Prologue
Before there were heroes, there was balance.
Not the kind born from peace or agreement — but the kind enforced by consequence. When a world leaned too far into light, it burned itself hollow. When it drowned in darkness, it devoured its own future.
Correction always came.
Civilizations once mistook it for disaster.
Floods. Extinction events. Collapsing stars.
They gave it names so they wouldn't have to understand it.
But balance was never blind.
It watched.
When Awakeners rose, the world tolerated them at first. Power had always surfaced in cycles — champions, tyrants, saviors, monsters. But this time was different. This time, will itself bent reality. Light lingered longer than it should have. Choice disrupted inevitability.
The scale tilted.
So the universe answered the only way it ever had.
Not with wrath.
Not with hatred.
With order.
Across dimensions long abandoned, things stirred — creatures shaped by failure, Awakeners who had survived their purpose and rotted beyond it. Paths once sealed cracked open, not violently, but deliberately.
The Abyssal Order did not march as conquerors.
They advanced as correction.
Gaia realigned worlds that had grown reckless.
Calamity waited for resistance to justify annihilation.
Ashura sharpened conflict into progress.
Zero prepared the silence that follows erasure.
And Paradox stood above them all, gazing through endless outcomes — choosing not the future that was kind…
…but the one that was necessary.
On a fragile world still healing from corruption, a handful of Awakeners prepared to stand against them.
Not because they were chosen.
Not because they were destined.
But because someone had to decide that existence was worth the risk.
As the first cities darkened and the sky forgot its color, the truth became unavoidable:
This was no longer a fight for survival.
It was a war over whether choice itself should continue to exist.
And the march had already begun.