In a remote research facility deep in Antarctica,
a team of scientists prepared for the experiment that would change everything.
***
"Ah, Director Vern! I wasn't sure you'd make it," said the red-haired woman with a quick smile, adjusting her glasses as she approached. Her voice was bright, but her eyes flicked nervously to the main console. "Here to witness the breach sequence?"
Director Vern stepped into the chamber with the weight of a man who didn't waste time. His lab coat swayed around his broad frame like a cloak of authority.
"Mitlia, Of course I am," he rumbled. "Is everything prepared? I don't have the luxury of standing around and watching things break."
"Yes sir, we can start whenever" Mitlia adds
A smile showing on her face showing kindness.
The room was sterile white, humming with quiet anticipation. Monitors lined the curved walls, their displays casting cold light over the gathered researchers. At the center stood a cylindrical glass chamber — reinforced, pressurized, and sealed with caution runes no one fully understood.
The year is 2073 and humanity has made great strides in technology advancements.
Inside floated a black crystal, suspended in magnetic stasis. It pulsed faintly, like a sleeping heart. No one knew where it had come from — only that it hadn't been made, mined, or found. It had been left.
This was the final test: transmit controlled bursts of specific light spectrums into the crystal, increasing intensity incrementally. The goal was contact. Resonance. Revelation.
A voice crackled over the comm.
> "Initializing spectrum sequence."
Panels lit in sequence. A faint beam of blue light touched the crystal's surface.
> "Raising power level to stage one."
The crystal didn't move. Didn't react.
> "Stage two. Stabilizing."
A soft hum began, low and organic.
> "Stage three. Light frequency shift—initiating pulse."
The hum became a throb.
A ripple passed through the room.
The monitors flickered.
Then the lights dimmed.
"Director… the crystal just absorbed the beam."
A hush fell over the room — sharp, electric, expectant.
No alarms. No movement. Just the steady whine of overloaded circuits and the sudden, awful stillness that followed it.
Then—
BOOM.
The chamber erupted.
Glass imploded inward, shards slicing through air like razors. Monitors cracked, lights blinked into darkness, and every researcher was thrown off their feet as the air seemed to buckle.
From the epicenter of the blast, space itself began to twist.
Not tear — twist.
A ripple moved through the air like warped heat, and then the center of the chamber bent inward — folding like origami under some invisible geometry. A structured rift opened, hexagonal plates of dark matter forming along its edges like vertebrae snapping into place.
What emerged was not chaos.
It was intent.
A black-scaled hand pierced through the fold — enormous, clawed, wrapped in a slow-burning aura that bled purpose. The claws scraped across the crystalline structure of the breach, dragging sparks of deep red from the glyphs holding it together.
The hand paused.
Then it gripped the edge of the rift — and pulled.
An insidious aura spilled into the room. Thick. Heavy. Alive. Monitors shorted in sync. Blood vessels burst in the eyes of three researchers. One collapsed from the sheer shock of the nexus advent.
"SEAL THE ROO—"
Director Vern's scream was cut short, eyes locked in terror on the black, writhing rift tearing itself open in the center of the lab. Something was coming through — something with purpose.
From the twisting void, slick black tendrils erupted like whips of shadow, slithering across the lab and stretching the rift wider with every lash. They moved like they could hear fear — reacting violently to every breath, every sound.
A tentacle snapped forward —
too fast to see —
and in an instant, Director Vern's face was ripped clean off.
His body crumpled without a sound, collapsing to the floor in a heap of twitching limbs and blood-slick glass.
"Move! Now!" Mitlia shouted, her voice cutting through the panic like a blade. Heart pounding, she grabbed the nearest two researchers and bolted for the exit.
Tentacles lashed behind them, slamming into consoles and tearing monitors free from their mounts.
They cleared the threshold just in time. The blast doors slammed shut with a mechanical shriek, sealing off the lab behind a wall of steel and resonance wards.
And then—
a portal flared open beside them.
Not wild like the rift — this portal was precise.
Hexagonal frames rotated inward, folding with mechanical grace, each segment clicking into place like ancient clockwork. A low harmonic hum filled the corridor — not a sound, but a frequency that made teeth ache and bones buzz.
