For ten minutes, Mythal believed it was over.

The cheering did not stop when the final gate collapsed. It spread, building through streets and restaurants and guild halls, the sound of people who had been holding something heavy for a long time and had just been told they could put it down.

Then the system confirmed it.

[All C-Rank Dungeons Cleared.]

[Mythal City: Completion Ranked 3rd Nationally.]

The ranking hit the broadcasts within minutes, and the city lost what little restraint it still had.

Third fastest on the continent.

All ninety gates are gone.

The city that had spent weeks watching people die and rankings collapse was still standing, and now it had a number that said it had done better than almost anyone.

Sora leaned back from her stream and rubbed both hands down her face. "We actually made it," she said. It came out tired and real, nothing like her usual delivery.

MYTHAL THIRD IN THE NATION!

WE DID IT!

Tell the people who gave up that we made it!

"Everyone gets one night before they have to think about B-ranks," she said, and laughed for the first time in a week. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

The emergency channels switched from dungeon coverage to celebration coverage. Music came back to the street districts. Bars that had run skeleton crews for weeks reopened their full floors. Someone somewhere started setting off illegal fireworks before the city finished announcing the ranking.

For ten minutes.

Then the sky stopped moving the way it should.

...

It started with the clouds. They quit tracking the wind and began to turn, slow and even, around a single point above the center of the city. At the edges of the sky, the stars went out one at a time, in order, too neat to be weather.

Then the pressure came down. Not wind, not cold. A weight people felt in their chests before they had a word for it, the feeling of a room when someone large has walked in behind you.

Every screen in the city flickered at once. Phones, televisions, the broadcast drones, and the public displays above the ranking districts. One synchronized flicker, and then they all came back showing the same line.

[Initializing Mythical Advancement Sequence.]

The noise stopped, crowd by crowd, district by district, as people read the words and understood the system was not finished with them.

Then the sky cracked.

The fracture opened across the whole of it at once, and the sound reached the ground two seconds behind the light, a concussion deep enough to set off every car alarm in range and rattle windows across the city. People would call it not-quite-sound afterward, because it landed in the body before it reached the ears.

[C-Rank Phase: Complete.]

[Mythical C-Rank Requirements: Unlocked.]

Then the sky opened.

...

Five places above the city tore open at the same time.

Not the blue of the standard gates. Black, the black of space light had never reached, spreading from five central points while gold symbols burned along the torn edges, shifting and reconfiguring too slowly to read.

The gates came through slowly, which was worse than all at once. Ancient stone structures pushed down out of the dark, each one larger than the buildings beneath it. Chains dropped from above each gate and drove into the city, the impacts registering on seismic equipment three districts away.

As each one settled, the pressure thickened until every hunter in Mythal felt it through their class connection in the same second. For a few seconds, the city skyline stopped looking like something built for humans. The gates weren’t moving but that made them feel even larger.

The names burned above them.

[Mythical C-Rank Gate: Titan Grave.]

[Mythical C-Rank Gate: Crimson Eden.]

[Mythical C-Rank Gate: Hollow Sky.]

[Mythical C-Rank Gate: Abyssal Clock.]

[Mythical C-Rank Gate: Divine Maze.]

Panic spread outward from the gates faster than the celebration had. The people nearest the gates moved first. Guild alarms went off in every district at once. The forums crashed under more traffic than the ninety dungeons had ever produced.

The realization spread faster than the panic.

The ninety gates had only been the qualification round, and now the real test had appeared. Then one more line arrived on every screen.

[Warning: Mythical C-Rank Failure May Result in City Collapse.]

...

Sora stared at her monitor.

Her chat had become a single wall of the same words, and she was not reading any of it.

"Everything we just went through," she said. "Every death. Every clear. Every hunter who made it and every one who didn’t." She looked at the five gates through her studio window, big enough that the buildings around them looked like an afterthought. "That was the entrance exam."

She read the warning once and then read it again. Just to make sure she’d read it correctly and twenty-two hours of streaming hadn’t finally broken her brain.

Then she looked at the camera. "I’ve had something to say about this city since the first clip appeared. I don’t have anything for this." She looked back at the gates. "But I know who will."

She did not say the name. She did not have to.

...

In the Black Tide compound, Lily Blue stood at a window and fixed both eyes on the nearest gate.

Reading dungeons was the thing she did better than anyone alive. When she looked at a gate, her sight laid the inside of it over the outside, the layout and the pressure points and the rough shape of whatever waited at the bottom, written across her vision in clean lines she had trusted through ninety clears.

She looked at the Mythical gate and let her sight open.

The lines came.

Then they kept coming.

Layout under layout under layout, more than any standard gate had ever shown her, the depth running down past where her sight had ever reached and still not stopping. The numbers kept rising and then they passed everything she’d ever seen.

The lines began to overlap, then to smear, then to come apart.

The read collapsed into one word across her vision.

ERROR.

She flinched back from the glass, a hand going to her temple as the failed read snapped through her sight like a cut wire pulling taut. For a few seconds, she just breathed, the gate still burning in front of her, unread, the first gate in her life she could not see into.

"You don’t send a team into that," she said quietly, to no one in the room. "You send a raid. Into every one of them."

...

Across the city, Mira Solt was in a medical ward with her rebuilt left arm strapped into a brace when the pressure rolled through the building.

She had taken the Storm King’s chain on that arm, and the Ashen Sovereign’s swing on the same side a couple of days later. The medics had told her three days before that it could be fixed by a competent healer.

She had been planning to argue the number down.

She looked out the ward window at the gate burning over the eastern district and stopped planning to argue.

The gates had opened tonight.

She ran the math the way she ran everything, and the answer was that the city was going to need its frontline very soon. She reached over with her good hand and pulled the brace tighter.

...

Victor stood at the glass wall of GaleWing headquarters and looked at the five gates.

The pressure coming off them was not like a standard dungeon. Standard gates felt made but these felt discovered.

He had been one of the fastest players through the standard phase. He had prepared for B-ranks because every sign had pointed to B-ranks coming next. He looked at the five gates and understood he had prepared for the wrong thing entirely.

The hardest standard dungeons had taken everything a full multi-team effort could bring, and those gates had sat quiet until someone entered them. These were not quiet. The chains alone had driven into the city deep enough to shake three districts, and that was the gate at rest, before a single person had set foot inside.

The warning still sat on the screen behind him.

Failure may result in the city’s collapse.

The standard phase had killed teams. This one was telling him, before anyone had even entered it, that it could take the whole city down with it. He had underestimated something once and paid for it.

He wasn’t going to do it this time. He turned from the window.

"Get me everything on the Mythical phase," he said to the room. "Whatever other cities have posted. Whatever anyone, anywhere, has learned about clearing even one of these." He stopped at the door. "And get the heads of the other four guilds on a call tonight. Nobody is doing this alone."

Half the eastern networks had already stopped responding entirely.

He walked out.

...

Kai stood on a rooftop in the outer district and watched the five gates settle over his city.

Below him, Mythal had gone loud in the panicked way, sirens and voices and a great many people moving with nowhere to move to. He let the city be loud as his attention stayed on the gates.

The distortion moved.

Not the way it did in a fight.