Chapter 222: Beginning (XXII)
The high-pitched, deafening screech of the sirens tore through the grey afternoon air, vibrating against the windowpanes of the small coffee shop.
Erin Volter didn’t think. The glass cup she had been wiping slipped from her fingers, shattering into dozens of glittering shards on the wooden floorboards. In a single, desperate stride, she vaulted over the low counter, her green eyes wide with terror. She scooped the silver-haired five-year-old boy off his chair, pulling him tightly against her chest as if trying to merge his small frame into her own.
"Mom...?" Hide whispered, his small hands clutching the lapels of her apron. He didn’t cry. His large, brilliant ocean-blue eyes simply looked up at her face in quiet, innocent confusion. Born at the very dawn of the Silver Era, the boy had never heard emergency sirens. He had never seen a sky bruised by dark mana, nor had he ever felt his mother’s heart hammer against her ribs like a trapped, dying bird. To him, the world was a quiet place.
"Shh... hold onto Mommy, Hide. Keep your eyes closed!" Erin rasped, her voice cracking as she burst through the front door of the shop and sprinted down the narrow, smog-filled alleyway toward their residential block.
Behind them, at the center of the commercial street, the air folded inward with a sickening, metallic snap. A bruised-purple tear opened, bleeding a thin, ozone-heavy mist onto the pavement as guttural snarls echoed from the void. It was only a 1-Star One-Way Gate—a minor, low-density anomaly containing a handful of feral G and F-Rank creatures. Within minutes, the local response teams converged on the grid. Heavy gunfire and spells cut through the street, neutralizing the beasts almost as quickly as they stepped onto human soil. There were zero civilian casualties.
To the local news networks, it was an minor military victory—a routine containment drill executed flawlessly. But to Erin, it was a death sentence.
She slammed the door of her apartment shut, throwing every deadbolt, latch, and security chain into place. Her hands trembled so violently she could barely fit the key into the secondary lock. She dragged the heavy oak bookcase across the floorboards, wedging it against the front entrance before rushing to every window in the apartment, pulling the thick, light-dampening curtains tight until the living room was plunged into total darkness.
Only then did her legs give out. Erin collapsed onto the carpet, her back pressed against the sofa, still clutching Hide against her heaving chest.
"Mom, why are we hiding in the dark?" Hide asked softly, reaching out a tiny hand to pat her sweat-slicked cheek. "Why were the loud lights singing on the street?"
Erin looked down into those clear, beautiful blue eyes—eyes so unburdened by the horror of monsters, government black-sites, and apocalyptic wars. A ragged, sob tore out of her throat. She buried her face in his soft silver hair, weeping tears of desperate relief.
"It’s... it’s nothing, my sweet boy," Erin whispered, her trembling arms wrapping tighter around his back. "Just a loud storm. Just a bad noise."
Hide tilted his head, resting his chin on her shoulder. "Did the bad noise scare you?"
"Yes..." Erin choked out, kissing his forehead again and again, as if her lips could seal away the cruel reality waiting outside. "It scared Mommy so much. But look at me, Hide. Look."
Hide pulled back slightly, staring into her brilliant green eyes. Erin held his face in her hands, her expression hardening into a diamond-sharp, maternal resolve.
"I promise you, Hide," Erin declared, her voice ringing with an absolute, unyielding vow that shook her very soul. "I will protect you. No matter what happens in this world, no matter what comes out of that sky... I will never let those monsters reach you. You will never have to see them. I swear it to you."
Hide didn’t fully understand the weight of her words, but he felt the warmth of her love. He offered a small, gentle nod, burying his face back into the crook of her neck. "Okay, Mom. I believe you."
That quiet afternoon marked the absolute death of the Silver Era.
The 1-Star gate in Sector 17 was not an isolated incident. Within forty-eight hours, global news channels were engulfed in unmitigated chaos. The four-year silence had not been a cure; it had been an incubation period. Hundreds of dimensional tears—One-Way Gates, unstable Loop Gates, manifested simultaneously across all five continents.
Exterminator agencies, softened by four years of peace and budget cuts, were caught entirely off guard. Vanguard strike teams were wiped out; cities that had dismantled their perimeter barricades were suddenly overrun by waves of Calamity Beasts. Humanity was violently dragged out of its serene dream and plunged back into the dark, blood-soaked nightmare of survival.
In Area 17, the shift was immediate and oppressive. The smog-choked streets were suddenly flooded with heavy, armored Exterminator vehicles. Sirens became a daily backdrop, and new, aggressive private Extermination Agencies cropped up in the commercial sectors like vultures feeding on public fear.
For Erin, life became a waking hell.
Every time a heavy boot stepped down the corridor outside her apartment, her heart froze, expecting the government black-ops teams or the National Exterminator Agency to burst through the door. Every time the sky turned grey, she feared a spatial tear would open inside her kitchen. She quit her job at the coffee shop, taking on low-paying, remote data-entry tasks she could do from her small kitchen table, refusing to let Hide out of her sight for more than a few minutes at a time.
Her only lifeline in the dreary district was Roxana.
One stormy night, while five-year-old Hide slept peacefully in the adjacent bedroom, Roxana sat across from Erin at the small kitchen counter. Erin was a pale, trembling mess, her hands shaking so badly she spilled the hot tea she was trying to pour. The overwhelming weight of her secrets, her paranoia, and her isolation had reached a breaking point.
"Erin..." Roxana said softly, placing a firm, warm hand over Erin’s trembling knuckles. "Look at me. You’re losing your mind. What is making you so terrified? The gates are outside, but you act like the shadows inside this room are going to swallow you."
