Alex landed on wet gravel and nearly lost a shoe in the mud.
He was standing in an old brick kiln about forty kilometres north of the city. The tall chimney was cracked down the middle and half the roof was gone. On one side the river smelled of diesel and rotten water hyacinth, and on the other there were only fields, black in the night. A stray dog barked twice from somewhere far away and then went quiet.
He had first felt this place three nights ago, lying on his sofa with his eyes closed. It was a small itch at the edge of his senses, like a mosquito you can hear but can't find. On Earth there shouldn't be any mana at all. Here, near the kiln, there was a thin cold thread of it.
He hadn't told anyone. At Arlan, while John argued with Marina about whether butter naan counts as a real naan, Alex had been half listening and half feeling that thread pull at him from forty kilometres away. Sara had asked him twice if he was okay. He had said yes twice. The three of them had been his only friends since school, the ones who had kept sitting with the orphan boy at lunch when everyone else found him boring, and by some miracle of marks all four of them had landed in the same first-year batch at NK College. Then they had paid the bill, split it four ways because John insisted, and walked out into the street where the night buses were roaring past with people hanging off the doors. He had waved them off at the crossing, waited until John's back went round the corner, and stepped into the dark gap between a closed pharmacy and a paan shop.
One breath later, the city was gone.
It was strange how quiet the world became out here. In the city there was always something. Horns, a pressure cooker whistle from some flat, a dog, a fight, a TV. Here there were only frogs in the ditch and the river sliding past, slow and heavy, and the wind knocking a loose tin sheet somewhere on the kiln roof. Tonk. Tonk. Tonk.
It reminded him, for some reason, of nights in Zaroth. Standing on the palace wall with Serena beside him, his Fallen Angel and the regent who ruled his empire whenever he was away, and nothing below them but forest, Robert, his old swordsman and general, somewhere below, shouting at the night guards for sleeping, the stars much bigger than these. He pushed the thought away. That world was behind him now. Or at least, it was on the other side of a door he couldn't open yet.
Alex- " Hmm. So I wasn't imagining it. "
He zipped up his bikers jacket and walked around the kiln once. Broken bricks, plastic bottles, a torn election poster with some politician smiling at nobody. Nothing strange that a normal person would notice.
But Alex was not a normal person.
First, he wanted to test something which was bothering him since the day he came back. He raised his hand and summoned a Tier 4 monster, the same grey ape-like one he used for sparring at home. It came out of the dark ground and stood there, waiting for his order.
Alex- " Attack me. Full strength. Don't hold back this time. "
The monster roared and rushed at him. Alex lowered his own strength to Tier 4 and fought it seriously. It was ugly. He took a claw on the left arm, a knee in the ribs, and once he slipped on the mud and almost ate gravel. In the end he caught the monster's wrist, turned it, and drove his elbow into its throat. It fell and turned into black smoke.
A small window appeared in front of his eyes.
[Summoned entity defeated · EXP +0]
Alex stared at it. Then he laughed, because the other choice was to kick the chimney.
Alex- " Zero. Of course it's zero. If I could farm my own summons, I'd be done in a week. "
So the system on Earth still worked like the game. Killing your own pets gave nothing. He needed real monsters, and there weren't any on Earth. Not yet.
That was why the thread of mana here was important.
He closed his eyes and followed it. The cold was coming from behind the kiln, near the old drying yard where they used to stack raw bricks in long rows. The rows were still there, half melted by years of rain. Between two of them, at about the height of his chest, the air looked wrong.
It was like the shimmer above a road in May, except it was night and the air was cold. When Alex went closer he saw it properly. A line. Thin as a hair, maybe thirty centimetres long, floating in the empty air. Black, and around the edges a faint red glow, like a cigarette end.
Alex- " …A crack. "
The portals were supposed to come after a few months. Big ones, the kind the military would seal with tanks and fences. This was nothing like that. This was a baby. A hairline crack, leaking.
He bent down and looked at the ground below it. The grass was dead in a perfect circle. A few bones lay there, small ones. A rat. A bird. And one bigger skull, like a dog, chewed clean.
Something had already come out of this thing.
