. 

Like my name was something she hadn’t expected to use again.

“Where is she?” I said. “Where’s my mother?”

Mrs. Halvern looked at me for a long moment with an expression I didn’t want to read. 

Then she took my hand in both of hers — small hands, dry and warm — and she told me.

⸻

My mother had waited two weeks after I disappeared into the gate.

Two weeks of not knowing — nobody, no word, no explanation, just her son who had gone out one night and hadn’t come back.

She’d asked everyone she knew. 

Gone to the underworld district and asked questions that a sick woman alone had no business asking. 

Gone to Vanthard’s recruitment office — I learned this later and it cost me something to learn it — and asked if anyone had information about an unemerged sixteen year old who had been seen near the gate district.

They had not been kind to her either.

When asking stopped producing answers, she started looking herself. 

Despite the allergy.

Despite the months of deterioration. 

Despite the fact that walking to the end of the street required rest afterward — she went out into Eurova and looked for me with whatever she had left.

She had collapsed in the Calveth district on a Tuesday morning three months ago.

A stranger had called the emergency services. 

They had taken her to the hospital.

The same hospital.

The same doctors.

They had done what they always did for people like her — the minimum, efficiently, without particular interest in the outcome. 

She had lasted four days. 

The stress of the search had accelerated the allergy’s progression beyond what even palliative care could manage.

She had asked about me until she couldn’t ask anymore.

The city had buried her in the public cemetery on the eastern edge of the residential district, because there was no family to claim her and no money for anything else, and they had marked the grave with the standard stone because that was what the city did and the city did not ask whether it was enough.

Mrs. Halvern was still talking when I left.

⸻

I don’t remember the walk to the cemetery clearly.

I remember the gate — iron, the kind that doesn’t quite close properly, the kind that public funding maintains to a standard slightly below adequate. 

I remember the pre-dawn grey of the sky above the stone markers.

I remember activating Verdict because reading the names carved into stone one by one in the dark would have taken too long and I couldn’t — I could not stand there in the grey light reading names that weren’t hers for longer than necessary.

The ability swept through the cemetery like a held breath.

[“Verdant Rift crystallized Melnos compound — inorganic.”]

[“Standard municipal grave marker — inorganic.”]

[“Standard municipal grave marker — inorganic.”]

[“Standard municipal—”]

I found it in the third row from the back.

[“Standard municipal grave marker — inorganic. Inscription: Jane Kojou.”]

I walked to it.

It was a small stone. 

The kind the city used when there was nobody to choose something better.

Her name was carved cleanly at least — whoever had done it had taken that much care. 

Jane Kojou.

The dates beneath it.

A hyphen between them representing everything she had been and done and endured and hoped for.

I stood in front of it and I waited to feel something I could name.

What came was not nameable.

It started somewhere below my sternum and moved outward — not grief, not anger, not anything with a word attached to it. 

Something structural. 

Something load bearing in my understanding of the world giving way all at once.

I had built the last six months on a single foundation: ‘she is waiting. get home. she is waiting.’ 

And the foundation was gone and everything built on top of it was going with it and I was standing in a public cemetery at dawn watching it fall.

The system registered it before I did.

[“Anomaly detected: Vireon energy — uncontrolled emission.”]

[“Recommend stabilization.”]

The aura came out of me like a shock-wave. 

Not explosive — gradual, the way a held breath releases, Vireon energy bleeding outward in a radius that bent the grass flat and rattled the loose iron of the cemetery gate and made the birds in the trees at the perimeter take flight all at once without knowing why.

I didn’t stabilize it.

I let it go.

I stood at my mother’s grave with my hands at my sides and Vireon pouring off me like heat and I waited for the tears that didn’t come.

I had not cried since I was twelve years old, and I had nothing left to offer this moment except my presence and my silence, and the fact that I had run — I had run through Eurova to get here, because some part of me had believed that if I moved fast enough the thing Mrs. Halvern had told me would not yet be true.

The stone said otherwise.

Jane Kojou.

She had smiled at me the morning I left for the gate. 

The specific smile — not the tired one, not the careful one she wore when she was in pain and didn’t want me to know.

The real one. 

The one that reached her eyes and made everything in its radius feel survivable. 

She had hugged me too — longer than usual, which I hadn’t thought about at the time — her arms around me with the particular warmth of someone who loves you in a way that costs them nothing because it is simply what they are.

I had said I’ll be back soon.

I stood in the cemetery and the Vireon bled outward and my hands didn’t shake and my eyes stayed dry and none of that meant I was fine.

It meant I was something else now.

The decision came quietly. 

Not dramatically — not with the weight of a pronouncement or the heat of a resolution.

Just a door closing in a room I had been standing in for six months, and another one opening.

I had to blame someone for this. And unfortunately for them, they were my pick.

The criminal crew that left me in that gate.

Because of that I had spent six months in a dimension while my mother went out sick into the city looking for her missing son.

Because of that she had pushed herself past whatever margin she’d had left.

Because of that the grave in front of me existed.

They were not the only ones responsible. 

The hospital. 

The nation’s system. 

Harven’s policies and the so called true hero, Calder-- his ideology and every bureaucrat and guild official who had decided that people like Jane Kojou were an acceptable loss in the maintenance of a functional world.

But the crew was first.

They were first because they were closest. 

Because the chain of causation ran through them directly and undeniably.

Because Cael had put his hand on my shoulder and said you’ll be fine and then looked me in the eyes and stepped through a gate without me.

I was going to find them.

All of them.

I looked at my mother’s name one last time.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was on my way,”

“I will get you to a more comfortable place so you can properly rest. Not here.”

Then I turned and walked out of the cemetery and began making plans.