Professor Locan Havak was writing with a rhythmic tap, tap sound, the chalk powder already accumulating on his shoulders and irritating his nose.

  He stopped after circling a number, the result of the long equation that took up the whole blackboard to solve.

  “The same result ...” he mumbled with a tired voice, taking a step back to better see the entirety of the solution.

  There must be an error somewhere. It has to be. He pinched the bridge of his nose in response to his growing headache.

  “I will do it one more time ...”

  A piece of half-eaten cookie hit him from behind.

  “C'mon, Havak! You've already done this three times, and I did it twice before coming to you. The result is correct.” The redheaded woman in her late forties grabbed and bit into another cookie from the mismatched set of snacks on the workbench and washed it down with lukewarm coffee.

  They were in professor Locan’s messy workshop, inside the grounds of the Academy. It was late night, and professors Locan Havak and Dahlia Lancaster had been crunching a set of disturbing data since lunch.

  Professor Dahlia Lancaster was a specialist in monsters, more specifically her research revolved around the gating process.

  The opening of gates from the Abyss was a natural occurrence, like storms or earthquakes. That was the primary way monsters from the Abyss migrated to the world. There were places where these gates were more likely to nucleate, such as the mana-infused caves colloquially called 'dungeons' or regions like – unsurprisingly – Cartographer's Bane.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  But just as you have strong rains and landscape-altering hurricanes, there are also the usual gates and ones like the one they were dealing with.

  “Maybe your sensors malfunctioned?” Locan asked hopefully.

  “All four at the same time?” Dahlia replied, raising an eyebrow.

  “The model could be wrong...”

  “If you have a better one, I'm all ears. If not, just accept that my model is correct and that we are screwed.”

  She ate another cookie, more annoyed by the distrust in her model than the ‘screwed’ part, and continued:

  “Tension on the fabric has been building for some time now, since a disruption that happened during the siege. I hoped it would fragment into dozens of smaller portals as it usually does, but two weeks ago... another disruption happened. It was like bursting a bubble; all that tension was released at once.”

  Dahlia made a bursting gesture with her hands and a popping sound. Her right hand lacked two fingers and had ugly bite scars on the palm and lower arm, a consequence of her unhealthy disregard for safety procedures associated with the overuse of healing potions.

  What could have happened two weeks ago that would have caused so much disturbance? A change in the Rule? A contradiction? Pondered Locan.

  But that was not important right there, what was important was the result of that equation.

  Locan stared at the circled number on the blackboard with a sense of dread. That number showed the estimated number of creatures gated in that event:

  One.

  One creature that consumed the entirety of almost a year of accumulated tension in the membrane that separated the world from the Abyss.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose with more strength because his headache was about to get way worse:

  “We must prepare for the very real possibility that one of the Cataclysms has gated into Central.”