Chương 33: First Lesson: Portals

After breakfast, barely enough time had passed to digest the standard-issue ration before the sergeant led our motley group toward yet another building. From the outside it was the same dull gray box, indistinguishable from a dozen others, but inside a surprise was waiting. We found ourselves in a fully equipped modern classroom: rows of brand-new desks, a projector humming steadily under the ceiling, and a wide board.

Standing by the board, adjusting her glasses with a thin, stylish frame, was the same blonde in a dazzling white lab coat I remembered from the recruitment office. Doctor Selina Langstrom. Against the harsh concrete walls, she looked like a visitor from a different, more civilized world. During the medical examination, she had been the one to conduct a detailed interview about my abilities, and back then we actually had a lively exchange, unlike the other doctors who simply ticked boxes on their forms.

Even then, I had a suspicion that our paths would cross again. We took our seats at the desks. There was more than enough space, so everyone sat separately. The sergeant, his heavy boots echoing across the floor, closed the door behind us and remained inside, leaning his shoulder against the wall near the exit, a living reminder that this was not an ordinary school.

"Good morning, cadets," Selina greeted us in a soft, enveloping voice. It was the kind teachers used in elementary school to calm a noisy class.

"We've already met during the preliminary assessment, but in case stress's erased your memories, let me introduce myself. I'm Doctor Selina Langstrom. However, within these walls, I'm your professor."

"Good morning, Professor Langstrom," Mary replied first, her words crisp and precise. The others joined in a disjointed, uneven chorus. A sense of surrealism would not leave me. Barracks, a sergeant, ranks, and suddenly school desks and a polite professor.

"The first day's always a challenge," Selina continued, pacing in front of the board.

"I assume the morning training's drained you completely?"

"Oh yeah!" Ted thrust his hands forward, which were indeed trembling slightly.

"My palms still hurt from that damn pull-up bar!"

"That's precisely why our program's balanced," Selina gave a subtle smile, clearly expecting the complaint.

"While your muscles recover, we'll put your brain to work. I'm officially beginning the lecture portion."

"Oh come on!" Ted groaned, leaning back in his chair.

"Even here we've got this stupid studying! I thought we were done with that back in school!"

"SILENCE!" The sergeant's thunderous roar made Ted jump, and the glass in the classroom rattled faintly.

"Cadets, in this room you open your mouth only when you're addressed by the instructor! Questions?" The teenagers fell silent instantly, shoulders tensed and heads lowered. Now it was clear why that walking wardrobe in uniform was here. He was a human volume control for Langstrom, who, for all her charisma, clearly lacked the command voice needed to rein in a storm of teenage hormones. Ted, still sniffling in offense, raised his hand, this time by the book.

"You've got a question, Cadet Drake?" the professor nodded.

"Go ahead."

"We were promised ability training," he muttered, avoiding looking at the sergeant.

"Why're we wasting time on all this theory instead of, you know, doing something actually useful? We're soldiers, not librarians."

"Cadet Drake, remember one simple truth: you're not being trained as cannon fodder, but as a special operations unit," Selina spoke more calmly, but steel edged her voice.

"There's no useless knowledge here. Even Michael Schumacher didn't just turn the wheel, he thoroughly understood how his car's engine worked. If you don't understand the nature of your power, you don't control it. You're merely a dangerous toy in the hands of chance." Ted opened and closed his mouth several times like a fish thrown onto shore. Apparently, he found no argument against that, or decided the sergeant's anger was too high a price for continuing.

"Before we proceed to the core of the lesson," the professor swept us with a serious gaze, "I'm obligated to remind you: at the recruitment office, each of you signed a non-disclosure package. If any information obtained within these walls leaks to your friends, your parents, or, God forbid, the internet, the consequences'll be catastrophic. This isn't about fines, but imprisonment in a high-security facility. No visitation rights. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am!" we answered in unison. I glanced at the others. Real fear had frozen on Nick's and Louise's faces. Apparently, only now had it sunk in that the Awakened Corps was not a fun game with special effects, but a state secret with very sharp teeth. Only Mary sat with a completely absent expression, studying a tiny crack on her desk. She was bored. Far too bored for someone being threatened with prison.

"So, the topic of today's lesson: Portals." Selina wrote the word in large letters on the board, the chalk screeching sharply.

