SSS Awakening : I can Adapt to Everything-Chapter 7: The Gate Opening

He looked down at his finger wedged in the door frame, pulled it free, and turned it over in the light of the corridor.

It was perfectly normal.

’Right.’ Hide nodded, then he put his jacket on and went downstairs.

Kai had the window down and one arm resting on the door when Hide came out of the building entrance. He looked up from whatever he’d been reading on his comm and his expression did the thing it sometimes did — a rapid series of micro-adjustments that culminated in studied neutrality, like a person who had decided in advance not to make a big deal of something.

"You actually came down on time," he remarked. "I had a bet with myself. I lost."

"You bet against me?"

"I bet it would take at least two more calls." Kai unlocked the passenger door. "Get in."

Hide got in.

The interior smelled like the pine-derived air freshener Kai had clipped to the vent since the academy days — a smell Hide associated, for reasons he had never examined closely, with not being alone.

The navigation display glowed softly. From the back seat came a very deliberate and somewhat theatrical silence.

He glanced in the side mirror.

Risa was sitting directly behind Kai, both hands in her lap, eyes pointed at the window with focused determination, pretending to find the industrial drainage infrastructure of the area deeply interesting.

It was nothing special...

"Risa," Kai called.

"Mm." Still looking at the drainage infrastructure.

"Hey."

"Mm-hm."

Kai pulled out into the street, and in the half-second that his eyes were on the road and presumably not on the back seat, Risa stopped looking out the window and looked at the back of Hide’s head instead. Her hands had moved from her lap to the bag beside her, fingers working at the strap.

Kai, without looking up from the road: "Just give it to him."

"I was going to—"

"Heh, you’ve been holding it since I picked you up."

"That’s not—" A pause. "Can you not?"

"I’m just saying, it would be more efficient—"

"Kai."

"—to give it to him now rather than waiting until we’re inside the restaurant and there’s ambient noise and you have to repeat yourself because—"

"KAI."

"—he probably won’t hear you the first time anyway, he zones out whenever there are more people—"

"Oh my god." Risa’s hands came up from the bag in visible surrender. A package appeared over the center console, wrapped in brown paper, white ribbon. It hovered in Hide’s peripheral vision with a slightly frantic energy.

He reached up and took it without ceremony.

It was heavier than it looked. He turned it once, found the ribbon, pulled it loose, folded the paper back.

There were chocolate cookies. Thick, golden, uneven at the edges. The smell that came up from the package was the kind that belonged in a kitchen that someone actually cooked in, not a food unit. They were made from actual grain, butter and something faintly warm that he didn’t have a precise word for.

He held the package and didn’t say anything for a moment.

"I just — I had the flour already," Risa started, from the back seat, at approximately twice the speed of her usual speech. "And I thought since today was, you know, your birthday, it would be — I mean it’s not a big deal, they’re just cookies, I wasn’t trying to make it a whole... huh, they might be a bit soft in the middle, I wasn’t sure about the timing, the oven in my building runs about fifteen degrees hot so I adjusted but I don’t know if I—"

Meanwhile, Hide took out a cookie from the pack and ate one.

Risa stopped, and the car went silent.

"Hmm, They are good." It was, in point of fact, very good. The center was slightly soft, the edges had a faint crisp, and there was something in the balance of it that tasted like a hardened cup cake.

He ate a second one. "Really good."

From the back seat — a sound. The kind of sound a person makes when they are trying very hard to sound normal and their voice is not cooperating.

Kai kept his eyes entirely on the road.

Risa cleared her throat. When she spoke again, her voice had steadied, though it was running slightly warm at the edges.

"Congratulations," she managed. "On the awakening. I — we both really..." She stopped, started over. "I’m glad it happened. I know how long you’ve waited for it."

"Thank you."

"And the unique class — Kai explained it to me, what that means." A pause, and something shifted in her tone. "Just... please don’t do anything stupid with it, okay? I know what you’re going to—" Another pause. "Just be careful. Please."

He looked at the cookie in his hand and said, slowly. "I will... be okay."

She made sigh of relief and disbelief at the same time.

Kai reached into the door compartment.

"My turn," he said, and held out a card.

Standard dimensions, matte black with silver trim. Hide took it and read the text.

Gate Training Facility 7, Area 17

General Access Permit — Two-time Entry

He read it twice.

His eyes didn’t change in any way that an observer would have easily catalogued. It wasn’t excitement exactly — it was more like a door that had been sealed for years making a sound, deep in the mechanism, like the tumblers were finally moving.

