The latest Portal had appeared in one of the biggest intersections of the city.

Atlas hadn’t been on hand the day the first S-Grade opened—one of many in the outbreak that began this new way of life. He hadn’t gotten evaluated yet and with no clear power manifesting, he hadn’t tried to be until after the strike team had already entered. But he thought he remembered it being on this very block, a catastrophe so intense and tragic it had spurred years of retrospectives and investigations at the highest level.

After he got his Class, he had scrounged up every article he could find about the disaster, like a man possessed. He’d seen the photos, read about the incomprehensible devastation. It was apocalyptic in its scope, but there had been no warning signs. There never were in those early days.

Things were supposed to be different now, nearly a decade after the initial devastation. They all prepared for Portals these days. Everyday people knew the evacuation criteria. Insurance covered the losses. The fallout was minimized, contained, commonplace.

At least it was—usually.

Today was the exception.

The great, gaping maw of the Portal was so immense and dark that it seemed to be clawing the sunlight out of the sky itself. An unnatural darkness swallowed the entire block, blotting out the little light that remained with dust and debris as it hurdled through open air.

The Portal had a gravity of its own, pulling the creaking, groaning metal of distant cars and aging infrastructure alike toward it like a fathomless magnet. Grass, trees, and mud wrested themselves free of the Earth and went careening into the center.

It seemed hungry.

Whoever had been in its path at the start had either fled or been sucked in already. Their screams seemed to linger in the uneasy feeling of the air, torn from their throats with the sort of force that collapsed lungs and broke families apart.

A base had been set up far enough away to preserve life, shielded by the flat side of a post-Collapse building with a foundation deep in the Earth. Portal Group employees rushed to and fro nearby, almost inaudible behind the great whooshing of the S-Grade and the creaking of the buildings holding on for dear life.

“Follow me,” Izar told Atlas as the sleek, black towncar they’d been driven in disappeared on the opposite side of a closed road. The Hunter's teleportation Skill had been on cooldown, so they'd had to get there the old fashioned way.

The sirens around them were rising in volume and frequency with every passing second, their pitch warbling in the strange gravity of the Portal’s pull. Atlas stumbled out into the street after him, still unsteady on his feet after the dozen or so high-speed turns they’d taken to get here. Izar seemed nonplussed.

"Where are we going?" Atlas asked, finally. He would prefer not to be left in the dark. He was about to die, after all.

Izar blinked at him, like he was just now realizing that Atlas had never been to an active Portal scene. “Last Bastion will be prepping at the triage area. I need to coordinate with them before initial entry.”

“Delightful,” Atlas murmured, shaking a few wayward shards of glass from his sleeve. Even here, he couldn’t escape that damn assessment pod. Stupid Acquisitions Department.

They approached the triage area faster than he would have liked, Atlas’ hands deep in his pockets and his scowl aimed at the dirt. It took the team a moment to clock who he was, that he wasn’t entirely a nobody or a random civilian in a dark hat.

But Atlas knew every last one of them immediately. It was hard not to—they were among the most famous faces in the world.

“What’s he doing here?” Charon asked, his shock of bright, red hair tied tight on top of his head and out of his face. Charon Gage—the Firestarter. He boiled the Portal’s numerous beasts alive, regardless of species, melting them into gooey slush that stung to the touch. He was well-outfitted and equipped, a radio clutched, still buzzing, in his right hand. “We shouldn’t be bringing an unregistered Hunter to a breach.”

“Atlas will be entering the Portal with us,” Izar told him. He held up a hand before Charon could protest. “I suspect he’s awakened. We need all S-Classes on deck, even suspected ones. You know how this went last time.”

“You’re the one signing his death warrant,” Charon answered with a shrug. His dark, amber eyes were narrow and mean. “Try not to get killed, kid.”

“Kid.”

Like Atlas wasn’t two years his senior. Like he hadn’t been the one to show Charon around headquarters a decade ago, when Atlas was still green and young and someone worth knowing.

Atlas gritted his teeth and shut his mouth, the muscle in his jaw jumping with the force of it.