"Who can tell me when and where the first recorded spatial breach occurred?" I immediately sank into the halls of my mind. Pages of articles I had studied over the past months drifted before my eyes. The required folder, History of the Awakened, opened on its own.

"February sixteenth, nineteen eighty," I said clearly, addressing my memory as if it were an open book.

"The city of Cuenca, Ecuador."

"That's absolutely correct, Staff Sergeant Ross," Selina rewarded me with an approving smile and pressed a button on her remote. The lights dimmed, and an image flared onto the board. The first portal. It looked like a white lightning bolt frozen in midair, tearing reality apart.

"This was the first documented case of a rupture in spatial metrics," the professor continued as the footage changed one after another.

"Mass evacuation, an international team of scientists, panic. That's what you can read in history textbooks or on Wikipedia. Now let's move to classified information. To what our cleanup teams discovered on the other side of the breach." She clicked the remote. Medical images appeared on the screen. Enormous humanoids with unnaturally long limbs and skin the color of overripe plum, bolted to steel operating tables. Then smaller, almost childlike figures with a bluish tint to their flesh.

And then something truly horrifying: a mangled carcass resembling a mad hybrid of a gorilla and a tyrannosaur, stretched across laboratory restraints. All of them shared one detail. In the photographs, they were dead. Autopsy incisions, sensors embedded in exposed muscle. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Selina clicked faster and faster. Scientific images gave way to grainy military footage. Now the creatures were alive.

Against alien landscapes, among jagged, unnatural structures, they moved with terrifying speed. We saw the purple humanoids burning entire platoons with beams from strange devices, the blue dwarfs tearing through jeep armor with their bare hands. This was not war. This was slaughter. Mud, screams, flashes, and blood splashing across the camera lens. The teenagers in the classroom turned pale. Ted stopped yawning. Nick gripped the edges of his desk so hard his knuckles went white. Even I felt uneasy.

My suspicions that the portals were harbingers of an apocalypse had received a vivid, bloody confirmation. There was no satisfaction in being right. Only Mary continued watching the horror with the expression of someone rewatching an old laundry detergent commercial for the hundredth time.

"Watch carefully and imprint this into your memory," Selina's voice turned hard, almost metallic.

"These creatures aren't our neighbors, aren't potential partners for dialogue, and certainly aren't friends. Some species can imitate human speech. If you're unlucky enough to encounter them inside a portal, they might talk about a diplomatic mission or a peaceful visit supposedly interrupted by our aggression." She froze the frame on a close-up of a purple humanoid whose eyes burned with a cold, calculating fire.

"Don't believe a single word. Not one gesture. They're invaders. They've got no concept of honor or compassion. Their goal's simple and unchanging: our planet. And to them, we're just an obstacle that needs to be eliminated." A heavy, almost tangible silence settled over the classroom. Doctor Langstrom fell quiet, giving us time to process the nightmare we had just seen. I felt a chill run down my spine, but deep inside, a familiar skepticism stirred.

In every alien movie, it always started like this: the government declared the aliens to be bloodthirsty invaders, pumped soldiers full of hatred, and in the end there was a twist, revealing that the real villains were us. Still, I pushed the thought away. Even if Selina was blatantly lying to our faces right now, it changed nothing. I had neither the power nor the desire to fight for intergalactic justice on behalf of fanged monsters.

My plan remained the same: survive, figure out the rules of these military games, and avoid sticking my neck out for someone else's ideals.

"So... we're supposed to fight an entire planet?" Nick's voice came out quiet, almost cracked. He nervously adjusted his glasses, which kept slipping down the bridge of his nose.

"No, Cadet Thompson. It's both more complicated and simpler than that," Selina stepped toward the board and wrote two letters: PG.

"There's a device we call the Portal Generator. From interrogations of the few captured prisoners, we've learned that this technology somehow materializes on planets that are on the brink of collapse."

"A planet can die?" Nick asked, his eyebrows shooting up in alarm.

"Everything in this universe is subject to entropy," she replied coldly, almost casually.

"Earth's no exception, although according to analysts, we've still got several millennia left. The Generator appears on a dying world as a last chance, a lifeline. It opens a passage to another planet, one that's perfectly suited for life. But it's not a direct bridge to our cities. No, the Generator creates an isolated pocket dimension, a limited territory where two worlds collide. What begins, if you like, is a game of bloody chess." I leaned forward, catching every word.

The concept carried a twisted kind of higher logic.

