Chapter 233: Propositions

WHEEE-OOO-WHEEE-OOO!

Blinding crimson emergency strobes flashed rhythmically across the vaulted ceiling of Gate Training Facility 7. The harsh, mechanical wail of the facility-wide klaxons echoed through the corridors.

"Gate Zone Two has undergone spontaneous dimensional destabilization. Interior mana density has spiked by three hundred percent. Reclassification in progress: One-Star Loop Gate upgraded to Two-Star Loop Gate. All non-essential personnel are instructed to evacuate the staging platform immediately."

Up on the glass-paneled observation deck, Commander James Maddox stood in rigid silence.

His hands remained buried in the pockets, but the playful slouch that usually defined his posture had left him. His youthful face was set in a cold, hard line, and his brown eyes narrowed into slits as he watched the bruised-purple vortex of Zone 2 expand and twist like an agitated beast behind the reinforced stasis barrier.

A Two-Star Loop Gate.

In all his years of overseeing the word, Maddox had never once witnessed a low-tier gate spontaneously evolve its internal hierarchy the exact second an applicant crossed the threshold. Loop gates were engineered to be closed, stable, and predictable. They required immense, catastrophic environmental shifts to reclassify upward.

A Two-Star gate meant that the monsters inside were no longer mere F-Rank fodder; the hunting grounds belonged to an E-Rank Calamity Beast, and the Gatekeeper would be an apex predator capable of tearing an unarmored human to shreds in seconds.

Maddox slowly gulped, the air in his throat feeling dry.

Just hours ago, he had thoroughly reviewed the confidential NEA incident report detailing Hide Volter’s awakening. Yesterday after the boy took his final assessment at the AAA station and awakened, an anomalous One-Way Gate had manifested directly in front of his car, nearly killing his friends. And now, on his very first morning out of the hospital, Hide walks into a training gate, and the training gate mutates.

’This is no coincidence,’ Maddox thought, his jaw tightening. Coincidences in this world do not arrive in synchronized pairs.

Without looking away from the swirling portal, Maddox reached into his coat and pulled out his black communicator.

The line connected on the very first ring.

"Commander," a disciplined, gravelly voice answered over the speaker. It was the NEA surveillance agent whom Maddox had intercepted and dismissed outside the facility perimeter only ten minutes prior.

"Report," Maddox commanded, his voice dropping into a low, authoritative register that brooked no hesitation. "Walk me through every single second of Hide Volter’s movements since he left the hospital. Did you notice anything out of the ordinary? And was there anyone else shadowing him?"

"Sir," the agent replied immediately, the rustle of wind indicating he was stationed at an overwatch vantage. "The subject exited the General Hospital not too long ago. His pathing was entirely mundane at first—he took the standard pedestrian route toward his residential unit in Eastern Block. He didn’t interact with civilians or use public transport."

The agent paused, his tone shifting with slight bewilderment. "However, at one of the intersection the subject stopped dead in his tracks. He raised his right hand and began poking and tapping at thin air, moving his fingers across empty space for nearly twenty seconds as if interacting with an invisible touch terminal. The moment he lowered his hand, he immediate turned and headed directly toward Facility 7."

Maddox’s brown eyes gleamed faintly. ’An invisible interface... so the boy’s Unique Class possesses an autonomous display.’

"And the tails?" Maddox pressed.

"There was a secondary tail trailing forty paces behind me on the western sidewalk," the operative confirmed. "He operated with advanced civilian-cloaking techniques. Based on the composite frequency of his dampening field, I suspect he was an asset from the International Exterminator Corporation."

"Understood," Maddox said calmly. "Good work. Maintain a wide perimeter around Area 17 and report any foreign corporate incursions directly to me."

"Yes, Sir."

Click.

Maddox tapped the receiver, severing the link.

He stood alone in the observation booth, the red emergency lights painting his sharp features in crimson hues. Maddox closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath.

