The sound of the explosion tore through the night like thunder. Dust rattled from the cracked walls of the ruined city, and Kairis froze mid-step, his instincts sharpening. The ground trembled beneath him, faint vibrations echoing through his bones.
Something unnatural was stirring.
He darted across the crumbling street, cloak snapping in the wind, and then he saw it.
A wave.
Not of water, not of fire, but of bodies. Dozens—no, hundreds—of corpses stumbling, dragging, and crawling over one another, their hollow eyes glowing faintly in the dark. Their flesh hung loose, torn in strips, yet some still bore the armor of hunters or the rags of ordinary civilians.
Zombies.
Kairis' jaw clenched. His grip tightened around his blade, but he didn't rush in. Instead, he bent the flow of space around him, black particles gathering at his fingertips as he pushed himself upward, floating onto the roof of a half-collapsed building. From there he stood, silhouetted against the pale moonlight, watching the sea of death surge below.
The system flickered in his vision, identifying fragments of the creatures, but their stats were blurred, indistinct, his affinity still too low to pierce the haze. All he could see was the madness—how many of them there were, and how endless they seemed.
And as he looked down on them, memory struck him like a blade to the chest.
He remembered his grandfather.
The old man's voice echoed in his ears, rough and ragged, speaking words no one else in the family had ever believed.
> "When the world cracks open and the dead walk, our bloodline will be tested. One of us must endure the flames of the end. And if we do, the God beyond the void, the one who forged creation itself, will descend… and we will be rewarded."
Everyone had called the old man mad. A relic, broken by time. They mocked his visions, his trembling hands, the way he stared into the night sky as if searching for something no one else could see.
But Kairis had always listened. And now, staring at the endless tide of the undead, he realized—his grandfather had not been wrong.
His lips curled into a humorless smile. "So this is the fire you spoke of, old man."
Below, the zombies screamed. It was not a human cry, but a warped chorus of hunger and agony that shook the air itself.
And far, far away, in the silent expanse of the Primordial Void, an ancient throne pulsed faintly with light.
Upon it sat a figure. Shadow and radiance intertwined, his form impossible to capture with mortal eyes. His gaze stretched across endless realities, piercing through multiverses and realms like paper, until it fell upon a lone boy standing above a ruined city.
Lucien Dreamveil, the Sovereign who had once grown the World Tree beyond the bounds of existence, smirked faintly.
The game had begun.