“I don’t give a fuck if you were saving the President of the Universe, you were late, you’re done! Clean out your locker and get the fuck out!” John screamed.

  “Are you fucking serious John?!” she yelled back. “I bust my ass at this shop, work all the shitty shifts, and the only reason I was late is that I was literally taken hostage by a villain!”

  Erika saw red. She wanted nothing more than to punch his face in, but that wouldn’t do shit to help her situation. Opening her mouth to beg for another chance or cuss the perv out, she wasn’t sure which, she was cut off by a high pitched air raid siren going off at the same time that everyone’s phones started to blare with another emergency alert.

  “Shit! We need to get out of here!” she heard Mary scream from where she stood behind the counter, her phone in her hand.

  “Nobody leaves!” John barked, freezing the employees in place. “Except you,” he said whirling around with a sick smile on his face. “Get out of here before I call the cops, and hand over the shirt, it’s company property.”

  “Fuck that, we need to get out now!” Erika’s coworker yelled, sprinting for the back door. Several other employees looked between John and Max before they turned to follow.

  John scowled as he pulled out this phone to read the message. “You’re all being ridiculous, it’s just another false alarm. Anyone who runs is fired just like Erika.”

  “Fuck this job, thats a portal warning!”

  “—” whatever John was about to say was lost as a crackling hole tore through the fabric of reality with the sound of fabric tearing and a bright purple flash.

  …

  Erika yelped as she landed on her ass, adding another bruise to her growing list of injuries. “What the fuck was that?” she said, looking around the cafe as her voice echoed strangely, only to freeze as her eyes locked onto a burning torch sitting in a wall sconce.

  The cafe definitely didn’t have torches lighting the interior. And even if it did, they definitely wouldn’t be burning blue. The hole in reality. The bright purple flash. Someone screaming at John about a portal warning. Fuck.

  Erika scrambled to her feet and took a fighting stance as she looked around. She was in a long hallway made of rough stone blocks, like something out of a dungeon crawler. Behind her was a solid stone wall, so she was in a dead end. The floors and walls were covered in dust and she could clearly see where she’d been, but didn’t see traces of anything else living. Ahead of her, the hallway stretched out into the gloom, getting almost dark before she saw another burning torch, and then another after that. Seeing no immediate threats, Erika calmed herself as she thought through her situation.

  Yup she was definitely sucked into a portal. The company that owned the building the cafe she worked in didn’t install a portal shunter. If they had, a portal wouldn’t have been able to open in the cafe.

  Or more likely, they installed a cheap one and the cafe was probably outside its radius with a cheap rent. She could picture John opening his cafe there because of the cheap rent. He wouldn’t care about being outside the radius of a portal shunter if it saved him a few hundred a month in rent. What were the odds a portal would open up inside the cafe of all places?

  Apparently pretty good since it just happened. Still there was a bright side; she didn’t feel her headache anymore. Other than the stinging where the meta’s claws poked her and her mildly aching ass, she felt good. Better than good actually. Which would make what she had to do easier.

  Portals opened up into strange places. Sometimes one opened to a small space no bigger than a large room, other times places so large they might as well be a whole new world. The environments were always different, from caves and forests to fortresses and cities and even fantastical places that defied reasoning. It’d been big news when a major corporation bought development rights to a portal that led to a space where the ground was solid clouds floating through the sky and each had their own gravity. It’d been turned into an amusement park.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  No two portals were the same except for a few things. First, any living thing close to a portal’s entrance would get sucked in. Second, the only way to get out was to find the exit portal, usually guarded by some kind of powerful monster. Third, people who survived a portal almost always came out with something valuable. Treasure, esoteric knowledge, even superpowers in a few cases. But that was only if they survived.

  Speaking of, though there weren’t any visible monsters nearby, Erika didn’t know when that would change. First things first, she needed a weapon. Luckily, the torch in the wall sconce was easy to slip out of its place. It was a simple piece of wood wrapped in bands of pitted iron and about two feet long, the last few inches of it burning with the strange fire. The flames didn’t give off any heat, but Erika didn’t dare touch them. Just because they weren’t hot didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. Holding the torch out in front of her, she began to step carefully down the hallway as more things she’d heard about portal regions came to mind.

  Traps were common in the manmade looking places, from pitfalls and poisoned darts to blades and spikes shooting out from hidden crevices or the ceiling. Looking up was almost as important as looking down. The ceiling was easy enough to see, only about ten feet up and covered in grime and cobwebs, but no obvious traps.

  Walking by the strange blue light of the torch, she slowly worked her way down the hallway, carefully scanning for anything that might be a trap. She didn’t find any, but what she did find were more unsecured torches that she pulled out as she moved. She quickly learned with the third torch that the flames stayed with the torch even if she threw them, and soon she was kicking or throwing along a full dozen torches while she kept one in her hand. The extra light and the weight of each torch as it skittered across the stone floor made her more and more confident as she moved that she wouldn’t blunder into a trap.

  At least, until she got to the end of the hallway. As she lobbed another torch underhand into the darkness, she saw the stone walls open up into a dark room. One that that wasn’t empty from the way something screeched in the darkness. Then she saw a booted foot step into the ring of light.

  “Oh thank god there’s someone else,” she said, starting to walk forward, only to freeze as another foot, then another, and another entered the ring of light. The sound of dozens of shuffling, dragging footsteps echoed down the hallway. Picking up another of the torches that lay scattered on the ground, Erika threw it forward and watched as its added light illuminated the group.

  Rotting, dripping flesh. Exposed bone. Torn and bloody chainmail and decomposing leather. A putrid smell that made her wish she had her mask on her. Their eyes shining the same deep blue that the torches did. The lead opened its mouth wide, sinew tearing as it let out a loud gurgling moan. More moans echoed out from the darkness.

  “Of fucking course its zombies. Where the fuck’s a shotgun when you need it?!”

  Erika glanced between the horde just starting to step into the hallway and the darkness behind her. Running wasn’t an option. There was nothing in the darkness behind her except a straight line stopping in a dead end, and all she’d found was the torches she pulled off the wall.

  “Damnit!” Bending down, Erika scooped one of the torches up and lobbed it at the first zombie. Maybe she’d get lucky and they were covered in gasoline or something.

  The torch spun through the air, trailing its cerulean flames as it spun before it struck the wall next to the zombie and bounced off, clattering to the floor. “Of cour—holy fuck!” She might’ve missed her throw, but the torch bounced off the floor, spinning as it collided with the zombies’ feet and the flames briefly touched one of the zombies. As if the zombie were soaked in gasoline, the blue flames engulfed the monster and it began to flail, bumping into more zombies in the horde which only spread the flames further.

  Taking a few steps back, Erika watched as the zombies quickly succumbed to the blue flames, burning to ash in record time, leaving only piles of soot next to several haphazardly scattered torches. Looking at the one that remained in her hands, Erika shuddered, imagining the flames leaping onto and incinerating her like it did the horde. Holding the torch head further away from her, she walked back down the hallway, carefully avoiding the haphazardly scattered torches until she got to the nearest pile of ash. Gently, she toed it, ready to jump back or swing with the torch in her hand, only for an opaque shape to shoot out of the pile of soot!

  “What the fuck?!” Erika yelped, swinging the torch in her hand like a bat at an opaque box that suddenly appeared in her vision.

  *Ding!* You have defeated Zombie (Class F) x17! You have gained 1,700 EXP! Congratulations!