Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
There was a brief period, anywhere from a few days to a few months from the moment the gate appeared, when the monsters couldn’t escape yet, but we could enter the gate from our side. It gave us a chance to extinguish the anchor and collapse the breach. The moment a gate manifested, the clock started ticking.
At first, destroying the anchors was the sole responsibility of the military, but it quickly got prohibitively expensive. Regular humans were no match for the breach beasts, and casualties were high. And it was discovered that the breaches contained a wealth of materials: strange ores, medicinal plants, and monster bones with incredible properties. Resources that could aid our fight and make us stronger. It wasn’t just about destroying the anchors anymore. We had to strip the breach of anything valuable before it collapsed.
Within months after the first Talents manifested their abilities, they banded into guilds, and governments around the world began to outsource gates to them, taking a percentage of the profits. Economic and security crisis solved at the cost of volunteer lives.
By now, the process of gate diving was almost routine. As soon as a gate appeared, it was graded, its threat level measured, a government assessor like me assigned, and the appropriate guild contacted. The guild sent a team in to do a preliminary survey and let the DDC know when they were ready to proceed, at which point I arrived at the site.
The attack began with the assault team, heavy hitters with combat talents, who entered the gate and cut and burned through the miniature pocket dimension until they found the anchor and destroyed it. The journey to the anchor took days, sometimes weeks.
While the assault team worked their way to the anchor, the mining crew came in and stripped the breach bare, extracting anything that could be of use and would help humanity keep fighting. Each breach’s resources were unique and precious. My job was to assess the space, guide the mining team, and make sure that the government got their thirty percent cut.
Once the anchor was destroyed, the assault team would rush back to the exit, because without the anchor, the gate would collapse in three days. Nobody knew what happened to the breaches once the gate closed. Hopefully everybody got out before the gate vanished, and when the next one appeared, we would do it all over again.
Ahead Aaron stopped. Finally. It was time to earn my paycheck. The sooner I found something of value, the sooner we all got out of here.
Apprehension curled around me like a cold snake. I could just turn around and run back to the gate, quit, and never go into any breaches again. I could absolutely do that. But then whatever this breach held would stay in it instead of becoming weapons, armor, and medicine.
I took a deep breath and pushed forward, past the miners, to do my job.
2
A massive cavern spread in front of us, awash in bioluminescence like some bizarre rave. It resembled an enormous egg set on its side, with the wider end to the right ending in a solid wall and the narrow end to the left splitting off into several dark passages. The cavern’s floor sloped to the center where a wide stream ran through the cave from left to right. The water was like glass, perfectly clear.
At the banks, the stream branched into several small pools bordered by rimstone dams, some shallow, others deeper. The pools flowed into each other, stretching toward a flat island on our right. The stream split around it and emptied into a lake, its waters moving slowly and disappearing under a spectacular flowstone wall where layers of calcite formed a frozen stone waterfall.
Melissa turned to London.
The blade warden surveyed the cavern. “Go ahead.”
“I need lights, people!” Melissa called out.
The mining crew spread out, planting floodlights along the nearest wall. The only flat space available was directly by the entrance, and the mining crew managed to fit three out of the four carts on it. The portable generator on the central cart sputtered into life, and bright electric light illuminated the cavern. The sloping floor was ridged with calcite, and it looked slick. A good way to break a leg.
“Much better,” Melissa declared. “It’s almost like we know what we’re doing.”
London nodded to the tank. Aaron moved to the left and planted himself in the narrower part of the cave, between the dark tunnels and the mining crew. London stayed at the entrance, guarding our exit route. The three strikers fanned out along the perimeter.
It was my turn to shine. The cavern walls were awash with swirls of bright green mixed with rust-colored metallic deposits. Promising.
I took a deep breath and flexed.
The official term was talent activation, but to me it felt like flexing a muscle I didn’t normally use. The world turned crystal clear. The edges of the rimstone dams and contours of the flowstone waterfall came into sharp focus, as if I’d adjusted my eyes to a higher resolution. The outlines of individual mineral deposits glowed slightly.