The bus lurched to a stop three blocks from home, and Kael Ardyn stepped onto the curb with his backpack slung over one shoulder. The evening air carried the usual urban blend of exhaust fumes and fried food from the corner vendor, unremarkable in every way except for the date.
Eighteen years. To the day.
He checked his phone out of habit—6:47 PM—then pocketed it and started walking. The sidewalk was crowded with the after-work rush, faces buried in screens or locked in hurried conversation. No one looked up. No one noticed the faint distortion rippling across the digital billboards overhead, text flickering just long enough to catch his attention before snapping back to advertisements.
Kael slowed.
It happened again. This time on every screen within view—phone displays, storefront monitors, the massive LED panel dominating the intersection ahead. A half-second of static, synchronized across dozens of devices, before normalizing.
He stopped entirely now, eyes narrowing.
Around him, the crowd continued its rhythm, oblivious. But Kael had spent years watching patterns, reading environments. This wasn't a power surge. This was deliberate.
The air pressure shifted.
It was subtle, the kind of change most people would dismiss as imagination. But Kael felt it in his ears, in the way his lungs had to work slightly harder to pull in the next breath. The pigeons roosting on the traffic light suddenly scattered, wings beating frantically as they fled en masse toward the horizon.
His phone buzzed.
Not a notification. A vibration that didn't stop, pulsing in a steady rhythm that matched no ringtone or alert he'd ever set. He pulled it out. The screen was black except for a single line of white text:
**[SYSTEM SYNCHRONIZATION DETECTED — AGE VERIFICATION IN PROGRESS]**
Kael's pulse didn't spike. He'd learned long ago that panic was a luxury he couldn't afford. Instead, he looked around, cataloging reactions.
A girl near the crosswalk stared at her phone, confusion twisting her features. A guy in a suit shook his device like it had frozen. A teenager across the street held his phone at arm's length, face pale.
All of them looked young. All of them looked eighteen, maybe nineteen at most.
Kael checked the time again. 6:49 PM.
The exact minute of his birth, eighteen years ago.
The screens changed.
Every single one.
The billboards, the phones, the storefront displays—all of them snapped to the same image simultaneously. A black background. White text. No logo, no national emblem, no identifiable source.
**[GLOBAL EMERGENCY BROADCAST — ALL NETWORKS OVERRIDE ACTIVE]**
**[PLANETARY-SCALE ANOMALY DETECTED]**
**[MANDATORY SYNCHRONIZATION EVENT INITIATED]**
The text pulsed once, then vanished, replaced by a countdown.
**[00:14:37]**
**[00:14:36]**
**[00:14:35]**
Kael's vision blurred. Not the screens—his *vision*. The countdown appeared again, this time hovering in the air directly in front of his eyes, translucent and unbothered by where he looked or how he moved his head.
He blinked hard. It didn't disappear.
Around him, chaos erupted. Voices rose in panic, questions overlapping into a cacophony of confusion and fear. Someone screamed. Others ran, though where they thought they were going, Kael couldn't guess.
He stayed still, testing. He waved his hand through the floating interface. Nothing. No physical interaction. It simply existed, overlaid onto reality itself.
A mechanical hum filled the air, low and resonant, felt more than heard. The traffic lights went dark. Cars slowed to a stop, engines cutting out in unison. Streetlights flickered once before stabilizing into an eerie, uniform glow.
The city was locking down.
Kael turned toward the intersection, where a crowd had begun to form, everyone either staring at their phones or shouting at each other. He moved closer, not to join them, but to observe.
An older man—mid-forties, maybe—grabbed a teenager by the shoulder. "What the hell is this? What are you seeing?"
The teenager stammered, eyes unfocused. "There's a… a countdown. In my head. Can't you see it?"
"See what? There's nothing—"
"You don't see it because you're not eighteen," Kael said, his voice cutting through the noise with calm authority.
Both turned to him. The older man's face twisted in confusion. "What are you talking about?"
Kael pointed at the sky.
The fractures had started.
Cracks spread across the clouds like shattered glass, edges glowing with a faint, sickly blue light. The distortions bent the air around them, warping perspective and making it impossible to judge distance or scale. One moment they seemed kilometers away; the next, they felt close enough to touch.
A low rumble echoed from somewhere deep beneath the city. The ground trembled. Not an earthquake—this was localized, controlled, as if something massive had shifted just below the surface.
People screamed. Some ran. Others froze.
