Chapter 658: Entering The Second Order B-Rank Gate

After the briefing concluded, Halvern spent a few minutes on the stakes.

He laid out the numbers plainly, the district’s economic value, the civilian population in the surrounding zones, the catastrophic radius if the gate breached uncontained.

He didn’t dramatize any of it, he simply made sure every member of the team understood exactly what rode on their success. Then he shifted from stakes to people, reminding them that their first priority was coming out alive.

Halvern then provided Moon and Nina with a full supply kit, matching what every other member had already received. Health potions, mana potions, stamina potions, all of them B-Rank Second Order grade matching the gate’s danger level.

He also provided them with canned food and water that could last each person for two months just in case things went wrong inside.

"Anything else either of you need before we begin? Speak now. Once you’re inside, there’s no resupply."

Moon shook his head.

Nina did the same.

"Nothing, Commander. We’re ready."

Halvern nodded and led them out of the tent toward the gate.

The plaza was filled with multiple cameras from various news channels that had the gate in focus, their operators positioned behind the outer barrier line, their lenses trained on the swirling vortex at the center of the plaza.

Reporters stood at the edges of the cordon, speaking into microphones, narrating the scene for audiences across the kingdom.

Halvern raised a hand toward the camera crews as the team approached.

"Move your cameras off the entry point. We need discretion on the identities of the Evolvers entering. You can film the gate. You cannot film their faces before they cross."

The crews complied without argument, angling their lenses away from the team and back toward the empty gate.

It didn’t matter if the public learned who had entered after the fact. That information would come out regardless, and there was no harm in it once the team had already cleared the gate. But before entry, the identities needed to stay hidden.

Especially with Moon on the roster.

After his recent conflict with the dark organization, they carried real bad blood with him. Knowing his exact location, in real time, broadcast on national channels, would hand them an opportunity that Moon had no interest in providing.

This wasn’t the capital. There weren’t many Ascenders stationed in this region, and the local defensive coverage was thinner than what the tournament grounds had enjoyed. If the dark organization decided to strike while Moon was pinned to a fixed location, things could turn dire before help arrived.

The cameras stayed angled away.

The team quietly stepped through the gate one by one.

Halvern watched the last of them vanish into the gate. He stood there for a few seconds longer, his eyes fixed on the swirling surface, and muttered something under his breath, too quiet for anyone to catch.

Then he turned around.

His staff was waiting a few meters back, watching him with the tired expressions of people who had been running this operation for days without proper rest.

"Stand down for now, rotate through rest. You’ve all been pushing hard for a long time. Nothing happens until that gate changes again, one way or the other. Eat something, talk to family and sleep if you can."

The staff dispersed toward the rest tents.

Behind Halvern, the cameras returned their focus to the gate, and the reporters resumed their broadcasts.

A team had entered to attempt the clearance once more, they told their audiences, and after the loss of the previous team, hopes were riding high that this new roster, with its collection of elite fighters, would succeed where the last had failed.

Moon’s team landed in a frozen wasteland.

Endless snow stretched in all directions, pure white stretching toward every horizon, dotted here and there with dark black trees that stood like scars against the pale ground.

The sky above was the color of ash, sunless yet somehow lit with a gray glow that came from everywhere and nowhere.

The cold greeted them like a death kiss.

It bit at their skin, sank into their bodies, gnawed at exposed flesh like a pack of wolves that had scented weakness.

The wind carried tiny ice crystals that stung on contact.

Every breath came out as a thick plume of vapor that froze and drifted before it fully dissipated.

Moon and Elsa handled it better than the rest of the team.

Their ice affinities gave them a natural resistance to the element, a buffer against the environmental damage that the others didn’t share. Where Vela and Kayn immediately hunched against the cold, and Nina wrapped her arms around herself, Moon and Elsa stood upright, the cold merely an annoyance rather than a real threat.

For a moment, a wave of nostalgia hit Moon.

The place reminded him of the first hidden realm he had ever entered, the frozen trial where only he and Selene had walked out alive after fighting the Winter Beast.

That had been a horrible experience, they’d had nothing prepared for the cold, no gear, no resistance, no plan, and they’d survived the first night by sharing body warmth in a tiny cave, waiting out the dark and praying the temperature wouldn’t drop further before dawn and that Gareth wouldn’t catch them.

He shook the memory off, focusing on the present.

He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a heavy coat, one of several cold-weather items he had gained over the months.

After his experience in the hidden realm, Moon had began to pay special environments more attention, keeping items that would help against them inside his storage ring.

Moon handed the coat to the teammate who was struggling most visibly, Marek, whose broad frame was shivering hard against the wind.

"Here, wear this. It has a cold resistance buff woven into the lining, should take the worst of it off you."

Marek took the coat gratefully and pulled it on at once. The coat effect was immediately noticeable, easing his shivering and loosening his tense shoulders.

"Thank you. That’s much better."

Moon nodded and turned his attention to their surroundings.

He swept his gaze across the snow in every direction, reading the terrain, cataloguing what the environment was telling him.

"There are no tracks in the snow anywhere near us," he said, his eyes moving across the white expanse. "And judging by how fast it’s falling, any tracks, whether beast or human, would get buried within a minute or two of being made. Which means we can’t rely on trails to find anything, and anything hunting us can’t rely on trails to find us either. Works both ways."

The team gathered closer, forming up as they took in the frozen wasteland around them.