Tokyo, Japan.
At Shibuya Crossing, thousands of people filmed the brilliant orange circle as it bloomed over the 109 Building like some sick parody of the rising sun.
The first monster that oozed through defied all earth biological description.
It was a writhing mass of grey pink flesh, roughly the size of a car, covered in eyes and mouths that opened and closed independently. Each mouth gibbered horrible and senseless sounds that made people's ears bleed and their minds rebel against what they were seeing.
The eyes rolled and focused at random, and wherever they looked, people screamed.
A gibbering mouther. A creature that shouldn't exist outside of nightmares.
It didn't walk. It just flowed across the pavement, leaving a trail of acidic slime. When it rolled over someone, the mouths bit and the eyes stared, and the person just… stopped.
Stopped moving, stopped thinking. Stopped being human.
Behind it came something almost elegant by comparison. A massive mass of grey brain matter surrounded by a crown of barbed tentacles and a parrot like beak.
A grill, gliding through the air like some obscene jellyfish.
It plucked a JSDF helicopter from the sky with casual ease, its tentacles wrapping around the fuselage. The helicopter pilot managed to fire one burst before the tentacles crashed the cockpit like tinfoil. The wreckage tumbled into the crossing, scattering the crowd.
The soldiers' rockers and machine guns did nothing against them. The gibbering mouther simply absorbed the damage, their mouths laughing madly as more eyes opened across its surface.
In seconds, Shibuya Crossing was gone, buried under gibbering madness and tentacled death.
*******
London, England
Over the Thames, the Gate opened like a vertical scar in the sky, and the creatures that poured through sang.
They were beautiful and terrible. Their women's faces twisted with rage, their bodies covered in filthy feathers, their wings beating like a sound like thunder.
Harpies, dozens of them, their song carrying across the river and into the streets.
And it was a song of such pure and captivating horror that people stopped running just to listen. Their faces went slack.
Some walked directly toward the creatures, their arms outstretched. Others simply stood paralyzed as the harpies descended, their talons outstretched.
The first responders who tried to help found themselves caught in the song. Police officers dropped their weapons. Paramedics abandoned their patients.
The harpies' enchanting melody was a weapon as deadly as any claw.
By the time the military arrived, the South Bank was littered with the torn remains of those who had been too slow to cover their ears.
*******
Moscow, Russia
In Red Square, the Gate wasn't colorful. It was black.
It seemed to absorb all the lights, making the surrounding air around it feel colder just by proximity.
What bled through wasn't flesh and blood. It was shadows given form.
They looked almost human at first. Dark silhouettes that drifted more than walked. But as they moved closer, the torches of Red Square revealed the truth.
These were Shadows, incorporeal undead that had no substance, only the memory of form.
When they touched someon, the victim didn't bleed. They simply withered and turned to grey. Their movements became sluggish, and their eyes went dull as their very life force was drained away, leaving nothing but a dried husk that collapsed into dust.
Behind the Shadows came worse things.
Wraiths.
Their mere presence caused frost to form on windows and made breath fog in the summer air. Where they passed, the cobblestones cracked from the sudden cold.
Russian soldiers fired their guns at them, but bullets passed through harmlessly. Grenades scattered the Shadows for moments before they reformed it.
It wasn't a battle—it was a massacre in slow motion, as Moscow's defenderes were drained one by one.
*******
Everywhere
The story repeated across every continent.
In São Paulo, lemures clawed their way from a Gate. Their shapeless blobs of damned flesh that reformed no matter how many times they were cut down.
In Mumbai, gnolls poured through. Their hyena headed warriors that howled with savage glee as they tore through the streets.
In Sydney, winged gargoyles descended like living statues, their stone hard skin turning aside bullets as they perched on the Opera House and surveyed their new hunting ground.
The monsters were brutally fast and horrifyingly efficient. Some tore flesh with their claws, others used supernatural powers like paralyzing bites, life draining touch, and mind breaking songs.
Some snapped people's heads off with their jaws full of teeth. Others simply crushed humans beneath their impossible weight.
Governments tried to respond, but their weaponry was designed for human enemies, not demonic invaders or incorporeal undead. Bullets bounced off or passed through with no effect. Police, fire departments, medical teams—all were overwhelmed within hours.
