Chapter 203: Beginning (III) GT Bonus
The underground Gate Research Facility of the NEA was completely silent, save for the low, rhythmic hum of the mainframe servers. It was 3:14 AM. The rest of the research staff had clocked out hours ago, leaving the sprawling laboratory bathed in the cold, blue light of holographic displays.
Erin Volter sat at her primary terminal, her silver-white hair tied up in a messy, haphazard bun. A half-empty cup of cold coffee sat near her elbow, completely forgotten. Her piercing green eyes darted across the projected screens, her pupils dilating as she processed the data she had spent the last seventy-two hours meticulously pulling from the deepest, most restricted archives of the National Exterminator Agency.
Ever since she had eavesdropped on the Summit, a feverish, insatiable obsession had taken root in her mind.
’A 6-Star Gate. A Reverse One-Way Gate. The Central Continent.’
She had started her search by looking for any anomalies matching the spatial frequency of a reverse dimensional tear. But the International Exterminator Corporation’s scrubbers were thorough. Any direct mention of a "Reverse Gate" had been systematically wiped from the digital registry.
So, Erin had changed her parameters. If she couldn’t find the gate itself, she would look for the people who first encountered the gates. She dug into the very beginning of the Awakened Era.
That was when she found a name buried in a heavily redacted casualty report: Vincent.
According to the history books taught in the academies, Vincent Greyhart was a legendary pioneer. He was one of the very first Exterminators hailing from the Central Continent, a hero who had supposedly sacrificed himself and his entire team to clear a violently mutating Dungeon Gate during the early days of the Calamity.
But as Erin cross-referenced what she knew and what she heard.
"They didn’t die clearing it," Erin whispered to the empty room, her fingers flying across the holographic keyboard to overlap two different charts. "The mana density... it didn’t dissipate. It expanded."
The truth hit her like a physical blow to the chest. Vincent and his team hadn’t died stopping a gate. They had perished trying to hold back a catastrophic, unstoppable dungeon break. And based on what she heard from the meeting, It was the 6-Star Gate.
Erin leaned back in her chair, a sudden, violent shudder running down her spine. Her mind instinctively flashed back to the little girl she had met in Maddox’s suite just days ago.
That disaster had been a 5-Star Dungeon Break, just five years ago. Erin had read the classified aftermath reports. The destruction was apocalyptic. An entire metropolitan sector, housing millions of people, was instantly vaporized and overwritten by a nightmare landscape of alien biomes and calamity beasts. The death toll was so staggering the government had resorted to mass graves and media blackouts to prevent global hysteria.
If a 5-Star break was capable of wiping out a city... what in the name of the gods would a 6-Star break do? The mathematical scaling was exponential. A 6-Star gate would let out an S-Ranked beast, practically a god.
Desperate to understand the true scale of the cover-up, Erin minimized the casualty reports and opened the global cartography files. With a few swift keystrokes, she pulled up two distinct maps: a geographical satellite scan of the Earth from before the gates first opened, and the most recent topographical scan recorded.
She placed the holograms side by side.
For a long, agonizing minute, Erin simply stared. Her breathing grew shallow. The cup of cold coffee slipped from her desk, shattering against the sterile white floor, but she didn’t even flinch.
The horror she felt in that moment was suffocating.
Erin saw the horrifying truth. The Central Continent wasn’t always so small... It was literally halved. A colossal, perfectly jagged crescent had been cleaved straight out of the landmass, as if a cosmic entity had taken a bite out of the earth. The ocean had violently rushed in to fill a void where millions of square miles of land used to be.
Her eyes darted to the Eastern Continent—the site of the 5-Star break five years ago. An entire eastern seaboard, a landmass the size of a small country, was simply gone.
"They... how did they manage to hide something of this scale?" Erin breathed, her voice trembling as she dragged a hand through her silver hair. "How could they?"
The weight of the lie was crushing. She was the Captain of the Gate Research Facility. She had dedicated her entire brilliant mind to understanding the dimensional physics of the Calamity. Yet, the military commanders and the bureaucrats had kept her entirely in the dark.
They had fed her sanitized numbers, restricted her field access, and treated her like a child playing with a chemistry set, all while the planet was literally being eaten alive.
The betrayal fueled a deep, unyielding anger in her chest. She hadn’t slept in three days, surviving purely on adrenaline, caffeine, and pure spite. She was done playing by their rules. She was done reading sanitized thermometers from behind a yellow barricade.
She turned back to her terminal. The direct search for the ’Reverse One-Way Gate’ had yielded nothing. The words themselves were flagged and erased by the system.
"If you want to find a black hole," Erin muttered, her green eyes narrowing with renewed, razor-sharp focus, "you don’t look for the darkness. You look for the matter being pulled into it."
She abandoned the environmental and spatial databases. Instead, she hacked directly into the International Exterminator Corporation’s logistical and requisition networks.
As she knew that one of the Reverse Gate existed in the Eastern Continent, and the upper echelons from there were sending data to NEA, or so was mentioned by Maddox.
Her fingers danced across the light-keys, filtering through thousands of mundane supply orders, troop movements, and budget allocations. She discarded the regular patrol routes, ignored the standard gate-clearing operations, and focused entirely on anomalous spending.
An hour later, at 4:22 AM, she found it.
The money being spent to purchase data from the eastern continent, but the data was not mentioned with anything and even had a password.
Reading through it, all Erin found was that the Reverse One Way gate opened 5 years ago, just before the 5-star dungeon gate break. That seemed suspicious, and also that 294 Exterminators have gone missing inside, including 3 S-Rankers!