Kael didn't move for a long time after the distortion vanished.
Not because he was stunned.
Because the world was recalibrating.
Sound returned in fragments—wind first, then distant movement, then the soft grind of stone settling where it had been folded and crushed. His hearing felt… uneven. Not gone. Just unreliable, as if certain frequencies chose when to exist.
He exhaled slowly and tested his footing.
The ground held.
That was something.
Kael crouched near the point where the creature had collapsed into nothing and pressed his fingers lightly against the stone. The response was immediate—a faint echo, not of sound, but of absence.
No residue.
No corpse.
Just a thinning of reality where something had failed to belong.
"A gate spawn," he murmured.
He straightened, eyes scanning the basin.
Creatures like that didn't emerge naturally. Not from the world itself. They came from elsewhere—from spaces where structure was incomplete, where rules existed only until something stronger overwrote them.
Gates.
Most were unstable when they first appeared—raw ruptures that bled distortion into the world. If left alone, they expanded. If stabilized, they became passages. Controlled. Exploited.
Kael's jaw tightened.
This one hadn't stabilized.
That meant it was early-stage.
And still that strong.
He had fought something that hadn't fully arrived yet.
Which meant its tier wasn't fixed.
Kael turned his gaze outward.
House-trained hunters classified threats in layers—local fauna, corrupted entities, gate-born manifestations. Tiering was based on damage output, adaptability, and resistance to conventional force.
By those standards—
Kael exhaled through his nose.
That thing had already surpassed the lower thresholds.
Mid-tier at least.
Possibly higher, if it had finished anchoring itself.
And he had survived it unarmed.
The realization didn't comfort him.
It unsettled him.
Gate creatures learned faster than natural monsters. They didn't inherit instincts—they acquired them. Every exchange refined them, every interaction tightening their grasp on the rules of the world they invaded.
Kael had been its first real contact.
Which meant he had taught it something before killing it.
He turned away from the basin, shoulders tight.
That knowledge wouldn't vanish with the creature.
Gates didn't forget.
As he left the fractured stone behind, Kael felt it again—movement far below awareness. Not pursuit.
Response.
Somewhere, a rupture was stabilizing.
Somewhere else, something older than the houses was adjusting its expectations.
And somewhere very far away, a record updated itself quietly.
Anomaly confirmed.
Survival outside expected parameters.
Kael walked on.
He didn't know what tier the world would assign him yet.
But it would