The squad reported in. Ten voices confirming positions in a forest that felt too big and too alive and too wrong in ways my C-rank senses were still cataloguing.

Belle was the first to say it.

"Something’s off." She stood with one hand on her crossbow and the other pressed flat against her temple, the Silver buff pushing her Treasure Sense to its maximum detection radius. "My readings are wrong."

The question hung there for maybe two seconds before Belle kept talking, her fingers already moving through the air like she was manipulating invisible controls that only her ability could see.

"The density. I’m picking up signatures everywhere. Not forty to sixty. More." Those amber eyes swept the canopy in jerks and starts, processing streams of spatial data that her brain was probably struggling to convert into language. "A lot more."

Jordan’s ability manifested as creeping darkness across the jungle floor, shadow tendrils sliding into the undergrowth where they vanished completely. "The mana density here is wrong. This doesn’t read C-rank."

"The trees." Hikaru’s voice came from my right, controlled and quiet with that specific edge she got when her instincts were firing faster than conscious thought. "Look at the trees."

I turned my head. The nearest trunk was massive, maybe fifteen feet in diameter, covered in vines that wrapped the bark in layers thick enough to hide the wood underneath. But the bark itself moved, or seemed to move, or did something that my eyes couldn’t quite track when I wasn’t staring directly at it. The surface was alive in ways that went past normal organic growth. Patterns formed in the bark that looked like faces one second and open hands the next, shifting with the angle of filtered sunlight and the specific focus of my attention.

"The gate," Naomi said.

I spun. The vertical tear in reality behind us pulsed twice in rapid succession, the edges contracting inward like fabric being drawn tight. The dimensional wound that was supposed to be our entry and exit point was sealing itself.

Not the slow steady dissolution that happened when a gate core died. That process took minutes, gave teams plenty of extraction time, let everyone organize their exit in proper formation. This was fast. The edges raced inward like skin closing over a cut, the purple glow fading to grey and then to black.

The gate sealed completely with a sound like someone slamming a cathedral door. The luminescence died. Where the tear had existed, there was only jungle.

No exit.

No extraction point.

No thirty-minute response window from the academy recovery team, because the team would arrive at coordinates where no gate signature registered anymore.

Every sound in the forest stopped. Insects, birds, rustling leaves, all of it cut off in the same instant like someone had hit a master volume switch. The silence pressed against my eardrums the way water pressure builds at depth.

Something screamed.

Not an animal scream. Not a monster scream. Something deeper, coming from everywhere at once, from the trees and the ground and the canopy and the air itself, a sound that vibrated in frequencies my bones recognized even though my ears couldn’t properly classify it. The scream lasted three seconds and then cut off so cleanly that the silence afterward felt louder than the sound had been.

Misato’s face had gone white.

Blair’s flames guttered and died.

Jordan’s shadows recoiled toward his feet.

Belle grabbed my arm with a grip strong enough to bruise through the tactical suit. Her Treasure Sense was still active, her eyes wide and unfocused as she processed data streams that her Silver buff was delivering in quantities that no student should have to manage.

"How many?" I asked.

Belle’s mouth moved. No sound came out.

"Belle."

"I can’t count them." Her voice came out thin, barely more than breath shaped into syllables. "Jace, I can’t count them. There are too many. They’re everywhere.

Above us, below us, in the trees, under the roots, between the roots." Her detection ability was the most comprehensive mapping tool any first-year squad had access to, boosted to Silver tier and capable of identifying individual signatures through solid walls at a hundred-meter radius.

Belle had been scanning gates since orientation week. She’d mapped C-rank fracture spaces with clinical precision, called out entity positions like she was reading a grocery list. Now her hands were shaking so badly that I could feel the tremors through her grip on my arm.

"The readings go past my range in every direction. I tried to find the edge of them. I can’t. There isn’t one. There’s just... more. Hundreds at minimum. Maybe thousands."

"That’s not possible in a C-rank gate," Charles said. His voice had the clipped quality of someone reciting established facts to keep themselves grounded. "C-rank gates have a maximum entity density of forty to sixty.

The dimensional compression can’t support higher populations without destabilizing the boundary membrane. It’s basic fracture physics."

"No," Misato said. She’d drawn her weapon. Both her weapons, the reinforced combat gloves sliding over her knuckles with the ease of muscle memory while her other hand pulled the collapsible staff from her belt and extended it to full length in a single practiced motion.

Her clones materialized in a defensive ring around the group, five copies of Misato Ayame snapping into existence with their fists raised and their bodies angled outward toward threats that hadn’t revealed themselves yet.

All six faces wore the same expression, the same terrible understanding that had just arrived in my own head. "It’s not. This isn’t a C-rank gate. It was never a C-rank gate. The initial readings were wrong."

The System notification appeared in my vision with the flat, clinical formatting of an automated warning that had been designed by someone who understood that the people receiving it might not survive long enough to read the entire thing.

◆ WARNING: GATE RECLASSIFICATION IN PROGRESS ◆

Initial Scan: C-RANK FOREST BIOME

Revised Classification: VOID GATE

Dimensional seal detected. Exit portal suppressed.

Estimated seal duration: UNKNOWN

Entity density: CRITICAL

Core threat assessment: RECALCULATING...

Survival advisory: EXTREME CAUTION