They Can Deal With It Themselves
Monsters began pouring out of the gates.
Halfway through his sprint toward the bunker, he stopped and looked up at the sky.
The heavens were choked with crimson gates. Some people called them Crimson Doors; others simply took the name as it was and called them Red Gates. Whatever the label, one fact united every living soul who knew of them: a Red Gate was catastrophically dangerous.
The monsters that spawned from a Red Gate were on a level ordinary gates could not begin to match. Worse still, if the mana inside was not completely extinguished within the allotted time, everything that had been trapped within would spill out onto the earth. That alone was enough to terrify not only the Peren Empire, but every empire that still stood.
And now those Red Gates were blooming across the sky by the dozens. It was a sight close enough to despair to taste.
Out of long habit, I reached for my long-range communicator — the Distance — meaning to contact my disciples. Inside it were countless saved numbers. Every single one belonged to the former disciples who had once stood with me as Gatekeepers.
...
I stood there, blank, rooted to the ground. Come to think of it, not one of them had sent me so much as a single message after everything that happened. Not a word of belief. Not even a hollow "we trust you."
They couldn't believe me, then.
I had insisted from the start that I had done nothing of the kind. The only "evidence" had been Belin's word. But Belin's striking looks and her spotless reputation had been more than enough; my former disciples had chosen not to trust me.
Was it that I never earned their faith? Or that they simply refused to give it?
I didn't know. I had turned the question over every day of those years in a cell, and still I could find no fault of my own. All I had ever done was use my trait to hold the gates at bay.
Legendary Gatekeeper [EX]
Permanently seal the mana of any gate you have cleared.
Legendary Gatekeeper. Without my trait, there was no reliable way to keep monsters from flooding out of a gate once it was cleared. Ordinary Gatekeepers possessed similar abilities, but those only worked on low-rank gates. To stop a Red Gate, my trait was essential. I had never doubted that.
So why should I?
I had devoted my entire life, and the nation had cast me aside. I had poured myself into my disciples, and they had refused to believe me. What remained was a barren, worthless life. Why should I risk that life all over again for the Peren Empire?
The thought was short. The conclusion was shorter.
They can deal with it themselves.
I broke into a run for the bunker. When I reached it a short while later, I found the interior better preserved than I had expected.
There were canned goods and other stores of food — not an abundance, but enough to last a few months if I was careful.
The Red Gates haven't opened yet, but they could at any moment. Hiding is the only sane option.
Most Red Gates did not open the instant they appeared. They drank mana from the atmosphere, and only when that power crossed a certain threshold did the doors swing wide. The real problem was the minority that ignored every rule — the ones that spat monsters out with no warning and no conditions met at all. The type of monster, and the danger they brought, was pure chance.
Granted, I've killed just about everything worth killing.
Still, a stretch of bad luck could mean a fight to the death. In three years of prison I had made myself a promise: I would no longer work for the Peren Empire.
So the best I could do now was bury myself in the bunker.
Because monsters had not appeared for more than two years, the shelter had been left to rot — and that neglect worked in my favor. Plenty of people had either never known it existed or had long since forgotten.
I flopped down on the floor of the roughly thousand-square-foot bunker and shut my eyes.
They'll manage somehow. They're the ones who threw me out and said they didn't need someone like me.
Roughly two weeks had passed since I sealed myself inside the bunker.
Across the many communities of the Peren Empire accessible through the Distance, chaos was beginning to take root.
Leos clicked his tongue as he scrolled through the posts. None of them grasped the severity. They had no real idea how terrifying a Red Gate was. One comment, though, caught his eye.
He nearly dismissed it as the usual ravings of some eccentric who spammed strange posts — until the name Leos Gallery made him flinch. He opened the community search tab.
The moment he entered the Leos Gallery, a wall of pinned notices filled the screen.
This gallery was founded to clear the name of the Legendary Gatekeeper Leos and to honor his greatness.
Leos is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Anyone who so much as suggests he is guilty will be permanently banned without warning.
If you know Leos's whereabouts, report it by comment or private message without fail. A reward will be provided.
I read through the Leos Gallery and clicked my tongue again.
They had sat silent while the scandal was exploding, and only now they wanted to play the loyalists? As if that would make me care even a little.
That was what I thought — until the timestamps on the notices left me staring.
What? Three years ago...? That's when the articles about me first started coming out.
The notice forbidding anyone from smearing my name had been posted at the exact moment the sexual-harassment headlines began to flood the feeds. The gallery itself had been founded long before that.
Over five years ago.
I scrolled back through the old posts one by one. The Gallery Master had uploaded photographs.
In internet slang, this was a dead gallery. Only the Gallery Master ever posted, and even those posts were nothing but praise and photographs from the years I had been active.
As I scrolled further up the timeline, a few trolls began to appear. The timing lined up with just before I went to prison.
The Gallery Master never stopped after that.
The pieces finally locked into place. During the trial, a petition had arrived from someone whose name I didn't recognize, and I had wondered who on earth had sent it. It must have been this gallery's master.
But thinking about it... there hadn't been only one petition.
I had never checked the names on them. I had assumed, of course, that my former disciples had written them. After my release, when I found not a single message waiting on the Distance, I realized those petitions had not come from my disciples at all.
It stood to reason. People who would not even send a text would not bother with a petition. Now, at least, I knew who had written the others.
Besides GalleryMaster and Zealot, there were a handful of other fixed nicknames that mostly posted praise for me. It was unexpected. That anyone in the Peren Empire still believed in me — that people still maintained this dead gallery and kept writing — that was unexpected.
Even my disciples never believed me.
A tear slipped free before I could stop it. No matter how many times I spoke, not a single person had stood with me — and yet people whose existence I had never even known had been supporting me like this all along.
On a half-hopeful impulse, I left a comment under the Gallery Master's post.
I tried to post a reply explaining the misunderstanding, but a hollow system window was all that answered me.
Blocked by administrator for 3,650 days
Reason: Defamatory remarks against Leos
Swallowing my bewilderment, I reassigned the IP on the Distance and prepared to message him directly. But in that same instant—
KRA-KOOOM!
A tremendous roar rolled in from outside. I edged toward the bunker wall and shifted just enough to look out.
"Ah..."
Among the Red Gates hanging in the sky, one of them had begun to spill monsters.
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
The Distance screamed in my hand.
The caller was the former disciple who had put me in prison.
Belin.