Midnight.
The hour the world blinked.
It started with sound—except there was none. Just the sudden absence of everything. No traffic. No wind. No breathing.
Even the girl noticed.
She tilted her head, eyes narrowing as though trying to hear something through a thick wall of static. Kieran froze mid-motion, hand on his knife, chest tight with tension.
The silence cracked.
And something else slipped in.
Not a noise. Not exactly.
More like… pressure.
Like the sky had dropped five feet lower, compressing everything, bending the shape of space. The air itself felt thinner. Tighter. Like the world had begun to exhale and forgot how to stop.
A ripple spread across the darkness outside.
It shimmered in the night like oil on glass. One moment, the alley beyond the church ruins was empty. The next—folded. Twisted. Like reality itself had puckered and torn.
Then it appeared.
A Gate.
It hovered six feet off the ground, its edges flickering like a dying filament. Oval. Black at the core, surrounded by concentric rings of colorless light. It didn't glow—it absorbed. Light bent around it, swallowed into its center.
And then came the stench.
Burned hair. Rust. Wet iron. All of it wrapped in a nausea that gripped Kieran's throat and clawed behind his eyes.
The Gate pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
Then it screamed.
Not out loud—no sound could describe what it did. But Kieran felt it in his spine, his skull, his marrow. The kind of scream that lives behind every nightmare. The kind that marks you.
The girl clutched her ears and dropped to her knees.
Kieran stood.
The time for waiting was over.
The first thing through the Gate was wrong.
Not a monster—not yet. Just… darkness. Something dripped from the tear in space. Not liquid. Not mist. Just a presence that made the temperature plummet.
And then something moved.
It stepped into the world on six legs, slick and glistening. Each one ended in a joint that bent the wrong way. Its body was long, low to the ground, covered in overlapping plates that shimmered like rotted chrome. No eyes. No mouth. Just a face like a cracked mask, featureless and smooth.
An Aberrant.
Class-1, maybe Class-2. Hard to tell in this light.
But it was real. It was here. And it wasn't alone.
Another slid through behind it. Then a third. By the fifth, Kieran stopped counting.
The air rippled again.
And then—just like that—the Gate stabilized.
No more flux. No more warping. Just a portal into hell, hovering in the alley like it had always belonged.
The girl whimpered behind him.
Kieran drew his blade.
Steel flashed in the dark.
The first creature saw him.
Or felt him.
Or smelled him.
It reared up, legs clicking together like chitin snapping, and lunged with a jerking, insect-like speed.
Kieran moved faster.
Two steps forward. Blade low. Momentum controlled. He ducked under the creature's strike, drove the knife upward into what passed for its throat, and twisted.
The blade met resistance—then broke through.
Black ichor sprayed across his coat.
The creature convulsed, limbs thrashing, and dropped.
The others didn't hesitate.
They surged.
He threw a flash pellet.
Light erupted.
It bought him three seconds.
Just enough.
He grabbed the girl by the collar, yanked her to her feet, and ran.
They sprinted through the back alleys, hopping fences, vaulting dumpsters, ducking beneath torn power lines. Kieran's mind raced through the map of Edenridge burned into his skull. The safehouses. The fallback routes. The kill zones.
But nothing was safe anymore.
Every shadow could now kill.
And still the Gate remained open behind them, pulsing like a heartbeat from the other side.
They ducked into a storm drain beneath a shuttered subway station.
Breath ragged. Muscles twitching.
He let her collapse against the wall.
Kieran leaned against the concrete, eyes closed for just a second.
Not long enough to sleep.
Just long enough to think.
It had begun.
The first Gate.
He'd fought through hundreds in his last life. Lost everything trying to close them. Trying to survive.
But this one?
This was his.
He had the timeline. The experience. The will.
All he needed now…
Was power.
And it wouldn't come cheap.
Somewhere deep in the city, a tremor passed through the earth.
A second Gate was beginning to form.
Kieran felt it in his bones.
The countdown had ended.
The real story was finally starting.