"Military Prospects for Other-Universe Passageways"

The Blizzard reached its peak at midnight.

The pitch-black sky was pressed low by heavy clouds, as if one could reach out and touch the churning grayness.

The snow no longer drifted down softly. Torn into sharp fragments by the gale, it howled against skyscrapers' reinforced glass, producing a fine, almost metallic shriek of friction.

The Blizzard swallowed the city's light pollution. The splendor of neon signs blurred into hazy patches of color, like oil paint soaking in water and slowly bleeding outward.

The technological creations of the UED capital seemed fragile and insignificant before nature's rage.

The signal lights atop the air traffic control towers still flashed stubbornly, but the once-bustling hovercraft lanes were now empty. Only a few autonomous snow-clearing drones struggled through the storm, blue light flickering from their ion engine nozzles like dying fireflies.

The ground-level maglev lanes were buried beneath snow. The smart snowmelt systems ran beyond capacity, yet still could not keep up with the accumulating Blizzard.

The sirens of emergency vehicles occasionally pierced the wind and snow, only to be swallowed by the howling gale moments later, as though they had never existed.

And in the city's darkest corners—

In the shadows beneath elevated bridges, by the vents of abandoned pipes, and beside heat sources leaking from the heating system, people forgotten by the UED's glamorous façade huddled together.

Wrapped in cheap thermal blankets issued by the government, they crowded together like hibernating animals, their white breath freezing into ice crystals the instant it met the cold wind.

Drone scanning beams occasionally swept over them, only coldly recording data on "low-energy urban populations" before moving on without a trace of concern.

Then dawn tore open the curtain of the Blizzard.

When the first ray of sunlight pierced the clouds, the entire city seemed