I stood amid the ashes, the sky above me like an inkwell spilled into endless black. There was no sun — only a fractured glare, flashing like an eye spying from behind a veil. The air itself was not air; a mixture of ash and smoke that stabbed my lungs like a burning blade, as if it meant to suffocate me slowly.
The ground beneath my feet was not solid, but a pulsing body of shifting cracks, like the heavy breaths of some colossal thing hiding beneath the surface. Each step produced a strange screech — not the sound of stone, but closer to a muffled wail.
I raised my eyes and saw the skeletons… eroded buildings without shape, leaning black spires like gravestones of giants. Some wept a dark liquid from their empty windows; some toppled suddenly for no reason, only to rise again as if refusing to die.
The only sound that filled the place was whispers. I couldn't find their source, yet they were many, overlapping, as if thousands of souls spoke at once. Some laughed, some wept, some cried my name: "Kim… Kim…"
I stepped back, my heart hammering, and realized those whispers were not just heard — they were felt. A cold crawled into my veins each time one of them called me.
Then… a rift opened before me.
A black slit like a mouth devouring light, from which misty arms uncoiled and looped like living smoke. They were the ash-phantoms — faceless beings with hollow, glowing eyes, approaching slowly as if they fed on my fear before my flesh.
One reached a hand toward me, and I felt my voice ripped from inside me, as if it stole my power to speak. I drew breath with all my strength and shouted into the void:
"You will not take me! This hell will not swallow me!"
The scream did not return as a scream; it came back as a warped laugh.
A laugh that was not mine, but the world's.
I drew my foot back and grabbed a stone from the ground, yet it felt warm like the pulse of a living heart. I hurled it into the rift; the place flared with a momentary red light, and another creature emerged… massive, its skin like cracked rock glowing with a faint inner fire. Its eyes were sockets, and from a cavity in its chest black steam rose. This was one of the Rift Wardens.
Its voice shook the earth: "Stranger… you chose refusal. If you wish to remain, then pay the price."
I felt the whole ground tremble beneath my feet, and the dead skeletons around me began to move, bowing as if before that beast.
But I lifted my head, and a new flame ignited inside me.
Kim (in a sharp voice): "No power, no system, no warden… will make me kneel. If this world wants to kill me, I will slay your entire world first."
Silence followed.
As if the void itself listened.
Then I heard a single whisper, stronger than all the voices:
"So… let the party begin."