"The enemy, whose numbers we don't know in advance, arrives in this zone first. They build a base, bring in resources from their dying homeworld. But at a certain point, their portal collapses, they become trapped. And that's when our passage opens. From that moment, humanity's got exactly thirty days to completely clear the area. If we don't eliminate every last one of them, the pocket stabilizes. A full, permanent tunnel opens between our planets, and then the invasion you've seen in movies begins.

Full-scale and unstoppable." Yes, bloody chess was putting it mildly. This was a gladiatorial arena on a planetary scale.

"I've got a question," Nick raised his hand again.

"If the enemy's got a time advantage, why don't they just set up machine gun nests right at our portal exit? Why give us a chance to get out and deploy? It's logical to crush us in a bottleneck."

"Good question, Cadet," Selina allowed herself a faint smile.

"The system that created the Generator accounted for balance. The enemy never knows where exactly our passage will appear. It always materializes in a so-called safe invisible zone. While we're inside it, we're ghosts to them."

"No imbalance at all," Nick muttered, tapping his fingers nervously on the desk.

"This sounds like an actual board game. But why? Why would anyone create rules like this?"

"We don't know," Selina spread her hands, and there was genuine helplessness in the gesture.

"Scientists argue themselves hoarse. Some believe in a supercivilization observing us like lab rats, tossing sugar to the survivors in the form of a new planet. Others, a minority, insist on divine intervention. Because of that uncertainty, and the risk of global panic, all countries signed a secrecy pact. Religious fanatics, pilgrimages to so-called sacred rift sites, all of that would only interfere with our work." I raised my hand, feeling something tighten inside me as a practical question surfaced.

"How do we survive in a portal?" The teenagers around me nodded. After the dismemberment footage, higher meaning had clearly lost its appeal, and survival instinct had taken center stage.

"For forty years, the Corps has developed a clear risk classification," Selina switched the slide. A familiar traffic light symbol lit up on the screen.

"Every incursion begins with reconnaissance, and based on its results, a portal's assigned a color code."

"Green: we've encountered this enemy type before. Their tactics, biology, and technology are thoroughly studied. We've got ready countermeasures. Mortality in these zones is practically zero."

"Yellow: a new or poorly studied enemy. Only Awakened with at least three years of clearance experience are allowed into such portals."

"Red: the worst-case scenario. The enemy outclasses us in every parameter. A Red designation's assigned automatically if the recon team doesn't return within the first twenty-four hours."

"And then what?" Ted exhaled.

"Do the strongest go into a Red portal, like Danny Kim?"

"A Red portal doesn't get the Awakened Corps," Selina pressed a button, and an image of ten massive, futuristic capsules wrapped in a greenish glow appeared on the screen.

"It gets this." This was clearly not nuclear weaponry. It was something far more refined and far more terrifying.

"Molecular disintegrator," the professor explained. On the video behind her, a bright green eruption bloomed. It did not resemble a conventional explosion, matter simply crumbled into dust, erasing entire hectares of alien landscape at the atomic level.

"Nothing survives that. Not the enemy, not the ecosystem itself."

"That's awesome!" Ted exclaimed, the familiar unhealthy excitement flaring up in his eyes again.

"So why don't we just hit those freaks with these things right away? Why all the training, the color codes, the special ops games? Just drop one from above and that's it!"

"Technology, Cadet Drake. Resources," Selina calmly slipped a hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a small vial.

"In my hand's a cure for asthma. Not an inhaler that provides temporary relief. It's a drug that completely rewrites the defective code in the lungs. A full cure. Thanks to technologies recovered from portals, medicines like this now cost next to nothing and are sold in every pharmacy." It felt like an electric shock ran through me. I remembered a coworker from the office who, a year ago, had been glowing with happiness, talking about how his son had forgotten inhalers forever.

Back then I had chalked it up to a breakthrough in pharmacology, but now the pieces fell into place. Because of media censorship, we had no idea what price was being paid for this progress.

"That's why," Selina continued, "we don't send tanks and bombers into portals to destroy everything of value. We send you. The best representatives of humanity. The Awakened. Compact, mobile units capable of eliminating the threat with precision and retrieving what will allow our civilization to move forward." Silence settled over the classroom again. The scale and cynicism of the system were staggering.

"Any questions left on the topic?" the professor asked, scanning the room. I raised my hand again. There was one question that had been bothering me since morning.