Chapter 219: Beginning (XIX)
The violent, deafening roar of spatial collapse faded into a heavy, suffocating silence.
Erin Volter lay on her hands and knees in the dirt, her lungs gasping for the crisp, familiar air of Earth. Her body trembled violently, not merely from the lingering chill biting through her skin, but from an existential dread that turned every drop of blood in her veins to ice.
Panic surged through her mind. Still, Erin forced her trembling legs under her and stood up, her green eyes wide as she scanned the immediate surroundings in frantic, erratic circles.
She was standing at the bottom of a colossal, earth-carved depression—the massive Dead Zone crater in Sector 4 on the Central Continent. Ten months ago, when she had illegally trespassed here to chase the Reverse One-Way Gate, the crater had been a wild, desolate trench surrounded only by overgrown trees and yellow government warning tape.
Now, the landscape had changed. High-voltage security fences and heavy, reinforced iron railings ringed the upper rim of the crater like an iron cage. Modular observation posts and technical monitoring arrays sat along the perimeter, erected by the International Exterminator Corporation to study the anomalous tear.
Due to the cataclysmic spatial backblast generated when the Reverse Gate collapsed and the Doom Overseer crashed, the inner staging ground was in complete ruin. Security floodlights were shattered, dripping sparks onto the wet earth. A doze armed Exterminator guards and technical personnel lay scattered across the mud, thrown against the iron railings by the kinetic shockwave, unconscious, their helmets cracked and their rifles abandoned.
Yet, the atmospheric noise of the spatial rupture—a sonic boom that had echoed for miles across the Dead Zone—had already alerted the patrolling squads.
Heavy, synchronized footsteps and shouting voices echoed through the woods as elite patrolling squads from the outer checkpoints began converging on the crater at high speed.
Under normal circumstances, an unawakened researcher caught in an illegal military zone would panic about federal prosecution. But Erin did not care about the incoming Exterminators. She did not care about treason, federal charges, or execution at this moment.
Her entire universe had narrowed down to a single, agonizing truth: Her child was gone.
In the ten months she had spent on the floating mountain of Hubin, Erin had struggled against a wall of conflicting emotions. She had resented the monster that created him. She had told herself a hundred times that he was an anomaly that should never have been conceived.
But in those quiet days after labor, holding that swaddled void against her chest, a mother’s fragile, unyielding love had quietly taken root in her broken heart.
She had cared for him. She had accepted him. She had even given him a name. She had named him Rosh.
"Run... My lady."
The deep, harmonious voice vibrated softly, directly within the deep recesses of her soul.
Erin froze, her breath catching in her throat as she lifted her face. A few yards away, slumped against the shattered roots of a fallen oak, lay the Doom Overseer. The ancient, luminescent teal feline was severely damaged. Its silky fur was scorched black, bleeding thick dark blood. Yet, its eyes looked at Erin with a calm.
"People are coming," the Overseer’s telepathic voice continued smoothly. "Awakened soldiers approach from all sides. I know you cannot allow them to capture you... Therefore, you must run."
"The child is safe," the Overseer assured her softly, its eyes flickering with a comforting, prophetic light. "He was not swallowed by the void, nor was he destroyed by the threshold. The child is safe on Rilth and will be... but you are not. If you stay here, they will catch you."
The feline beast slowly pushed its heavy head up, its long, deep-blue ribbon-antlers pulsing with a faint, corrupted violet aura.
"I will keep them busy," the Doom Overseer declared. "Not merely for a few minutes, but for a long time. I shall draw their attention away from your path... even the one named Maddox. The child is safe, but you must go now."
Erin blinked in sheer, stunned bewilderment. "Maddox...?" she whispered. How did an ancient beast from Rilth know the name of the 3rd Commander of the National Exterminator Agency? It made no logical sense. But before she could voice the question, the distant sounds of snapping branches and shouting Exterminators broke through the treeline just two hundred yards away.
"Check the crater floor!" an authoritative voice barked.
"Go!" the Overseer commanded, its telepathic voice slamming into her mind like a physical shove.
Erin’s survival instincts, honed by a year of surviving under the shadow of primordial entities, overrode her paralyzing grief. She forced herself up from the freezing mud. She looked at the wounded teal beast one last time, swallowing the heavy lump in her throat, before turning her back and sprinting directly into the thickest part of the forest.
As she plunged into the dense, overgrown brush of Sector 4.
She was no longer the fragile, unawakened researcher from ten months ago. Her body moved with a fluid, terrifying grace that completely defied human biology. The Core deep behind her flesh and blood flared to life, automatically interacting with her environment.
Sector 4 was part of the Dead Zone—a region heavily saturated with ambient, corrupted dark mana leaking from historic gate breaks. To a normal human this atmosphere was toxic, requiring respirator masks to prevent mana poisoning. But to Erin, whose core was fundamentally affiliated with dark mana, the forest was full of fuel.
The dark energy in the air surged into her limbs, lightening her weight and enhancing her perception. Erin moved through the towering trees in a seamless, silent blur, as agile and swift as a hunting cat.
She wove effortlessly between the massive trunks, slipping past the incoming squads of heavily armed Exterminators. Searchlights swept through the fog above her head, but she moved beneath their vision, a phantom gliding through the tall grass, completely unnoticed as the troops rushed toward the crater where the Doom Overseer awaited them.
In less than twenty minutes, Erin had crossed the entire quarantined expanse of Sector 4, stepping out from the edge of the dark woods and arriving at the concrete threshold of the outer border town.
She skidded to a halt in a narrow, shadowed alleyway, leaning her back against a rusted brick wall as she gasped for air. Her chest heaved, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Erin looked down at her own reflection in the cracked, dirty glass of an abandoned storefront window.
The sight made her flinch.
She looked like a beggar. She was still wearing the same specialized isolation suit she had put on when she stepped through the Reverse Gate ten months ago. The fabric was tattered, shredded at the elbows and knees, its original color faded into a dull, mud-stained brown. Her long, silver-white hair was wild, tangled, and matted with dried leaves and dirt. She had no shoes, no money, no datapad, and no official identification.
Erin pulled her torn collar higher around her neck and stepped out of the alleyway, entering the quiet, dilapidated streets of the border town.