The city changed before the news of the Ironpact became city-wide news.

A delivery worker named Paso arrived at the eastern D-rank entrance at seven in the morning with a thermos and a folding chair. He had been bringing both for eleven days because the wait had been averaging ninety minutes and he had learned to be comfortable about it. He set the chair down, looked at the line, and picked the chair back up.

In only a couple minutes, he only saw five people.

He blinked and then his expression changed into shock. The line had moved faster yesterday but everyone thought it was just a fluke or a miracle.

But two days in a row? Paso trembled before he scrambled up and rushed toward the gate.

...

Three blocks north a team of four had been rerouted to an E-rank entrance every morning for two weeks because the D-rank they preferred was always at capacity by the time they arrived. This morning it was not at capacity.

"This was wrapped around the block yesterday," someone said outside the northern entrance.

"I know."

"I got in after twenty minutes."

They stood there for almost a minute before one of them said they should go in before it changed back.

They went in.

By midmorning the rumors were moving faster than the gate queues.

Infrastructure hit.

Routes collapsed.

The communication network was gone.

And one detail that kept reappearing no matter who was telling the story: the lines were gone. Every gate that had been running at ninety minutes was running at its natural pace. Whatever had happened to Ironpact, the city had woken up to find its gates working the way they were supposed to work.

Most people did not know what Ironpact was.

They just knew the wait was shorter.

And for most people in Mythal, that alone felt life-changing.

...

The guild district meeting started early and nobody had called it. Representatives simply arrived, found each other in the same building, and sat down around screens full of reports they had all read.

Dungeon stabilization charts. Traffic movement. Gate activity across six districts, everything had returned to how it functioned during the second week after the gates appeared.

All within a twelve hour window.

"It’s coordinated," someone said.

"Obviously. The question is who."

"Another guild?"

"No conflict reports. No large scale battles. Nothing on any monitoring channel."

The room went quiet.

A guild leader leaned back slowly. "Vanguard was running a C-rank operation in the western district all night. Iron Cross doesn’t operate in this zone."

"So who?" someone asked.

"An organization we don’t know about yet," another voice said carefully.

The meeting ran two more hours and did not produce a name.

...

Raze read the report between gates, sitting on the wall he always used when he had time to kill between runs.

He read it once, then went back and read it again.

Thirty-two down.

Not one of them dead.

Found unconscious, laid out where they’d fallen. And one left able to walk out and talk, on purpose. Whoever did it had cut communications first, then sealed the exits, then moved inward through the building room by room until there was nothing left to move through.

He set the phone down and watched a woman cross the street below him with two bags of groceries, one in each hand. That kind of sequence took weeks of preparation.

Somebody had watched Ironpact long enough to know which lines to cut before anyone could call for help, long enough to know the building well enough to lock it from the inside. He had planned enough operations himself to know what that level of patience looked like when you saw what it left behind.

He pulled up the public forums with posts pointing to Vanguard or Iron Cross. Some said it was a coordinated guild strike. He read through each theory and moved past it. Guilds would have left trails such as payment or communication logs that could have been traced.

Whoever this was had left none of that.

He pocketed the phone and started walking again

In the past two weeks he had seen two things that the ranking system had no number for. He was not ready to say they were connected. But when he stored them away in the back of his mind, they went to the same shelf.

...

Sora was tracking dungeon queue times when her phone lit up with a message.

Not from her usual sources. From the number she had learned to recognize over the past two weeks, the one that had sent her early dungeon footage and timing data.

She had figured out who it was after the second message.

She had not said it on stream.

[Eastern gate opened first. Northern routes collapsed at 0300. One person entered the main base. Thirty-two in. One out. The one that left was released on purpose.]

Her pulse jumped.

She set her phone face down and looked at her stream setup for a moment.

Then she turned everything on.

She opened a second screen and pulled up the public dungeon activity logs for the past seventy-two hours. Then she pulled up the Ironpact’s known gate rotation schedule that her chat had been crowd-mapping for the past two weeks. Then she pulled up the Black Vein Depth footage and let it run in the corner while she read.

She pushed the clip to the main screen and her chat moved faster than it had all stream.

It’s Kai!

Null Class!

It must have been our King!

Stop trolling you idiots! How could it have been–

Because he is him!

