He could remember the stories his mother used to tell him. About the day the world changed.

It was an average day, plain as any other, she would say, until the first gates appeared. In the beginning people didn’t know what to make of the giant glowing doorways that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. They sent their best thinkers and scientists to try and explain them. People gathered from far and wide laughing and guessing about what might come out of the massive doorways.

And exactly ten days after the first gate appeared, the world’s first dungeon break happened.

Monsters poured out of the now open portal in furious waves. Scores of people died, and they kept dying regardless of the armies of the world doing their best to stop it. The monsters were immune to everything that humanity could throw at them. Cities were forever erased from the map; if it wasn’t the monsters then it was the nuclear hellfire the leaders of the world hoped in vain would put a halt to their advance.

And all the while more and more gates continued to appear. People thought o teas the end of the world, and as the dead climbed into the millions it became harder to claim that it wasn’t. But that’s when the first hunters appeared.

No one remembers the names of these first heroes. They came from simple backgrounds, a farmer, a factory worker, a mother of three, but one thing that united them all was the power to fight and kill the monsters from the gates. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that their efforts pulled humanity from the brink of extinction. With the power of the hunters on their side mankind was finally able to push back the unrelenting horde.

And then from the ever growing ranks of the hunters the very first chosen was selected. Blessed with incredible powers by the gods of the gates themselves; these champions led the charge to not just repel the monsters, but actually start pushing them back. It wasn’t long after that humanity managed to close its very first gate.

At last seeing a way out of their hopelessness humanity did what they did best, they adapted, rebuilt and turned danger into opportunity. And now over five hundred years later, the gates, the dungeons they connect to, and the brave hunters who conquer them have become the basis of the entire world’s economy.

“And so Max,” she’d ask him, “What do think the message of that story is?”

“Hunters are awesome!” he’d answer enthusiastically.

“Besides that silly! It’s that people can do anything. So no matter how bleak things might look in your life, never give up and you’ll see things will eventually get better.”

The image of his mother’s brilliant smile made this memory particularly bitter sweet. Because as much as Maximillian Carter loved his mother, he just couldn’t bring himself to agree with her in this case. From the time he was small he had never given up on anything, and all it had gotten him was the shit kicked out of him in this alleyway.

“You like that you fucking shit heel!” the not-question was accompanied by a swift kick to the ribs.

“He must bro. That’s why he keeps coming back without your money!” another blow to his gut.

Max didn’t know the thugs names, just thinking of them as jerkoff one through three. He’d never understood the point of the beatings. It wasn’t like hurting him would make him able to earn the money any faster. But judging by the gleeful look on jerkoff one’s face, he knew this too and was just enjoying himself.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Jerkoff two’s foot came down on his face crushing it further into the filth of the concrete.

“Well that’s enough fun for one day, boys. Listen shit, you have one more week. If you can’t pay in full by then well have to start chopping off body parts. Wonder how much your balls would go for?”

“Come on, bro! We can’t sell something he don’t have!” The three started cackling like the hyenas they were before walking off, jerkoff three making sure to grab Max’s wallet and cellphone before he left.

Max laid there bleeding for a while, waiting to catch his breath.

“Shit,” he said softly.

His wallet wasn’t a great loss, he was flat broke anyway, but his phone had all of his contacts on it. It was going to be next to impossible to get any work without that. Not that he would have been able to pay off his debt even if he worked for the next week straight without sleep. Max would have mentioned something, but he’d learned early on that any backtalk just made them hit him for longer.

As he checked himself for critical injuries, he thought back to how this had all gotten started. Part of him wanted to blame his father. Max’s dad had been a C rank hunter. Not weak but far from the strongest hunter out there and when Max was just ten he had entered a gate and never come back out. Because he had died alone in a gate with no one to confirm his death, Max’s mother was unable to claim any insurance, forcing her to come out of retirement and go back through the gates to support her son.

His mother was a B rank, so they were fine for a few years. But as time went on and Max grew older his mother’s desire to provide for his future made her delve more and more dangerous gates until she was eventually crippled and unable to hunt again, leaving them with only one option. Another part of Max wanted to blame his mother for seeking help from her family, while another still put the blame on his relatives for hospitalizing him when he came asking why his mother hadn’t returned from her visit. While the biggest part of him blamed himself for spending so much money that wasn’t his trying to get them to cough up her location.

But deep down Maximillian knew the truth. Everything was because he wasn’t born strong enough. His mother’s family was one of the oldest clans of hunters out there; some rumors said their family tree could be traced back all the way to that crop of original hunters. If he had been able to awaken as a hunter, if he wasn’t the first one in the family’s history to be born as nothing but a normal person, if he had been able to do more to help his mother earn money, then he would never have had to sit and watch as life took everything he cared about away from him.

He wouldn’t be caught in this never ending cycle of debt that had threatened to take his very life away from him now. Yes, he often thought back to his mother’s story, but try as he might he just couldn’t see any way of climbing out of the bottomless hole his life had become.

Though that didn’t mean he was going to lie quietly and let it happen. It just wasn’t in his nature. Max was a tryer, as his mother used to say. He just didn’t know how to give up on something. He often thought that life would have been easier if he could change that part of himself. But even now, pushing himself shakily to his feet in that dirty alley, he still had a resolve to live deep within his heart. So Max got to planning. He couldn’t get enough money to pay back his debt, but he could make enough for a plane ticket to somewhere else, another city, another country. He’d figure that part out later.

First thing was to head back home and pack his things, then he’d run down one of his contacts and try to scrounge up some work for the week. Goffering supplies for a dungeon raid, cleaning and dismembering monster corpses, it didn’t matter what as long as it could fund his escape. With a goal in mind even his aching ribs felt a little better and he began to make his way across the street towards a bus stop. He always hid some spare change in his sock for just such occasions.

And that’s when the sky split open.

Max’s blood ran cold, as did everyone else’s in that intersection. Because they all knew what the violent crackling sound, like god’s nails on the chalkboard of the world, meant. They were in the middle of a dungeon break.

Except that wasn’t quite what this was. For a dungeon break to occur a gate had to be left uncleared for a prolonged period; the mystical energy would build to a breaking point and the opening would shatter allowing whatever horrors were inside to spill out into our world. But first there had to be a gate for something like that to happen and there wasn’t. Cities were heavily monitored to make sure this exact thing didn’t happen. And instead of shattering like expected, the crack in the sky continued to grow bigger and bigger until it had engulfed everyone in Max’s view.