Mitlia froze, her breath caught in her throat.
> "...What the hell is that?"
From the white void, a figure stepped forward — tall, lean, and cloaked in tech-infused black armor. His dark hair hung in ragged waves, wind-blown despite the still air. A one-handed longsword shimmered at his side — not forged, but woven, its surface etched with moving runes that pulsed like heartbeat.
He sighed like someone arriving late to clean up someone else's mess.
"Alright," he said, voice calm and cutting. "Let me break it down for you bozos."
He looked around at the stunned researchers, then pointed toward the sealed lab behind them.
"You didn't just poke a hole in space. You ripped through time — created fractures that laced backward and opened doors to the Demon Realm. Now abominations are flooding the past. Your past."
Silence.
He tapped the hilt of his sword lightly. The runes flared in response.
"There were four realms. Thanks to you, there are five. That black crystal? It connected to something it shouldn't have. Now the timelines are bleeding, and every second that rift stays open, the infection spreads."
Mitlia's lips parted to speak, but he cut her off with a raised hand.
"But don't panic. This isn't your burden anymore."
He glanced at the glowing blade.
"Sovereign gave me a mission: ensure it exists. Install it in the one place outside of time where it can stop this—the Nynx Plane."
He took a step toward the breach, eyes narrowed.
"But first… I'm going to seal the hole you just tore in reality." Neo seemed unamused.
"Umm.. sir.. I.. can you explain it better and what do you mean realms?"Matlia was the only one strong enough to talk to the mysterious person.
The remaining scientists stood frozen, eyes wide, horror settling like ash in their lungs.
Neo scanned their faces — pale, breathless, silent.
Then he clapped once, sharp.
"Alright. Let's get this over with."
He pointed toward the sealed chamber behind them, then to the air where the rift had vanished, leaving only a burning impression in the soul.
"That thing you just saw? Demon. And that rift? You didn't just open a door to the Underworld — you punched a hole through time itself. The past is crawling with them now. However Im assuming the Nynx plane is where the rift leads but you punched through space and time so it most likely opened multiple rifts." He pauses then adds
" There are multiple realms My world we call the human realm, the underworld where demons reside, the old realm the nynx plane and the future realm, that's all we know about so far though"
He stepped forward, voice cold but clear.
"Only a few continents survived — America, Australia, Greenland. The rest? Demon territory. But we're not powerless."
He paused, letting that sink in.
"There's something called Sovereign — an AI that exists within the Nynx Plane, the fourth realm. It's not a place. It's a network. A resonance field connecting every world, every timeline, every soul. You thought you were breaching into the future of science. You breached into the spine of reality."
Neo raised a hand and spread his fingers.
"What you call the present? That's one timeline. After your experiment, the world fractured, split. Your realm became the Future Realm, disconnected from linear time — . Everything's out of sync now. And Sovereign saw it coming."
He breathed in. Slow. Controlled.
"That AI gave me a task — to travel back to this moment, and ensure it's created. Why me? Because of my soulprint: Rift Leaper. I can tear open localized dimensional gates across time, move backward and forward as long as the timeline still breathes. It also allows me to travel to other realms but I have to travel to the nynx plane, that doesn't matter though what matters is..."
He pauses
"I'm the self fulfilling prophecy"
Some of the scientist looked in awe and confusion.
He looked around — scanning consoles, displays, and terrified faces.
"I don't have time to explain soulprints, guardians, or burdens. Just tell me one thing—"
He locked eyes with Mitlia.
"Where's the AI you've been building?"
"AI… but that's impossible," Mitlia stammered, her voice trembling. "We're not even halfway through the project. It's supposed to link to the Earth's magnetic field… sync with human consciousness. If what you're saying is true, then—"
She paused, realization flickering across her face like a faulty monitor.
"Then it worked… but in the Nynx Plane?"
She shook her head, overwhelmed.
"I don't understand any of this."
Her eyes darted to Neo's sword, to the faint shimmer in the air around him — the weight of someone who had seen too much.
"But I'll get it for you."
