Instant.
In the literal exact moment that hand threw Matt to the side, Tanya had her head cleanly removed from her shoulders.
The person who stepped out from the Gate with a languid gait was, in a word, average. Surprisingly average considering how most people became more attractive as time went on and they leveled up, but Matt wasn't really able to split hairs on appearance when the man had saved his life.
Pale skinned with molten gold eyes that were almost luminescent in their brightness, he seemed to practically glide along the ground as he moved toward Tanya's corpse. Waving his hand over her body, a shimmering blue light illuminated her and he nodded about something he seemed to find.
Ten seconds had now passed, within which Matt had his life saved, Tanya had hers removed, and the man had done some kind of magic scan, and in the eleventh second the Gate disappeared.
A deep breath filled the clearing and Matt's ears rang painfully as the man spoke, his heavy timbre resonating within the space.
"So Lady Iris's prediction has come true."
Noticing Matt holding his ears on the ground, the man said, "oh. Oh no. crap." He took a deep breath that seemed to go on for a full thirty seconds and his energy noticeably retracted as his presence seemed to diminish.
"Hey man, you ok?"
It took a full minute of watching Matt try to push himself up before he just reached down and gently pulled him up by the hand, setting him down on his feet.
"A little wobbly, but you're still alright!"
Still shaking from the onslaught of the man's power, Matt quite obviously couldn't respond.
"Hmm."
Gently touching a dull gold ring on his finger, he pulled out a book and flipped through it for a moment before saying, in slow halting English, "Veil, am I. you who?"
The surprise of hearing such an uncomfortably familiar speech pattern hit Matt and he said, "No no, I could understand you before!"
"Ohhh, thank goodness. I was worried I had forgotten all my lessons."
The man before Matt, Veil, was…an oddity.
He had clearly been inside that Gate, but when he left, it closed.
That didn't make sense.
Gates close from time to time, not all of them last exceptionally long, but for a Gate to close on what was likely its first expedition was extremely strange.
Still shaking off some of the shock from everything, Matt asked, "Are you the only survivor?"
"Survivor?"
"Yeah, of the Gate?"
Veil raised an eyebrow and asked, "What the hell is a Gate? Well, beyond the obvious of course." The last part was practically whispered sarcastically…to himself?
Looking over at where the Gate had been, Matt sighed when he saw that the whole shrine was gone too. What the hell was happening?
Veil walked over to the remnants of the Gate, which had silently collapsed in on itself, condensing into the shape of a tiny stone, and looked down in what appeared to be bewildered annoyance.
Pulling a chair from his inventory, Matt sat down and casually tried to Identify the man, only to stop dead in his tracks as his System outlined the man in red and gave him a message.
Identify Target Ineligible.
Target Level: Adjusted to standard, 650.
Simultaneously, Veil turned his head to Matt and said, "hey, its rude to pry."
There was no threat, no overwhelming energy coming from the man, just…casual denial.
Somehow this was more frightening.
Its easy to overcome the fear of something you can feel or see, but whether because of his level or just his demeanor, Veil wasn't giving Matt anything to cling to.
He had just killed Tanya right in front of him, but it felt petty to hold that against him. The woman had just tried to kill him, and he didn't particularly like her in the first place. All of this was before acknowledging that Veil hadn't done anything but save his life at this point.
If the man didn't want Matt trying to use an ineffectual Identify on him, Matt was pretty inclined to comply.
If nothing else, he didn't seem…hostile?
Well except toward Tanya, but who cared.
Cocking his head to the side, Veil asked, "What is this screen?"
"You don't know what the System is?"
Shaking his head, Veil shrugged and popped his hands in the air in a show of confusion as he said, "Nah man, never heard of it."
"If you've never seen the System before, are you not from here?"
Turning back to Matt, Veil closed one eye and raised the opposite eyebrow as he made a show of thinking as hard as he could before he said, "I'ma keep it real with you bud, I've got no clue what's going on. One second I was partying down by the river and now I'm here."
Ok, so pre-system update.
That's something, Matt supposed.
"Oh there is one thing, I remember! Lady Iris was pretty jazzed about something. She kept saying," he raised his voice to a mid falsetto, "I finally got that leech bitch, I finally GOT her!"
