On a slightly elevated stretch of land, three silhouettes stood overlooking an abandoned facility two kilometers away, where a shifting time rend distorted the air. Alex, the figure on the left, turned to the middle and said, "Maya, you don't have to do this. If you want to prove yourself, there are so many ways to do it. All you need to do is train hard and surpass others."
Maya turned toward him, her expression firm. "It seems after all these years you still don't understand me. I never want to prove myself."
"Then why?" Alex questioned.
"Ever since I got my talent, I always have these visions where everyone perishes," Maya replied. "If I continue to stay under the protection of my family, I won't be able to stop it."
"Fine," Alex conceded. Maya then turned to the figure on the right. "Connor, were you able to hide our tracks?" Connor gave a nod of affirmation. With that settled, the three figures accelerated, running toward the shifting rend.
As they drew near, the temperature plummeted, and an eerie sensation caused goosebumps to prickle their skin. Within 500 meters of the rend, a thick, cloying fog swallowed the landscape. They slowed their pace, forming a tactical triangle: Alex acted as the vanguard with his heavy axe, while Maya with her bow and Connor with his twin short swords flanked him.
Entering the 200-meter perimeter, the first undead lunged from the mist. Before it could reach them, Maya dispatched it with a single arrow that whistled through the air and returned to her hand. Having awakened at Level 1 Sublevel 5, she possessed the Level 5 skill Arrow Control.
The creature's death acted as an alarm. Suddenly, twenty undead rushed out of the fog. Alex charged forward, swinging his axe in a wide arc and releasing Shockwave, a Level 5 skill that blasted the horde back and separated them. Connor moved in instantly, and the trio systematically took them down, clearing the wave in fifteen minutes.
They pushed deeper past the outer fringes into the middle layer, where visibility dropped to a mere ten meters. Snarling noises erupted from the gloom. The snarling grew from a low rumble into a frantic, wet scraping of teeth against bone. Suddenly, the first wave burst out from all directions at once.
"Formation!" Alex bellowed, his voice cutting through the gloom.
The undead moved with a jerky, unnatural speed. One lunged at Alex's throat, its jaw unhinged. Alex didn't flinch. He stepped into the beast's reach, slamming the butt of his axe into its chest to create distance before swinging the massive head of the weapon in a horizontal cleave. As the blade bit into rotted flesh, he triggered Shockwave. A visible ripple exploded from the point of impact, blasting three more creatures backward.
To his flank, Maya drew three arrows at once. As she released the arrows from the string, the shafts didn't fly straight, she used ARROW CONTROL to make them fly in a spiral. One arrow arced high, diving into the skull of a creature trying to leap from a rusted car roof, the second curved around Alex's shoulder to pin another undead to a concrete pillar through the head, the third zipped in a low circle, severing the hamstrings of a group of undead charging from the rear. With a flick of her wrist, the arrows tore themselves free from the fallen corpses and whistled back to her hand.
Connor swooped in between with a bur of silver light moving like a ghost. He slipped under the arms of an undead, his twin short swords flashing in a crosscut that decapitated the creature before its body even knew it was dead. He spun on his heel, parrying bone-shards from a crawler, and delivered a flurry of stabs to its vitals. He was the glue holding the formation together, catching anything that slipped through the gaps.
The battle became a rhythmic, bloody dance. But for every ten they fell, twenty more seemed to emerge from the fog. The constant strain of using their skills began to weigh their limbs and minds. After what felt like ages, they finally saw a momentary gap in the swarm.
"Now! Fall back to the fringes!" Alex roared, clearing one final path with a desperate, two-handed swing.
Exhausted from the relentless assault, they retreated to the outer fringes to recover. Upon reaching the outer fringes they spotted the infamous HETRAMS. They immediately ducked into an abandoned building for cover.
"What are they doing here?" Alex hissed. "This is just a D-rank time rend. What do they want?"
Maya watched the elite unit through the shadows. "We should go closer and take a look."
After recovering their strength in the abandoned building. Maya, Alex, and Connor began heading towards the HETRAMS who had already finished setting up their camp during the time they were recovering. They moved stealthily as they approached the camp, every time a HETRAMS guard turned their head to scan the perimeter, the trio will pause and immediately take cover behind anything that could hide them.
while they where taking cover behind a rusted machinery in one of the buildings, A HETRAMS scout, equipped with a specialized Detection skill, snapped his head toward their position. A harsh, electronic pulse rippled through the air, and red flares ignited across the camp. "Intruders!" a voice boomed, followed by the heavy thrum of boots.
The trio bolted. "run!" Alex roared.
A volley of gunfire erupted, shredding the weakened machinery around them. Alex spun mid-run, his axe glowing with a frantic light as he slammed it against a fallen pillar. Shockwave! The blast distorted the air slowing down the incoming bullets. Connor together with Alex moved with accurate precision to deflect the bullets.
Maya, sprinting while twisted backward, unleashed arrows. With Arrow Control, the shafts bypassed the guards' shields, threading through the gaps in their armor to jam the firing mechanisms of their rifles and strike nearby fuel canisters to create distracting explosions.
