Chapter 801: The Eight Gate

The second emergency task was worse than the first, and everyone knew it the moment Marcus read it out.

[Emergency Task: Sector 9, the Threnhold Reach.]

[Two kingdoms overrun. Breach points: 5 unheld. Estimated hostile presence: extreme.]

[Warning: Sector 9 has already claimed responders from three separate kingdoms.]

"Already claimed responders," Lily repeated. "That’s the Six telling us people have died answering this."

"That’s exactly what it is," Rudra said.

Nobody spoke for a moment. Eleven hours in, forty-three wounded, two positions already fallen back, and the layer was asking them to send people into something that had killed the last three kingdoms who tried.

Big D’s voice came through the link, and for the first time all event, he didn’t answer immediately.

"How many would it take to matter?" he finally asked.

Marcus had already run the numbers, because Marcus always had. "Five. Minimum. Anything less and we’re just adding names to the list of people who died there."

"And five leaves us where?"

"Thin," Marcus said. "Very thin. If anything escalates here while they’re gone, we don’t have a response force at all."

The silence stretched.

"We don’t send anyone," Almond said.

It landed hard. Kira turned to look at him directly, and she wasn’t the only one.

"You’ve never said that before," she said.

"I’ve never had a reason to." Almond’s voice stayed level, but there was something tight underneath it. "Sector 9 has five unheld gates and has already killed responders from three kingdoms. Five of us doesn’t stabilize that. Five of us dies in it, and then this sector falls too, because we sent our reserve into a fire that was never going to go out."

"So we let it burn," Julian said. Not an accusation. A clarification.

"We let someone else answer it," Almond said. "There are kingdoms in this event closer, fresher, and less committed than we are. If nobody answers, then it falls, and I’ll carry that. But I’m not spending five of you on a task the Six themselves flagged as lethal."

Big D let it sit for three full seconds.

"Agreed," he said. "Nobody goes. Marcus, log that we declined."

"Logged," Marcus said quietly.

The task notice stayed lit in everyone’s vision for another hour before it finally, silently, went dark. Nobody asked whether that meant it had been answered or lost.

The eighth gate opened at the fourteenth hour.

There were supposed to be seven. Every kingdom’s deployment listed a fixed number, and the number had been seven since the event began.

It opened in the middle of the sector, on ground the Regalons had been treating as safe rear area for fourteen hours, and it opened directly beneath the position where Kayla had been treating the wounded.

"MOVE!" Maya’s scream came through the link a half second before the ground went.

Kayla had forty-three people off the line, most of them unable to walk. She had four seconds of warning, and she used every one of them.

Edenroot exploded outward in a lattice of green, roots erupting from broken ground and catching wounded bodies as they fell, holding them suspended over a breach that had opened directly under their feet.

She held. Forty-three people, over an open gate, on a deck that had already been running on nothing for six hours.

"Kayla!" Julian was already running.

"Get them," she said through her teeth. "I can hold. Get them off."

Everything went wrong at once.

The eighth gate began venting, and what came out of it came out upward, straight into the lattice Kayla was holding. Not a wave. A pressure, grey and formless, pushing up through the opening like water forcing its way up a pipe.

Julian reached the edge first and put Wildfire Eternal directly into the gate mouth, flame filling the opening and buying maybe ten seconds. He could feel exactly how much it was costing him to hold it there, and he could feel exactly how little that ten seconds was going to matter.

Noah reached it second and started pulling wounded off the lattice two at a time, moving faster than anyone had ever seen him move, no blade drawn at all, just hands and speed and the specific desperation of someone doing math he didn’t like.

"Twelve off," he called. "There’s thirty-one still on it!"

Natalia’s Huntress’s Brand marked everything that made it past Julian’s fire, and Emma, on reserves she genuinely did not have, dropped light on every marked target because there was nobody else left to do it. Her hands had started shaking two targets ago. She kept going anyway.

Kira froze the lattice’s anchor points into the surviving ground, ice binding root to stone, and the roots stopped straining quite so badly.

