The journey to the plains outside the capital felt like walking toward a ghost. For Haruto, every step was heavy with dissonant memory—this was the place where his life had been shattered and remade.
The grass was the same, the distant mountains the same purple haze against the horizon. But the air now tasted of ozone and wrongness. They traveled light and fast: Haruto, Lyra, and Kaito.
Kenji and Akari remained in the capital as their anchor point, ready to mobilize the Council's resources if needed. the silence between the three of them was not the easy quiet of companionship, but the focused hush of hunters tracking an invisible predator.
Lyra saw it first. Her elven sight, attuned to the flow of natural energy, perceived the distortion before it manifested visually. "There," she whispered, pointing to a spot fifty yards ahead where the summer air shimmered like a heat mirage.
But the day was cool. "The life threads… they bend around it. They don't want to touch it."
As they approached, the shimmer resolved into a tear. It was not a clean cut, but a ragged, vertical gash in the fabric of the world, about ten feet tall and pulsing with a nauseating, colorless light.
Through it, the plains of Esteria were overlaid with a wavering, translucent image of a narrow urban alley at night. Graffiti-strewn brick walls, overflowing dumpsters, the harsh orange glow of a distant streetlamp.
The sounds leaked through first—the distant, Doppler-shifting wail of a siren, so alien and mechanical it made Kaito flinch and reach for his sword. "A wound,"
Haruto breathed, his shadow-sense recoiling from the edges of the rift. It didn't feel like a doorway; it felt like a sickness. The boundaries weren't just crossed; they were infected, fraying.
"It's not stable. Look at the edges."
They rippled and blurred, slowly dissolving and reforming, like a wound struggling to scab over in a hostile environment.
Kaito kept his hand on his hilt but didn't draw. "Can you feel what's on the other side? Magically?"
Haruto closed his eyes, extending the faintest tendril of shadow. "Nothing.
It's a… a magical vacuum. A dead zone. My world doesn't have ambient magic. It's like pushing against a wall of static." Before they could formulate a plan, the rift coughed.
A small, four-legged creature tumbled out from the Tokyo alleyway into the Esterian grass, landing in a disoriented heap. It was a raccoon, its eyes wide with animal panic, its fur matted. It shook itself, sniffed the alien air, and let out a confused chitter before scrambling away into the tall grass.
A mundane, earthly creature, now stranded in a fantasy world.
The sheer normalcy of it was more unsettling than any monster. Then, from their side, the wind shifted. A cluster of luminous, dandelion-like seeds—Fairy's Breath, a common Esterian weed—drifted on the breeze. Several floated toward the rift.
As they crossed the shimmering boundary, their soft glow winked out. They became dull, brown, and dead, falling into the Tokyo alley as mundane fluff. "It's not just a window,"
Lyra said, horror dawning.
"It's a filter. A grinder. It's stripping the magic from our world and… and who knows what it's doing to the things from your world when they come here?"
As if to answer her, a low growl echoed from the rift. From the gloom of the Tokyo alley, a pair of amber eyes glowed. A moment later, a sleek, gray form slunk through the tear.
It was an Esterian shadow-wolf, a creature whose very substance was woven from magical darkness. It landed on the grass, its form flickering, insubstantial.
It let out a whine of distress. In the low-magic environment bleeding through the rift, it was unraveling, its magical cohesion failing. Within minutes, it dissipated like smoke, leaving only a cold spot on the ground. "Two-way contamination," Kaito muttered.
"And both ways are lethal.
Their things die here without magic. Our things die there because of it." Haruto's mind raced, connecting the pieces. His mother's voice: People are vanishing.
What if someone, a human, stumbled through one of these? Into a world with breathable air, but also with ambient, wild magic their biology had never encountered? Or worse, what if an Esterian child wandered through into the path of a Tokyo subway train?
"This isn't a localized problem,"
Haruto said, his voice tight. "If the shockwave from the Silence's collapse hit the dimensional boundaries here, it would have hit them everywhere they were thin.
The original summoning site was just the weakest point.
There could be dozens of these. Hundreds." The scope of the catastrophe unfurled before them, vast and cold. This was not a villain to fight. This was a foundational crisis.
They needed to understand the rules, and fast. For three days, they became field researchers of the apocalypse.
They located and monitored six more rifts within a day's ride of the capital.
Each was unique and horrifying in its own way.
One opened ten feet above a meadow, a horizontal scar in the sky. Through it, they could see the undercarriage of a massive jetliner screaming past, leaving contrails against a blue sky.
Another was a small, circular hole at the base of an oak tree, showing a pristine Japanese tatami mat room where an old woman was silently drinking tea, oblivious to the giant roots now visible in her ceiling.
They witnessed a songbird fly through a rift and drop dead on the other side, its simple life-force incompatible with the magical null.
They saw a confused Esterian fox bolt through into a suburban backyard, only to be immediately targeted by the screeching, rotating sprinklers, which it clearly perceived as a bizarre hydra. The data was clear, and terrifying.
The rifts were: Unstable: They flickered, moved, and sometimes vanished, only to reopen nearby.
Equalizers: They seemed to enforce a brutal neutrality, canceling magic on the Esterian side and who-knew-what on the Earth side.
Expanding: The ones they found on the first day were measurably larger by the third.
On the evening of the third day, huddled around a magically shielded campfire (the light contained so as not to attract anything through the rifts), they reviewed their grim notes.
"We can't close these," Kaito stated flatly.
"Not with the magic we have. My light just scatters at the boundary. Your shadows get absorbed, Haruto. It's like trying to dam a river with sand."
"Closing them might be the wrong goal," Lyra said, staring into the flames.
She had been unusually quiet, her mind working in the way Haruto had come to recognize—thinking in systems and connections, not force.
"The Archivist's spire was a structure meant to contain a perfect state. When it fell, the energy released was chaotic because it was rejecting that containment. These rifts… they're chaos given form.
Trying to force them closed might just make the backlash worse." Haruto looked up, a connection sparking.
"You think we need to… stabilize them? Turn a wound into a scar?"
"Or a bridge,"
she said softly.
"But not a bridge made by us. A bridge that heals itself. We need to understand the fabric that's torn. We need someone who doesn't see time and space as obstacles, but as materials."
A name surfaced from the depths of Haruto's memory, from old texts in the Archive of Echoes that spoke of beings beyond the understanding of mortal kingdoms.
"A Chronomancer," he whispered. Kaito frowned.
"Time-mages? Fairy tales."
"So was a city of perfect silence,"
Lyra countered.
"So was a hero who talks to shadows. If time and space are woven together, a tear in space might be seen as a fault in time. A Chronomancer wouldn't try to sew the tear.
They'd… adjust the tension on the loom so the thread doesn't break." The plan, impossibly daunting, began to take shape. They couldn't fix this with the power that had broken it.
They needed a higher perspective. They needed to find a legend who understood the loom of reality itself. The mission was no longer reconnaissance.
It was a quest for a healer of worlds. And the first symptom of the sickness was everywhere they looked, in every shimmer in the air—a constant, silent scream from the universe itself, bleeding through into the quiet of the Esterian night.