Chapter 196: Habour District…

Akira jerked awake as a sharp needle-like sting lanced through his shoulder. The system alert didn’t make a sound; it simply appeared, overlaid across his bedroom’s room ceiling like text projected onto smoke, glowing faintly at the edges.

[GATE MANIFESTATION: ACTIVE]

[LOCATION: HARBOR DISTRICT — SECTOR 4 DRAINAGE INFRASTRUCTURE]

[CLASSIFICATION: BETA-CLASS]

[ENVIRONMENTAL SIGNATURE: AQUATIC — PRESSURIZED]

[RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE RESPONSE]

Akira sat up. Checking his bedside table, the time was 5:47 AM. Outside, the city was still in that brief state of quiet it only managed for about thirty minutes before the first trains began to run.

He stared at the notification for a moment, then dismissed it with a blink.

“Good morning, darling,” Ai greeted in a warm, unhurried voice, like she’d been awake for hours waiting for this. “Beta-class gate. Water environment. And you have a Domain Battle in approximately sixteen hours. Fantastic scheduling.”

“Not now, Ai.”

“When, then? Because the gate isn’t going to wait for a more convenient Tuesday.”

Akira was already reaching for his clothes, mentally running through the familiar checklist of his gear, the route he would take, and the timing. But then a thought stopped him.

Last gate that had appeared, he’d delegated and sent Satomi and Ayaka to the warehouse district while he handled Rina’s crisis. It had worked barely… gate closed, but the near-miss with the Order was something he was hoping to avoid.

“You’re thinking about going alone,” Ai said.

“I’m thinking.”

“You sent them to the last one and it bothered you, especially with the way things turned out.”

“The warehouse gate was supposed to be E-Rank.”

“And this one?” Her tone shifted; it was still warm but sounded sharper. “Beta-class, pressurized aquatic environment, unknown guardian type. You’d walk into an underwater pocket dimension by yourself because delegating once made you feel like you weren’t pulling your weight?”

He pulled his shirt on and didn’t answer.

“Akira.”

“I know.”

“You know and you’re still considering it. That’s the part that worries me.”

He picked up his phone, opened the group thread and yyped: Gate’s live. Harbor district. Moving at six-fifteen.

Three confirmations in under two minutes.

“See,” Ai said. “That wasn’t so hard.”

“Still annoying.”

“You’d miss me if I stopped.”

Akira didn’t reply; he just looked around and headed for the door.

—

The harbor district at six in the morning was covered in fog, and filled with the machinery sounds. You could hear distant crane operations starting their shifts, along with seagulls and water slapping the concrete dock walls.

It was the kind of industrial quiet that felt inhabited without being populated.

Ayaka was already at the drainage tunnel entrance when Akira arrived. Her hands were in her jacket pockets, and her breath misted slightly.

Rina appeared thirty seconds later, pulling her hair back. Satomi came last, looking like someone who’d been awake for an hour already and was mildly irritated about it.

“Sector four,” Akira said, checking the signal against what his vision was showing him. The gate energy was strong here. It wasn’t crackling or violent, but simply present, like pressure behind a wall. ’Below us,’ Akira said.”

Ayaka crouched near the drainage grate and pulled the cover aside without ceremony. The drop was about eight feet into a maintenance shaft. Below that was dark, still water, clearly deeper than the shaft itself had any right to be.

“It’s flooded,” Rina said.

“Gate changed the geometry,” Ayaka said. “Standard. The real entrance would probably be at the bottom of this.”

Akira looked at Satomi. “You’re backup and exit anchor. If the Gate seals before we’re out…”

“I’ll find another way in,” Satomi said. “Go.”

Akira dropped in first.

The water hit cold… not painfully cold, but cold enough for him to feel every degree of it. He went under immediately, the shaft dropping him into something that had no business existing under a harbor drainage system.

The water was clear.

He’d expected murk, sediment, and the usual dark sludge of industrial waterways.

Instead, he was looking down through about forty feet of transparent blue-green water. Below him was the roof of an enormous structure, built of stone arches and carved pillars, which spread outward in every direction. Its lower levels were swallowed by the deeper dark.”

Rina surfaced beside him, exhaling a breath that had caught in her throat. “That’s… okay. That’s not what I expected.”

“Gate magic,” Akira said. “You can breathe fine. The dimension compensates.”

