The Threshold
Three months after the incident at District AAA, the fragile peace City CC had maintained finally reached its expiration date.
It happened on a quiet Tuesday evening.
Ruyi was standing on the balcony of her family’s apartment, holding a warm cup of tea and watching the city skyline fade into deep purple twilight. Below, traffic crawled lazily through the streets, commuters walked home from the transit stations, and streetlights flickered to life one by one.
Suddenly, the air pressure plummeted.
It wasn't a gradual shift. It was a violent, suffocating drop in atmospheric pressure that made the glass windows across the entire apartment complex rattle violently in their aluminum frames.
Ruyi’s tea sloshed over the rim, scalding the back of her hand, but she didn't so much as flinch. Her amethyst eyes snapped toward the eastern horizon.
Five miles away, directly over the central commercial plaza of City CC, the sky literally tore open.
It wasn't a standard Class-2 or Class-3 spatial fracture. It was a massive, jagged rift over a hundred yards wide, burning with a sickening, blood-red glow that painted the surrounding storm clouds in shades of crimson and violent violet.
A Class-1 Disaster Gate.
The sirens across the city didn't just wail—they screamed in high-pitched, frantic patterns reserved exclusively for total district evacuations. Loudspeakers mounted on public transit posts began blaring automated warnings over the deafening hum of spatial static:
ATTENTION ALL CITIZENS. CLASS-1 DISASTER GATE DETECTED IN SECTOR 1. EVACUATE TO SUB-LEVEL SHELTERS IMMEDIATELY. ALL REGISTERED HUNTERS ARE ORDERED TO REPORT TO THE PRIMARY BARRICADE.
Inside the apartment, panic erupted in an instant. Her mother let out a terrified gasp, dropping a ceramic dinner plate that shattered against the kitchen tile. Her father rushed to turn on the television, where every local news channel had already been overridden by a flashing, red emergency broadcast banner.
"Rion! Get your jacket!" her father shouted, his voice cracking with sheer panic as he grabbed his wallet and keys from the counter. "Lia, leave the dishes! Grab the emergency supply bags! We're heading to the sub-level civilian shelter right now!"
Rion bolted out of his bedroom, his face pale and wide-eyed. He caught Ruyi’s gaze through the balcony’s sliding glass door. His posture was stiff, his hands subtly trembling at his sides as his fingers twitched—instinctively preparing to manifest a compressed barrier shield.
Ruyi caught his eye and gave him a single, stern, barely perceptible shake of her head.
Not here. Not in front of Mom and Dad.
Understanding passed between the siblings instantly. Rion swallowed hard, immediately dropping his hands and forcing a look of frantic, teenage panic onto his face to match their parents.
"I'm coming, Dad!" Rion called out, turning to help their mother zip up the emergency bag. "Ruyi, hurry up!"
Ruyi stepped back inside, sliding the balcony door shut behind her. She set her scalding tea cup down on the wooden dining table with absolute, chilling composure.
She glanced out the window one last time. The blood-red light of the Class-1 gate was spreading like an ink stain across the evening sky. Even from miles away, her spatial perception picked up the suffocating, heavy density of high-tier Alpha beasts pouring over the threshold and spilling into the city streets below.
The Guild would be overwhelmed. The local response teams would be scattered within minutes. Vance, Mark, and every active hunter in City CC were about to be dragged into the meat grinder of the storm.
Ruyi reached into her jacket pocket, her bare fingers closing into a firm, silent fist.
Deep inside her chest, behind the quiet facade of a mundane civilian daughter, the cold, boundless void opened wide—silent, absolute, and completely unbound.
She would walk her parents and Rion to the shelter door. She would play her part as the scared, ordinary older sister until they were safely locked behind three feet of reinforced bunker steel.
And then, she would vanish.
The world had forced her hand once before. She had hidden, she had run, and she had played the part of the powerless civilian survivor just to keep her small, quiet life intact. But as the crimson sky illuminated her dark hair and unblinking purple eyes, one thing was abundantly clear:
If the world was going to keep breaking around her family, she was simply going to have to erase everything that stood in their way.