The evening air was crisp, carrying the scent of damp earth and coming rain, but the atmosphere in Aunt Elena's garden was thick with an electric tension that made the hair on Dack's arms stand up. Dack followed Glad to a secluded corner, deep in the shadows of the old oak trees, far from his aunt's prying ears. The stranger radiated a quiet, steady confidence—a grounded strength that reminded Dack, with a pang of nostalgia, of the hero in his father's bedtime stories.
"I was supposed to wait until you were twelve to tell you all of this," Glad began, his gaze fixed on the darkening horizon where the first stars were beginning to pierce the veil. "That was Mir's wish. He wanted you to have a childhood, a normal life. But with the Octagon abducting Laine, safety is a luxury you no longer have, even here."
Dack narrowed his eyes, his mind racing. "This dimension?" he repeated, clinging to the man's every word as if it were a lifeline.
Glad turned to face him fully, his silhouette dark against the twilight. "Did your father never speak to you of a parallel world? Not as a dream, but as a place of soil and blood?"
"He did... but I thought they were just stories to help me sleep," Dack whispered, the memories of his father's voice echoing in his head.
"That world is called MEL," Glad said, his voice dropping an octave, becoming gravelly and solemn. "Your father and I come from there. We weren't just technicians or citizens. We were Gleaners in the Realm of the Zenith. Our mission was to protect the Balance—to stop criminal syndicates from seizing the Meteorite Island and to hunt the Shapeshifters, those humans warped into monstrous aberrations by the raw power of the Flux."
Dack listened, his breath hitching in his chest. The jagged pieces of the puzzle were finally slamming into place with a violent clarity. Glad explained that Mir belonged to the elite Swordfish Squad—the sharpest blade of the Zenith—while Glad himself had served in the Roe Deer Squad. But Mir carried a dangerous secret: he was obsessed with uncovering the true origin of the Parallel, a mystery that the leaders of their world preferred to keep buried.
"He infiltrated the Octagon—some call them the Scolopendra—to steal an artifact capable of siphoning the Meteorite's energy. He needed a key to tear through the dimensions. I granted him access to an ancient blade belonging to the First Lord of the Zenith. Together, we ripped open a breach and fled here, to Earth, to escape the arrest warrants and the shadow of the Octagon."
Glad paused, his face clouded by the weight of a memory that seemed to age him by a decade in a single second.
"We separated so we wouldn't be found. But Mir's quest wasn't over. Two years ago, he located the 'Island's anchor' in this dimension—what your scientists call Zone Beta—and crossed back over. He managed to extract a shard of the Meteorite, but he was ambushed by Shapeshifters. He slew one and dragged its carcass back through the breach before vanishing again."
Dack understood everything now: the incident at Zone Beta, the overwhelming sensation of weight by the river, the visions of the crystallized stone... it wasn't madness. It was the proximity of his home world bleeding through the veil of Earth.
"Your father isn't dead, Dack. He went back to finish what he started. And the Octagon took your mother to force his hand—to make him return and surrender the shard."
Dack tightened his fists, his knuckles turning white. A new, cold resolution began to burn in his eyes, replacing the hollow sadness of the past two years. The fear that had haunted his dreams was incinerated by a willpower made of iron.
"Take me there," Dack said, his voice no longer trembling. It was the voice of a soldier, not a nine-year-old boy. "Take me to MEL."
Glad nodded, a thin, knowing smile playing on his lips. The Child of the Zenith was finally ready to claim his heritage.
Night had draped its heavy shroud over the city by the time they prepared to leave. In the oppressive silence of his bedroom, Dack gripped a pen with a trembling hand. He scratched a few desperate words onto a scrap of paper for Aunt Elena and his friends—a gut-wrenching farewell promising that one day, he would return to explain everything. He couldn't stay. To remain was to condemn everyone he loved to the cold, reaching shadow of the Octagon.
Outside, in the center of the garden, Glad was waiting. He knelt and traced a luminescent circle onto the grass—a complex geometry of light that seemed to defy every known law of physics. At its epicenter, he placed the Ascendance Shard. The object began to thrum, emitting a pulsing radiance that made the surrounding leaves shiver in a phantom wind.
"Are you ready?" Glad asked, his hand outstretched.
Dack nodded, the raw determination in his chest finally drying his tears. "Yes. Take me there."
Glad gripped his hand, his grip like a vice. "Dack, listen to me. What we are doing now is a sensory cataclysm. Stay close to me. Do not let go, or you will be lost in the void between worlds."
They stepped toward the rift—a jagged, dark fracture in reality rimmed with cosmic sparks. The moment of crossing was a nightmare of physics. Dack felt his physical form disintegrate, every atom of his being scattering into particles of light before violently reassembling. A dull, throbbing ache exploded behind his skull, and a blinding flash of light forced him to his knees.
When he finally managed to pry his eyes open, the world had been rewritten.
The very air was different—denser, charged with a heavy static electricity that made his skin prickle. Around them, there were no more asphalt streets. Instead, a monumental jungle stretched toward a sky of impossible, swirling colors—violets, deep oranges, and neon greens. Every leaf, every twisting vine seemed to vibrate with an ethereal, fluorescent glow, as if the forest itself were breathing.
"Where… where are we?" Dack wheezed, struggling to pull the thick, oxygen-rich air into his lungs.
Glad was already on his feet, his eyes scanning the perimeter with predatory focus. His hand rested on the hilt of a glowing weapon that hadn't been there a moment before.
"Welcome to MEL," he replied, his voice grim and low.
Dack reached out, mesmerized, toward a plant shimmering with deep mauve reflections, but Glad stopped him with a sharp, lightning-fast gesture.
"Touch nothing," Glad warned, his eyes reflecting the strange light of the jungle. "Trust no one, even if you think you can. Here, everything is alive... and everything is hungry for your skin. The Zenith is far from here, and the Octagon has ears everywhere."
The heavy silence of the jungle was suddenly shattered by a distant, bone-chilling cry—a long, animal wail that sounded like a mix between a wolf and a grinding machine. Dack realized then that his father's stories were merely pale shadows of this terrifying reality. The journey had truly begun, and Earth was already nothing more than a fading memory.