Chris woke up in a bunk surrounded by strangers.
The room was cold, wet, and smelled like sweat mixed with cheap disinfectant. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the beds were metal frames with mattresses so thin they may as well have been printed paper. Someone was snoring. Someone else was already vomiting into a plastic bucket.
He sat up, head pounding, and the AI watch immediately piped up.
"Good morning, disappointment."
Chris groaned. "How the hell did I sleep through that racket?"
"Because your body entered emergency hibernation to conserve energy. Humans are pathetically inefficient. You should be ashamed."
He ignored it and looked around.
There were maybe twenty people in the room. All of them looked as beat down as he did. A few were older—late twenties, maybe thirties. Most were around his age. A couple still had dirt under their nails like they'd come here straight from digging through garbage.
One girl in the corner had shaved her head and tattooed her ID number across her collarbone.Another was missing three fingers.
This wasn't a team.This was a slaughter queue.
A siren wailed overhead.
Then came the voice. It was distorted, emotionless, and projected through ancient speakers like the announcement at a train station no one wanted to go to.
"All probationary adventurers report to Induction Bay Zero for evaluation and technique imprinting. Failure to comply will result in termination."
A few people hesitated.
One guy—tall, with sunken cheeks and a burn scar across his neck—just sat on the edge of his bed. Muttering to himself. Shaking.
"Come on, mate," someone said. "We'll get through this."
"No, you don't get it," the scarred man whispered. "I saw the sea. My cousin tried. His bones came back in a bag. No skin. Just bones."
The others didn't wait.
Chris stood, stretched, and followed the shuffling crowd into the hallway. The walls were rusted. The floor was uneven. At some point, someone had tried to paint motivational slogans on the walls, but they were now unreadable under layers of mildew and hopelessness.
One barely legible line caught his eye:
"TO SUFFER IS TO GROW. TO BLEED IS TO LEARN."
Induction Bay Zero
It looked like a decommissioned meat factory.
Rows of surgical beds, each surrounded by medical staff in mismatched lab coats, protective goggles, and improvised Magicka dampeners. Some of them looked as terrified as the recruits.
"Strip to the waist!" someone shouted.
Chris hesitated.
One of the medics—a woman with robotic arms and the face of someone who had buried more friends than she could count—pointed to a spot on his chest. "You feel that? That's your origin organ. It pulses slower than your heart but deeper. That's where Magicka starts."
Chris squinted. "It's under my heart?"
"It is your heart," she corrected. "Or what your heart becomes once circulation starts. Problem is, it wasn't designed for this."
"Great."
She didn't smile.
They injected him with something thick and cold.
The pain came seconds later. Not sharp—wrong. Like his veins had been filled with gravel and glass and were being pulled tight from the inside.
He screamed. Others did too.
The AI watch buzzed: "Initiating baseline compatibility scan. Try not to expire."
Chris collapsed off the bed, convulsing. His arms and legs felt like they were being twisted, wrung out. His vision blurred. Somewhere above him, someone yelled "We got another rupture!" and another voice screamed "Clamp it! Clamp it!"
He couldn't breathe.
Then—Silence.
A warmth, sudden and terrifying, bloomed from his chest and spread. Not like blood. Like static. Like a thousand tiny fingers dragging themselves through every artery.
Magicka.
His veins didn't explode.
He didn't die.
Barely.
When it was over, he was on the floor, sweating like a dying animal. Someone handed him a towel. Another shoved a protein bar into his hand.
A girl nearby wasn't as lucky. Her arms had swollen and split. Blood pooled beneath her and she was carried out, screaming, still alive—but not for long.
Chris sat up, shaking.
"Congratulations," the AI watch droned. "Your vascular integrity is above average. Like a sturdy garden hose. Disgusting but serviceable."
"Did I… do it?" he asked no one in particular.
The woman with the robotic arms knelt beside him. She checked his vitals, then stared into his eyes for a long moment.
"You're alive," she said softly. "That makes you rare."
Then she stood and moved on.
Later That Night
Chris lay back in his bunk, staring at the ceiling. The other survivors from today's "induction" were mostly silent. A few cried. A couple had passed out from exhaustion. One guy kept twitching in his sleep like he was being shocked.
He flexed his fingers.
He could feel it now. The static. Magicka. Like a river under his skin, just waiting. Waiting to be used. But every instinct told him not to. Not yet.
The AI watch lit up.
LOG ENTRY: 1SUBJECT: CHRIS MANTLESTATUS: ALIVE (TEMPORARILY)PREPARATION PROGRESS: 8%DEPLOYMENT ETA: 72 HOURSDESTINATION: LEVIATHAN'S GATEWARNING: SURVIVAL RATE REMAINS 0.00%.
