— lincoln high school portland, oregon, september 2022

["Can you see what's happening?"] White noise was mixed in with their words. ["Are they really shooting a movie?"]

["How does that make sense?"] Voices overlapped, each one more excited than the last.

He wouldn't have minded, but for some reason he couldn't stop looking at the comparatively small smartphone screen that was being held in his direction. It was kind of annoying, but he tried to shake it off.

Anyway, to be more precise: It was only held in his general direction, as he happened to be standing near a group of people who identified themselves as friends of the one with the phone.

Still, she didn't seem bothered by him participating in her viewing session. She was just that kind of social butterfly, he mused.

Meanwhile, Isaac just looked at the black hole in the sky that hung over Seattle. It had an almost hypnotic effect on him, as it was the only Gate he had ever seen in person.

There was something wrong with these things. He sensed it even then, though he had not known what he was looking at.

That day sparked a change in how the world would run from that point on. A flame was lit and it swallowed the entire human race like there was no tomorrow. When he saw the old cell phone video, he felt transported back to that moment. Even though twelve years had passed, he had a good memory.

He saw the masses in the video and knew it was the same crowd he had seen from his window on his fourth birthday, looking out and down the street.

Soldiers from the U.S. military began to push back the crowd, leading only a small group of people to the center and helping them get up on a fire truck ladder. The lower third generously gave us their names.

From left to right: Adrian Zane, Karina Hausner, In-Sung Choi, Hippolyte Vaillancourt, Samuel Dryer, Konstantin Pavlovitch Krasnoff, and Marisha Pavlovna Krasnoff.

Following that fateful day, each of them turned into names that the world would never forget. Even at that very moment, all those years ago; even when no one knew who they were, the eyes of the world were on their backs as they walked up to that Gate.

It was as if they already knew what kind of role they would play, even though they barely understood if what was happening in front of their eyes was even real.

["No, I heard about this before! It was taken down, but there was one of those things in Russia too!"]

["You're bullshitting!"] At that moment, the police approached the guy who was filming.

Isaac could remember that it must have been around this time that his mother was frantically running around their apartment, gathering up everything that was important. He could still feel her warm hand on his shoulder, pulling him away from the window with an uncomfortable look on her face as she pretended to smile.

"Honey, come with us, we're going on a little birthday trip," she said cheerfully, her voice trembling despite her efforts.

Isaac's father stood right behind her, nodding with his car keys at the ready, and next to him, the guests lined up to leave.

In the hallway, they watched the tenants flee in droves, while Ellen Layer gripped his hand so tightly he wondered if he might break a bone. She had to hold on to him, though, because it got rowdier as they made their way out.

His mother had glanced at her phone. "Evacuation," was all she could manage to utter amidst the chaos.

"Everything's going to be fine," Chris reassured her, trying to squeeze through next to his wife without losing sight of her.

They had hoped to get out of the building as quickly as possible, but as soon as they had, they wanted to run back in. It was like all hell had broken loose.

All the people fleeing their apartments, as well as every passerby, policeman, soldier, and journalist in the area, made them feel more like sardines in a tin can than actual people near a major intersection.

A scream snapped the brown-haired boy out of his thoughts, back into the hallway of his local high school.

["Oh my God, what is that?"]

The young woman in the recording screamed, but at the same time seemed to hold her breath. She was in awe of what she saw.

The teenagers couldn't see it because the cameraman was so confused that he let his arm hang down before he collected himself and quickly filmed again. ["Can you see this ...?"]

More white noise filled his ears as he saw something crawl out of the blackness above their heads. It was ugly and slimy looking, like a giant crocodile; a creature that should not exist in this dimension.

It moved slowly, as if it had all the time in the world.

["I might die today. I want to say..."] Suddenly, someone seemed to have bumped into him, causing him to drop his phone into the crowd and the connection was cut.

Then, as if nothing had happened, the video resumed from a different angle. "It's basically a compilation. Since there was so little footage, someone took the best quality ones from what was left and put them together," the blonde girl explained simply, as if to apologize for what they were all seeing.

Even though they knew all too well what it was like. A lot of people in the crowd had to hand over their phones to the military. Helicopters hadn't been allowed in the air above Seattle either.