Without making a sound, he opened the floodgates of his immense, terrifying aura. Rather than projecting it as a blunt, destructive hammer, Maddox refined his white mana into microscopic, razor-thin sensory threads. The ethereal sensory net silently expanded in every direction, effortlessly passing through the reinforced walls, sweeping across the lobby, and blanketing the entire perimeter alleyway like an invisible spiderweb.

Outside the facility, crouched deep in the damp shadows, Rosh was smiling.

His human face was perfectly composed, his green eyes reflecting the faint red light filtering from the facility’s high windows. He had felt the spatial distortion violently shift. He knew the 1-Star gate had evolved into a 2-Star death trap. A fragile, newly awakened human boy who had only held a core for twenty-four hours could never hope to win that.

’Die in the dark, brother,’ Rosh thought with cold, malicious satisfaction. ’Let your soul be extinguished so Garath’s servant can claim what remains.’

Suddenly, the atmosphere around Rosh curdled.

The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up as an icy, suffocating presence silently wrapped around his body. The air in the alleyway froze, the ambient moisture turning into frost under the sheer density of Maddox’s scanning net.

Rosh’s chest violently seized. His heart hammered against his ribs in frantic, panicked bursts. The instinctual terror that had made him flee the subterranean facility yesterday flared back to life with agonizing clarity.

Rosh snapped his head upward.

Through the high, reinforced smart-glass of the facility’s observation tier, two glowing brown eyes were staring directly down at him.

Maddox wasn’t searching. He had locked dead onto Rosh’s exact coordinates.

"Shit!" Rosh hissed in genuine terror.

He didn’t hesitate for a single millisecond. Dropping all pretense of physical stealth, Rosh flicked his index finger, tearing open a microscopic, silent spatial rift directly behind his spine. He threw his body backward into the void just as Maddox began moving.

POP!

The spatial tear snapped shut, and Rosh vanished into the dimensional slipstream.

A split second later, Rosh materialized half a mile away, tumbling onto the gravel-strewn rooftop of an abandoned textile warehouse overlooking Facility 7. He immediately dropped behind a rusted air conditioning unit, panting heavily, his fingers clutching his chest as he forced his chaotic spatial mana to stabilize.

’That monster... how can a human detect my concealment so effortlessly?!’ Rosh cursed internally, wiping cold sweat from his forehead.

Steeling his nerves, Rosh activated his enhanced spatial vision, peering through the distant facility glass to confirm Hide’s demise. He expected to see the bloody aftermath and Hide’s death.

Instead, what he saw made his entire mind grind to a violent, screeching halt.

Down in Zone 2, the swirling bruised-purple vortex rippled outward.

Stepping smoothly out of the portal was Hide Volter. His cloths were slightly disheveled and torn from a few places, but his body was completely uninjured. In his hand, he was casually turning over the dark brown core of the defeated E-Rank Rootshell Gatekeeper, while the terrified Helper, stumbled behind him with his mouth hanging open in absolute disbelief.

Rosh’s jaw fell slack, his ocean-blue eyes widening into trembling circles.

’He... he cleared it?’ Rosh’s mind completely short-circuited. Not only had the boy survived the sudden gate mutation, but he had systematically butchered an E-Rank Gatekeeper and walked out of the dimension entirely unharmed in mere minutes! Yesterday, Hide had walked away from an ambush; today, he walked out of an elevated gate.

A bitter, hysterical laugh bubbled up in Rosh’s throat.

He, the inheritor of spatial authority, the terror of Rilth, had spent two days meticulously engineering traps, only for a weak, newly awakened human teenager to casually stride through them like an afternoon stroll.

It made Rosh feel like an absolute, pathetic clown.

"Heh... hehe... HAHAHA!" Rosh laughed quietly to himself, a twisted, venomous smirk carving across his face. "Fine. If the gates cannot swallow you, brother... then I will drag you into the abyss myself."

Inside Facility 7, Maddox was halfway down the observation stairs, preparing to personally sprint outside and intercept the spatial intruder, when the digital record board above the main lobby suddenly flashed with blinding golden light.