Regardless, it had to be an amazing group!

Sora stared at the chat silently for three full seconds. Her chat had gotten there before she finished building it. She had been going to take another two minutes laying out the logic and the chat had looked at the Black Vein footage and done the math in about eight seconds.

She looked at the camera.

"Okay," she said. "You’re not wrong, but give me a second."

The chat exploded harder.

She pulled up a map of Ironpact’s network on the secondary screen and left it there while she talked. "Whoever did this knew the layout. They hit the network and the base on the same night, and nothing tripped an alarm. And the order it fell apart in was not an accident. Communications went down first, before anyone could get a message out."

She swapped the map out for a video clip and pushed it to the main screen. Kai walking out of Black Vein Depth. The crowd standing still around him and him not looking back.

"That dungeon killed three full teams the same morning he walked out of it alone," she said. "He has been tracking Ironpact’s gate rotations for months. He has been clearing dungeons that should be too far above him and nobody has a good answer for how."

She let the clip keep playing. Same pace, same direction, like he was leaving a grocery store. "He took apart a D-rank dungeon’s entire gate system in one night. And he let one person walk out alive." She looked into the camera. "Why would you do that?"

Her chat answered before she could.

TO SEND A MESSAGE!

THE NULL CLASS!

IT’S HIM ISN’T IT!

SORA SAY IT!

She looked at the Black Vein footage and then at the dungeon activity data and then back at the camera.

"I’m not confirming anything," she said lightly with a grin.

And then watched the viewer count cross sixty thousand.

The number was still climbing.

While she was talking and did not comment on it because commenting on it would break something that was happening in the room.

She pulled up the exit clip one more time. He walked out the same way he always did, steady and unhurried, not once looking back at the camera.

She watched until the clip ended, then glanced at the notification blinking on her secondary screen. Sixty thousand viewers. She had been sitting at forty thousand during the Black Vein stream, and somewhere in the last eight minutes, while she was just talking, another fifteen thousand people had found their way in.

She left the number alone. There was something about saying it out loud that would have made it smaller.

She closed the clip, opened the gate data for tomorrow morning, and started reading through the eastern routes. She wanted to know what those gates looked like in the first light, before the crowds came through.

Her chat was silent for almost a full minute.

Then it erupted.

...

Victor set the report on his desk after reading it. He rose and walked to the tall window. He stared at the darkening sky for a full minute before he dared touch the paper again.

His assistant waited by the door, silent.

Victor replayed Crane’s last message in his mind. He had read it four times. "Something had happened to the Ironpact... The target seemed to be more difficult than expected. But no worry, we will deal with it like always."

Crane almost never made mistakes. Six hours after that message, Crane’s entire operation had vanished.

The assistant stepped forward. "People think this was a guild attack. They have several names."

Victor shook his head. "Guilds leave tracks—messages, money trails, supply chains. There was nothing here. And even if it was one, it would have been known to me by now..."

He flipped to the survivor logs. Only one person had walked away and that person had been released on purpose.

He thought back to the order he gave Ironpact six weeks ago. To have Kai join so they could slowly break him down until he came running to him. Ironpact had handled jobs like this for years without fail.

But for the first time they had failed.

He did not know if it was Kai. There was no evidence, but Crane’s operation had been tasked against Kai specifically.

And Crane’s operation was gone.

The assistant paused. "Kai? The null class person? They are at forty-four now."

Victor turned from the window and inhaled slowly. "I want every bit of data on dungeon runs for the last couple weeks. Every time Crane’s team met a player outside a guild. All public footage. Everything."

"You think it’s connected?" the assistant asked.

Victor studied the report again. He had to admit Kai being able to clear dungeons was a surprise to him but nothing more. But then that surprise turned into suspicion when he saw him not only appear in the top 100.

But somehow reached rank forty-four in the next two weeks.

He still couldn’t prove it was Kai. But Crane had targeted Kai and Crane’s operation no longer existed.

"I want to know how this happened," Victor said. "Every detail."

The assistant bowed and hurried out.

Alone, Victor leaned against the window frame. Below, the eastern gates stood open and empty. He had told Ironpact to contain the growth.

Now he wondered what that containment had cost. He did not smile. He could not decide how he felt. Victor sat back down and waited for the answers to reach him.