Uh…
Well that didn't do much to help Matt, but it was information he could add to the pile of confusion.
"Oh wait! There was one other thing."
Matt gestured with his hand and said, "Go on?"
Nodding aggressively, Veil said, "Yeah! There was this massive black and red storm that was killing everything it passed! It covered Lady Iris with Void and then spun into the shape of a guy with glowing red eyes!"
Squinting at Veil, Matt took a deep breath and let it out through his nose.
Veil rolled his eyes and said, "That guy sucked. He put me in some kind of portal, next thing I know, I'm here with you and that Peace lady was trying to kill us."
Portal?
Peace?
Red Eyes?
Matt stopped himself before he had a list of one and two word questions a mile long and started parsing what he knew.
A portal could pretty clearly be some kind of Gate.
Peace was…well Peace was a dead end, after all Tanya was pretty obviously not very peaceful.
The red eyes could be a reference to the Crimson Affliction, but that didn't do much to narrow down a timeline or a location for him since that had been recorded in mythology as early as a thousand years pre-system.
Matt audibly gasped and asked, "You were locked inside a Gate?"
Veil rolled his eyes again and nodded, glazing over Matt calling his portal a Gate, and Matt came to a quick realization.
The Gate.
The Wooded Worm Gate had to be some kind of prison for Veil.
It aligned with the Gate closing for no reason, as well as the obscene power coming off of it before he'd touched it.
The Gate being a prison also explained why it was reading at level sixty five instead of six hundred and fifty; it must have been suppressing Veil's strength.
"Geez man, I don't know how long I've been out, but it feels like the world's totally different. The mana in the air is way stronger and everything feels, I dunno, stretched out? Also, did you know there's a whole new world core down there?"
Matt had no idea what a world core was, but by now he'd stopped fixating on stuff he didn't know and started shuffling it away to ask or research later.
"Yeah, since the System update, the world has been growing and there's a lot more ambient mana than there used to be."
Nodding in false sagacity, Veil said, "yoo, I'm so sorry man, I didn't even ask your name!"
Matt gave him his name and spent some time getting Veil up to date so he at least had a basic idea of what was going on in the world.
After twenty minutes of explanation, Veil said, "Blegh, I hate when Iris is right about this kind of stuff, it makes her all preachy. Well, I guess that's alright, she's probably locked up somewhere…wait, if I'm out, that probably means she's out too."
Letting Veil work through all this information on his own, Matt checked his System map and made a note of the clearing just in case he needed to come back. Even with the Gate gone, the Bureau might still be interested in the location, so it was worth jotting down.
Veil's voice broke him from his work, "Hey man, you seem pretty calm. If I'm out, those other guys are probably out too."
"What other guys?"
Veil tapped the air and it rippled as it formed into several sheets of paper.
"A bunch of us followed Iris and Aya because they were Goddesses and pretty strong, but we're not all the same. They were super strong, and their power made us all different, closer to whatever part of it we were closest to."
"Power so strong it alters people around it seems…outrageous," Matt said, trying to think of even a single example of something like that.
"Well yeah man, they were goddesses? Wouldn't make much sense if they made much sense, now would it?"
The sentence felt mishmashed together, but it clicked in Matt's mind as he watched Veil start shambling around and looking for something.
"So you followed this Iris lady?"
Nodding, Veil said, "Yup. My uptight and stressed out Goddess."
"What was she the Goddess of?"
Veil smirked slightly and the air reverberated as he said, "C h a o s".
Matt's head felt like it would split open, as if he'd heard something he wasn't supposed to.
When Matt had left on this little trip, he'd been really hoping to get some leveling in, and maybe get a break from forbidden knowledge and ancient secrets, but here he was again.
Maybe he was cursed?
Nah, that didn't seem likely, but it was weird it kept happening.
Veil watched Matt start rubbing his temple with a smirk as he started tapping through his System menus. Yeah, they were new to him, but they weren't all that much different in concept from some of the devices people had used before he'd been locked down.
He didn't have much to do while he waited for the little Peace girl to wake up. It was strange that someone so young would be following Aya instead of Iris, but she did always manage to attract the weirdos back in the day.
