The air inside "The Ship" was cold and filtered, devoid of the scent of flowers or the dust of old books. It was synthetic air, designed for efficiency, not comfort. The moment the elevator doors closed behind Arthur, he felt another mask fall away—not the mask of the lazy noble, but the mask of the frustrated brother. The remnants of the emotional confrontation with Kyra dissipated like steam in an icy wind, replaced by the cold, hard focus that this place demanded.
He stood at the center of the command deck, the panoramic display screen surrounding him like a digital celestial dome. The world map was in a state of relative calm, just a peaceful blue and green sphere floating in the void.
"Morning report, Orion," Arthur commanded, his voice devoid of any emotion.
In an instant, the peaceful map transformed into a nightmare. Dozens of red and yellow alerts lit up its surface like a fatal pox. Each point of light represented a crisis, a tragedy, a struggle for survival.
"Highlights from the last twelve hours," Orion's calm voice began. "A Grade-2 gate has been contained in the Eastern Kingdoms. Initial losses are estimated at 20% of the Seventeenth Battalion. A sudden collapse of a Grade-4 gate was detected in the Southern Ocean; secondary tsunami waves have struck the 'Glass Sands' archipelago. Reports on casualties are still preliminary."
As she spoke, images began to flicker across parts of the screen. They weren't just data; they were real footage, captured by reconnaissance drones, magical satellites, and even the phones of soldiers just before the darkness consumed them.
A shot appeared of knights in shining silver armor fighting a wave of giant insectoid creatures that moved like a living wall of chitin and teeth. Then another scene of a coastal city, where collapsed buildings were half-submerged in water, and the corpses of strange, tentacled sea monsters were scattered on the shore. Then a graph moving frantically, showing a sharp rise in global mana activity, as if the planet itself were suffering from a fever.
This was the daily noise of the world. Disaster turned routine. For most people, this was just bad news from faraway places. For Arthur, it was a data set, each part of it representing a colossal failure.
"Enough," he said with an edge of impatience, his hand rising in the air to cut off the flow of horrific images. "This is what everyone sees, Orion. The noise. The chaos. Show me the raw data. Show me the truth behind the stage."
The images vanished, replaced by a complex analytical interface filled with symbols and equations that only a handful of scientists in the world could comprehend.
"As you wish," Orion replied. "What parameters are you searching for?"
"Let's start with the basics," Arthur said, beginning to walk slowly around the central platform, like a professor giving a lecture to a single student. "The gates. How does the 'Supreme Council of Sciences' currently define them?"
"'Gates are unstable spatio-temporal ruptures'," Orion quoted the official text, "'that connect our world to unknown outer dimensions, allowing for the influx of raw energy and hostile entities'."
"Wrong," Arthur said sharply. "They aren't 'gates' or 'portals.' They are wounds. Lacerations in the very fabric of reality, and that reality is bleeding energy from another dimension. The monsters aren't 'entities' that invade; they are the symptoms. They are the blood clots and cancer cells that form from this energy bleed, influenced by the environment in which they appear. That's why we see ice monsters in the north and sand monsters in the desert. They aren't invaders; they are a part of our world, grotesquely mutated."
Orion fell silent for a moment, processing his hypothesis. "This interpretation fundamentally changes the threat model. It makes the problem internal, not external."
"Exactly!" Arthur spun around, a flash of excitement in his eyes. "And now, the classification. Grades 1 through 10. Based on what?"
"Initial mana energy emissions recorded in the first five minutes of formation," Orion answered immediately.
"Which is an almost useless metric," Arthur continued. "It measures the size of the initial blast, not the true threat potential. A Grade-3 gate in a mana-rich region can be far more lethal than a Grade-6 gate in a barren desert. They're measuring the size of the gun, not the type of bullet it uses."
"And the global response?" Orion asked, following his logic.
Arthur sighed, frustration returning to his voice. "The most idiotic of all. 'Contain and Respond.' They put a bandage on a bleeding wound, then wait for the next wound. They never ask: why are we bleeding in the first place?"
He walked to the outer edge of the platform and placed his hand on the cold display, over the image of the entire continent. "They're treating the hemorrhage without looking for the injury. And I'm tired of watching the patient slowly die."
He turned, his gaze fixed and resolute. "Open Project Cassandra."
The entire interface changed. The maps and news reports disappeared, replaced by an unbelievably complex holographic network. It was like a galactic cluster of data, where every star was a piece of information and every thread of light was a potential connection. There was astronomical data on lunar cycles, historical mana fluctuations extracted from ancient ice layers, linguistically analyzed texts from extinct civilizations, and even genetic analyses of thousands of monster samples. Everything was interconnected in one giant, impossible model.
This was Arthur's secret life's work.
"The core premise of Project Cassandra," Orion began, as if reciting the first principles of a new religion, "is that the appearance of gates is not a random event."
"Not random," Arthur affirmed, the passion of a scholar overwhelming the coldness of the player. "It's a language. A pattern. It's either a response to something we're doing here—a change in the climate, a war, a failed magical experiment. Or it's a message being sent to us, a message we're trying to decipher. Or, worst of all..."
He paused, looking at the intricate network before him. "...it's a countdown. The ticking of a cosmic clock we don't understand."
He reached into the network and grabbed one of the points of light—the one representing the anomalous gate he had spotted the day before. It was still pulsating irregularly. "Everyone looks for the rules in the recurring events. But I believe the truth lies in the deviations. In the anomalies."
He looked at Orion, his eyes shining with a colossal ambition. "Run the 'Black Swan' algorithm. I want you to compare the full energy spectrum of this gate against the historical data of the last thousand gates that collapsed catastrophically, regardless of their initial grade. Ignore the energy volume, focus only on the pattern signature."
"That is a massive computational process," Orion warned. "It will consume 15% of our computational resources for the next twenty-four hours."
"Do it," Arthur said without hesitation. "If there's a pattern, the deviations are the key to understanding it. And I have a feeling... that this particular deviation is whispering something important."
He leaned closer to the magnified image of the pulsating gate, as if trying to hear its whisper across the digital space. In this secret vault beneath his family's palace, Arthur Von Haym was not a lazy noble or a cold player. He was the mythical Cassandra, the prophet doomed to see the future without anyone believing him, and the only scientist on a world at the brink of an abyss who dared to ask the most important question: not how do we fight the monsters, but why they come in the first place.