He tested it, inhaled slowly underwater. Air, or whatever the Gate was converting the water into near his lungs. It felt slightly different, faintly metallic, but it worked.

[GATE ENVIRONMENT: THE DROWNED CATHEDRAL]

[STATUS: ACTIVE — SEALED]

[INHABITANTS: MULTIPLE]

[PRIMARY GUARDIAN: UNDETECTED — DEEPER LEVELS]

Ayaka slipped in beside them, oriented herself in about three seconds, and pointed downward. “Entrance is through the main cathedral doors. See the arch at the bottom?”

Far below, they could barely see two massive stone doors standing slightly open. The doors were so old that their carvings had blurred into vague shapes, but the gap between them was clear.

“We swim down,” Akira said. “Stay together. Don’t touch the walls… I don’t know what’s living on them yet.”

And so they descended.

—

The cathedral was beautiful in the way that old ruins often are. Although it was clearly not built for beauty, time and decay had added a quality that the original builders never intended.

Mostly intact stained glass windows filtered the dim light from above, creating long, colored shafts that cut across the interior. The pews were still arranged in rows, now covered in pale kelp that moved gently with the water’s currents.

At the far end, an altar was visible on a raised dais, where a stone figure with an eroded face stood watch over the empty room.

Or what seemed like an empty room.

Akira’s system vision was scanning constantly.

“Something’s wrong with the floor,” Ai said.

Akira looked down. The cathedral floor which was made of regular stone flags, was wrong near the edges. Flags were missing near the walls, replaced by open voids that dropped into black.

And the water was moving.

It was a slow, barely perceptible movement, but it was heading right toward those voids.

“The floor is draining,” Rina said. She’d noticed it too.

Then the pressure hit suddenly; the water above them was getting heavier, and the light from the surface was shifting… getting further away.

[TRIAL DETECTED: THE DROWNING HALL]

[CATHEDRAL CHAMBER IS PRESSURIZING]

[STRUCTURAL AIR POCKETS: 4 IDENTIFIED]

[TIME TO MAXIMUM PRESSURE: 6 MINUTES]

[OBJECTIVE: REACH THE NAVE CROSSING BEFORE SEAL COMPLETES]

“Move,” Akira said.

The water around them compressed as they swam. He could feel the pressure in his ears and chest as the Gate’s trial mechanics fully engaged. The voids in the floor opened wider, pulling a current through the chamber, while the entrance doors behind them ground shut.

“Air pockets… there,” Ayaka called, pointing to where the ceiling arched highest. A pocket of compressed air was visible as a shimmer, a few feet above the waterline that was now actively rising.

“We don’t need air,” Rina said. “We can breathe…”

“The pockets are markers,” Akira said, already moving toward the first one. “Look at the pattern.”

Four pockets were spread across the length of the nave. The path between each one was blocked by collapsed ceiling sections and tightly spaced pillars. In one stretch, the floor had given way entirely, creating an eight-foot drop into a flooded sub-chamber.

It wasn’t about breathing; it was a route… a specific route, through specific obstacles, in a specific order.

“It’s a puzzle,” Ayaka said.

“It’s a test,” Akira corrected. “First pocket is through that gap in the choir screen. Rina , lead through the tight sections.”

Rina looked at him, then at the narrowing gap. “What if I get stuck…”

“You won’t.”

She went first.

The next four minutes were a blur of controlled chaos. Rina forced her way through tight passages while Akira and Ayaka followed close behind.

Shirayuki manifested briefly to bridge a collapsed floor section with a temporary ice platform as pressure built steadily in their ears and chests.

At the third air pocket, Rina’s hand caught on broken stonework. She lost two seconds pulling free, and a small cloud of blood from her palm drifted into the water.

She didn’t stop.

At the fourth pocket, the one positioned directly above the nave crossing, the pressure peaked and then released.

[TRIAL 1: COMPLETE]

[PASSAGE TO THE INNER CATHEDRAL: UNLOCKED]

They hung in the water at the crossing, catching their breath slowly. Rina looked at her hand; the cut was shallow and already closing. “That’s one.”

“That’s one,” Akira agreed.

Ahead, through the crossing arch, the cathedral descended into shadow. Corridors branched left, right, and straight, stretching into parts of the structure that the filtered surface light couldn’t reach.

“Deeper,” Ai said. “The guardian’s at the bottom. But it looks like the Gate has more to say before you get there.”

Akira looked at the three corridors.

“We split,” he said.

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