Kael's gaze tracked the nearest fracture as it widened, splitting the sky with surgical precision. No explosion. No debris. Just a clean, reality-defying tear that shouldn't exist.
In the distance, something detonated. Not a bomb—wrong sound, wrong light. A building collapsed inward, consumed by a sphere of distorted space that folded the structure into itself before vanishing, leaving nothing but an empty crater.
Military jets screamed overhead, low enough that the roar shook windows. They banked toward the nearest rift, weapons armed.
They never reached it.
One moment, three fighters were on approach. The next, they were gone. No debris. No parachutes. Just absence.
Kael's jaw tightened. This wasn't a threat humanity could fight.
The countdown flickered.
**[00:11:02]**
It shifted, personalizing. The global display faded, replaced by something new, something that addressed him directly.
**[IDENTIFIER: KAEL ARDYN]**
**[AGE: 18 YEARS, 0 DAYS, 0 HOURS, 11 MINUTES]**
**[AWAKENING ELIGIBILITY: CONFIRMED]**
He felt it then—a presence. Not physical, not visible, but undeniable. Something was watching. Evaluating.
Around him, other eighteen-year-olds were receiving the same confirmation. Some sobbed. Others stared blankly, faces drained of color.
One boy bolted, sprinting down the street like he could outrun the interface in his vision. He made it half a block before collapsing mid-stride, body seizing violently.
Kael moved closer, instinct overriding caution.
The boy convulsed on the ground, eyes rolling back. His overlay flickered wildly, text scrambling into incoherent symbols before stabilizing into a single, damning message.
**[AWAKENING FAILED — GENETIC REJECTION]**
A woman—his mother, maybe—tried to reach him, but an invisible force repelled her, sending her stumbling backward. Kael stopped just short of the same barrier, watching as the boy's skin turned ashen, veins darkening beneath the surface.
It took less than thirty seconds.
When it was over, the body didn't look human anymore. It looked hollowed out, like something essential had been extracted.
The crowd recoiled. Panic became hysteria.
Kael stepped back, mind racing. The system wasn't offering a choice. It was selecting. And failure meant death.
The broadcast voice returned, cold and utterly devoid of humanity.
**[AWAKENING PROCESS IS COMPULSORY.]**
**[REFUSAL EQUALS TERMINATION.]**
**[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: VARIABLE.]**
**[MEMORY RETENTION: GUARANTEED.]**
**[PHYSICAL CONTINUITY: GUARANTEED.]**
**[FORCED ENTRY WILL FOLLOW STABILIZATION.]**
Kael's hands curled into fists. This wasn't evacuation. This wasn't training.
This was selection.
The countdown shifted again.
**[00:08:15]**
Vertigo hit him like a wave. His vision blurred, then sharpened unnaturally, colors too vivid, edges too defined. Heat bloomed at the base of his spine, spreading upward in a slow, invasive crawl.
Pressure built behind his eyes.
Data flashed across his vision—strings of symbols, numbers, graphs he didn't recognize but somehow understood on an instinctual level.
**[BIOLOGICAL COMPATIBILITY: 87%]**
**[COGNITIVE STABILITY: OPTIMAL]**
**[SURVIVAL COEFFICIENT: CALCULATING...]**
The numbers spiked. Glitched. Then normalized.
**[ELIGIBLE — PRIORITY NEUTRAL]**
Kael forced himself to breathe. Whatever this was, it had just scanned him. Dissected him. Judged him.
And he'd passed.
For now.
The countdown accelerated.
**[00:03:47]**
The crowd around him began to thin as the interface isolated each individual, pulling them into their own private synchronization. Kael felt the shift—a sensation of separation, like reality itself was peeling away from him in layers.
His heart rate spiked.
Then it stabilized.
Not by his will. By external force.
The system was preparing him.
**[00:01:00]**
Kael planted his feet, jaw set. He didn't pray. Didn't hope. He simply accepted what was coming.
**[00:00:30]**
The fractures in the sky widened. Light poured through them, not from any sun, but from something vast and unknowable beyond.
**[00:00:10]**
His surroundings dimmed. Sound faded. The world became distant, like he was viewing it through thick glass.
**[00:00:05]**
His overlay isolated completely, turning opaque. The city vanished.
**[00:00:00]**
The interface flared.
**[PERSONAL SURVIVAL INTERFACE INITIALIZING...]**
**[AWAKENING CONFIRMED.]**
**[SURVIVAL PROTOCOL BEGINS NOW.]**
Reality fractured.
And Kael Ardyn fell through.