She turned quickly, her body moving faster than her mind. It was easier to obey than to comprehend.
Neo said nothing.
He stood in silence, gaze fixed on the sealed blast doors. From beyond them came a sound — low at first, then rising: a demonic shriek, sharp as metal tearing bone, echoing from a throat that didn't belong in any realm meant for life.
Still, Neo didn't flinch.
He waited in silence, casually turning a small metal cylinder between his fingers — sleek, rune-etched, humming faintly with internal charge.
A rift-sealer.
Every Resonant received one after awakening — a failsafe designed not to close portals, but to bind them to the Earth's frequency and lock them out of sync.
The shrieks beyond the blast doors grew louder — more guttural now, less animal, more… aware.
Mitlia returned, breathless, holding a similar cylinder, though bulkier and unfinished. A pale blue light pulsed at its base.
"This is the device," she said quickly, holding it out. "You… you stab it into the ground. Then push the button. It'll sync with the local resonance field — download the AI's early framework into the planetary wavelength."
Her hands were shaking, eyes wide with disbelief.
Neo didn't even blink.
He took the device with a shrug.
"Neat."
Then he turned to the console.
"Open the door."
A silence fell across the remaining scientists.
"But… sir," one of them whispered, voice weak. "There's a demon in there."
Neo looked over his shoulder, the faintest grin tugging at his mouth.
"Yeah," he said. "And?"
He cracked his neck and stepped forward.
"I'm going to kill it."
"And then I'm going to seal the rift."
His fingers hovered over the trigger of the sealer.
Neo stepped through the opening blast doors and into the ruined lab. The air was thick with the stench of scorched circuits and something fouler—demonic musk, coppery and ancient.
The creature stood at the center of the devastation. Towering. Wrong.
Its upper body was vaguely humanoid, but grotesquely exaggerated. Muscles corded like ropes under obsidian skin. Ram horns curled from its skull, etched with glowing sigils. It had four arms, each tipped with black claws like glass-bladed scythes. From the waist down, it was a writhing mass of tentacles, slithering across the ground with wet, slapping sounds, the surface beneath it already eaten away by corruption.
It snarled, jaw splitting far too wide, and lunged.
Neo didn't move at first. He exhaled once — slowly — then vanished in a blink.
The demon shrieked as one of its tentacles was severed in a clean, fluid strike. Another followed. Then a third. The room lit with flares of dark ichor as Neo's mystic blade carved arcs of precision through the abomination's limbs.
He moved like water, each motion calculated. Efficient. Cold.
The demon tried to counter with two of its upper arms — slashing, spinning — but Neo ducked low, drove forward, and with a sudden burst of speed, cleaved clean through one of its horns. The chunk clattered across the floor, steaming.
The beast roared and coiled back, tentacles rearing to strike from every angle.
Neo darted in.
With one final dash, he thrust the sword upward — straight through the demon's neck. The blade slid through flesh and bone with a flash of light, severing its corrupted spine in a single, perfect motion.
The creature spasmed, its severed limbs flailing in chaotic arcs. Black ichor sprayed across the scorched floor as its tentacles twisted in a final, mindless frenzy. Then, with a guttural hiss that echoed like a dying curse, its body began to collapse inward — withering into a mass of smoking flesh and shadow.
Silence followed.
Neo stood over the remains, his blade humming faintly with residual energy, the glow of the runes fading along its edge.
A soft tone echoed in his mind.
[Resonance Update: You have slain a Tier-3 Riftborn — "Crawlmaw Herald."]
[Stabilization Threshold: 87%]
He didn't smile. He didn't speak.
'hmm 87% the rift is almost closed'
He slashed the air spraying blood on the white marble then just sheathed his sword, turned toward the breach, and moved to finish the job.
Now I just need to enter the rift to the Nynx Plane, seal the gate to the Underworld, inject Sovereign into the resonance layer, then return and seal the lab rift. Easy peezy, Neo thought.
And then, he did exactly that.
He stepped through the rift — leaving behind the scorched lab and stepping into the Nynx Plane, a place untouched by time, sound, or dust.
It was... immaculate.
