At first, it was electric.
The crowd was alive—standing, roaring, clapping. Thousands of voices merged into a singular sound, a tidal wave of adrenaline and awe as the screen zoomed in on the newly opened rift.
Massive. Glowing. Unstable.
And beautiful.
Dark energy bled from the sky like ink spilled across glass. Crimson lightning forked behind it in eerie rhythm. Monsters poured out by the dozens, grotesque and surreal, each one more horrifying than the last.
And yet, the crowd cheered louder.
Children on shoulders pointed excitedly. Spectators gasped in wonder. Even nobles from the upper tiers leaned forward with interest, wine glasses forgotten mid-air.
"This must be a new twist!" one announcer laughed, voice full of theatrical bravado.
"A surprise mechanic, folks! And look at those designs—those Rift creatures look terrifyingly real! A brilliant illusion by the Nexus Council, no doubt!"
The other announcer laughed nervously.
"Yes… yes, certainly a bold new addition. Spontaneous rift openings haven't been featured before…"
He trailed off, scrolling rapidly through his data glyphs.
"…though I don't… seem to see anything logged."
"Maybe they're keeping it secret! To raise the stakes!"
The crowd loved it.
They screamed for blood. For action. For chaos.
But then—
the camera feed glitched.
Just for a moment.
A flicker.
A blur of static.
Then it snapped back in—but the image had changed. No longer clean. No longer theatrical. It was real.
The drone camera zoomed too close. A contestant—a boy no older than sixteen—was yanked screaming from the treeline by a beast with too many legs. His shield cracked, his resonance flared desperately, and then—he was gone.
Swallowed whole.
The crowd hesitated.
Silence started to ripple, like a quiet shudder rolling across the stadium.
The announcers stopped speaking.
The screens—normally framed with elegant interface borders—glitched again. The overlay vanished. The footage was raw now. Unedited. Unfiltered.
Blood.
Smoke.
Screams.
Another contestant—a girl surrounded —fell to her knees as corrupted shadows coiled around her. She shrieked, and the sound didn't fade to black like it usually did.
It echoed.
And kept echoing.
The cheering died.
All at once.
Then, one final screen came into focus.
A bird's-eye shot of the battlefield, panning slowly across the carnage. Contestants fleeing. Others already fallen. Aether flaring in desperate bursts. And in the very center, the rift still growing—its jagged edges pulsing wider, deeper, hungrily.
And beside it, a figure floated. Twitching. Grinning. Eyes glowing.
The corrupted contestant.
No longer bound.
No longer human.
In the control room, alarms blared.
Magical barriers flickered. Overseers shouted. Dozens of Nexus agents scrambled across glyph-lined floors, trying to locate the source of the breach.
It was chaos. Everywhere.
And on the screen above the stadium, in massive golden letters, a new message flickered into view:
[ ERROR: TRIAL BREACH DETECTED ]
[ UNAUTHORIZED RIFT ZONE INITIATED ]
[ UNKNOWN SOURCE: INVESTIGATING… ]