Across the globe, cities went into lockdown. Makeshift barricades were erected. Military and police formed thin defensive lines that broke almost immediately.
The Gates were everywhere. Sometimes opening within supposed safe zones, occasionally appearing inside buildings themselves.
Communication networks, strained by billions of panicked calls and the strange disruptions from the Gates, finally crumbled. Power grids failed.
In the encroaching darkness, local TV stations running on emergency generators broadcast scenes of slaughter, of ever widening zones where monsters ruled, of death tolls that quickly became meaningless.
On livestreams and emergency broadcasts, one word began repeating, followed by whispers of the terrified civilians, then shouted by anchors and reporters.
GATES.
That was what people called the circles. As if naming them might make them less monstrous. The name spread faster than the creatures themselves. A simple, and familiar name from games and fiction.
The world shook to its core. Humanity had been abruptly, violently demoted from apex predator to prey on its own planet.
*******
Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Dr. Hassan heard the gunfire before he saw the soldiers.
A pair of battered military trucks rolled up the dusty slope to KV62's sealed entrance, kicking up clouds of sand. Rescue workers jumped down with cutting torches and heavy gear, their riffles slung over their shoulders.
They had come to save the boy.
But the desert no longer belonged to men.
The first scream cut through the dry air. Every head snapped toward the horizon where the sickly green and yellow circle pulsed like an infected wound.
Something created the nearby ridge.
It was one of those hunched, eyeless demons. A mane, but this time Hassan could see it clearly. Its grey skin hanging off bones, too many joints in its arms. That horrible, shrieking mouth that never stopped wailing.
Then another appeared. Then three more. A dozen. Two dozen.
They bounded across the sand on all fours, moving with that terrible jerky speed.
"Positions! Positions!!!" a higher ranking officer barked with his rifle raised. The rescue team quickly formed a shaky firing line.
Hassan's heart thundered. He stumbled backward toward where the students' bus had been, but there was nowhere to run.
The creatures shrieked and charged.
The first volley of gunfires cracked open the night, the muzzle flashes lighting the Valley in strobing bursts. The manes staggered under the impacts… then kept coming. Their supernatural flesh knit almost as fast as the bullets tore through it.
Behind them, larger shapes emerged.
Gnolls, seven feet tall, and their hyena heads split in savage grins, wielding crude axes and spiked clubs. They loped forward, and when they hit the line, they hit like battering rams.
A soldier went down screaming, his rifle torn from his hands. Another tried to reload and took an axe to the chest.
Hassan felt his throat tighten with pure terror. He watched helplessly as the defense crumbled.
Then something else appeared. Something that made even the gnolls look small.
It landed with enough force to crack even a tank. A thing of living stone, its wings spread wide, their eyes glowing red. A gargoyle, easily nine feet tall, its claws longer than combat knives.
The soldiers turned their fire on it. The bullets only sparked off its stone hide, ricocheting harmlessly into the night. The monster didn't even flinch.
The gargoyle moved with terrible speed for something made of rock. It caught a soldier when he was still reloading, lifted him off his feet with one clawed hand, and threw him into the side of a truck hard enough to leave a dent on the truck. The man didn't get up after.
More gargoyles descended from the Gate.
The high ranking officer was still screaming orders, but his voice was lost under tha cacophony of gunfire, shrieks, and dying screams of the people.
Hassan felt his legs give out. He then collapsed to his knees in the sand, his hands pressed against his ears as if that could block out the nightmare unfolding before him.
A mane noticed him. It turned at him, that eyeless face somehow focusing on him, and began to lope closer.
Hassan didn't run. There was nowhere to go, and it was useless. He just closed his eyes and thought about his wife, his children, the classroom full of students he would never see again.
The last thing he heard was the creature's impossibly loud shriek, before claws closed around him.
*******
In the sealed tomb below, Ryan Pearson felt the vibrations through the stone. It was distant but deep. The unmistakable sound of something terrible happening above.
He pressed his palm flat against the rubble blocking his escape, and in the absolute darkness lit only by his supernatural sight, he knew with crushing certainty.
No one was coming to save him.
No one in the Valley of the Kings was getting out alive.