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The Underworld had two parts.
Everyone who lived here knew this the way they knew the cold — not something learned, just something understood from the moment you arrived. The Inner City sat at the center, enclosed behind a barrier that had stood longer than anyone could accurately date, its white walls rising above the snowline like something that had grown there rather than been built. The Outer City sprawled around it — wider, louder, less protected, the kind of place where people built lives knowing the lives were provisional.
Between the two was White. The number 1 undefeated ranker in the outer ranking.
Not a name given warmly. Just a description that had stuck — a giant, white as the snow he stood in front of, broad enough that three men standing shoulder to shoulder couldn't match his width. He guarded the gate between Outer and Inner with the particular stillness of something that had been doing one thing for so long it had become the thing. Beside him and arranged in formation along the barrier wall, soldiers stood in their positions with the practiced readiness of people who had been trained for a threat that had never come.
Until now.
---
It started as sound.
Not an explosion. Not a crack. Something lower than that — a sustained deep vibration that moved through the snow underfoot before it moved through the air, the ground itself carrying the news upward through the soles of every foot standing on it.
Then the snow erupted.
Not in one place. In dozens — simultaneous columns of white exploding upward across the Outer City as things came through from underneath, the snow that had compressed over centuries offering no real resistance to what was pushing through it. Fire. Shape. Movement.
The first monster that fully cleared the surface was roughly the size of a house — a quadruped built from something between molten rock and living flame, its body shedding heat in visible waves, the snow around it converting instantly to steam that rose in thick white columns. Its eyes, if they could be called that, were two points of concentrated orange in a face that was otherwise just fire finding a shape to inhabit.
It moved immediately. No pause. No orientation. Just forward — into the Outer City, into the structures, into the people.
The screaming started.
---
The Inner City barrier went up within minutes.
Someone in the top hundred had the sense or the authority to trigger it — the formation activating with a sound like a held breath releasing, the barrier sealing itself along its perimeter in a visible shimmer that separated the Inner City from everything outside it with clean and total indifference.
Inside, the top rank hundred were safe.
Judas stood at the barrier wall and watched the Outer City through it.
The fire was visible from here — multiple points of it, spreading, the steam from melting snow rising in columns that obscured and revealed in alternating moments. People were running. The direction they were running was here — toward the Inner City gate, toward White and the soldiers holding the formation, toward the barrier that was currently closed to them.
Judas watched a column of fire consume a building in the Outer City.
His fan was in his hand without him remembering opening it.
---
The team had been in the Outer City when it started.
No warning. No preparation. Just the ground shaking beneath their feet and then the snow erupting around them and suddenly the Outer City was a different place from the one it had been thirty seconds ago.
Kamira moved first.
Her hands found Spidey — and the mechanical spider responded before she finished the gesture, its body expanding outward and reconfiguring, the black legs extending and locking into place as it opened itself around her like a second skeleton. The armor settled across her body with the familiar weight of something built specifically for her — Spidey's consciousness merging with her movements, the curved pincers extending beyond her shoulders, the thick legs becoming an exoskeleton that moved when she moved and hit when she hit.
She was already running toward the nearest monster before the armor finished sealing.
"FORMATION—" George's voice cut through the chaos — and the team responded without needing the rest of the instruction, falling into the positions they had fought from enough times that the arrangement was muscle memory now.
Zina's silver bow was up immediately, three arrows nocked, her eyes finding the weak points on the nearest beast with the quiet efficiency of someone who had spent every early morning of her life preparing for exactly this — not this specifically, but something like this, something that required her to be ready when everyone else was still processing.
She loosed.
The arrows found the joints — the places where the fire was thinner, where the structure underneath was closest to the surface. The beast stumbled. Not dead. But slowed.
"Eyes and joints—" Zina called out. "Fire is thinner there—"
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