Looking back to the burned spot he'd emerged from, he muttered, "Gates huh?"
Raising an eyebrow at his gold robed companion, Matt asked, "You know anything about them?"
Shaking his head, Veil said, "Not really. Maybe some of the others might, but honestly we were usually pretty busy even under the best of circumstances. Aya's little ragtag bunch managed to make things pretty bad most of the time, so that wasn't really something we got to enjoy much of."
Pointing at Tanya's now floating head, he said, "Not sure why, but they just don't stay dead."
Watching with rapt attention, Matt's jaw dropped as the head slowly extended flesh and bone to reconnect to the body and a glowing teal seal burned itself around her neck where the connection was formed.
"I figured something like this would happen, so I tried to make the cut clean at least. No reason to make her suffer after she came back."
A pulse of energy left Tanya's body, flattening the grass and making the trees bow away from her as she floated in the air and began glowing. Matt lifted his arm to block out the light as it brightened to a blinding intensity before abruptly dimming to nothing.
"You god damned idiots attacking for no reason will always be so irritating," she shouted as the show died down.
"Trying to kill someone is hardly no reason, don't you think," Veil said with a small smile on his face.
Matt dropped his arm to see the woman, now dressed in a green and silver midriff robe and black cargo pants, standing with her arms crossed in annoyance.
She, unlike Veil, was stunningly gorgeous, a fact now clearly visible with her face clean and hair no longer disheveled.
"If it makes you feel any better, I was trying to kill you, not him."
Veil laughed nonchalantly, "nah, not really."
"So, where were you located," Tanya asked, her voice stern and curt.
"I'm from Argentina, little friend," Veil said, a little annoyance leaking in, "Iris doesn't really give us much in the way of instructions."
Tanya snorted and said, "Explains why you idiots were the first ones gone, now doesn't it."
Veil shrugged and looked at Matt and said, "Aya's people are a little more tightly wound than us, aren't they?"
"Its better to be a finely tuned machine than a band of miscreants and serial killers, isn't it," Tanya shot back.
The air around Veil began vibrating as gold energy radiated through his aura as he said, suddenly deathly serious, "One. One serial killer who was swiftly dealt with."
Unimpressed, Tanya smirked as she said, "Ohhh, sore spot?"
Veil let out a tense breath and asked, "So what are you doing, just wandering around looking for people to annoy?"
Matt, while intrigued by all of this, decided he should probably get going.
Waving his hand he said, "Look as interesting as all of this is, it looks like you guys have a lot to talk about, so I'm out of here."
Walking toward where he entered, he made rapid progress before stopping dead in his tracks as Tanya said, "Typical. Conflict avoidant behaviors, as should be expected from a Bureau lackey."
The Bureau.
The number of people who know about the Bureau, from an outsider's perspective, could be counted to less than a hundred and even fewer considering the events as of late.
With all of its grand plans and "greater good" intentions, the Bureau is not, and has never been, a public organization.
Operating in the shadows, the Bureau has always approached the worthy and the useful at their most private and secured significant contracts and oaths to ensure its own secrecy.
It was never the Founder's belief that the Bureau be public, and with good reason. Humanity is…fragile, particularly compared to other races throughout the universe, and it was his justified opinion that operating in full view would nullify their efforts since between politics and human stubbornness, they would be resisted at full strength by the shortsighted and the greedy.
Working with the highest echelons of government hierarchies and later Guild authorities, the Bureau strove to drive humanity to its heights, both through technological advancement and magical superiority.
Whatever level Tanya was, Veil was level 650, and thus Matt turned slowly and was mildly shocked when he saw the man with a confused look on his face.
"What's the Bureau," he asked.
Tanya raised an eyebrow and said, "The Bureau are the monsters in your closet and the serial killer outside your window."
Matt opened his mouth to disagree when she continued, "They're also the only people who actually know what's going on."
Veil raised an eyebrow and asked, "Ok, and what's actually going on?"
Tanya shrugged and said, "How the hell would I know? I'm not with them, but I do know one more interesting fact that might interest you."
Gesturing for her to continue, Veil pulled a staff from the air and used it to lean back to listen.
"The Bureau's Founder killed Lady Aya and Lady Iris."