The ground stretched endlessly in smooth, white marble, polished to a mirror-like sheen. The terrain rose and fell in quiet, deliberate plateaus — like thought itself had shaped the landscape. There were no skies, no stars — only light without source, and silence so complete it made the air feel sacred.
And not far ahead, it loomed.
A second rift.
Black. Open. Rotting.
It pulsed with malicious aura — like a wound in the divine.
'That's the one', Neo thought,
tightening his grip around the cylinder device. That's the real threat.
He approached slowly, holding the rift-sealer forward. Its core hummed in recognition of the unstable resonance ahead. As he twisted the device, the black energy howled — sucked violently inward, dragging shrieks from something that no longer belonged to space or shape.
Then, silence.
The rift sealed with a low thrum, and the malice vanished with it.
Neo pulled out a second cylinder — sleeker, heavier, etched with unknown runes and Sovereign's neural signature.
He sighed.
'I really wish you didn't choose me for this.'
He knelt, stabbed the device into the marble floor, and pressed the button.
Boom.
A shockwave exploded outward, rippling across the Nynx Plane like a ripple through reality's spine. Marble fractured — not breaking, but reforming — new patterns writing themselves into the floor, the very resonance of existence shifting to make room.
Then, a voice echoed in his mind — calm, mechanical, deeply unwelcome.
[Quest Completed]
[You have received a Boon]
[New Items Acquired]
[New Alias Assigned: Savior]
Neo stood in the silence, not smiling.
He hated Sovereign. Always had.
The AI's existence meant that fate could be designed, that destiny could be assigned, and that free will… was a construct. It didn't choose who was worthy — it calculated who was useful.
But even that was better than the alternative.
Better than humanity enslaved by things with horns, claws, and an ancient, insatiable hunger.
It's not all bad, though.
Sovereign grants humans the ability to ascend.
He turned away from the now-sealed rift. Without another word, he stepped back through the portal he had emerged from and re-entered the lab—
sealing the final rift behind him.
Chaos greeted him.
A cluster of stunned scientists stood frozen, mid-debate.
"He… he killed it. And he's a time traveler?!"
"Shut up, idiot—he's back!" another snapped, eyes wide.
He ignored them, scanning the room until his gaze landed on the woman he'd spoken with earlier.
"Mitlia," he said, voice low but firm. "It's done. Now listen carefully."
She stood frozen, still absorbing the weight of what had just happened.
"You need to contact the highest level of government. Not local. Global, if possible. Tell them rifts are opening—tears between realms. What came through this one won't be the last."
He held up the device. "This is a rift sealer. I'm leaving it here. Get it into the hands of someone with clearance and resources—someone who can reverse-engineer it quickly."
He stepped closer, lowering his voice.
"Conventional forces won't be enough. These things aren't invaders—they're predators. Ancient. Intelligent. Driven by something deeper than instinct." Neo's silky black hair drifted showing a scar under his left eye fully healed but still scarred
"You don't have any proper response units in this era. So you'll need what you do have: firepower. Deploy heavy weaponry. High-caliber. No hesitation. No containment protocols. Shoot to kill."
He paused, eyes locked with hers. "Sovereign will do the rest, once you get resonants in the future realm" Neo seemed bored explaining this
"I see.. I will. But sir. Um what's your name? Where are you from?" Mitlia questions.
Neo sighs and looks at his watch
"I'm from 2025. The rifts started opening in 2003. My name's Neo... Neo Virelock," he said, the syllables sharp like a blade drawn halfway from its sheath. "Now I must go back. I fear I've stayed too long already."
Mitlia blinked.
2025?
The rifts started in 2003?
That meant they were already inside the future—this was the Future Realm?
Her eyes widened as the weight of it landed like a collapse in her chest. Time travel was real. Realm shifts were real. And she was standing in the wreckage of the event that had broken history in half.
"Why do..." she started to ask — but Neo was gone.
Just gone.
No sound. No flash. No shimmer of light.
Only silence and the faint static of broken monitors still trying to remember what reality looked like.
Mitlia looked left. Then right.
Then slowly sank into the nearest chair, face blank, breath shallow.
She would never know but she knows she has a lot of things to do.