Alien Exodus:The Portal War

ALIEN EXODUS: THE PORTAL WAR They called it the Great Step. Humanity's most audacious dream. Earth was not dying. It was thriving. But the human eye has never been satisfied with what it already holds. Mars had been mapped. The Moon had been walked. Venus was next. But rockets were too slow. Too small. Too expensive for the scale of what they imagined. So they built something extraordinary instead. A silver ring three hundred meters tall — a portal ring to Venus — humming with enough electricity to power a continent, standing on the edge of Zone 4 like a monument to human ambition. The Venus Gate. A door to another world that could be crossed in seconds instead of years. Thousands gathered at the perimeter fence to witness history. The protests had been silenced. The lawsuits buried. The scientists who objected reassigned. The religious coalitions who called it an abomination — who said humanity was tearing open something never meant to be torn — dismissed as fearmongers. Curiosity, it turns out, is the most dangerous force ever unleashed. On activation day the ring ignited. The crowds cheered. The cameras rolled. And then the center of the Gate turned the color of a bruised sky — deep violent purple — and something stepped through. Not empty land. Not a new frontier. Venus had life. And that life saw an open door. The screaming started six seconds later. Kael was scrubbing grease off a plate in a Zone 4 restaurant when the sky changed color. No soldier. No scientist. No chosen one. Just a twenty year old cook-boy who survived the first night when entire battalions did not. The Gate is still open. The city is a graveyard. And the world that built this monument to curiosity has gone silent. Someone has to fight back. It might as well be the dishwasher. ####Come watch Kael battle the aliens###