NEW RECORD — 2★ LOOP GATE (Zone Two)

HIDE VOLTER — 5 MIN 48 SEC

Below it, in smaller text, the previous record:

JAMES COLLAR — 7 MIN 03 SEC

Maddox froze on the staircase, his boots halting mid-step.

He stared at the massive numbers glowing on the display. Five minutes and forty-eight seconds. In a mutated Two-Star gate. Solo.

The irritation over the escaped spatial intruder completely melted away, replaced by a slow, triumphant, and utterly predatory smile spreading across Maddox’s youthful face.

’Five minutes...’ Maddox thought, his heart thumping with rare, genuine excitement. ’Erin... what kind of world-ending monster did you leave behind?’

Maddox knew that once these telemetry logs synced with the central municipal servers, every greedy corporate syndicate, legacy assassin clan, and international recruiter would descend upon like starved vultures. He had to secure the boy before anyone else even realized what they were looking at.

Ten minutes later, inside the facility’s private VIP recovery lounge, Hide Volter sat quietly on the edge of a leather sofa, reviewing his new stat allocations on his translucent System screen.

Before Hide could open his inventory, the space beside the left wall subtly shifted.

Hide’s enhanced perception flared, and he shot to his feet, stepping backward with his hands raised. "What are you doing here?" Hide demanded sharply.

Standing before him was a young man in a dark hooded jacket. The man pulled his hood back, revealing a boyish, cheerful face with messy auburn hair.

"Hey, it’s me. In case you don’t remember," Maddox smiled warmly, raising his hands in a harmless gesture.

Maddox reached deep into an inner pocket and pulled out a slightly bent, weathered business card with wrinkled edges—a private, direct-line credential he had carried in his pocket for the last fifteen years. He tossed it lightly onto the coffee table in front of Hide.

"Come to the headquarters of the National Exterminator Agency in Area 5," Maddox said with an easy, knowing grin. "It’s not too far away. We have quite a lot to discuss, Hide Volter."

Before Hide could even blink, the man simply stepped through the wall and vanished into thin air, leaving behind only the bent card on the table.

Late that afternoon, the grey sky over Area 17 shifted into the gloomy, bruised hues of dusk.

Hide walked down the quiet, overgrown path of the public municipal cemetery on the city’s outer perimeter, his footsteps muffled by the damp grass. Behind him, dragging his feet in exhausted humiliation, came Fuu—who had lost their wager and was now completely bound to Hide’s whims.

they stepped inside a graveyard, which gave Fuu a very weird feeling.

Hide stopped before a pale grey headstone.

The inscription was clean and simple:

ERIN VOLTER

An Excellent Gate Researcher and a brave mother

Hide asked Fuu to apologize to the grave, which actually made him feel bad about what he had said earlier.

Hide stood there in silence, his eyes soft with a quiet, profound grief. After a few minutes, he turned to the trembling boy behind him. "Go home," Hide said flatly.

"What... you’re serious?" Fuu stammered.

"I told you to go," Hide repeated with a cold glance. "I’ll call you when I need you."

Fuu didn’t wait to be told twice; he turned on his heel and scrambled toward the iron gates as fast as his legs could carry him.

Left entirely alone in the silent cemetery, Hide turned back toward his mother’s grave, placing a single withered flower at the base of the stone.

That was when Rosh approached him, wearing the same mask he had worn the day he came to meet his mother. He had not planned to kill her, and if he could actually remember, he didn’t cause her enough damage to the point of death, someone else must have killed her.

But he was here for a different thing, he acted all cheerful, fully becoming a clown... and baited Hide with the truth about his mother and the truth about his father. He was sure the by needed answers desperately.

"Tell me, Hide Volter..." the masked figure murmured, his voice echoing with dual resonance. "...do you want to know who your father really is? And the truth behind your mother’s murder?"

Hide’s pupils violently shrank to pinpricks, his heart skipping a beat.

When he spoke, his voice was rough and filled with pants. "What do you know?"

"For that," Rosh said, "you will have to visit a certain place." He straightened from the bow. "Area 5. Further instructions would be given when the time comes."