"You can go in alone," Kai said, watching the road. "Its an F-rank clearance and they’ll pair you with an observer for the first run but you’ll have full combat access." He paused. "It’s the lowest-tier training facility."

His fingers tightened on the card once, then relaxed.

"Thank you," he replied. "Thanks a lot, both of you."

Kai glanced at him sidelong. "Don’t get sentimental on me."

"I’m not."

"I thought you were about to cry..."

"Look straight and drive the car."

Kai drove the car. But he was smiling now, fully, the composed exterior entirely set aside, and he didn’t try to hide it.

From the back seat, Risa laughed as well.

The navigation display announced a left turn in three hundred meters.

Hide turned the access card over in his hands once more. He was about to put it in his jacket pocket when the world reached out and took the moment apart.

There was no warning or atmospheric preamble. One moment: the inside of a car moving through the evening streets with warm light.

The next moment, everything was just chaos.

The force hit from the left with a violence so absolute it bypassed comprehension entirely. The car left the road. The navigation display became the floor. The window became the sky. Something that used to be the roof became the road.

Then everything went still.

Hide’s eyes were ringing impossibly.

His brain ran its inventory with the quick, unglamorous efficiency of a body that had been near enough to death before to know the procedure.

He turned his head.

The car had come to rest inverted against the lower facade of a residential block, the roof crumpled against the pavement, the undercarriage to the sky. Steam was rising from the drive units. The windshield had fractured into a web of cracks around a central impact point.

And there was blood, pooling under the car.

The breath stopped in his chest like something had reached in and held it.

Kai. Risa.

He was already moving before the thought had finished forming — twisting out of the seatbelt, catching himself with one knee down in broken glass, not feeling it and he was out — on his knees on the pavement, coughing displaced air and particulate out of his lungs.

He got upright.

"KAI—" His voice came out rougher, scraped raw. "RISA—"

He pressed both hands against the inverted undercarriage and pushed with everything his legs had.

The car didn’t move.

He pushed again. His boots scraped back across the composite. His shoulders screamed. The car weighed approximately a four hundred kilograms and his stat sheet was not having a conversation with that number.

He let go.

His chest was heaving. He looked around for his communicator to call help. He found it lying on the ground face up. Its screen was cracked but active, cycling through an alert.

He crossed to it.

⚠ AREA 17 — SOUTHERN DISTRICT — EMERGENCY NOTICE ⚠

MANA CONJUNCTURE DETECTED — SECTOR 17-S, GRID 4 THROUGH 9

PROBABILITY: GATE FORMATION — HIGH

ALL CIVILIANS EVACUATE SOUTHERN AREA 17 IMMEDIATELY

EMERGENCY RESPONSE UNITS DISPATCHED — ETA: UNKNOWN

DO NOT APPROACH MANA CONCENTRATION ZONES

The sirens started, just after.

With the pattern that every child born in Area 17 learned before they learned to read. The one that meant whatever was happening was not a drill and a serious danger.

Hide looked up from the screen.

At the intersection twenty meters ahead — where the navigation display had been announcing a left turn, the air had changed.

The geometry of the visible world was folding inward at a single point above the road surface, the way a piece of fabric pulls toward a tear before the tear opens.

He watched it and counted without meaning to. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

At the end of those eleven seconds, the gate opened.

The sound it made had no clean equivalent. The nearest thing was the sound of a very large volume of water receiving something that displaced it entirely.

The air at the intersection folded inward and did not come back. What replaced it was not darkness. It was like a hole in the expected world, and through it, barely visible, something that was not earth’s sky.

And from beyond it—

A vibration that came up through the pavement and through the soles of his boots and into the bones of his feet.

It was unmistakably: snarling. The kind that no training simulation had ever quite captured.

Hide gulped hard though his dry throat.

His eyes were fixed on the gate.

Somewhere behind the inverted car, metal groaned. The blood was still pooling on the ground. Kai and Risa were still in there.

The emergency response ETA was listed as unknown and the sirens were still going and the gate was fully open now, its edges stabilized into a dark, perfect circle floating above the intersection like a hole punched through the world.

His jaw set.

He took one step toward the gate.

Then another.

And somewhere in the lower register of his chest — beneath the cold, beneath the rage that had been there for years, beneath the grief something else surfaced.

Something that had no name yet but felt, in a way he did not examine, like the first step of a thing he had been born to do.

The snarling grew louder.

The corner of his mouth moved. He was not a weak kid anymore, he was awakened.

’Come on bastards.’