"We need the help of Rank 4s." Henry understood the gravity of the situation. But it was already a little too late.
With communication down, they were unable to reach anyone in the city. Even if they sent soone, there was no guarantee help would arrive in ti, not before the cold finished what it had started.
Adyr was not the only one in danger of freezing to death. Their three Rank 3 Players were being pulled into it too. Victor was among them, Henry’s own son.
The experint, which had begun with the intention of awakening one man, was suddenly about to end with the loss of four of their most important people—a chain reaction born from one decision, spiraling beyond anyone’s control.
Despair fell over the entire experint site at once. Their failure was about to strike not just them but all of humanity with devastating impact.
At that mont, just as hope was about to vanish, a new developnt cut through the panic.
Amid the chaos and sudden silence, 2 massive structures appeared on opposite sides of the experint area.
"W-what are those things...?" The researchers and soldiers stood stunned, frozen in place more by shock than by the still-falling temperature.
The structures appeared out of nowhere without any warning. There was no sound of construction or arrival.
The two structures resembled giant doors. They were impossibly tall and broad, their edges sharp against the pale air.
The one on the left side of the experint area opened into a dinsion that could not be seen with mortal eyes. Yet the sounds of countless screams spilled outward. The sound sent shivers through everyone. It filled their bodies with intense fear and dread that tightened their chests, turned their stomachs, and made their hands go numb.
The one on the right was the opposite, opening into a dinsion filled with light, warmth, and comfort. Even the sounds rising from within were like a choir, countless instrunts flowing together in harmony, accompanied by the laughter of people, blending like the lyrics of a song that made their nerves loosen without permission.
Two opposing effects, one of despair, fear, and inevitability, the other of endless happiness and hope, filled every human present with an indescribable sensation, tugging at them and drawing them toward the gates, splitting their instincts between recoil and surrender.
They were still trying to understand what the gates ant or represented when two gigantic figures began to erge from them. The space around them seed to resist their entry.
They looked unreal, yet disturbingly familiar.
"They are..." Dr. Mara and the other head researchers stared with wide eyes at the two godlike figures revealing themselves from the gates, all of them gripped by the sa sense of familiarity at once, their minds racing through old files and forgotten debates.
Soon, they all realized where that familiarity was coming from.
"They are Nephilim?"
On Earth, across countless cycles, each ti a cycle struck, humanity reset its culture, knowledge, and progress, the world wiping itself clean no matter how far they had advanced.
Yet every ti everything was lost, so remnants were left behind as archaeological remains. They were never completely erased. They served as traces of the cycles’ existence, buried deep but always returning to the surface eventually, unearthed by chance or obsession.
So were discoveries like pyramids or Mayan ruins, which Adyr had later learned about from the 12 City Managers.
But so went further, containing writings and drawings, fragnts of recorded mory.
Among those drawings, there was a single being that stood out prominently. It appeared again and again in the researchers’ studies. It drew significant attention because the sa form repeated across unrelated sites. Different cultures had recorded the sa image.
The drawings depicted a giant race with massive fras, recorded in the decoded scripts as the children of gods and humans, an ancient hybrid race known as the Nephilim.
Until now, the researchers had only encountered crude drawings of the Nephilim among ancient remains. They had dismissed them as fantasy art from old civilizations, exaggerated myths turned into lines and symbols.
However, after arriving at Beyond, their perspective had begun to change. Those remnants beca the subject of renewed debate regarding their truth. Too many pieces were starting to align. Too many impossibilities had already beco real.
Now, as they saw the two giant figures erge from the gates that resembled entrances to heaven and hell, they imdiately recognized the similarities. It matched the ancient drawings down to proportions and posture. No coincidence should have explained it.
Aside from the researchers, Henry was one of those who recognized that familiarity, the realization striking him like a physical blow, leaving his throat dry.
"They were real?" he muttered. A strange, unexplainable feeling rose within him, part shock, part dread, and part disbelief.
So far, he had been helping the 12 City Managers search for a connection between Earth and the Beyond. They had not been able to find anything, only fragnts that never ford a complete line, hints without an answer.
Only Adyr knew of one such connection, the languages used in the Beyond, like Latin and Old Chinese, but he had never told them, as doing so would also require revealing that he ca from a different Earth.
For the first ti, the Nephilim’s existence, matching the beings found in Earth’s archaeological excavations, beca a real clue that the two worlds were historically connected in so way, not just by theory, but by sothing that could be seen with their own eyes.
Though Rhys told them that he saw two gates and two silhouettes during his awakening, what he saw was blurry and without detail—more sensation than image.
Under the pressure from those two beings, all the humans simply stayed where they were. They watched without daring to move, their bodies rigid and their minds blanking under the scale of what stood before them, leaving their fate in those hands, knowing that any struggle at this mont would be futile.
The Nephilim also seed to notice the tiny humans beneath them. They turned their heads and gave them a brief stare, a look so casual it felt worse than hostility. Then, without any change in expression, their gazes shifted to the one person lying between them on the gold-colored platform.
They watched Adyr’s body for a while without moving. Deep emotions passed behind their eyes, restrained and unreadable, mory and judgnt mixing in silence.
Finally, in perfect synchronization, they raised their hands from within their gates. They reached toward him with massive fingers, careful and precise despite their size.
They looked as though they ant to touch him, but they stopped just short, leaving a thin, unbearable gap between skin and air.
Then they spoke in the sa synchronized cadence, their ethereal voices mixing and filling the space around them, carrying the sound of an ancient ceremony, a command that did not feel ant for human ears.
"Stir, O One of Ages."
Then, from their gates, a black, oppressive light and a white, blinding light poured outward, flooding the surroundings in the sa monochro colors as the Sun.
—-
"Where am I now?" Adyr looked around at the endless expanse of emptiness, his voice sounding small in a place that did not echo.
There was no darkness or light in the space, but his eyes could still see perfectly into the nothingness, or maybe his mind understood it without needing his eyes at all.
So far, during his sleep, as he tried to replenish his life force, he was not fully asleep. He had been dreaming, again and again, drifting through scenes that felt too vivid to dismiss.
In all those dreams, his awareness had been completely intact. He could rember most of them even after one ended and another began. It felt like he was being carried from life to life without losing himself.
In so dreams, he found himself on Earth, where he was sotis a doctor healing patients, other tis a worker on a construction site, and occasionally a father on a trip with his family, with countless lives presented as dreams.
There were also dreams where he was in entirely different worlds with different races. He lived different lives... lives and things he had never seen in his life. So ended with deep tragedies. So ended with happy endings. Yet all of them left him with a deep nostalgia, the feeling of rembering a place he had never truly been.
And finally, after all the dreams ca to an end, he found himself in this empty space all alone, with no sky, no walls, and no horizon to asure.
With nothing else to do, he looked around and started to walk across the formless ground. It seed to be made only of light. It was firm enough to hold him, yet it left no sound beneath his steps.
After a long walk in this tiless place, he finally saw sothing.
A little ahead, he saw two chairs facing each other, an odd sight in a place where nothing existed.
And on one of the chairs, soone sat there, motionless, as though they had been waiting for him.
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