Chris closed his eyes.
He dreamt of water. Endless water. And something massive moving just beneath the surface.
Water. Everywhere.
Not still water—living water.Roaring and writhing and collapsing in on itself, churning with salt and weight and pressure.
In the dream, Chris was falling. Not from a height, but from sanity.The sky was wrong—black, but burning. And beneath him, the ocean was rising like a wall.
Not a wave. A thing.Its body was the sea. A mountain of flesh and salt and storm.Eyes the size of cathedrals cracked open beneath the surf.
Then a voice, louder than any thunder—
"WHY DO YOU TRESPASS, HUMAN?"
He opened his mouth to scream but saltwater poured in.
A slap.
A real one.
Chris jolted upright with a gasp, clawing at his throat. His bunk sheet stuck to his skin with sweat. His eyes adjusted fast to the fluorescent lighting above.
"Damn, you were not breathing," said the boy who slapped him. He stepped back, hands up, clearly amused. "Looked like you were choking on your own tongue or getting possessed or something."
Chris blinked. "You just—slapped me?"
"Yup."
"…Hard."
"You're welcome."
Chris wiped his face with the pillow and groaned. "Who the hell even are you?"
The boy gave a mock bow. "Name's Kelvin Prado. Not dead yet, and planning to stay that way."
It turned out others had been stirred by the nightmare too.
The air was still thick with fatigue and stress, but now, there was a ripple of something else: the desperate need for normalcy. When you're trapped in a meat grinder, sometimes you cling to the people around you, if only to feel like you aren't alone in the gears.
Kelvin sat at the end of Chris's bunk and clapped his hands once. "Right. Since we're clearly not sleeping, roll call time."
One by one, the others stirred.
Some grunted. Some sat up properly. One girl in the corner just stared at Kelvin like he'd grown a second head.
Chris sighed. "Guess it wouldn't hurt to know who's dying next to me."
They went around.
Kelvin Prado was from São Paulo, Brazil. Grew up near the garbage fires and megachurches. He used to be a street performer, mostly juggling knives and hustling tourists. Apparently, he'd accidentally killed a rich German with a dropped blade and was offered a one-way ticket into "adventuring" in exchange for legal forgiveness.
Mina Akhtar, a girl with a shaved head and the ID number tattooed across her collarbone, had once been a medical student in Lahore. When Magicka became known, her university burned itself down during the first wave of riots. She was the calmest in the room. Too calm. The kind of person who'd cut her own leg off to survive and not flinch.
Danny and Dean, twin brothers from Birmingham. They looked like someone copy-pasted a pub brawler twice. Thick necks, missing teeth, matching track pants. One was missing an eye. Nobody knew which.
Aya, the quiet girl in the corner. Japanese, or at least sounded it. Said nothing the entire time. But when her eyes met Chris's, he felt something sharp in her stare—like she was already evaluating him for future usefulness.
There were others. Some mumbled names. Some made them up. No one bothered correcting.
Chris hesitated, then finally spoke.
"…Chris Mantle. Eighteen. Peterborough."
Dean snorted. "Peterborough? That hellhole still exists?"
"It's clinging on."
Kelvin grinned. "Man, I had a girl from Peterborough once. She was, like, 90% nicotine and passive-aggression."
Chris shrugged. "Sounds about right. She my mum?"
That got a laugh.
For the first time since induction, the room didn't feel like a morgue.
They kept talking.
Not about the gate. Not about Magicka. Not about the real shit. That came later.
Instead, they joked about the Ministry uniforms ("Who designed these, a drunk prison warden?"), complained about the tasteless protein bars ("Tastes like expired chalk"), and swapped fake rumors they'd heard about what lay beyond the wall ("I heard there's a continent where the laws of gravity reverse every Tuesday").
It was absurd. And maybe that's why it helped.
Chris leaned back and let the noise of the others wash over him.
Normalcy. Camaraderie. Human voices.He hadn't realized how much he needed it.
The AI watch, dormant for once, buzzed to life quietly.
"Interesting."
Chris looked at it. "What?"
"You humans stabilize under collective delusion. Fascinating. Keep it up. You'll scream louder when you die."
He rolled his eyes and covered the screen with his sleeve.
Eventually, they settled.
Sleep came in patches. Nervous silence returned, but it was different now. Less isolated. More communal.
Chris sat on his bunk, watching the ceiling again. The dream still lingered. That thing beneath the waves. That voice. It hadn't felt like a dream. More like… a message. A warning.
His hand rested over his chest—his origin organ.
It was still warm. Still alive.
He knew what was coming. They all did. But in this moment, for just one night more, they were still people. Still whole.
And in the faint silence before the next alarm, the faintest sound of waves—distant, not real—echoed in the back of Chris's mind.