The sky was red.
Felix Valerius stood on a cliff overlooking the valley, his silver-white armor caked in mud and monster gore. Behind him stretched a forest of twisted black trees, their branches clawing at the crimson sky like skeletal fingers reaching for something.
A cold wind swept through the valley. Felix smiled.
"Beautiful."
The woman beside him looked at him like he’d just eaten something off the ground.
"You have a very strange definition of beautiful."
"There’s an S-rank monster nest three kilometers ahead," he said, still grinning.
She sighed.
Her name was Aria Frost, an S-rank with ice affinity, and the strongest fighter in the current team.
She carried a silver spear over one shoulder, its blade dusted with a thin layer of frost that never seemed to melt.
Beside her stood Darius Kane, S-rank, earth affinity, built like something you’d find holding up a bridge.
Behind them, five A-rank heroes rounded out the party:
Lena Veyra - wind,
Kael Draven - fire,
Mira Solenne - space,
Orion Vale - lightning, and
Felix himself, healing affinity.
Fifteen heroes total. Five A-ranks, eight B-ranks, and the two S-ranks anchoring the formation. A standard raid team for a gate this size.
The job was simple: kill the boss, collect the cores, close the gate, and go home in one piece.
Behind them, the gate pulsed: a black wound torn into the fabric of the world, leading to a temporary dimension humanity had learned to fear a long time ago.
The things that crawled out of these rifts came from worlds with their own forests, their own mountains, their own oceans, and, always, their own monsters.
Fifty new rifts opened somewhere on the planet every single day, and every one came with a clock attached.
Ten days.
If the boss inside wasn’t dead by then, whatever lived on the other side would start crossing over on its own. So humanity didn’t raid gates because it wanted to. It raided them because it had no choice.
Felix rolled his shoulders. "Everyone ready?"
Darius cracked his knuckles. "Been ready for ten minutes."
"You’re only saying that because you’re scared Felix will reach the boss first," Kael said.
"Shut up."
Felix’s easy smile fell away, replaced by a grin that had no business belonging to a healer.
"Let’s hunt."
Aria watched him go. "See? Mad."
He was already gone.
Three kilometers vanished beneath his feet in under ten seconds. The first monster: something wolf-shaped, six-legged, its mouth a mess of serrated teeth, barely registered him before his fist caved in its skull.
"Too weak!" he laughed, wiping blood from his cheek.
Another dropped from the trees. He twisted aside, its claws missing his throat by a hair, and drove his elbow into its ribs hard enough to hear something crack.
Three more came at once.
He didn’t retreat, he stepped into them, throwing punches and elbows and a spinning kick that put all three on the ground before they understood what had happened.
A blade of condensed mana wrapped his forearm. He swung it through a fifth monster like it was made of paper.
Dozens more poured out of the treeline.
Felix’s grin only widened.
"That’s better."
Then the rest of the team caught up, and the forest turned into a war zone. Lightning split the air. Ice erupted in jagged columns. Wind blades shredded bark and bone alike. Fire rolled between the trees in waves.
Aria drove her spear into the earth, and a mountain of ice tore upward, impaling a dozen monsters at once. "Stop charging ahead!" she shouted over the chaos.
"I’m not charging," Felix called back, thirty meters out in front of everyone.
"You’re literally thirty meters ahead of us!"
"I’m scouting."
"You’re fighting!"
"Scouting while fighting."
"You’re impossible."
Darius slammed both fists into the ground. "Earth break!" A wave of stone rolled forward, crushing monsters beneath it, and the B-ranks scattered into formation behind him while the A-ranks locked in as the second line.
Felix stayed at the front. Not the healer’s place.
Twenty minutes later the ground was a carpet of corpses, and the team pushed deeper into the rift.
"Contact!" a B-rank shouted, and something enormous tore through the treeline, six meters tall, black-scaled, four arms, a roar that shook loose leaves from branches a hundred feet away.
"High A-rank!" Mira called.
One massive arm swept down. A B-rank hero named Ryan got his shield up half a second too late, and the impact sent him flying into a tree.
"Ryan!"
Felix was already moving. He caught the beast’s second arm bare-handed, cracking the ground beneath his boots. The monster stared at him.
He stared back.
"You’re strong," he said.
It roared.
He twisted, snapped the arm at the joint, and buried his fist in its chest.
It staggered. He pursued: punch, kick, elbow, slipping between its remaining arms like water finding the gaps in a wall.
His fist found its jaw, then its ribs, then its throat, and when it finally stumbled, he jumped, mana wrapping his leg, and brought his heel down on its skull hard enough to end it in one motion.
Silence.
"That was fun," he said to no one, and then heard Ryan groan behind him. The grin vanished. He was at Ryan’s side in a second, palm pressed to a chest caved in around broken ribs and a half-collapsed lung.
"Don’t move."
"Can’t," Ryan managed.
Golden-white light spilled from Felix’s hand.
Bone knit back together. Torn muscle wove itself whole. Within seconds Ryan was breathing deep, staring up in disbelief.
"I’m alive."
"Of course you are," Felix said, standing.
"Thanks."
"You’re buying me dinner."
