Dungeon Hunter: Act I

Activation

"Have you seen this one, L-man?" Axel asked me, pushing his iPhone into my face.

He played the video and I watched as a man approached one of the black holes, tentatively reached up to touch it and then disappeared. Here one moment, gone the next. In a single frame. I wondered if the man had a family or friends. Hoping his loved ones would see the video so they may have closure, I shook my head.

"No, but that's kinda messed up. Why didn't the person filming stop him?"

Axel shrugged and continued scrolling. Sitting across from him, I tried to find the good of his parents in him. There was nothing of his mother's warmth, nor his father's cheer. In all ways but personality, he took after his father who'd been naturally athletically gifted, especially in sprints. Axel was a blonde man in his late twenties with an undercut, deep bags under blue eyes that were blessed with thick lashes, and full lips pressed together in idle thought.

I had heard in passing people compliment his looks, with girls in high school even giving him the nickname of Apollo, literally comparing him to a Greek god. And that was why I had stopped comparing myself to him ages ago. The dude didn't even exercise but still managed to have the kind of build men spent hours at the gym to achieve. It gave me some semblance of mental peace that despite all that, Axel had never fully settled into his height, having sprouted up during puberty to compete against skyscrapers, and even now to compensate he hunched over his phone. Part of me thought it might even be a confidence thing.

Not wanting to suffer something else from his social media feed, I left him at the dining table and moved to the lounge. We'd gotten these armchairs secondhand at the dump much to Axel's chagrin. I sunk into one and I tried not to think about what these black holes meant. But avoiding the idea just sent me right back to it.

Was it aliens? Demons? Alternate dimensions? There were so many conspiracy theories floating around online with no official explanations from any government that it would've been easier to figure out time travel at this point than to find out what was actually happening.

Lost in my thoughts, I only vaguely heard the audio from another video play off Axel's phone. The sound of several people screaming slingshotted me back into reality. Turning around in my chair to face him, I shot him a worried look.

I'd known Axel all my life. We weren't so much friends as the second generation of friends. Our parents had been super close and as a result Axel was like a sibling that I didn't really understand. Simply due to circumstance, we now shared a flat in the city. Sometimes life is like that. You get tied to someone for life because of things outside of your control.

Most people assumed since we'd been together for so long that we were a couple. It didn't help that when friends saw us heckle each other they often joked about what a married couple we were. Axel hated it, and was always first to correct it, but it played in my favour for a long time, especially since I didn't know how to break it to my parents that I was ace. That was a conversation I'd been avoiding since I'd realised there was a label for the way I'd felt way back when I was twelve. A decade and a half long con to avoid an awkward exchange with my mother and father.

Omission wasn't lying, was it?

Again Axel shrugged in reaction to my expression, jutting his chin at his phone. "Same man disappearing, different person who filmed it."

"Howabout stop?" I suggested, a pit of tar sinking in my stomach, as I looked away from the uncaring form of my flatmate.

The appearance of the black holes around the world had initially seemed like a stunt meant for virality, but the way that people seemed to no longer exist after touching one was too uncanny for it to just be special effects. Too many angles, too many reactions. I had laughed the first time I saw one, but now I was beginning to feel sick. There was something seriously wrong. This wasn't just some social media blitz or social experiment.