The second Raith stepped through the portal, everything tilted.
Sound vanished. Color deepened. His lungs seized for half a heartbeat as a heavy pressure rolled over him—like being caught in a wave he couldn't see.
It didn't feel like walking into another place.
It felt like being swallowed whole.
He stumbled, boots scraping across fractured asphalt. The shimmer of the entrance portal hung just behind him.
The ground was split wide open—blue crystal veins jutting from the cracks like jagged shards of glass. Nearby, a broken traffic light floated in midair, severed cleanly from its pole.
The red light blinked on and off slowly though nothing powered it.
All around them, buildings leaned at impossible angles, warped by a hundred years of unstable energy. Storefronts, apartments, schools—their walls half-fused with rootlike tendrils of crystal or folded into the ground.
A child's bicycle lay melted across the hood of an upside-down car. The sky overhead pulsed with cracks of gold and violet, bleeding light from an unseen source.
It was a city. Or had been.
Now it was something else.
"Is this… real?" a voice asked behind him. "This was the Old Earth?"
Raith turned.
One of the other Untuned had stepped up beside him—tall, lanky, his mining helmet dented on one side. The visor's tint hid his eyes, but the shakiness in his voice gave him away.
It was clear that this was his first time coming to a Force Field.
Raith nodded slowly. "Yeah. It is."
He didn't say anything more. Just stared at the warped ruin of a city caught in stasis—floating debris, crumbling towers, cracked pavement.
He remembered it all.
Before the age of ten, most of the kids in the Outer Wards were given access to basic education—recycled content, filtered videos, and shelves of salvaged books no one cared to censor properly.
Raith had devoured them.
While the other kids played or slept, Raith would find a corner in the dim library and sit there for hours—alone, with nothing but stacks of old paperbacks and flickering holo-readers that barely held a charge.
His favorite was always the same. A black-bound journal.
Inside were bright images of Old Earth—skies so blue they hurt to look at, cities that reached the clouds, and oceans that seemed to go on forever without a single bump on the horizon.
But it wasn't just history or nostalgia that stuck with him. The journal—part textbook, part logbook—documented what happened before and after the Shattering.
It talked about how the first Tuners appeared—and how their strange powers, later called Forces, began to reshape everything.
It explained Marks too—the glowing symbols that burned into the skin when someone awakened, proof that they could wield a Force.
There were pages on the rise of Force Fields, the strange zones where reality twisted, and how they were later classified by grade and risk level.
It even broke down monster types, survival patterns from the early years, and warnings about what happened when a Force Field grew unstable or out of control.
He memorized it all.
Without realizing it, Raith had been born with an eidetic memory—a mind that locked onto every word, every diagram, every broken whisper of the old world and refused to let go.
Not that it ever helped him in the labor camps. Knowing things didn't mean much when all they wanted was your hands, not your head.
But now, standing here again—staring at another ruins of a world he had only seen in books, it made the silence worse.
He was brought back to the present as his wrist monitor blinked green.
Luckily, it was still stable.
Behind him, the portal was still visible between the two Field Stabilizers. But now it looked farther away than it should've—like distance had started lying.
"All of you," a voice crackled from a loudspeaker behind them. "Move up the lane. Stay in your assigned groups."
Raith moved with the others, gravel crunching beneath his boots. They followed what had once been a city street—now twisted with floating debris and cracks.
They'd been divided into groups of five.
Raith's group had stuck close since the truck ride.
The girl from earlier was right behind him—thin, smaller than the rest, helmet slightly crooked.
She hadn't spoken since entering the Field. She looked sixteen at most. Everyone just called her "Kid" for now.
Next to her walked a taller girl—nineteen, judging from her voice and build. Her tone was sharp, but her movements were cautious.
"Mira," she'd introduced herself earlier. "Not here to talk, but I'll swing if I have to."
Then there were the two other men.
Nineteen-year-old Kev was broad-shouldered, probably used to physical labor. He kept glancing around like he expected something to jump out at any second. Paranoid, but quiet.
And the oldest, Dane—twenty—walked with a limp like he'd taken a bad hit once and never healed right. He had the steady presence of someone who'd seen too much and survived anyway. His voice had a tired rasp to it.
Raith didn't offer his age. Didn't matter. They all wore the same wrist monitor. The same helmet. The same hopelessness.
"Let's stick close," Dane said, tightening the strap on his mining harness. "If anything tries to drag one of us off, at least the others will see it happen."
"That's comforting," Kev muttered.
"Better than dying quiet."
They stopped at a collapsed ridge where pale-blue crystal veins jutted from broken concrete, faintly pulsing with light.
"Looks clean," Mira said. "You want to check it, or should I?"
Raith stepped forward and tapped a shard with his glove. A sharp tingle ran up his fingers, but no heat.
"This is it," he said. "Force Crystal. Shallow vein."
"Then we mine." Dane drove his pick into the ridge. A chunk of crystal cracked loose with a sharp snap.
Nearby, a guy from another squad dragged a rusted mining cart toward the rubble. The cart wobbled badly—one wheel bent, one side missing—and it bounced unevenly over a crack in the ground.
"That thing gonna hold?" Kev muttered, watching it rattle along.
"Nope," Mira said dryly. "Last thing we need is chasing a runaway cart across this mess."
Dane scanned the road ahead. "There."
About fifteen meters up, half-buried in debris and cracked pavement, sat another cart. Its frame was dented, but the wheels looked solid.
Raith moved first, pulling it free with Dane's help. The cart creaked, but the wheels turned steady enough.
"Better than nothing," Raith said.
They wheeled it back near their spot.
"Start working," Dane ordered, already raising his pick.
Mira swung her pick into the base of a jagged shard, the impact sending a sharp crack through the air. Raith worked the other side, loosening the bigger pieces. Kev hung back near the cart, tossing chunks in and glancing nervously at his wrist monitor every few seconds.
Even the Kid chipped away at a smaller patch, crouched by a cracked slab of pavement, her swings light but steady.
The sound of tools striking crystal filled the air—sharp, rhythmic, almost hollow.
There was no wind. No movement. Just the endless ringing of metal against stone.
Ten minutes slipped by. Maybe more.
No monsters. No shift in stability.
Just that heavy pressure in the air—thick and restless, like the world was holding its breath.
Then Raith felt it.
Not a sound. Not a sight. Just... a shift. Like the Field itself had exhaled—and the world forgot how to breathe.
His wrist monitor blinked yellow.
Then Mira's.
Then Kev's.
All of them.
Raith stiffened.
Mira was nervous. "Why are they blinking?"
Raith didn't answer. His head turned slowly, scanning down the broken street.
A streetlamp twisted in midair—not drifting, but spinning in slow, unnatural circles.
Off to the side, a rusted playground swing jerked into a tight knot with a screech of metal, then snapped back, rattling wildly.
"You feel that?" Kev said, his voice tighter than before.
Dane's brow furrowed. "Yeah. Felt something like this a few weeks ago. Lost three guys that time."
Raith's skin crawled under his mining suit.
"Something's wrong," Raith said quietly. "Everyone—move back. Now."
Mira grabbed the edge of the mining cart. "Back where?"
Raith's eyes snapped to the ground ahead.
The pavement was splitting open—not from a collapse, not from pressure—but like something was peeling the world apart.
A faint light bled from the crack, shimmering in the air.
And inside it—something moved.
It was moving slowly.
But everything about it screamed... danger.