Everyone was shooed away as quickly as possible. Online videos were taken down at the speed of light. All in a vain effort to hide what had happened.

"Did they really think they could hide this?" asked a girl next to Isaac. "A Gate in the middle of a city like Seattle and they actually had the guts to try and cover it up anyway?"

"Yeah, I can't believe it either," Rue added with a sigh. It was the girl with the blonde curls who showed the video.

"Not gonna lie though, they did manage to keep it from us until that happened. This was going down for at least a year before shit hit the fan, let's face it."

"And that's just what they officially admitted, mind you. Who knows what's really going on? They found all those Hunters near the hidden Gates and trained them. Is one year really enough to do that?"

No one could refute that statement - and frankly, no one wanted to. It would have been like fighting a losing battle. The whole world was angry.

It was the only time that the governmental bodies of several nations had come together and more or less pulled on one string - citing the American Zombie Apocalypse Clause as the basis for a united fight against the unknown.

Unsurprisingly though, they largely stopped doing so shortly after the cat was out of the bag.

As the public began to become aware of all the new resources that could be gained in these Dungeons, people everywhere wanted to hop on the bandwagon. And with that, industry and commerce began to shift drastically in one direction.

New energy sources, tougher materials for clothing, security, warfare, new medical treatments, exotic fruits and meats - almost anything you could think of.

On the screen one could still see what would soon be known as the Giant Crocodile King, which explained what it looked like. People were running around screaming, everything was shaking, and then the real pandemonium began.

Gunshots echoed throughout the city and the chaotic visuals became even more erratic.

For a split second, they could peek through the crowd and see the Beast breaking through the police barricade. The first person to face it was ripped in two. They didn't see the whole thing, but they still imagined what it looked like without knowing.

Well, at least most of them didn't. A brown-haired boy scratched his head. He remembered.

His mother had tried to lead them to her old Chevrolet, but they had been kept together by the military. They were supposed to be evacuated, but only in the eyes of the media.

Back then, the government was really trying to keep it all under wraps, which didn't work, as expected.

Because of this, only after the Beast came out and true terror flooded the crowd like a tidal wave, did they actually have a chance to break the siege and escape to another city.

Isaac had seen it all.

The street that had slowly been dyed red, so dark it had seemed almost black; the pieces of flesh dangling from the reptile's exposed teeth; humans torn in half with their guts lying around for people to walk all over them.

He could smell the sweat of the other people; gunpowder, smoke, and the metallic stench of blood. Still, he didn't feel the need to interfere. At least not yet. On the other hand, he had never been so close to doing so.

If it hadn't been for what came next.

The video cut again. This time it was from an official news channel.

They managed to sneak in after everyone else was busy trying to slow down the Giant Crocodile King.

And then it happened. Two of the young people who had gone inside the Gate suddenly jumped out in a hurry. Even though the black hole had been more than twenty feet above the ground, they landed as if they had just hopped down from a particularly high curb.

They were both very young, one male and one female. The girl was part of the Russian twin Hunters, Marisha Krasnoff, and the other was the South Korean shooting star, In-Sung Choi. They had followed the Beast out of the Dungeon and were now charging at it.

The woman stood behind her ally, opened her arms, and activated some sort of force field. The next second, the Crocodile jumped into the crowd again, but this time it couldn't get through. Instead, something invisible flattened its face like a frying pan.

Accordingly, In-Sung Choi manifested something in his hand; it looked like a rather short black spear, with a double-edged blade about as long as Isaac's forearm these days.

He leapt into the air, gaining speed and power to land a single throw on the disoriented oversized lizard.

His movements seemed perfectly choreographed, the strike well delivered, and with a sickeningly wet sound, the blade sliced through the Beast's malfunctioning brain and lodged itself in the concrete beneath.

It was a scene that could not be explained or comprehended, even by those who saw it with their own eyes.

As the Beast screamed and twitched for one last time, the remaining humans around it stood still. Tears formed in their eyes, and some sank to the dirty ground. It really did look like hell.

But their tears were of relief, disbelief, and hope. It was a sign that they had long since stopped believing in a new tomorrow, without even realizing it themselves.

There was nothing left of an uneventful afternoon. It had become like this in a mere thirty minutes.