The monsters kept getting stronger the deeper they went: A-rank, then more A-rank until Mira stopped mid-stride and went very still.
"Something’s wrong."
"What?" Felix asked.
"Mana density. The whole forest’s saturated with it."
Darius’s face hardened. "Boss?"
"Definitely."
Felix’s eyes lit up. "Finally."
Aria grabbed his shoulder. "Don’t."
"I’m not doing anything."
"You have that look."
"What look?"
"The one you get right before you do something stupid."
Before he could argue further, the ground exploded. Trees flew through the air; the earth split open, and something vast pulled itself up out of the gap: serpentine, six-limbed, armored in black plate, a crown of glowing horns crowning a head the size of a car.
Its eyes opened.
"S-rank," Mira whispered.
"Combat formation!" Darius barked.
Felix stepped forward, grin already back in place. "Mine."
"Absolutely not," Aria snapped.
Felix exhaled. "Fine. I’ll support you."
"Good."
He raised a hand. "Go."
Aria’s spear became a white blur. The boss roared, lightning crawling across its scales, and the collision between them shook the valley floor. Darius joined a beat later, raising walls of stone to box the creature in.
Kael’s flames rolled through the gaps. Lena’s wind tore at its footing. Orion brought lightning down from a clear sky. Mira warped the space around it just enough to throw off every strike.
Behind them, Felix never stopped moving.
Healing mana flowed the second anyone was hit. When mana ran low, he steadied it.
When someone was thrown clear, he was there to catch them. And whenever an opening appeared, he took it.
"Left," he called once, and Aria shifted without question. The claw meant for her ribs swept past empty air, and Felix’s fist found the joint instead.
"Thanks."
"Anytime."
Later, Darius went through a stone wall and came out the other side coughing blood.
Felix was on him before the dust settled.
"Still alive?"
A hand on the chest, a wash of green light, and Darius was back on his feet. "Again?"
"Again."
The fight dragged past the twenty-minute mark before Aria finally gathered everything she had left and let it go at once, ice spreading across the whole clearing.
"Now!"
Everyone struck together. Felix’s healing aura dropped entirely, every scrap of mana he had left funneling into a single punch that tore through the boss’s defenses.
Aria’s spear found its heart a heartbeat later.
Darius crushed its spine. Fire and lightning finished what was left.
It roared once, and collapsed.
For a long moment, nobody moved. Felix stood over the corpse, his clothes in ribbons, blood drying on his face, hair a disaster, smiling like he’d just won something.
"That," he said, catching his breath, "was amazing."
"You are completely insane," Aria told him.
Darius knelt by the body. "Boss core."
"It’s enormous," Mira breathed, staring at the dense mass glowing inside the creature’s chest.
Around them, the rest of the team moved through the field, collecting cores from the fallen.
The gate had been cleared. The dimension would go on existing somewhere on the other side of rift, the monsters inside it would breed again, and someday another gate might open onto the exact same world.
But for today, they had won.
Hours later, the team stood before the gate, equipment wrecked, bodies aching, everyone still breathing. The portal’s edges had already begun to shiver and fold inward.
Felix looked back one last time. "See you next time."
"You know it won’t remember you," Aria said.
"Let me have my moment."
She let him have it, and one by one they stepped through, Felix last of all.
The crimson sky vanished. The smell of blood disappeared with it. Earth came rushing back: the noise, the lights, the enormous Association transport facility built around the gate site, already swarming with staff.
"Core containers, now!"
"Careful with that S-rank core!"
"Get the wounded to medical!"
"Someone log the completion time!"
Felix stretched until something in his back popped. "Finally."
Kael dropped straight onto the ground. "I’m never moving again."
"You said that last week," Lena said.
"And I meant it then, too."
Darius hauled a crate of core containers past them. "Felix. You’re eating with us tonight."
"Obviously."
Ryan raised a hand. "I can’t afford it."
"You almost died."
"And?"
"Dinner."
Ryan sighed and gave up arguing, and the whole group laughed.
That was the Felix most people knew: sharp, reliable, the kind of teammate who remembered everyone’s favorite food and never hesitated to bleed for the people beside him.
The Association knew a different one. The one who smiled at the sight of monsters. The one who ran toward the thing everyone else ran from. The one who fought like something feral while somehow keeping fifteen people alive at the same time.
The Mad Healer.
He was halfway to leaving with the others when a voice stopped him.
"Felix Valerius."
He turned. A uniformed Association official stood a few meters off, clipboard in hand.
"Yes?"
"Upper Management wants you. Immediately."
"Me?"
"That’s all I was told."
Felix glanced back at his team. Darius shrugged. Aria’s eyes narrowed.
"Well," Felix said, handing his gear off to Ryan, "dinner’s going to have to wait."
"Don’t get yourself into trouble," Aria warned.
"When have I ever done that?"
Every single person on the team looked at him.
Felix laughed. "Okay. Fair."
He turned to the official. "Lead the way."
He had no idea, walking through those doors, that he’d just taken the first step toward the strangest assignment of his life, one that would put him face-to-face with women far more dangerous than anything he’d fought in that rift.
But he didn’t know any of that yet. For now, he just followed the official inside, and the doors closed behind him.