The crack twitched.
Alex stepped back on instinct. A grey claw pushed out of the black line, then a wet snout full of needle teeth, then a whole body squeezed out like toothpaste and fell on the grass. It looked like a rat the size of a goat, bald, with too many joints in its legs. It sniffed the air and turned its milky eyes straight towards him.
Alex- " Hello. Are you the one eating the dogs here? "
The rat screamed and jumped.
Alex didn't change his form. He didn't even use magic. He picked up a half brick from the ground and threw it. At Tier 5, even a lazy throw was faster than a bullet. The brick hit the rat in the middle of its open mouth and came out of the back of its head. The body flopped twice and lay still.
[Rift Rat (Lv 12) killed · EXP +40]
And then, before he could close it, a second window opened below the first one. This one was new.
[Vessel Sync: Tier 5 · Stage 1/5 · Next stage: 15%]
Alex read it twice. He had never seen this window in World of Zaroth.
Alex- " Vessel… my body? "
He opened his status. Most of it was the same as always, the long scary list of skills and titles which nobody on Earth would ever believe. But under his name there was a new line. Vessel Sync. When he touched it with his mind, he understood at once. It was a measure of how much of the True Demon God his weak human body could hold. Tier 5 was stable. The rest of the tiers were greyed out with small clocks next to them. The cooldowns he had found in the empty room at home.
Every real monster would push that number up. One Lv 12 rat, fifteen percent.
He did the maths in his head.
Alex- " Seven rats for one stage. Not bad. "
Then he looked at the greyed-out tiers above it, Tier 6 to Supreme to Suppressor, each one with its own five stages and its own hungry little bar, and he stopped smiling. Rats would not be enough for long. Not even close.
He crouched beside the dead rat and looked at it properly. Up close it was worse. The skin was grey and wet, like the skin of something that had lived all its life underground. The smell was sharp, not like a normal dead animal, more like a battery that had burst. Where the brick had gone through its head, the blood wasn't red. It was black, and it was steaming a little in the cold air, and where it touched the grass, the grass curled up and went brown.
Alex- " You're definitely not from Earth. "
He opened his inventory out of habit, the way he used to after every kill in Zaroth. And there, in the first empty slot, sat a new item. A pebble, grey and dull, the size of a marble.
[Rift Core (Fragment) · Grade: lowest]
He took it out and rolled it on his palm. It was cold, much colder than it should be, and when he squeezed it, he felt the same thin thread of mana inside it that he had felt from his sofa three nights ago. A little piece of the other side. Somebody, someday, was going to pay a lot of money for these. In Zaroth, monster cores ran half the economy. Lamps, weapons, potions, the heating in the palace baths.
He put it back in the inventory and stood up. If the army really sealed every portal, then every core on this planet would belong to the army. Unless somebody got there first.
Alex smiled to himself. Money and influence. He had written both words in his diary just last week, with no idea where to start. And now one of them had come crawling out of a hole in the air with its mouth open.
Still. It was a road. Before this, he had only known that he had to "hunt monsters". Now he could see the progress bar. Anyone who had played games would know how much difference that makes.
He walked around the crack, careful not to touch it. It was stable for now. Small things could squeeze out of it once every few nights maybe. Nobody would notice a few missing stray dogs near an abandoned kiln. In a few weeks it might grow. In a few months it might become one of those portals.
He decided he would come here every night. Kill whatever came out. Watch it grow. Learn how it worked before the army put a fence around it.
Alex turned to leave, and his foot hit something hard in the grass.
It was a metal stake, painted green so it would vanish in the weeds. On top of it there was a small black box, the size of a lunch tiffin, with a solar panel and a tiny blinking light. A wire ran from it into the ground. Alex crouched and looked at it without touching.
A sensor. Someone had put a sensor here, pointed right at the crack.
He looked at the fence beyond the drying yard. A piece of white cloth was tied to the wire there, flapping a little in the river wind. On the cloth, stitched in gold thread, was a small sun with an eye in the centre.
Alex felt the hair on his arms rise.
He was not the first person to find this crack.
And the light on the box had just stopped blinking and turned solid red.