Chapter 80: The First Gate To Close, The President Of Claymore Enterprises Panics!

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Daniela and Carlos were still awake long after everyone else had gone to bed. The two of them quietly walked around the quiet house until they finally stopped in front of their parents’ bedroom door.

The door was slightly open, just enough for them to peek inside without making a sound. Both children leaned closer and carefully spied on the scene within.

Their parents were sleeping peacefully while tightly hugging each other, their faces relaxed and content in the soft moonlight that filtered through the curtains.

"Ah~ So cute!" Daniela giggled softly, her eyes sparkling with pure delight. "Aren’t they just the cutest?"

"Hm," Carlos looked at his older sister with a slight frown. "Big sis, this is wrong. Why are you such a perv?"

"P-Perv?!" Daniela almost coughed in shock and quickly closed the door with a soft click. "Who are you calling a perv?! Now go back to bed right this instant!"

"Hmph, I was already going to bed anyway..." Carlos muttered as he walked away without saying another word.

A bit of Elisa’s sharp personality had clearly stuck to him in the way he acted and spoke.

Daniela sneaked back to her own bed with a small smile still on her face and soon fell into a peaceful sleep.

That same night, Little Noir sat quietly by the window and looked up at the night sky in complete silence. The stars above seemed to twinkle in gentle response, as if acknowledging the young wolf’s quiet presence.

♢♢♢♢

Claymore Enterprises Headquarters.

Arthur Claymore continued receiving call after call from multiple sources demanding answers about what had just suddenly occurred in the Gate Sector. Only a few hours earlier the D-Rank Gate known as the Dark Cave Labyrinth had simply... vanished.

The blonde man groaned in frustration, wiping the sweat from his forehead as he answered what he hoped would be the last call of the long day. "I have absolutely no idea why this is happening. Stop calling me already, Mordred!"

Of course, he normally pushed almost every call onto the dozens of secretaries working under him. But when it was one of his own children calling, there was very little he could do to avoid the conversation.

"But father, how could I have possibly known that a Gate can close just like that?! This makes absolutely no sense at all...!" Mordred’s voice cracked with stress on the other end of the line. "We’ve already lost millions because of this!"

"Tsk." Arthur cut the call short and groaned again, turning his tired eyes toward the huge television mounted on the wall in front of him. News about the unprecedented event had already spread through the city, across North America, and even to the rest of the world in a matter of hours.

[The First Ever Reported Gate that has been Closed!]

[Claymore Enterprises faces heavy backlash as they attempt to investigate and make sense of this unprecedented event. Experts around the globe are calling it a paradigm shift in the understanding of the Dungeons that have plagued humanity for decades.]

On the massive screen in Arthur Claymore’s private office, the news anchors spoke rapidly over frantic footage of the empty crater where the Dark Cave Labyrinth once stood. The Gate’s swirling black portal was completely gone, leaving only scorched earth, scattered residual mana crystals, and the stunned faces of the hunters and researchers who had been stationed nearby.

Arthur leaned back in his expensive leather chair and rubbed his temples. The weight of the situation pressed down on him heavier than any previous crisis the company had faced. Gates had always been permanent fixtures of the modern world. They opened, they stayed open, and people simply learned to live with the constant threat of monsters pouring out of them. For one to simply close and disappear without warning was something no expert, no hunter, and no corporation had ever prepared for.

"This is history in the making," one reporter declared, her voice trembling with barely contained excitement. "For the first time since the Gates appeared twenty-three years ago, a D-Rank Gate has completely vanished. No residual spatial tears. No lingering dimensional instability. It is simply... gone. Sources inside Claymore Enterprises confirm the company had exclusive rights to the site and had been extracting resources for nearly eight months. The sudden closure has wiped out projected profits estimated in the hundreds of millions."

Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose as another chyron scrolled rapidly across the bottom of the screen:

[Public outcry grows: "Is Claymore losing control?"]

[Rival families demand independent investigation]

[Hunter Association issues emergency statement: "All Gate data to be re-evaluated"]

The intercom on his desk buzzed again. This time it was his eldest daughter, Guinevere.

"Father," her cool and measured voice came through the speaker, "the board is already moving. They’re asking whether this was sabotage. Some are even whispering that a new type of hunter ability might be responsible. The markets open in six hours. If we don’t have a narrative ready—"

"I am aware," Arthur cut her off sharply. "Have the PR team leak the ’natural dimensional collapse’ theory. Anything to divert their attention away from us. Buy us time. And find out who the last registered party to enter that Gate was. Quietly."

He ended the call and stared at the frozen image of the empty crater on the large monitor. Something about the residual mana patterns felt deeply wrong. It was simply too clean, too deliberate.

"Could it be? What we know about Gates... has been wrong this entire time?" he thought for a long moment.

Arthur Claymore had never gotten to where he was by being a fool. He was a cold and calculating man who put interests above everything else, but he was also someone incredibly sharp and observant. He could never have reached his current position otherwise.

"Someone or something closed the Gate. It’s been confirmed for years that Gates don’t close even when you conquer them," he sighed heavily. "At first there was mass panic decades ago. But slowly, once we took control of them and used them to extract resources, they became limitless resource generators. But now, suddenly, one is gone? This... it’s simply too odd. There has never been such a pattern before. But why now? Why not before?"

As he sighed again, he quickly restarted several new private investigations regarding the D-Rank Gate known as "The Dark Cave Labyrinth."

The empty crater on the screen continued to stare back at him like an open wound. The usual faint spatial distortions that always lingered around a conquered Gate were completely absent. No residual mana haze. No fluctuating energy readings. Just clean, empty earth.

Arthur leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. His mind raced through every known rule about Gates that the Hunter Association and the major families had established over the past two decades. Gates were permanent. Even after the final boss was defeated and the core claimed, the dimensional tear remained open, slowly regenerating monsters and resources over time. That was the foundation of the entire modern economy.

Yet this one had simply ceased to exist.

He pulled up the latest internal reports. Claymore Enterprises had invested heavily in that particular Gate. Specialized extraction teams, reinforced tunnels, automated mining drones — all of it now worthless. The projected quarterly profits that had already been promised to shareholders had vanished overnight.

Rival families would smell blood in the water. The Hunter Association would demand answers. And somewhere out there, someone knew exactly what had happened.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed. He opened a secure channel and issued a series of quiet orders to his most trusted investigators. Every record of parties that had entered the Dark Cave Labyrinth in the past three months was to be reviewed. Every mana signature, every exit log, every unusual report was to be examined with extreme care.

He would find the truth.

No matter how carefully it had been hidden.

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