“What? I didn’t have anything like that,” Ken said.
“Me either,” Frankie added.
“I could have sworn when you opened the door I saw a similar statue in your room, Ken,” I said. “Old guy, straw hat, cane?”
“Nope. I just have a bed and a storage chest.” He crossed his arms, mock-aggrieved. “More bullshit Special Class stuff, probably.”
Frankie rolled her eyes, but she was grinning.
“So what’d you see then?” I asked her. “When you looked in mine?”
She frowned, thinking back.
“Didn’t really register anything specific. Just a room. Gray, empty-ish. Same as mine.”
I sat with that for a second, turning the information over. I remembered watching Ken step through that same door, his whole body disappearing the instant he crossed the threshold. The same way I must have disappeared in front of Frankie a moment later. I’d assumed, without really thinking about it, that we were simply walking through a door. Just close it and let the next person in.
That wasn’t it at all, though.
“I don’t think we’re seeing the same room,” I said. “I think the door always shows you your own. Whatever’s actually behind it is different for each of us. Same door. Different location.”
“Yes, it’s a portal, similar to the safe room doors,” Ken said. “I thought you were some kind of smart guy. That’s basic stuff.”
“Basic stuff you didn’t know thirty seconds ago,” Frankie said.
“Prove it,” Ken replied with a shrug.
I let that one go. We gathered what little we needed and made our way back out through the safe house door. I patted the pastel pink tree trunk as we stepped into daylight.
The map showed the marker Threxx had dropped for us, a little icon of his face. The spot was a good distance to the southeast, past the edge of cleared map and well into the fog. I also noticed something I hadn’t clocked before.
A scattering of red dots, bigger than those I’d gotten used to seeing. Before there had been small, single dots, easy enough to route around. These were different. Larger. Clustered in twos and threes all around the visible area toward the marker. They grew denser the closer I looked toward the Leonid settlement.
“Anyone else seeing that?” I asked.
“Bigger dots, more of them,” Frankie said, shrugging.
We set out toward the marker, and the land changed under our feet as we walked. The wooded area gave way to something drier, tougher. Grass crunched instead of whispered as we stepped through it. The sky stayed the same shade, but the sun felt closer. Hotter. I wiped sweat from my brow as we continued our trek, avoiding the clusters of red dots as best as we could.
It was Frankie who noticed first.
“What the hell?”
She pointed, and I followed her finger to a patch of earth maybe twenty feet off the road. It was black, cracked, and veined through with something that looked less like a stain and more like a living rot. Thin, dark tendrils branched out from a central point the way frost creeps across glass. The surrounding grass wasn’t just dead. Brittle, gray blades curled away from the substance, as if they had died trying to escape.
Nobody said anything for a second. Ken crouched down near it, close enough to look, but farther than he could reach.
“That’s not normal,” he said quietly.
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”
We found two more spots as we closed in on Threxx’s mark. These were smaller than the first, as though the rot was testing its reach in small, deliberate increments.
And past those, rising out of the haze at the very edge of what I could make out, I saw a massive pearly gate. The Gate according to my interface. The way to the next floor. It showed up on our maps labeled White Gate.
“Whoa, so that’s it,” Ken said.
“Good to know where it is, but nothing we can do about it yet,” Frankie said.
I tore my eyes from the massive structure and checked the map. The fog had cleared from the Leonid settlement; it was close to our east. We made another detour around a cluster of five red dots, and the town finally came into view, right as the sun reached its apex.
Brighthaven’s gate had been manned with mismatched armor and a shrug. This was something more refined.
A wall rose ahead of us, taller than Brighthaven’s, built from some dark red, sun-baked stone instead of pale limestone. It was manned along its length by figures in matched, well-maintained armor that caught the light. There were no mismatched pieces here. No casual lean against a spear shaft. Six Leonids stood posted at intervals that I could tell were measured, not guessed at. Each one stood alert in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up. The males had immense manes, and the females looked sleek and powerful. There were no smiles or laughter here, only disciplined vigilance.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
A soldier met us before we’d gotten within twenty feet of the gate. A scar ran down her face through one of her eyes, leaving it milky and blue. She wore the same dark plated armor as the others, but something that read as rank was hammered into a pauldron.
“Halt,” she said. Not hostile. Not unfriendly. Just absolute and heavy with authority.
We halted.
Solana — NPC
Leonid
Level 2 Vanquisher