The Gate

'A Gate… there is a Gate…'

Before Sunny even comprehended these words, he was trembling, cold fear rising from the depths of his heart to swallow him whole. This was not a conscious response, but an instinctual reaction — something that his body had learned to do in the past, the terror that all modern humans came to bear in their very bones.

The grating, echoing ringing meant only one thing — run! Run if you wish to live, if you don't want to die in a manner so harrowing that words could not describe it.

But Sunny wasn't a mundane human anymore.

Strangling the instinctual fear, he threw it aside and stared at the screen of the communicator with a dark expression on his face.

The notification was similar to the ones he had seen several times in the past. Previously, when he lived in the outskirts, he had learned of the devastation an opening Gate could bring firsthand. Wherever you lived, you were bound to hear that sound once every few years.

Granted, the infrastructure in the outskirts was way less developed than in the proper parts of the city, and there wasn't a lot of Awakened around. So the results were often more disastrous.

He was in a very respectable district right now.

But ironically, things were much worse.

Sunny wasn't very versed in the technology the government used to detect the appearing Gates in advance, but he knew that it failed this time. Usually, people would receive a notification at least ten minutes, half an hour, sometimes even days before the dreaded event.

This gave most of them time to evacuate out of the impact zone, and also allowed the government forces to arrive before the flood of Nightmare Creatures broke free of the opening Gate and cut through the ranks of the nearby Awakened who tried to stall it.

Two hundred seconds… that was nothing. Less than nothing. It was not nearly enough time for people to run, and not nearly enough for help to arrive. Such a small time window meant only one thing…

That unless something happened, there was going to be a massacre.

He was safe, though. He could just Shadow Step away at any moment.

As people jumped to their feet and ran to the exit with panicked expressions, Sunny sighed and pressed on the notification.

Immediately, a map opened up, showing him the location of where the Gate was going to appear, as well as optimal evacuation routes.

'Too close…'

There was no way that Rain's school was going to be able to evacuate thousands of students in time. If their hazard protocols were well established, they were not even going to try. They would just gather the children in the most protected part of the school, activate their defense systems, and try to hold until help arrived.

The school was in the direct vicinity of the opening Gate, though. Sunny wasn't sure how well its defenses would do, no matter how formidable they were. Even if there were several Awakened staffed as security personnel or instructors for this exact eventuality, they wouldn't be able to do much. The true elites would not take such positions, after all.

'What to do…'

This time, the notification interface was different from how Sunny had seen it in the past.

There was an additional, urgently blinking symbol on the map. It was very similar to the insignia Master Jet wore on her sleeve, only this one had two stars on it instead of three.

This symbol was there because the communicator knew that Sunny was an Awakened.

…There were one hundred and ninety-two seconds remaining until the Gate opened. Out in the classroom where one of his shadows was currently hiding, the children and the teacher were still staring at the notification with stunned expressions, not yet comprehending what it meant exactly. Or simply refusing to…

Not paying a lot of attention to the chaos happening around him, Sunny pressed on the symbol, and additional information appeared on the screen.

ATTENTION ALL AWAKENED

REQUEST IMMEDIATE ACTION

ATTENTION ALL AWAKENED

REQUEST IMMEDIATE...

Below that, several lines of text shimmered:

Gate Category: 2 (89% probability), 3 (10% probability), HIGHER (undefined).

Strike Force ETA: 16 min, 14 sec.

'Thirteen minutes!'

A corner of Sunny's twitched, a resentful grimace appearing on his face.

The earliest any government force would be able to arrive to the Gate was in thirteen minutes after it had opened. Thirteen minutes… that might as well have been an eternity.

'Too long!'

And now, Sunny had to make a decision.

He had to either run away or respond to the call to arms to stand in front of the Nightmare Gate, hoping to survive in the flood of monsters for thirteen entire minutes.

Well… it wasn't that hard of a decision, really. Sunny knew that he was going to stay — not out of any sort of moral obligation, but simply because he wanted to.

He was equally as reluctant to turn tail and allow the Spell to invade his world with impunity as he was to see countless nice, mundane humans die in the maws of Nightmare Creatures. Like the polite waitress who served him the delicious pastries, or the baker who had made them.

This was his world, his city, and his fellow humans. Before, Sunny was always weak and had no choice but to run, hide, and tremble in fear.

...He was done living his life in fear a long time ago, though. He was also done allowing anyone — or anything — to take what was his without a bloody fight.

He was done being weak.

But even that wasn't the real reason. Perhaps Sunny would have considered the approaching disaster too much of a risk and retreated… but Rain was there, very near to the center of the map displaying the Gate's impact zone.

So really, running away wasn't even an option.

One hundred and eighty seconds remained.

Now left alone in the empty cafe, Sunny stood up and stretched. A heavy sigh escaped from his lips.

"This is going to be… a wild, wild ride…"