Chapter 205: Beginning (V)
The rhythmic, blinking green dots on Erin’s datapad suddenly froze. A second later, the screen completely blacked out, replaced by a glaring red error message.
Erin tapped the screen frantically, but it was useless. The three S-Rank artifacts the Vanguard team was carrying had completely vanished her tracking. She leaned back in the rickety booth of the crowded café, her green eyes narrowing as she mentally mapped their last known trajectory.
They had crossed into Sector 4.
To the general public of the Central Continent, Sector 4 was nothing more than a sprawling, government-mandated nature reserve. But Erin knew the grim reality. The "nature reserve" was a colossal, artificial forest planted decades ago, designed specifically to act as a colossal curtain. Its sole purpose was to hide the apocalyptic horrors of the Dead Zone from the civilian populace.
Erin packed her datapad away and slipped out of the café. If she wanted to follow the team, she couldn’t rely on the transit lines of inner city. Those lines were heavily monitored, and none of them went anywhere near the quarantined borders.
Instead, she took the old, rumbling subterranean mag-trains that serviced the industrial outskirts. As the train rattled away from the glittering, skyscrapers of the capital, and major cities, the scenery outside the windows grew progressively bleaker. The Central Continent was hailed as the peak of human civilization, but out here, on the fringes of the Dead Zone, it was a ghost town.
Half-abandoned concrete housing blocks flew by. The population here had largely evacuated, fleeing to the developed hubs to escape the oppressive dread that constantly leaked from the quarantine zone. The sky turned a sickly, permanent shade of smog-choked grey.
When the train finally screeched to a halt at the last station on the line, Erin was the only passenger to step off.
She walked into the shell of the dilapidated border town, finding a secluded alleyway behind a rusted-out convenience store. Here, she opened her heavy toolbox. She couldn’t just walk into Sector 4. The Dead Zones were called so for a reason... the dark mana bleeding there was highly toxic; breathing it in for more than an hour would kill a normal human or subjugate them to mana poisoning.
Erin pulled out her lead-lined isolation dress. It was a bulky, unflattering hazmat suit made of thick, synthetic rubber, designed for deep-core gate research. She stepped into it, pulling the heavy material over her shoulders and sealing the airtight zippers. Finally, she strapped the heavy, dual-filter respirator mask over her face. The world instantly narrowed into the muffled, heavy sound of her own breathing.
Thus equipped, she left the abandoned town and stepped into the artificial forest of Sector 4.
The moment the thick canopy of ancient, twisted pines closed over her head, the temperature plummeted. The forest was terrifyingly silent. There were no birds, no insects, no rustling of normal wildlife. A thick, unnatural mist clung to the forest floor, swirling sluggishly around her rubber boots.
For an unawakened human, this was psychological torture. Every single shadow looked like a crouching Calamity Beast. Every snap of a twig under her boots sounded like a gunshot. Her heart hammered wildly against her ribs, the adrenaline making her hands shake inside her thick gloves. She had no talents or weapons. If a monster found her here, she would die in seconds, entirely alone.
But as she pushed deeper into the dense, thorny underbrush, the threat that finally materialized wasn’t a beast.
Crunch.
Erin froze, pressing her back flat against the thick trunk of a massive oak tree. The sound of synchronized combat boots echoed through the mist.
"Keep the perimeter tight," a gruff male voice commanded from just thirty yards away. "The team from north has already went in, it is suspected that they might try to send others behind our backs."
’Human guards. And to my goo luck, they are exactly looking for me!’ Erin squeezed her eyes shut. Of course the IEC would have Exterminator patrols blanketing the forest around the gate site.
She tried to slowly inch her way around the tree to avoid their line of sight, but her bulky isolation suit betrayed her. The thick rubber snagged violently on a jagged, protruding briar bush.
Riiiiiiip. The loud, tearing sound echoed like a siren in the dead silence of the forest.
"Over there! Movement!" one of the guards yelled.
"Fuck!"
Erin didn’t think; she just ran. She abandoned all attempts at stealth, tearing through the thick underbrush as the heavy footfalls of the Awakened guards thundered behind her.
"Halt! Halt or we will use lethal force!"
A blast of grey mana sheared through the tree canopy directly above her head, showering her in shredded leaves and splinters. Erin gasped, her lungs burning against the restrictiveness of her respirator mask. She was fast, but she was a baseline human. The Awakened guards were closing the distance with terrifying speed.
Desperate, Erin reached into the deep pockets of her isolation suit and pulled out a small, metallic cylinder, a spatial-resonance emitter she had built in the lab. It was designed to mimic the exact frequency of a forming gate.
She twisted the cap, primed the charge, and hurled it as hard as she could to her left, deep into the darkest part of the woods.
Three seconds later, the emitter activated. A massive, deafening hum of spatial distortion violently shook the forest, projecting a fake, blinding surge of mana.
"Gate formation!" the lead guard roared in a panic, his footsteps immediately pivoting away from Erin and rushing toward the fake signal. "Square up! Defensive formation! Half the guards go for the intruder."
Taking advantage of the utter chaos, Erin sprinted frantically to her right, pushing through a final, brutally thick wall of razor-sharp brambles. The thorns tore mercilessly at her isolation suit. She felt the heavy rubber rip in three different places along her arms and abdomen, the toxic air of the Dead Zone immediately entering.
But as she stumbled out of the briar patch, the forest abruptly ended.
Erin dropped to her knees on the edge of a massive, perfectly circular crater. Her green eyes widened behind her scratched visor, entirely forgetting the tearing pain in her arms and the guards searching the woods behind her.
Hovering in the dead center of the crater was the Gate.
It didn’t look like the swirling, violent purple portals that spawned on Earth. It was a terrifyingly calm void in reality. A perfectly still, pitch-black mirror that seemed to suck the very light out of the air around it. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was the door to the abyss.
"She’s over here! By the threshold!" a voice yelled from the tree line.
Erin scrambled to her feet. Two guards burst from the bushes, their weapons raised.
She didn’t look back. With a fierce, defiant scream muffled by her mask, Erin Volter sprinted down the slope of the crater and threw herself directly into the pitch-black void.
The spatial transition was catastrophic. It felt as though her entire body was being disassembled at the molecular level and violently shoved through a microscopic needle. The world spun in a blinding flash of agonizing, suffocating darkness.
And then, she was falling.
Erin slammed hard into the ground, the breath completely knocked out of her lungs. She rolled, expecting the hard, jagged rock, but instead, her body sank deep into something freezing and soft.
She groaned, her vision swimming as she pushed herself up onto her hands.
Snow.
Complete, blindingly white snow stretched out for miles in every single direction. The sky above her was a bruised, swirling vortex of dark violet clouds, but the ground was a frozen, pristine wasteland. The freezing wind howled across the plains, instantly biting through the deep tears in her isolation suit.
She pulled her damaged respirator mask off, gasping for air. But the air here wasn’t meant for human lungs. It was thick, heavy, and saturated with raw dark mana.
Erin coughed violently, a sharp, agonizing pain instantly blooming in her chest. Her vision blurred, the edges of the frozen wasteland turning black. She reached a trembling hand out toward the endless white snow, her brilliant mind fighting to stay awake, but the environment was too hostile.
Her eyes rolled back, and Erin Volter collapsed face-first into the snow, completely unconscious in the world of the Calamity Beasts.