Chapter 184: Call of Nightmare
’A Gate... there is a Gate...’
Before Sunny even comprehended these words, he was trembling, cold fear rising from the depths of his heart to swallow him whole. This was not a conscious response, but an instinctual reaction — something that his body had learned to do in the past, the terror that all modern humans came to bear in their very bones.
The grating, echoing ringing meant only one thing — run! Run if you wish to live, if you don’t want to die in a manner so harrowing that words could not describe it.
But Sunny wasn’t a mundane human anymore.
Strangling the instinctual fear, he threw it aside and stared at the screen of his phone with a dark expression on his face.
The notification was similar to the ones he had seen several times in the past, heard from the decrepit phone his family shared.
Previously, when he lived in the outskirts, he had learned of the devastation an opening Gate could bring firsthand. Wherever you lived, you were bound to hear that sound once every few years.
On Earth, there were countless Gates that went unsupervised across the wilderness, which meant that countless Nightmare Creatures roamed around without Awakened interference. The cities themselves weren’t safe, since there were no Awakened to protect the civilians.
At the same time, it could be said that the lack of Awakened might have been the reason they survived for so long.
Nightmare Creatures prefer to feast on Awakened souls, so Gates tend to open in places where there were more of them. The frequency of Gates opening near cities was low, and if there was a Gate that close, the IPC would send some people down to neutralize it. Then they would leave again, leaving the planet defenseless.
Those actions had always confused Sunny, but now wasn’t the time to ponder on it.