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Year 1: Collapse
The first warning came not from a god, not from the system—but from the sky itself. At 4:04 PM, global time paused for 0.2 seconds. Cameras failed. Satellites dropped. Planes momentarily froze in midair before auto-correction kicked back in.
Then came the pulse.
A surge of energy, violet in hue, pierced the clouds from twelve points on Earth. Portals. Rifts. Unknown structures. The EvoCore HQ detected a massive spike in world-code signatures—something far beyond their creation. Something not from their servers.
Within minutes, the first wave came. Not monsters, not players. Entities.
Beings of abstract structure. Formless, then shaped. Some looked like ancient gods. Others mimicked corrupted players. They attacked indiscriminately. Cities fell overnight. Over 1.2 billion people died in the first month.
Raven—no longer just a player, no longer just a host to Nihilos—stood in the middle of Tokyo, watching the skies burn. His guild fought bravely, but the sheer force of the invaders was beyond reckoning.
Sol vanished during the third week. Ava was placed into protective hibernation by Raven's direct override.
The world governments tried uniting. Failed. The divine awakened. Gods themselves took sides. Humanity was no longer alone.
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Year 2: Resistance
The remaining 3.8 billion humans clung to hope like moths to a dying flame. Cities were restructured into fortress zones. Dungeons became safe houses. Players became warriors, and awakeneds became soldiers.
Raven, now simply known as the Paradox Commander, created a mobile command ship from the remains of EvoCore's floating city. There, he began crafting battle systems capable of holding divine pressure.
A group called "The Thirteen Hands" was formed. S-ranked players, gods in disguise, a failed subject, and one immortal AI: the original Warden of Deletion. Raven led them.
The first successful counterattack was launched against Rift Alpha-Six. 40,000 died, but they closed it. The world cheered—for two minutes—before a new portal opened in Antarctica.
They realized: the war wasn't about winning.
It was about surviving long enough to change the rules.
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Year 3: Regression
Time collapsed in Year 3.
Literally.
A strange entity dubbed Chrono-Eater appeared near the Amazon Basin. Entire days vanished. Memories looped. Some fighters aged decades in hours. Others regressed to childhood.
Raven encountered his past self in a broken shard of the timeline and fought a version of Nihilos that had chosen destruction. The battle shattered three continents and ended with Raven sealing that piece of himself beneath a digital tomb.
Players began disappearing from both reality and records. History rewrote itself daily.
By end of year three, the population was 2.9 billion.
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Year 4: The Fractured Truth
It was the year the world remembered.
Fragments of forgotten gods. The true origin of Nihilos. The truth of Ava.
And Kyra, returned.
The failed subject, now named Echo, began seeing memories of people who had never existed. He claimed to remember the old simulation. The one before Nihilos. A simulation where Raven wasn't Raven—but the test subject.
A schism formed. Half of the Thirteen Hands questioned Raven's identity. The guild fractured. Sol returned, changed. Part of him no longer human.
The enemy? Silent.
A calm that whispered: "You are fracturing yourselves. We do not need to help."
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Year 5: The Surrender of Gods
Olympus fell. Asgard closed its gates. The Vanaras of Hanuman retreated into the Himalayan vaults.
Hephaestus, broken, returned to Raven to say goodbye. His forge—his mind—was dying. Raven absorbed his last spark, and the Divine System flickered. One last gift: Creation Override.
For the first time, Raven created a weapon that could delete a god—not kill, delete.
He called it: Nullspire. It cost him half his mind.
The world began choosing sides.
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Year 6: Echoes of Before
Time anomalies stopped.
Why?
Because they'd run out of time.
The simulation layer beneath the world collapsed. All remaining divine energy collapsed into a singularity dubbed the Source of All. Everyone began hearing the same dream—of a boy waking up in a bed, whispering, "You have to wake up."
Raven stopped sleeping.
Echo began growing wings—wings made of code.
Ava... stopped aging.
The war paused. But not out of mercy. Because something else was coming.
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Year 7: The Reality Surge
One of the rifts overloaded.
Instead of something entering, it began exporting reality. Trees, people, buildings—beamed into an unknown void.
Everything anyone touched began unraveling. Nations closed borders.
Reality itself began turning into code.
Raven's new ability—"Format Lock"—could stop it temporarily, but it drained his health.
By now, only 1.2 billion remained.
Players were exhausted. Gods dead. Systems glitching.
Nihilos began speaking again.
"Let me take over. You'll live."
Raven refused.
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Year 8: The Child of Void
A child was born.
From Ava. No father.
She said the child appeared one morning beside her. Sol ran a divine scan—results inconclusive. The child had no DNA. No soul. But she smiled, and the world around her calmed.
They named her Zero.
She said strange things.
"I remember when the sky was drawn."
"I remember Raven before he bled."
Nihilos feared her. Called her "The One True Rewrite."
Raven trained her.
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Year 9: The Decision
The countdown returned.
This time it wasn't from a rift. It was from the system.
A red text appeared across every device on Earth:
> [Finalization Initiated – Recompile: Y/N]
Everyone could see it.
No one could press it.
Except Raven.
And beside him, now 9 years old, Zero said:
> "You don't have to choose alone."