The message came through the channel on a Wednesday evening.

Coded. Untraceable. The kind of communication that looked like background noise to anyone who didn’t know what they were looking at. I read it twice in the three minutes I had between Renn leaving for the communal bathroom and returning, which was sufficient.

<Just acquired a permit for a Class Five gate — at the Keshar industrial sector, eastern coordinates attached. Anomalous resource signature. the guild not willing to attempt clearance, cause of lack of competent personnel, as they are all occupied with other missions. Awaiting your assessment. — C>

I deleted it.

Sat back on my bed and looked at the ceiling.

[“Vireon System: ability stage assessment — current.”]

[“Lightning — Stage 3, Forged: progress 84%.”]

[“Fire — Stage 3, Forged: progress 79%.”]

[“Ice — Stage 3, Forged: progress 81%.”]

[“Super Strength — Stage 3, Forged: progress 76%.”]

[“Gravity — Stage 3, Forged: progress 88%.”]

[“Presence Erasure — Stage 3, Forged: progress 71%.”]

[“Remaining abilities: Stage 3, Forged — varied progress.”]

Two weeks inside Vanthard. Two weeks of calibrated Stage Two lightning in training sessions and carefully managed gate runs that didn’t push anything past what a Kindled level recruit should be capable of. 

Two weeks of watching my ability progress stall because the combat available to me inside Vanthard’s framework was not the kind of combat that evolved Vireon.

Vireon evolved through real danger. Real stakes. The kind of fighting that required everything and still might not be enough.

Vanthard’s training gates were not that.

I looked at the coordinates Calyx had attached.

Class Five. The highest classification in the guild system — gates that even senior hero teams approached with full unit support and extensive pre-entry intelligence. The kind of gate that produced the highest tier resources precisely because almost nobody came back with them. 

The kind of gate I hadn’t been in since the six months that had made me what I was.

My abilities needed it.

And the resources a cleared Class Five would generate — the Ashen Court needed those too.

Renn came back from the bathroom.

“You look like you’re thinking about something,” he said.

“I’m always thinking about something,” I said.

“More than usual,” he said.

I picked up the gate manual from my desk and opened it.

“Get some sleep Renn,” I said.

“jeez, you are no fun at all.” he stated while getting on his bed.

I lay in the dark and calculated timing.

⸻

Thursday. Free period. Fourteen hundred to seventeen hundred hours.

Vanthard’s daily schedule had three free periods distributed across the week — unstructured time that recruits used for personal training, rest, or the social architecture that I had been consistently absent from without generating sufficient suspicion to matter. 

Nobody tracked where you went during free periods. You were simply expected to be present for the scheduled sessions on either side.

Fourteen hundred to seventeen hundred. Three hours.

Space and Time at Stage Two — the ability Calyx had once called insane and then accepted because that was what Calyx did — could open a gate to a pre-specified location in approximately forty seconds. Transit was instantaneous. Closing the gate behind me took another thirty seconds.

Entry and exit: under two minutes total.

Which left two hours and fifty-eight minutes inside the gate each day.

I would need to be back in room 14B — or visibly somewhere in the facility — by seventeen hundred. I set the calculation and filed it and at thirteen fifty-eight on Thursday I walked to the eastern stairwell that Verdict had confirmed as the lowest traffic point in the building during the afternoon free period, activated Presence Erasure at Stage Three, and opened a gate.

The Invisible King stepped through.

⸻

The gate Calyx acquired under the name of the Meridian Consolidated was in an abandoned industrial lot in the Keshar sector — the eastern waterfront, machinery and rust and the specific silence of a place that had been functional once and stopped. 

The dimensional tear was visible from forty meters — a Class Five signature announced itself differently from lower classifications, the shimmer at the edges carrying a depth that lower gates didn’t have. Like looking into something that went further than it should.

I stood in front of it for a moment.

The mask was on. Plain. No markings. A face that wasn’t a face — exactly what Calyx had described the night we’d agreed on it. The Invisible King looking at a gate that no guild team had been willing to enter.

[“Vireon System: gate assessment initiated.”]

[“External Melnos signature: Class 5 confirmed.”]

[“Internal conditions: unknown.”]

[“All abilities: Stage 3, Forged.”]

[“Recommendation: proceed with caution.”]

I went in.

⸻

(DAY ONE)

The dimension on the other side was a Void Rift.

