The gate sat at the bottom of a shallow valley, a vertical tear of pale blue light humming in the open air with nothing around it but flattened grass and a wide ring where the mana had burned the ground bare.

You didn’t just walk up to a gate, though. A rope line sagged across the mouth of the valley between two posts, a small guild checkpoint set up beside it. Two guards leaned against a folding table while a third sat on a crate, looking like the boredom had been killing him by inches for days.

The one on the crate got to his feet the second he saw them coming.

"Hold it right there." Then he caught the badge on Hajin’s belt, saw the number stamped into it, and his tone changed completely. "You’re the Ranker the guild sent. Hajin."

"That’s me."

The guard grabbed a sheet of parchment off the table and skimmed it. "Says here it’s an exclusive clear for your party, straight from the Guildmaster."

His eyes drifted past Hajin to the three hunched at the back, lingering on their cheap gear and the bare belts that didn’t carry a single rank marker. "These three aren’t on the sheet, though, and they’re not carrying permits."

"They’re with me," he said. "Hired porters. Anything they do in there falls on me."

The man weighed that, glanced at the badge one more time, and decided it outranked his paperwork.

"...Your call." He lifted the rope for them. "Thing popped up a few days back, and nobody’s set foot inside since. It’s never been measured, so there’s no rank on the books, we’ve just been turning people away." He paused as Hajin ducked under. "Whatever’s down there is stronger than an unranked has any right to be. Watch yourselves."

Past the rope, Hajin walked to the lip of the bowl and stopped, both hands in his pockets.

He could feel the mana rolling off the anomaly from all the way up here, a steady pulse that pushed against his skin like heat radiating off an open fire.

It was incredibly strong for an unranked Gate that the Guild hadn’t even bothered to properly measure, putting out significantly more pressure than he had initially expected. A standard adventuring party would have taken one single step toward it and immediately rethought their entire decision to come here.

For him, none of it landed.

He had stood in front of a Beast King and felt the air itself try to crush the breath out of him. This gate didn’t come close.

Juna stepped up beside him, ears flicking toward the light, "seems like it’s nothing," she said, almost disappointed.

"Pretty much," he agreed.

Loccy popped up on his other side, sniffed once, then scrunched her nose. "It smells green, like wet leaves after rain." Her ears stood straight up. "Can we go in? Are we going in now?"

"Give it a minute," he said, flattening one of her ears with two fingers just to watch it spring back.

Vella hung a step behind the rest, arms crossed, eyeing the tear with a lazier kind of interest. "Whatever’s living in there isn’t strong," she said. "But unranked means nobody’s walked it before. We won’t know the layout or what’s waiting until we’re already inside."

"Then we’ll find out the hard way."

Behind them, the slope finally delivered the rest of the group.

Cassie dragged herself over the ridge first, red in the face and soaked through, an oversized supply pack carving lines into both shoulders.

The large man staggered up after her, looking like he’d leave his lungs somewhere on the trail. The third one had given up on dignity entirely, leaning on a crooked branch he’d cut along the road.

Then they felt the gate.

All three stopped dead at the top of the valley, their eyes dropping to the pulse of blue light below. What little color Cassie had left drained out of her face.

"That’s—" The large man’s throat worked, and he took a step back without meaning to. "That’s a lot of mana."

"Is that normal?" the third one asked, his voice cracking on the way up. "That’s not normal. Tell me that’s not normal."

Hajin looked back at them, then at the gate, honestly not seeing the issue.

Then it clicked, the three of them were two-shard adventurers. To someone at their level, the mana bleeding off this gate probably felt like standing at the edge of a cliff with a hard wind at their back. What barely touched him was sitting on their chests like a boulder.

The stream panel sat open in the corner of his vision, the viewer count fatter than usual.

[ CringeSlayer91: ] not the supply mules dying before the gate even opens 💀

[ ShadowMage44: ] those three are one breeze away from passing out lmaooo

[ NewViewer_02: ] hajin just standing there with his hands in his pockets while they sweat through their armor

[ ashley (Mod): ] be nice, they’re trying their best 😅

He huffed out a short laugh and let the panel fade. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

Cassie let her pack hit the ground with a thud and folded over it, hands braced on her knees while she dragged in air.

"How are you all just standing there?" she got out between breaths. "That thing feels like it wants to swallow me whole."

"Because it’s weak," Juna said, not bothering to look at her.

"Weak." Cassie lifted her head and stared at the wolfkin like she’d started speaking another language. "It feels like a four-shard zone, at least."

"Could be," Hajin said, rolling a shoulder. "Three, maybe four. Hard to tell until we’re in."

The large man made a small, wounded noise and sat straight down in the grass.

"Four shards," he whispered, staring at nothing. "We can barely clear a two-shard gate, even with a full party and a healer backing us up."

"And now you’re clearing a four with us," Vella said sweetly, drifting past him. "See? You’re already growing."

Cassie did not look comforted by that in the slightest.

Hajin started down the slope toward the gate, the rest of them falling in behind, Cassie’s party bringing up the very back and looking like they’d rather be anywhere else.

He stopped a few feet from the tear, the light washing everything pale blue. The mana had a strange grain to it this close, a faint roughness he didn’t usually feel off something so small. He couldn’t place it, and anything he couldn’t explain put him on edge.

’Probably nothing,’ he thought, even as he tucked the feeling away for later.

He turned back to the group.

"Quick rules, since half of you have never done this," he said, his eyes landing on the three at the back. "Stay behind us. Don’t try to be a hero. If something comes for you, run toward me, not away from me. Clear?"

The three of them nodded so fast it had to hurt.

"Master, can I go first?" Loccy was already up on her toes, practically humming.

"Go ahead."

She lit up and shot through the light before he could get a second word out, gone in a blink. Juna sighed and went after her. Vella followed at her own unhurried pace, throwing him a small smirk over her shoulder before she crossed.

Hajin looked back one last time, "coming?" he asked.

Cassie’s eyes went from the gate to the pack at her feet, then off to the middle distance, where ten gold a day was apparently waiting for her.

"...Yeah," she muttered, hauling the straps back onto her aching shoulders. "We’re coming. Boys, get up."

He gave her a nod and stepped through the light.