Chapter 87

  The System’s options hung in his mind, clear and merciless.

  Close the Rift.

  Remove the Core.

  Destroy or claim the Rift.

  Raime exhaled slowly.

  Closing it outright would be the cleanest solution. The safest, too. The System would step in, repurpose the collapsing space, and issue a reward in compensation. Sometimes those rewards were absurdly valuable. Sometimes they were… disappointing, to say the least.

  He had no shortage of gambles in his life already.

  Claiming it, on the other hand, would give him something tangible — a Rift Core, intact, potent, and rare. Well, rare for those not in the integrated phase. He had read enough text to know what such a thing could become. Power sources. Anchors. Catalysts for class evolution. Some Awakened had used them to force breakthroughs that should have taken decades.

  But the Rift lay in the center of the town plaza.

  Claiming it would leave it open. Available for mining resources and good for training fighters. But even if nothing went wrong immediately, how many would like to have it there, ready to create trouble?

  No. Not this one.

  I will remove the Core.

  The Rift would collapse on its own, violently but without System intervention. No roulette-wheel reward. No immediate benefit beyond the core itself. But the space would die honestly, stripped of its heart, unable to linger or grow. And he would walk away with knowledge, with a core of his own to study.

  Raime’s gaze softened, just a little.

  He thought of Neimar, and the old man’s relentless insistence on self-reliance. Power borrowed is power you don’t possess. Tools dulled the edge of growth. Crutches became habits. Habits became ceilings.

  Raime didn’t fully agree. Tools were not the enemy — dependence was. Still, he couldn’t deny how little he’d touched the trove Neimar left him. An advanced spatial artifact stuffed with relics from a civilization that had walked farther down the path of power than humanity ever had.

  And yet here he was, fighting barehanded, shaping the world with thought and will alone.

  Thunk crossed his mind — the broken weapon, fragmented but not completely lost. One day, he would reforge it. Not as it was, but as something new. Something that fit who he was becoming.

  That day wasn’t today of course.

  He extended his hand toward the pedestal.

  The orange light flared, reacting instantly to his intent. The System responded as well, cold and precise like usual.

  [WARNING]

  Removing the Rift Core will destabilize local space.

  Estimated time to total collapse: 42 minutes.

  Immediate evacuation recommended.

  Raime didn’t hesitate.

  He took the core in his hand, the moment he lifted it free, the cave shuddered.

  A sound rippled through the Rift — not an explosion, but a groan, deep and vast, as if the valley-sized dimension had just realized its heart was missing.

  Cracks spiderwebbed through the stone. The orange glow sputtered, then surged erratically, bleeding into jagged veins along the walls. Gravity wavered, pulling sideways for a breath before snapping back.

  Raime pulled the core close, watching the angry energy it contained seethe and churn in its crystalline bound.

  The pedestal collapsed inward, stone folding like wet clay.

  “That’s my cue,” he muttered.

  He put the core into the spatial ring, then exited the cave and launched himself into the air.

  The Rift was dying slow, but it was still dying. Space warped visibly at the edges as he flew, distant valleys folding in on itselves like an origami. The sky fractured into overlapping layers, each one misaligned by a few degrees. The farthest terrains stretched, snapped, and vanished into nothing.

  The monsters near those edges screamed as the ground betrayed them. Some were crushed outright. Others were flung into the void as gravity lost interest in keeping them tethered.

  Raime didn’t slow.

  After just five minutes of relatively slow flight the portal shimmered ahead, unstable but still open, its edges flickering violently as the Rift tried to tear itself free from Earth.

  He crossed the threshold with plenty of time to spare, but the relatively short cooldown didn’t bode well for those who will have to come back and didn’t have the speed, or were injured. There were a thousand and one way the return could go wrong, he had to make this clear to whoever wanted to face the Rifts in the future.

  The transition was brutal — a wrenching sensation like being pulled through a narrowing keyhole — and then he was back.

  Stone plaza beneath his feet. Open, fresh air.

  Behind him, the Rift imploded with a thunderous crack, the portal collapsing into a point of blinding light before vanishing entirely. A shockwave rippled across the plaza, rattling windows and kicking up dust, but it faded quickly.

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  Silence followed.

  Raime turned around to look at the place the portal used to be, hovering for a moment longer.

  Why did it close as sooin as I exited? There was still plenty of time left.

  He turned to the first person he saw, a middle age woman who was posted around the portal as guard. “How much time was I inside the Rift?”

  The woman was momentarily startled but soon enough regained her composure, “Not more than fifteen minutes, but if I can ask… what happened?”

  Fifteen minutes… so the time dilation is still a thing, good, this gives me more time to work with… actually, this gives me a great idea…

  “I was in there for a bit more than an hour, time works differently inside, and I eliminated most of the monsters and the guardian of the core, then I retrieved the core so the rift would close. It’s gone now, it won’t open again.” After a second of thought, before departing Raime turned back to the woman.

  “Actually, could you tell this to Alice or anyone in charge if you see them?” Raime proceeded to give her the rundown of how the Rifts worked, his stunt just now could give someone unprepared the false idea that they could close portals like closing a door. It was the furthest from the truth, and the people around that were listening in, started to undertand it, but the information need to spread anyway so he decided to do it this way for now.

  The woman stared at him for a heartbeat longer than politeness required, lips parted, eyes still trying to catch up with what he’d just said. Then she inhaled sharply, squared her shoulders, and nodded.

  “I will,” she said, voice steady despite the tremor underneath. “I’ll tell to the first I see around, all of it, I’ve good memory.”