"Twenty off," Noah called. "Twenty-three left."

Kayla’s arms had started to shake. Not from fear. From the simple physical fact of holding forty-three people suspended over an open breach on a deck that had been empty for six hours.

"Faster," she said, and her voice came out thinner than she meant it to.

The gate widened.

It widened faster than any breach had all event, edges tearing rather than expanding, and something came through it that didn’t climb or crawl or fly. It simply expanded into the space, filling the entire gate mouth, a mass of grey that pushed Julian’s fire back down its own throat and kept coming.

Kayla’s lattice took the full weight of it.

She screamed, a sound nobody in the family had heard from her before, and half the roots gave out at once, and eleven people fell.

Ainen caught six of them.

Feast Golem hit the ravine floor a full second before they did, positioning itself directly under the fall, and six people landed on a construct built to absorb impacts far worse than that.

Almond caught three more, Keyward Absence reaching into the space between them and the ground and simply declining to let the collision finish arriving.

Two hit the ravine floor.

Both of them were still breathing when Kira reached them, and neither of them would be walking for a very long time.

"Kayla’s failing!" Maya shouted.

She was. The remaining lattice had gone visibly thin, and Kayla herself was on her knees at the edge, both arms shaking, holding twelve more people over a gate that had stopped venting and started reaching.

Grey mass climbed the roots toward her.

"Kayla, let go," Rudra’s voice cut through the link, hard and absolute. "That’s an order. Let go and get clear, we’ll catch them."

"You can’t catch twelve," Kayla said.

"Let go."

"You can’t catch twelve!"

Lily reached her.

Not by running. Veilfang Reach had never needed her to be close, and Oathbreak Wraith had never needed permission.

She severed the grey mass’s connection to its own sense of what it was climbing toward, and for one confused, crucial second, the entire thing forgot the roots existed at all.

That second was enough. Noah pulled four. Jian pulled four more, ribs be damned. Emma’s light held the gate mouth for eight seconds she absolutely did not have to spare, and Kira froze the last stretch of lattice solid so it stopped needing Kayla to hold it at all.

The last four came off, and Kayla collapsed forward onto solid ground, and Julian caught her before she hit it.

The eighth gate kept widening behind them.

"That thing is still coming through," Marcus said.

"Then we close the gate," Almond said.

"You can’t close a breach."

"No," Almond agreed. "But Kira choked three of them this morning, and I’ve spent all day learning how to stop things from arriving."

Keyward Absence had never been tested on something this large.

Almond stood at the gate’s edge and reached into the space where the grey mass was pushing through, and instead of stopping the creature, he stopped the arrival itself, declining to let the far side of the breach connect properly to the near side.

The gate mouth flickered.

The grey mass, halfway through, found that halfway was now permanent.

It thrashed, and the ground shook, and Almond held that refusal for eleven straight seconds while the entire rest of the family hit the exposed half of it with everything they had left.

Rudra’s accumulated debt landed first. Grimreaver Sovereign followed. Natalia, Noah, Jian, Julian, Kira, Emma, Maya, Marcus, all of it at once, on a target that could neither fully enter nor retreat.

It died halfway through a gate that then, finally, collapsed in on its own unstable opening.

Almond went down on one knee immediately afterward and stayed there for a while.

The final count came in at the fifteenth hour.

Two critically wounded. Kayla unconscious and not expected to wake for hours. Almond unable to stand without help. Emma’s light entirely gone, not low, gone, with no estimate on when it would return.

Nobody dead.

"Nobody dead," Marcus repeated, reading it off the roster three separate times to be sure.

"This time," Rudra said quietly.

He looked out at seven gates, one collapsed crater where an eighth had been, and a family that had come closer to losing people in the last hour than in the entire previous year.

"Rotate everyone who can still stand," he said. "Full rest for anyone who can’t. And Marcus?"

"Yes?"

"Next time an eighth gate opens, I want to know before the ground does."

"Working on it," Marcus said.

Above them, the sky had gone from sick orange to something closer to black, and the event had another six days left to run.