Charon could reduce him to a memory in a moment’s time, very possibly without any consequences at all. That was the simple truth. That was the burden Atlas bore by virtue of being useless.

Izar kept speaking like he had finally “awakened,” but Atlas wasn’t so sure.

He had known the name of his so-called Skill—Phoenix—since the first time his status window had flickered to life.

Early on, Skills themselves weren’t ranked or known by name. The status window didn’t automatically update until the final closure of the first S-Grade Portal, weeks after the breach had initially appeared. Atlas thought sometimes, idly, that it felt like the interface had been waiting for something to render its verdict.

By then, he had already swallowed his pride and made the trip to the makeshift evaluation centers that popped up everywhere in the aftermath. They could only provide a relative assessment at that point, a strength determined against the profiles of other individuals’ health and mana. It was a pseudo-ranking made only in proportion to the rest of the awakened.

The centers started small, run mostly by volunteers who had determined they had the ability to evaluate others as a part of their own Skill set. The machines didn’t come until later. They were developed by Portal Group more than a year after the Vast World Collapse to expedite the evaluation process.

Every person and machine had always agreed about him, though. Atlas Cane was consistent. High Mana. High Health. Potential. An S-Class, through and through.

If only they could also tell him what this useless Skill of his did.

No one, no Hunter or machine or researcher, could ever tell a Hunter what their Skill did, instead only giving an arbitrary ranking of its imagined power and potential. It was usually evident to the Hunter—something obvious enough with the name on their screen or something easily uncovered with an afternoon of real effort.

Not Atlas, though.

Not that he hadn’t given it plenty of thought. Alone, in his run-down apartment, he had tried everything he could think of to activate it, looking unbearably stupid in the process.

Nothing had worked.

He knew it was possible, with a name like Phoenix, that it was a resurrection skill. But there was no world where he was willing to take that bet head-on. And in any case, what good would that sort of ability do for a powerless civilian? Some average waiter with a basic healing skill couldn’t take down monsters the size of buildings.

Was he supposed to die over and over again until the threat grew too tired to continue?

So, unlike Izar, Atlas had relatively little hope that the pod’s odd reaction to his reading meant anything at all. It was almost certainly nothing more than some strange malfunction of the device back at headquarters, overburdened by the surge of Hunters seeking evaluation in the past few months, hoping to hit the big time with every mediocre Skill under the sun.

But that malfunction had a price, and Atlas was paying it now.

Izar wasn’t budging. Atlas could try to run, but he would just be dragged back, kicking and screaming, by less sympathetic employees. So, for now, he would follow instructions, keep quiet, and hope he could sneak his way back out of the Portal behind bigger, better Hunters.

In the end, he was at the mercy of Portal Group, as always. All Hunters above C-Class were, in perpetuity.

It had been that way since Portal Group was first established, a popular solution passed easily through the legislature in the haze of fear and panic that had consumed the country after the Vast World Collapse sent streams of beasts and shadows and ghouls pouring into their streets.

The remainder of Last Bastion joined Portal Group a few years later. Today, they were just a line of familiar, unhappy faces that barely spared him more than a pitiable glance, wielding a variety of intimidating weapons that oozed auras of every color. Each member had one: oversized guns, bows, and a dagger with intense black mist around the handle.

“We’re waiting on the remaining A- and B-Classes,” Charon told them. He was the acting head of Last Bastion and had clearly been appointed the incident coordinator. He flagged down one of the buses approaching from the west, and a bevy of other Hunters from every team at Portal Group came flooding out. “We have another ten minutes before it’s at risk of spitting out dimensional beasts.”

“If that,” Izar said, a sour look on his face. “We have very little to compare it to. Is it the same shape as the original?”

“It looks similar enough,” Charon said.

Atlas forced himself to look, tracing the edges he could make out with his navy eyes.

“It is identical,” he said, before he could think better of weighing in. “The warp in the top left is the same as the Portal during the Collapse. This isn’t just another S-Grade. It’s the same S-Grade from before.”