  Raime nodded at that, around them, the plaza had gone quiet in that way crowds do when something important sinks in. People who had been pretending not to listen were suddenly very interested in the cracks between the stones. A couple of fighters leaned closer. An older man with a crowbar resting on his shoulder frowned, thoughtful rather than afraid.

  “So you’re saying,” someone muttered, “it’s not just… going in and killing everyhting that moves.”

  Raime shook his head. “Mainly yes, and these are smaller Rifts, so it would not be that hard as long as someone has the power to eliminate the monsters. But the return could be just as deadly as the fighting, it’s something to take into consideration.”

  That did it.

  The mood shifted, it gained a kind of gravity. The kind that made people stop fantasizing about being heroes and start thinking about consequences. The woman thanked him again, more quietly this time, and Raime gave a brief nod in return before turning away.

  He didn’t linger. He couldn’t stay here and explain everything to everyone, it was better to give the information to Alice, or Michele, and let them infor anybody else.

  The next portal lay only a few streets away, right where the old fountain used to be. The square around it was broken and pitted, signs of years of wear and tear, and the recent fighting didn’t help the look, but the guards looked… relaxed. Three men, weapons lowered, talking in low voices.

  The Rift itself was a swirling, murky yellow that made Raime’s skin crawl just looking at it.

  “I’m going in to close it,” he said simply.

  One of the guards stiffened immediately. “Hold on—”

  Another reached out and caught him by the shoulder, shaking his head once, firmly. “Let him.”

  Their eyes met for a brief second. Whatever passed between them, Raime didn’t ask. Nor did he care. He stepped forward, and the yellow light swallowed him whole.

  The world on the other side was… bright.

  Very bright.

  Low grass, almost glowing in shades of lemon yellow and mustard, rolled gently with a breeze that smelled faintly sweet. The sky was clear, pale, and wrong in that perfect way only aliens worlds managed.

  And scattered across the field were creatures. Dozens, maybe hundreds.

  They bounced.

  Raime blinked.

  They were round. Perfectly, offensively round. About the size of a soccer ball, covered in fluffy fur of pastel colors — blues, pinks, creams, soft greens. No legs. No arms. No eyes. No ears. Just… spheres. They moved by compressing slightly and springing into the air, landing with soft pofs before bouncing again.

  Some nudged each other playfully. Others looked like they were munching on the grass. A few bounced in lazy circles for no apparent reason.

  Raime hovered there, completely at a loss.

  “…You have got to be kidding me.”

  He swept his senses outward. No hostility. No aggression. Their minds were simple, warm, dull sparks of contentment and curiosity. Nothing predatory. Nothing malicious.

  A slow calm settled over him, tension draining from his shoulders.

  Not everything out here is a nightmare, at least some species are simply pacific in the multiverse, he reminded himself.

  Alice would lose her mind if she saw these, he thought. She’d name them, feed them, build little pens...

  Raime drifted closer to one of the creatures and slowly lowered himself, bending his knees as if to crouch. He reached out, careful, intending nothing more than to—

  The moment his feet touched the ground, everything changed.

  He felt it before he saw it.

  A ripple. A collective shift.

  All around him, the bouncing stopped.

  The creature in front of him split open.

  It literally split open in half.

  Its fluffy shell peeled apart, revealing rows of glistening, needle-like teeth snapping shut where his hand would have been. Raime yanked back and launched himself upward in the same instant.

  Below him, chaos erupted.

  Dozens of the round beasts hurled themselves toward where he’d been, colliding, stacking, bouncing higher and higher in a frenzy. It was like watching a school of piranhas made of cotton candy and nightmares. Some missed entirely and slammed into each other, teeth sinking into fur, bright pink blood spraying across the yellow grass.

  Chunks flew.

  Raime hovered well out of reach, staring down in disbelief.

  “…Motherfuckers,” he muttered. “I take it all back.”

  He didn’t waste another second.

  No exploration or extermination.

  He streaked across the Rift, ignoring the shrill, squealing sounds below as the creatures chased his shadow, he crossed a forested region of bright white trees until the land rose into a gentle hill. At its peak stood the pedestal.

  With the core pulsing above it.

  Around it swarmed at least a thousand of the little monsters, and two large ones.

  They were still round, still fluffy, but these stood nearly a meter and a half tall, fur thicker, movements slower but heavier. The tier II, without a doubt.

  Raime stayed airborne and gathered light into his palms.

  A charged sphere bloomed into existence on Raime’s palm, it’s condensed brilliance humming with restrained violence. He released it towards them without ceremony.

  Both monsters got obliterated in an instant, the smell of burnt fur the only trace of their existance.

  Below, the swarm went berserk, but Raime wasn’t watching them.

  Something else had caught his eye.

  A shallow depression near the pedestal, half-hidden by grass. Inside it sat a cluster of eggs — smooth, differently coloured, about thirty of them, glowing softly from within.

  He hesitated.

  Then shrugged internally.

  Omelette, he thought. Or maybe I can trade them later. Or… something.

  He wrapped them gently in telekinetic force, lifting them to hover near him, then touched the core and selected to remove it.

  [WARNING]

  Rift destabilization detected.

  Estimated collapse time: 27 minutes.

  “Plenty,” Raime said, already moving.

  He made for the exit at top speed and didn’t look back.

  The portal swallowed him, and moments later he was back, the Rift collapsed in on itself again. The guards jumped and fumbled with their weapon, Raime noticed the one who’d tried to stop him earlier was gone.

  “It’s closed,” he said, already drifting away. “You can stand down.”

  Questions chased him as he made his way home.

  He ignored them, as he reached his house he dropped the eggs off in a safe corner of the garage and closed the door. He then stepped inside the front door just as voices rose from the kitchen.

  It was still early.

  And yeah.

  Second breakfast sounded perfect.