The Void Gate notification burned in my peripheral vision like a neon sign advertising my own funeral.
I'd encountered Void Gates exactly once in my reading: a throwaway chapter in "Hunter Academy: America's Elite" where the author had used one as backstory for a tertiary character whose name I couldn't even remember. The passage described what happened when dimensional sensor readings failed catastrophically and spatial boundaries inverted. Teams entered gates expecting routine mob clearing. Standard protocol. Standard risk assessment.
Those teams became cautionary tales filed in locked archives.
The Federal Gate Response Authority kept meticulous records of every confirmed Void Gate event since the first Fracture tore reality open eighty-seven years ago. The survival statistics existed somewhere in their database. They just weren't included in any academy recruitment materials or guild orientation packets. Funny how numbers that uncomfortable had a way of staying classified.
