The summit was called two hours after the announcement.

Kai arrived at a room he had never expected to stand in. The Coordination Building’s upper floor had been built for the Five Guild Heads to meet quarterly, and most of those meetings barely filled half the chairs. Tonight, every chair was taken, with extras brought in.

Raze leaned against the wall near the door. Victor sat at the table with his hands folded. Mira Solt stood at one end with her left arm in a brace, the medical harness from this morning gone. Lily Blue was at the window, looking out. Elden Cross had pulled up a chair near Victor without speaking to him.

Sera sat next to Kai.

No aides or analysts.

The man at the head of the table was not a hunter. He looked like he had not slept in two days.

"Thanks for coming," Mayor Ethan Ko said. "I know none of you have either."

Nobody postured. Nobody argued for floor time. The gates outside were bigger than guild politics, and everyone in the room knew it.

Lily said it first, without turning from the window. "For the next week, every major guild in Mythal is effectively one organization."

Nobody disagreed.

Mayor Ko set down a folder. "I’d like to listen for a while. Then I have a few practical questions. Please proceed."

Victor started with what GaleWing had collected. "Three days of readings from the outer barriers of all five gates. Most of it disagrees with itself. The things we are confident about, we built from the streamer tests and the people who crossed boundaries by accident."

He laid them out.

"Titan Grave. It seemed to have the highest mana pressure of the five. People with low magic report feeling like they have weights being tied down on them. The hunter with the chains yesterday had raised his magic over 70 with skill, and the pressure dropped." He looked at Mira. "You went to the boundary at noon."

Mira nodded. "I walked the perimeter. At thirty meters, my arm hurt more than it should have, and my left side dragged like it was carrying extra weight. I buffed my stats with a skill, and the weights came off."

"Was it also over 70?"

She nodded. "Anyone below 70 got pushed back.

"It’s filtering people," Elden said.

"Yes," Mira agreed.

"Seventy magic." Raze snorted. "So it wants mages."

"Okay, let’s go to the next one." Sera leaned forward. "Crimson Eden?"

"Different problem." Victor checked his notes. "Four hunters approached the outer radius yesterday." Victor checked his notes. "All four came back describing different experiences. Two said they felt overwhelming grief. One described a rage that wasn’t his. Another started crying and couldn’t explain why."

"Same gate but different responses." Sera frowned. "Do you have a video–"

"We do." Mayor Ko spoke up. "One of the hunters is outside."

One of the men in black understood immediately and headed for the door. A minute later he returned with a trembling level 32 hunter.

Billy nodded and said. "It was weird. I don’t recall much, but only the memories of me burying a dog and then crying nonstop."

The others blinked.

Billy hesitated and then said, "But I don’t recall ever having a dog. I even asked my girlfriend, family, and friends... They all said I never had one."

"Fake memories?" Kai pointed out.

"Most likely, but there still isn’t much information."

"No, it’s good enough for now," Lily said before nodding at Billy. "Thank you, Billy. You can go now."

Billy quickly nodded before leaving the room.

Raze sighed before saying. "Then the next one is the Hollow Sky... It punishes hesitation."

"No." Victor shook his head. "It punishes uncertainty."

"Same thing."

"It isn’t."

"Okay, then explain exactly how it works," Mira said with a raised brow.

Victor slid a tablet onto the table, and the recording started.

A speed hunter sprinted forward, but nothing happened. The second hunter did the same, but then he began slowing down and then paused. He furrowed his brows as he glanced left and right as if he was considering his next action.

The recording blurred.

The hunter slammed into a wall twenty feet away.

Kai blinked while Mira tilted her head.

"The one who committed to every step had the easiest time. The one who paused mid-step to reconsider got launched ten feet. The one who tried to sprint while hesitating about which way to go got the worst of it." Lily looked up. "The gate punishes hesitation."

Kai turned from the window. "So, it knows whether they’ve committed to a choice."

"Or measuring how much of the movement is theirs and how much is them reacting to the gate," Lily said. "Still unclear."

"Abyssal Clock?" 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"Time equipment within two blocks of it goes inconsistent–"

"We lost three clocks."

"What?" Sera furrowed her brows.

"Three." Elden tossed a broken watch onto the table. "The minute hand started moving backward."

Lily nodded and continued. "Other hunters report cooldowns finishing earlier or later than they should. Two analysts had digital recorders side by side at the barrier. The recordings drifted apart by twelve seconds across an hour."

"Twelve seconds is a lot," Sera said.

"It is."

