System Breaker: Surviving Apocalypse with Nine-Tailed Kitsune

"We should’ve known he was crazy. I mean, he killed his best friend, right?" Axel muttered, staring at the swirling rift.

"Think we can still turn back?" one of the twins asked, voice tight.

The group shifted nervously, feet shuffling on broken pavement. No one moved toward the rift. No one wanted to be first.

Then someone stepped forward.

Nyla, with her hammer resting casually on her shoulder, walked toward the rift without hesitation.

"Don’t be cowards," she called back over her shoulder. "Boss is waiting."

And just like that, she stepped through.

The others stood frozen for a moment, blinking at the space where she’d been. Then, one by one, as if her courage had been contagious, they found the nerve to follow.

***

Damon frowned the moment his recruits began appearing beside him.

But it wasn’t their delayed appearance that made him frown, but the rift itself.

Unlike every rift he’d cleared before, mountain passes, forests, and swamps, this one was entirely artificial.

He stood in a corridor carved from dark, navy-blue stone. The walls were flat and smooth, too precise to be natural. Torches lined the walls at regular intervals, their flames casting flickering shadows that stretched and twisted across the floor.

The air was unnaturally cold, clinging to their skin like a wet cloth. The ceiling hung at least three meters above their heads, and stood around four meters wide.

The corridor stretched endlessly in both directions, vanishing into darkness far beyond what even his mana-enhanced eyes could penetrate.

’That’s new,’ he thought.

"Some rifts have existed for centuries," Kitsune’s voice murmured in his head, as calm as ever. "If the creatures inside are intelligent enough to construct things, anything’s possible."

Damon’s mind flicked back to the rift with orcs, the crude huts that they had built to live in. Those had been primitive, merely functional. But this?

This was something else entirely. The scale alone suggested a level of organisation and intelligence far beyond what he’d encountered before. The walls weren’t just carved, they had to be planned.

Whoever or whatever had made this place had done so with purpose.

Behind him, Amber gasped softly as she materialised beside the others. Her wide eyes swept the corridor, taking in the torches, the stone, the sheer size of it all.

"What... what is this place?" she whispered.

Damon didn’t answer immediately. His gaze was fixed on the ceiling, or rather, the lack of sky above it.

It was the first time since he had started clearing rifts that he couldn’t see the sky.

Normally, the natural way to find the rift core was to follow the jagged lines leading directly toward it.

But here, locked in some windowless corridor, that method of finding the core was gone.

’Well,’ he thought, his jaw tightening slightly. ’This just got more complicated.’

"Any idea which way to go, boss?" Nyla asked.

’Boss?’ Damon lingered on the word for a moment before brushing it off.

He took a long glance in both directions, trying to see anything that could indicate the right way to go.

Unfortunately, there was nothing. Both directions looked exactly the same, eerily so. With no real way of locating the rift core, he had no choice but to go with his gut.

"We’ll go to the right," he finally answered, earning a few nods from the group.

Damon moved quickly to the front, leading the others into whatever this place was.

Though he couldn’t see the end before, the corridor stretched far beyond what he had expected.

Half an hour of relentless marching earned them nothing but more distance to cover.

"I thought there’d be more enemies," One of the twins said, while the other quickly agreed.

The rest of the group seemed to share their views as each quickly grew restless from the never-ending walk.

Damon couldn’t really blame them. Even he was starting to grow uneasy from the march. The lives of the group were in his hands. He was the one responsible for bringing them here, and it was his job to get them out.

’Did we go the wrong way?’

Just as the thought entered his mind, Damon began to notice that something was off.

At first, it was subtle. Just the way the torchlight seemed to flicker differently than it should have. But the deeper they went, the more the feeling of unease clung to every single one of them.

Then, Damon began to notice something else. The way his shadow had slowly begun to lag behind. At first, it was barely noticeable, but with each step, his shadow began to lag further and further behind.

"Is... is anyone else seeing this?" Amber pointed towards the shadows, which Damon had already been keeping an eye on.

The other members of the group quickly freaked out.

"Stay focused," Damon quickly called out, trying to keep his group in check.

They walked for another ten or so minutes before the corridor suddenly started to turn narrower.

It was unnoticeable at first, but as the rest of the group had to shift to make space, it soon became very apparent to everyone that their surroundings were changing.

Then, they finally saw something.

A sudden corner at the far end of the corridor.

Everyone’s pace picked up without speaking, relentless in getting out of this place.

But as they turned that very corner, they were quickly met with another, then another.

"Damon... something’s wrong I-" Kitsune’s voice in his head suddenly cut off before she could finish her sentence. Her weight on his shoulder also vanished, and as he turned to see where she went, his blood ran cold.

The entire group was gone.

"Huh? They were just there..."

He turned around the last corner they took to check if they were there, only to see it empty.

His heart hammered against his chest as he quickly backtracked his steps. But with each corner he took, he found himself in a new place, and before he realised it, he was in the middle of a maze, far away from Kitsune or any of his group members.