Despite their efforts, the HETRAMS forces were too overwhelming. They transitioned into a pincer movement, cutting off every alleyway until the trio was pinned between an intersection.
"We've been cornered!" Alex shouted, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "Maya, what should we do?"
Maya took in a deep breath and closed her eyes and opened it which was now shimmering with a translucent golden light, a sign that her unique talent Temporal Glimpse had been activated. Her body immobilized as her mind raced through fragments of the future. Her consciousness yanked out of the chaos of the battlefield and was thrust into a vast, silent expanse of shimmering light. It was a space where the past and the future swirled like stars. Countless possibilities of the past and future stretched out in every direction all around her. She reached out mentally, searching for a thread of survival.
Suddenly, a specific sequence of images crystallized before her. She saw bits and pieces of a group of people from years ago entering the very facility they were currently fighting in, long before it was abandoned and claimed by the time rend. She watched, mesmerized, as a figure in a lab coat walked toward a specific warehouse. The vision flickered, showing the figure pressing into a section of the wall. The scene fast forwarded to the figure typing a digit of a passcode, 7… 4…9…, she had managed to capture the final numbers, when a violent time storm tore through the vision. The space around her fractured, and she was forcibly cut off from the stream of time.
On the surface, her body had been protected by the desperate arcs of Alex's axe and the flickering steel of Connor's blades.
Five minutes of grueling defense had passed when the light in Maya's eyes snapped back to focus, the translucent silver fading into her natural color. She gasped, her lungs hitching as she returned to the present. She looked at her companions, her voice ringing with a strange, calm certainty.
"We won't die," she stated firmly. She pointed toward the looming structure at the edge of the perimeter. "There, that warehouse. If we reach it, we survive."
Alex didn't hesitate. He planted his feet, his muscles bulging as he poured every remaining drop of his energy into his weapon. He brought the axe down with a cataclysmic roar. The Massive Shockwave struck the ground, triggering a localized quake that brought down the nearby walls generating a thick cloud of dust, with debris billowing upward, blinding the HETRAMS assailants and throwing their formation into chaos.
"Go!" Alex choked out.
The trio vanished into the dust cloud, speeding towards the warehouse. Inside, Maya sprinted toward a certain section of the wall. Her fingers danced across the surface, tapping any part of the wall until her hand pressed in a hidden mechanical contraption.
The floor in the center of the warehouse shuddered, and a terminal rose from the dust. Maya's fingers flew across the keypad, entering a complex passcode she had seen in her vision. With a heavy, pressurized hiss, a concealed door slid open, revealing a dark underground passage without any hesitation They threw themselves inside. The door slammed shut seconds after they entered.
The air in the passage was thick and heavy, carrying the damp smell of humidity and the cloying scent of wet, decaying moss. The passage was completely dark.
"Connor," Alex's voice sounded muffled in the narrow space, "you've got flashlights?"
Even though the darkness made him invisible to the others, Connor gave a silent, habitual nod. He reached for the tactical bag strapped firmly to his waist, the one that had miraculously stayed secured during their frantic escape and grabbed a foldable torch. With a click, a single beam of harsh, white light sliced through the gloom, illuminating the damp walls and the thick carpet of moss forming on the walls.
They moved forward in a tight line until they were stopped by what seemed to be a dead end, but as they drew closer, the beam revealed the edge of a massive structure buried under layers of green growth.
Alex stepped forward and pressed his palms against the surface and released a low-frequency shockwave. The vibration was subtle but intense, causing the door to shiver. Sheets of thick moss and centuries of grime shook loose, falling away in wet clumps to reveal a heavy reinforced metal door.
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Back at the fringes, the HETRAMS units had regained their footing. The chaos of the earthquake had subsided, leaving only the settling dust and the rhythmic, mechanical hum of their scanners. The elite soldiers moved with terrifying, synchronized efficiency, their tactical lights cutting through the fog like searchlights. They began a systematic sweep of the entire perimeter.
After a futile search for two hours. The commander in charge put a stop to the operation and He told them to focus on their main objective.
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Maya and Connor also moved closer to the massive door to take a good look. After a few moments of silent examination, Connor spoke up.
"I can unlock it," he stated.
"You can?" Alex asked, his voice full of doubt as he stared at the rusted, reinforced slabs of metal.
Maya shot a stern look at Alex. "Connor's skill is Master Key, remember? He has a high success rate with any lock, whether it's electrical or mechanical." Because Connor's skill was a non-combat, supportive skill, they had almost overlooked its utility during the heat of the battle outside.
Connor stepped toward the mechanism, pulling a specialized set of tools from the tactical bag strapped to his waist. He placed his hands on the metal and activated his skill. Maya and Alex waited for a full ten minutes before finally, a series of clicks echoed through the passage, followed by a loud, unsettling screech of metal grinding against metal. The heavy door groaned as it slowly split open from the center.
The trio stepped through the threshold, curious to know what they what secretes it held.