[First Year of the Appearance of the Gates]
The first year of the Gates was carved not in history, but in the geology of ruin. It was an age of screaming steel and crumbling skyline, a year where the map of the world was redrawn not by treaties, but by vast, smoldering scars.
Otherworldly monsters, beings of nightmare logic and chitinous grace, poured forth from tears in the very air. They laid waste to cities with the casual indifference of a tide washing away sandcastles. But the bitter truth, the one that choked the survivors with a particular kind of shame, was that even before the first Gate shimmered into existence, humanity was already a skilled architect of its own demise. The world was a tapestry frayed by unending wars—petty, grand, brutal—instigated for the oldest and sorriest of reasons: greed for resources, the hollow hunger for conquest, the poison of ideology.
Then, by some desperate, bloodied miracle, as if teetering on a cliff's edge, humanity had found a fragile, tense stability. A ceasefire in the soul. It was a chance, perhaps the last one.
The universe, it seemed, found our domestic quarrels tedious. It had other plans.
The Gates were not just rifts in space; they were a contradiction made manifest. Beautiful, in a terrifying way—shimmering veils of iridescent energy that hummed with a cosmic frequency. Yet from this beauty spilled forth pure, methodical ruin. They were portals to dimensions of fang and shadow, spelling a doom so absolute it felt predestined, a plague upon the world that initiated an unforgiving game for survival where the rules were written in blood and the penalty for losing was extinction. But in the silent, ash-choked nights, as the survivors huddled in the dark, a forbidden, heretical thought would sometimes whisper: Did a part of humanity, weary of its own mirrored hatred, find a terrible, unifying solace in this external calamity?
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[Fifth Year of the Appearance of the Gates]
In the fifth year, a new variable emerged from the shattered gene pool of mankind: Awakened humans. They were called Hunters. Men and women who could shatter stone with their fists, command flame and frost, move faster than sight. They were not soldiers; they were forces of nature wearing human skin.
With their emergence, the relentless retreat of humanity slowed, then stuttered, then—in blessed, defiant pockets—halted. Ground, precious inches of it, was regained. From this newfound, fragile hope, the Hunters Association was forged. It was a global pact, a staggering notion in what remained of the world. Old hatreds, ancient grudges, were not forgiven, but they were set aside on a high shelf, beneath the single, glaring emergency light of survival. Humanity, for a time, united under one cause: eradicate the monsters, seal the Gates.
Those who stood on the front lines, who ventured into the monstrous dungeons and returned, breathing and victorious, became more than heroes. They became legends, modern mythologies. Their names were passed from trembling lips like talismans—tales of impossible courage, of sacrifice, of dazzling power that painted color back into a grayscale world.
And the ones who died? They were grieved, deeply and truly. Mountains of flowers piled at memorials, candles flickered in the wind. But time, in its relentless march, is the enemy of memory. The dead were slowly, inevitably, folded into the anonymous statistic of loss. Only those who lived, who endured until the end of a raid or a battle, got to bask in the benefits their grateful, desperate nations provided: wealth, status, adoration. It was a brutal economy of survival, where the currency was life itself.
Then, one day, far from the echoing thunder of the front lines, in a quiet, government-provided civilian residence—a place of safety, of supposed normalcy—a boy was born.
He entered the world not with a whimper, but with a profound, shuddering cry, as if protesting the very air he was forced to breathe. The sterile, enclosed cold of the room was a shock after the cushioned, dark warmth of the womb. He was naked, bruised from the journey, and his new, orange-amber eyes glistened with tears that stung under the relentless overhead lights.
Yet, his mother smiled through her exhaustion. His father, gripping her hand, did the same. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated joy, a tiny rebellion against the despair beyond the walls. In a few years, this cycle of happiness would repeat with the birth of his younger brother, a testament to the stubborn, beautiful human need to build futures even on crumbling ground.
But the boy, he cried nonstop. A raw, persistent sound.
"Oh dear," a nurse's voice floated to him, strange and filtered. "Hope. What a lovely name."
A foreign hand grasped him, weighed him, cleaned him. Then, he was placed on his mother's chest. Her heartbeat, a frantic drum against his ear, began to slow, to sync with his. She was warmth and softness and safety. She leaned down, her lips pressing a kiss to his damp forehead, and her breath, hot and alive, brushed against him as she looked into his strange, glistening eyes. Her own eyes were wells of warmth and gentleness, the universal gaze of a mother beholding her child.
She whispered then, not a lullaby, but a benediction. A covenant.
"For the glory of humanity."
Poor boy.
Named not for a wish, but for a responsibility. Christened not with love alone, but with the weight of a vision he could not possibly comprehend. He was born to a world long forsaken by indifferent gods, a world that had traded one apocalypse for another, and he was already, from his first breath, anointed as its potential salvation. His crying, in that moment, seemed less the distress of an infant and more the first, instinctive lament of a soul understanding the immense burden it had just been handed.