Erin looked at her friend. Roxana’s eyes held no malice, no corporate greed, and no judgment—only the deep, empathetic understanding of a mother hiding her child from a cruel world, she was an exterminator too. A strong one.
In a moment of pure, desperate vulnerability, Erin broke. "I also used to have a talent, you know."
Roxana’s dark eyes widened slightly, but she remained silent, listening intently.
"It wasn’t a normal talent," Erin continued, tears welling in her green eyes as the forbidden memories flooded back. "It was... that of an Oracle. I could see threads of what was to come. I saw the world burning. I saw things humanity wasn’t meant to know..." She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting Roxana to laugh, to call her crazy, or to back away in fear. "You think I’m insane, don’t you? A mundane coffee shop clerk claiming to be a Seer..."
Roxana didn’t laugh. Instead, she leaned forward, her grip on Erin’s hand tightening with profound, absolute sincerity.
"I don’t think you’re crazy, Erin," Roxana said quietly, her voice carrying a heavy, solemn weight. "In a world where monsters step out of tears in the air, why should I doubt the burden you carry? I trust you. With my life."
Erin wept silently, leaning into her friend’s touch, feeling the suffocating loneliness in her chest lighten by a fraction.
Yet, even Roxana’s friendship could not cure the terrifying puzzle that consumed Erin’s mind late at night.
Why had the gates reopened?
Normal Calamity Beasts did not possess the authority to open bridges between Rilth and Earth. That power belonged solely to a Primordial Overlord with Authority over Space—it belonged to Roshhide.
When Roshhide died, his life core and spatial authority had passed directly into their child—the void-born infant. The child she had lost during the dimensional transition.
Had the Doom Overseer’s promise been a lie? Had some other Primordial Lord slaughtered her firstborn child on Rilth and stolen his spatial core? Or... was her lost child, who would only be five years old now, somehow tearing reality apart and unleashing hundreds of gates across Earth simultaneously?
The horrific imagery of a five-year-old void-born anomaly casually opening portals of death across her planet nearly drove Erin insane. Night after night, she lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, her mind spiraling into manic, chaotic loops of forbidden physics and maternal guilt.
The only thing that kept her tethered to reality, the only force preventing her fragile mind from completely shattering into madness, was Hide.
Whenever the darkness threatened to swallow her, she would walk softly into his room, sit on the edge of his bed, and watch his quiet, peaceful breathing. Touching his warm, silver hair and seeing his delicate, human face reminded her of why she had survived. Hide was her anchor. For his sake, she forced herself to smile, forced herself to cook breakfast, and forced herself to act like a normal mother.
Slowly... agonizingly... time did what it always does. Months bled into months, and months eventually turned into years.
The dread that had once paralyzed Erin began to fade into a manageable, background hum. The world outside remained dangerous, but within the walls of Sector 17, a comfortable routine established itself.
By Hide’s tenth birthday, Erin’s life was far better than she had ever dared to hope during those dark, paranoid nights. The government had not come for her. Her small apartment was warm, filled with the smell of home-cooked meals and fresh coffee.
Hide had grown into a quiet, remarkably handsome, and reserved boy. Though he kept to himself most of the time, he was not isolated. He had made a small, close-knit circle of six friends in their residential block. Among them, two were practically inseparable from him: Kai, a bright, easy-going boy with a warm smile, and Risa, a cheerful, silver-tongued girl, just like her mother, whose laughter could light up the dreary concrete streets. Seeing Hide sit around the small living room table, laughing softly with Kai and Risa over birthday cake, brought a profound, quiet healing to Erin’s scarred heart.
She gradually stopped looking over her shoulder. She stopped checking the spatial frequency monitors she had secretly built in her closet. The memories of Rilth, of the Overlord, and even the phantom sorrow of her lost firstborn slowly faded into the quiet shadows of her past. She was no longer Erin Volter. She was simply Erin, a mother raising a handsome, gentle silver-haired boy in Area 17.
Hide’s twelfth birthday came and went in a peaceful, beautiful blur. The boy was growing taller every day, his frame sturdy, his demeanor calm, and his love for his mother absolute. For the first time in over a decade, Erin felt true, undisturbed peace.
Until two months after Hide’s twelfth birthday.
It happened in the deep, dead hours of the night, at 3:14 AM.
Erin woke up abruptly, bolting upright in her bed. Her chest heaved violently, her clothes drenched in a cold, sickening sweat. Her heart was hammering against her ribs with such brutal force it left her gasping for air.
A bone-chilling horror—a primal, spiritual dread—shot straight down her spine.
The air inside the bedroom suddenly grew heavy, cold, and thick. The distinct, metallic stench of rot flooded her lungs as a wave of corrupted, pitch-black dark mana saturated the atmosphere, so dense it made her internal organs ache.
WAAAAAAIL—!
The emergency sirens erupted directly above their residential block, shattering the quiet night with their high-pitched, deafening screech.
Erin threw back her covers, her bare feet hitting the freezing floorboards as she stumbled frantically across the room. She reached the window, her hands trembling uncontrollably as she violently yanked back the heavy curtains.
She looked down into the street below.
To her absolute, soul-crushing horror, hovering barely twenty yards away, directly in front of her apartment building, the air folded violently inward. A massive, bruised-purple dimensional tear ripped open in reality, bleeding a cold, metallic mist onto the pavement as the guttural snarls of Calamity Beasts echoed into the night.