Then Elden put the next thing on the table directly. "Three of the strongest hunters in the city failed their barrier tests today. A C-rank fighter from Eden Veil could not get within sixty meters of Hollow Sky without losing his sense of direction. A B-rank striker from Black Tide reached the Crimson Eden barrier and walked back in tears after eleven minutes." He looked at Mira. "The chain specialist who handled Titan Grave is ranked thirty-one."

The room fell silent.

"So it is not strength," Mira said.

"We need to figure out the requirements." Elden said.

Lily slowly nodded and said, "The correct hunters clear the dungeon, not the strongest ones."

Victor watched Kai as Lily said it, briefly, then looked away.

A man near the back raised his hand. He was D-rank. Kai did not know him by name. The Mayor had brought a few representatives from the lower-tier guilds in case anyone had questions.

"So what do we do?" the D-rank said.

Nobody answered him. Not because no one wanted to. Because no one had an answer yet.

The D-rank lowered his hand and looked at the table.

Mayor Ko had been writing in a small notebook through all of this. He set down his pen.

"Three questions, please."

The room turned to him.

"First. Assuming none of these gates are cleared this week, how many people do I need to move?"

Nobody answered immediately.

Lily said, "If Hollow Sky expands. Fifty thousand. The blocks south of it are residential."

"If Crimson Eden does," Elden added, "another twenty. There is a hospital inside its outer radius."

Mayor Ko wrote. "Second. If Hollow Sky expands, which districts do I evacuate first?"

Victor answered. "The seven blocks immediately south. Then the eastern transit corridor. If you lose that, you lose access to two of the others."

The Mayor wrote that down too. He looked up. "Third. Which of these gates is the one we cannot lose to?"

Silence.

After a moment, Mira said, "Sorry."

"All right. I will assume the answer is all of them and plan accordingly." Mayor Ko nodded once. "Then I need evacuation plans by tomorrow morning."

Nobody laughed or pointed out that tomorrow morning was less than twelve hours away.

Mayor Ko went back to his notebook.

Under the table, Sera bumped Kai’s elbow. "You think we’ll clear them?" she said, quietly, just to him.

He thought for a second. "Eventually."

Kai looked at the assignments. He wasn’t sure what exactly was needed but strength wasn’t enough for these dungeons. The distortion worked the same way sometimes. It never cared about the hardest solution.

It cared about the right one.

"So, how will we split the team up?" Kai asked.

"I have an idea based on what has been shown so far by everyone." Lily said as she began writing down a list on the table.

After a minute, she pushed it forward, and everyone peered over to see.

[Mythical Assignment Recommendations Issued.]

[Titan Grave:]

Raze.

Mira Solt.

Elden Cross.

Hunters with high Magic specialists.

[Hollow Sky:]

Lily Blue.

Kai Rosefield.

Sera Vale.

Agility-focused hunter specialists.

Crimson Eden:

Pending

Emotional-stability support classes.

[Abyssal Clock:]

Pending

[Divine Maze:]

Pending.

Sera looked at her name under Crimson Eden and let out one breath. Mira looked at hers under Titan Grave and adjusted the brace on her arm.

"So the Crimson Eden, Abyssal Clock, and Maze will be left alone for now?" Kai asked.

"For now." Lily tapped the unfinished assignments. "We don’t know enough."

"Why am I on Titan?" Raze raised a brow.

"You know why." Lily bluntly said as she met his gaze.

Raze stared at her for a few seconds before chuckling. "How much do you know about my class?"

"Enough."

Raze laughed even more before nodding and saying. "Alright, I agree."

"That would work." Mira nodded with a smile.

"I agree." Elden bluntly said.

"Me too," Victor said.

Mayor Ko copied the assignments into his notebook and did not ask anyone about them. The meeting would have ended there if Lily had not turned back from the window.

She had been silent for the last twenty minutes, working on the tablet in front of her chair. The console held the spatial-measurement data the analysts had collected from Divine Maze across two days of tests.

She set the tablet down.

She was pale.

"I have something on Divine Maze," she said.

The room turned.

Victor straightened, and Mayor Ko looked up from his notebook.

"Every measurement from that gate came back different," Lily said. "The data is contradictory."

She paused. "I think I know why."

Nobody spoke.

"The gate does not care how strong you are," Lily said. "It cares how people think."

The room sat with that.

"What does that mean?" Sera said.

"I do not know yet. But every measurement came back different. Not because the instruments were wrong but because the gate was changing the answer."

Nobody spoke.

Lily looked down at the tablet. "There’s one more thing."

The room went still.

Lily tapped the screen once. "The measurements only change after someone gets close to the gate."

Silence fell in the room.

Kai felt the distortion move even harder than before. He didn’t know what Divine Maze was but the distortion did.