The world ended in thirteen seconds.
Dr. Kim So-young's fingers froze over her keyboard. Her sensors had just detected something she never expected — spatial coordinates appearing 400 kilometers directly above Seoul.
Not from the outer space, that everyone was familiar with to some extent, but from somewhere else.
"That's... you got to be kidding me" She adjusted her glasses, ran the diagnostic again, all yielding the same result, curiosity got the better of her, but just as she wanted to try again
Then—
The air above the city tore.
Reality split like razor dividing a silk gown, and through the wound came foreign Monsters.
Shadow-spiders the size of buses, their legs made of crystallized darkness. They descended on threads that weren't there, langing on skyscrapers with movements too fluid for their mass.
So-young watched her monitors. The military response was immediate — helicopters, missiles, artillery, firepower that could level mountains, only meant for international war perhaps until these creatures descended.
The weapons passed through the creatures like smoke.
One spider turned its head — if that fat mass of eyes and mandibles could be called a head — toward a helicopter, and with just a gesture.
CRUNCH.
The helicopter folded in on itself, compressing from thirty meters to thirty centimeters in half a heartbeat. The wreckage dropped like a stone.
"OH....MY...GOD," So-young whispered. "This must be a dream—"
Just as she was trying to make sense of the situation, her screens flickered with new readings. She looked up through the lab's reinforced windows at the night sky.
Two figures materialized above Earth's atmosphere. Incomprehensibly vast.
One seemed made of crystalline order — geometric perfection, light refracting through its form in impossible patterns.
The other was its opposite— churning chaos, boundaries undefined, matter and energy interchanging freely.
Aethon. Chaos.
So-young didn't know their names yet, matter of fact, nobody did, but watching them settle into position like gods preparing a board game, she instinctively understood one thing:
Humanity was the game pieces.
Aethon moved first.
The crystalline Being, Aethon, reached down — through layers of reality, through dimensions humans couldn't perceive — and touched a point near Saturn, one of the planet's moons shifted.
It simply was somewhere else now.
Chaos responded. Its form rippled, and three stars in the Orion constellation went dark simultaneously, not burned out, just... gone,
Erased.
With each move they made, Earth changed.
Rifts multiplied across the planet.
One opened above Moscow, another in the Amazon. Twelve more scattered across Asia.
Through them poured monsters — from the shadow-spiders came Fledgling-class beasts, barely stronger than normal animals but numerous as locusts.
Then something worse emerged over Seoul.
So-young's sensors screamed warnings. The spatial signature was off the charts. Something Overlord-class was manifesting — exuding power equivalent to nuclear weapons.
The creature stepped through the rift, Humanoid, roughly, four meters tall wearing skin like volcanic glass, eyes burning with internal fire.
It surveyed the city below with ancient intelligence as if looking at ants.
Then it screamed.
VVVVVMMMM—!
The sound wave was visible — ripples in the air itself, cascading outward at supersonic speed.
Buildings in a three-kilometer radius fell.
Buildings fell upwards instead of collapsing, defying gravity, tumbling into the sky before disintegrating into component atoms.
Half of Seoul simply ceased to exist in the span of that scream, maybe that was an exaggeration, but So-young's lab was outside the immediate radius, and the shockwave still hit.
KRRSHHH! Windows shattered, equipments exploding.
She dove under her desk, hands over her ears, feeling her teeth rattle in her skull.
When silence returned, she crawled out.
Her monitors were dead, but through the broken windows she saw the orange glow where Seoul's center used to be.
The golden age was over.
Humanity had ruled Earth for years, built cities that touched the clouds, reached for the stars even believed themselves masters of their world.
Thirteen seconds proved them wrong.
THUD.
So-young's head snapped toward the new sound, heavy footsteps of something moving atop her lab.
THUD. THUD.
The footsteps could be detected even by a child, and it was coming toward the emergency stairwell, she grabbed the pistol from her drawer — useless against monsters, but holding it gave her some phantom courage.
Backed toward the far wall and waited.
BANG!
The door exploded inward.
The creature that entered wasn't one of the shadow-spiders.
This was smaller, almost the size of a human, yet its body kept shifting — now furred, now scaled, now something between.
Eyes that reflected no light at all.
When it opened its mouth, she saw bad teeth, yes bad teeth, and unbrushed.
It spoke.
Words in a language that predated human civilization, she didn't understand the words, but she understood the meaning:
You are prey now.
So-young fired every round in her pistol, the bullets hit and even penetrated the creature's flesh.
It looked down at the wounds with curiosity — then backhanded her almost casually.
THWACK!
Her body hit the wall with enough force to break her spine. She slid down, lungs refusing to work, vision darkening.
The last thing she saw was the creature examining her equipment, pressing buttons randomly like a child with a new toy.
CLICK click
Then it seemed to lose interest.
It left through the broken window, dropping five stories and landing without breaking stride.
Dr. Kim So-young died alone in her lab, surrounded by equipment that could have warned the world — if anyone was left alive to listen.
But hundreds of kilometers away, in an underground bunker designated Sanctuary Gamma-7, something else was happening.
An event that would matter far more than one scientist's death, in the cramped medical wing, a woman named Lee Min-ah lay on a cot, her pregnant belly distended, her breathing shallow.
The readings were clear: her baby was dead.
Vitalis Displacement Syndrome — the fetus's soul had somehow been torn away by the cosmic energies rippling across Earth.
The doctors could do nothing. They could only guess it was the soul that was being torn away, not like they could do anything, in the last hour over 30 cases of similar incident has been reported, every child conceived after the first rift had opened was at risk.
Min-ah's husband, Jae-sung, had been called away three hours ago. Hunters were needed — people with even a fragment of ability to fight these monsters.
He'd kissed her forehead and promised to return, she knew he was lying, nobody was returning from the surface anymore, but deep underground, where cosmic energies shouldn't reach, reality fractured one more time.
A fragmented soul — scattered 823 years ago across dimensions, lost in the emptiness of space — felt the pull of massive energy.
Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the pieces began to coalesce, they found the dead fetus, and filled the space where its soul should have been.