I had read about them. Never been in one. The research descriptions were accurate in the way that descriptions of pain are accurate — technically correct and entirely insufficient for the actual experience.

A Void Rift was not dark. It was the specific absence of light that predated darkness — a dimension where the ambient energy was so dense and so alien that human perception kept trying to find a reference point and kept failing. The ground was solid. The air was breathable. Everything else was wrong in ways that took several minutes to stop reacting to and start reading.

The creatures were wrong too.

The first one found me eleven minutes in.

I heard it before I saw it — which shouldn’t have been possible given Presence Erasure at Stage Three, but Class Five creatures in their native environment operated on sensory systems that didn’t map cleanly onto the abilities designed to counter them. 

It moved through the Void Rift atmosphere like something that had been born in the absence of light and had never needed anything else.

Eight meters. Dense. Moving fast.

I discharged Lightning at Stage Three — Forged level, shaped and directed, the most precise output I could produce at this stage. It hit. The creature absorbed approximately sixty percent of the discharge and kept coming.

“This is not going to be easy.” I said. 

I moved.

Speed at Stage Three put me clear of the first strike — barely. The creature’s limb passed close enough that I felt the air displacement against my mask. I landed, discharged again, Fire this time — Stage Three Forged, a sustained stream rather than a burst — and the creature slowed. Not stopped. Slowed.

It took four minutes to bring it down.

Four minutes for one creature.

[“Vireon System: combat assessment.”]

[“Lightning — Stage 3, Forged: effective at 40% against Class 5 resistance.”]

[“Fire — Stage 3, Forged: effective at 35% against Class 5 resistance.”]

[“Note: significant output required per engagement. Vireon drain elevated.”]

Forty percent effectiveness. I had gone into the six months in the Verdant Rift at Stage One and the creatures there had required everything I had. Now I was at Stage Three and the creatures here were requiring everything I had.

The calibration of danger scaled perfectly with ability level.

I noted this without finding it particularly comforting.

The second creature found me twenty minutes later. This one was larger — not the same type as the first, the Void Rift apparently supporting multiple predator classifications, which the pre-entry intelligence had not specified because the pre-entry intelligence had been assembled by people who hadn’t been inside.

I used Gravity this time — Stage Three, the wide radius control, attempting to pin the creature against the dense atmosphere of the Rift. It worked for approximately eight seconds before the creature’s own energy output disrupted the gravitational field.

Eight seconds was enough to re-position.

Not enough to end it.

The fight lasted six minutes. By the end of it my Vireon reserves had dropped to a level that the system flagged without being asked.

[“Vireon capacity: 34%.”]

[“Recommend withdrawal for recovery.”]

I looked at the Void Rift around me. At the resources — crystalline formations unlike anything I’d seen in lower classification gates, dense with energy that registered on Verdict as something significantly beyond standard Melnos compounds. The kind of resources that would make the Ashen Court’s financial position for the next year irrelevant -- as I like to separate the Ashen Court finances from the Meridian Consolidated.

I hadn’t reached them yet.

I had been in the gate for forty-seven minutes and I had fought two creatures, and my Vireon was at thirty-four percent and curfew was in two hours and three minutes.

[“Recommendation: withdrawal for recovery.”]

I withdrew.

I made my way back to the gate opening on the Keshar lot. I stepped through into the late afternoon Eurova light and stood in the rust and silence of the abandoned industrial space and let the Vireon begin its slow recovery.

I was back in room 14B at sixteen fifty-eight.

Renn looked up from his desk. “Good free period?”

“Fine,” I said.

He looked at me for one second longer than the question warranted. Then he went back to his reading.

I sat on my bed and let the Vireon recover and thought about Class Five resistance ratings and the gap between Stage Three output and what the gate actually required.

[“Day one: 2 creatures neutralized. Resources: not yet reached.”]

[“Vireon capacity: recovering.”]

[“Note: Daily Space & Time usage: 2 of 2”]

[“Progress toward Stage 4: insufficient combat data logged.”]

Insufficient.

Tomorrow I would go deeper.

⸻

(DAY TWO)

Friday free period. Fourteen hundred.

I went back in.

The Void Rift received me with the specific indifference of an environment that didn’t particularly care whether you survived it. I moved faster today — not because it was safer but because I understood it better. 

The sensory wrongness that had taken minutes to adjust to on Thursday took thirty seconds today. The ambient energy patterns that had been noise were resolving into signal.

The first creature I encountered was the same type as day one’s second — the larger classification. I didn’t wait for it to find me. Verdict at Stage Three had enough range to detect it before it detected me, which gave me the initiative.

I led with Gravity.

Wide radius compression — not trying to pin it this time, trying to disorient it, to disrupt the sensory systems it used to track prey in the Void Rift’s absence of conventional light. The creature’s movement pattern broke for four seconds.

I followed with Ice — Stage Three Forged, sustained stream aimed at the joint systems where the creature’s plating was thinner. The cold penetrated where direct force hadn’t. The creature’s movement slowed measurably.

Then Lightning. Then Fire.

The combination worked better than any single ability had the day before. Seven minutes instead of six — marginally longer — but the Vireon drain was lower because I was using each ability for what it was specifically effective against rather than defaulting to whatever had the highest output.

[“Vireon capacity: 61% after engagement.”]

Better.

I pushed deeper into the Rift. The resource formations were visible at the edge of Verdict’s range — approximately two hundred meters ahead, dense clusters of the crystalline compounds that had registered as exceptional yesterday. Between me and them: three creature signatures that the system had catalogued from the first encounter’s data.

I moved toward them.

The second fight of the day was harder than the first.

Two creatures simultaneously — not coordinated, not hunting as a pair, simply occupying overlapping territory and responding to my presence with the combined attention of two things that had decided I was a problem. 

I split my focus between them and immediately understood why combat doctrine in every guild manual stressed never engaging multiple Class Five threats without unit support.

Splitting focus meant neither ability stream was at full effectiveness. The Gravity field covering both creatures was thinner than it needed to be. The Ice sustained stream that had worked cleanly in the previous fight kept getting interrupted to address whichever creature was currently closest to a hit.

The third time I had to abandon a suppression to dodge I took a strike across the left side — not penetrating, Iron Body’s passive defense absorbing the impact, but the force transferred and my footing went and I hit the ground of the Void Rift on one knee.

[“Iron Body — Stage 3, Forged: passive defense engaged.”]

[“Impact absorbed: significant.”]

[“Note: Stage 3 passive threshold approaching limit against Class 5 strike force.”]

Approaching limit.

I got up.

The cold thing in my chest — the one that had lived there since the cemetery, the one that didn’t panic — assessed the situation and made a decision. I stopped splitting focus. I ignored the creature on my left entirely, committed every available ability stream to the creature on my right, and trusted Iron Body to keep me functional through whatever the left one delivered while I finished the right one.

It delivered two more strikes.

Iron Body held.

The right creature went down on the fourth minute. I turned to the left one with everything I had and it took another three minutes and by the end of it my Vireon was at twenty-two percent and the system immediately flagged it as dangerous.

[“Vireon System: critical threshold warning.”]

[“Vireon capacity: 22%.”]

[“Withdrawal recommended immediately.”]

I looked at the resource formations ahead.

Eighty meters.
Immediately, the system said.

I turned back toward the extraction point and walked — not ran, walking was more efficient, running elevated Vireon burn — I felt the exit of the gate and stepped through into the Keshar lot with my Vireon at nineteen percent and the left side of my body informing me in specific terms about the two strikes Iron Body had absorbed.

I sat on a piece of rusted machinery and waited.

The Vireon recovered.

The body recovered more slowly.

I was back in Vanthard at sixteen forty-three. Earlier than yesterday. I needed the extra time to move through the facility without the specific gait of someone whose left side was making itself known.

Renn was in the training yard when I passed it — running solo drills with the focused energy of someone working on something specific. His Signal ability pulsed in the ambient space around him. He didn’t see me pass.

[“Presence Erasure — Stage 3, Forged: active.”]

I went to room 14B and sat on my bed and the system ran its end of day assessment.

[“Day two: 3 creatures neutralized. Resources: not yet reached. 80 meters remaining.”]

[“Vireon capacity: recovering.”]

[“Stage 3, Forged combat data accumulated: significant.”]

[“Note: Lightning — Stage 3, Forged approaching threshold.”]

[“Note: Space & Time daily usage: 1 of 2.”]

Approaching threshold.

I lay back.

Tomorrow, the system said. Or I said. The distinction had become less clear over two years of operating with it.

Tomorrow.