20 years ago, the world's common sense was defied and defiled.
The human ability to separate the fantastic from the real and foresee the future, however loosely, was suddenly lost.
The idea that history flowed through cause and effect had collapsed.
History saw itself derailed from the tracks it had once laid with care.
The culprit was a singular event.
Detached from anything that came before, and responsible for all that came after.
"The First Contact", as we now call it, undid our world's logic.
Even now, there isn't a soul alive who doesn't remember her words...
[Congratulations, people of Earth.
I, Catherine, Goddess of the Red Night, have kindly chosen to bless your planet.
Rejoice, for you may now claim your Gifts.
Your planet shall be awakened to its true nature.
You are to be welcomed among countless others.
Revel and celebrate. Pray, and struggle.
As I have chosen you...
Prove to me your worth.]
Had it been isolated, it would have been dismissed as mass hysteria.
Yet when the same words echoed in every mind, from presidents to children, from the deaf to the indifferent...
Humanity knew.
This was no trick of man.
Our only choice was to accept.
And we did.
However, understanding was another matter.
No one could have foreseen it, but soon, people began discovering their Gifts.
Her words were proven true.
Sedentary men could outrun athletes.
With a wave of their hands, some healed the injured.
Some could fly, some could change their appearance at will.
From minor physical enhancements to reason-defying powers, cases spread like wildfire.
Many felt truly blessed by these miracles.
However, humanity cannot trust what it cannot comprehend.
Forced to accept our new reality, many sought explanations that fit the world we once knew.
The leading theory claimed Catherine was a being from a far more advanced civilization.
Her powers, and those she shared with humanity, were not magic but science beyond our comprehension.
Unfortunately, popular as it may have been, and influential as it might continue to be, common sense no longer dictated reality.
Those quick to embrace the new world were intrigued by something far more crucial.
They noticed uncanny similarities to certain games.
By accessing their Gifts, they could see their own status.
Things like their mana, their magic power, strength, speed...
Even their levels.
All concepts familiar to anyone who has ever played an RPG.
But the last one especially...
Levels almost universally imply progression.
And in RPGs, that usually meant only one thing: Combat.
It was almost a warning.
But without the threat itself, without monsters, the warning fell on deaf ears.
There were no other races. No labyrinths or dungeons to be explored.
That was our reality.
For a brief time.
The answer to the questions we still had could be found in Catherine's words.
The self-proclaimed Goddess, dubious as such a claim might have been, had spoken about changes in both humanity and the world.
We had grown used to humanity's new reality, but the world's...
It was subtler at first
Gates.
Aside from being unusually large, they had no distinct characteristics.
Their design was old and simple, made only of wood and stone, with a medieval appearance.
Few in number initially, it took a while for the general public to notice their existence.
And yet, these structures began appearing across the world.
They appeared randomly.
Sometimes in odd, but acceptable places, such as forests or mines.
To an unsuspecting onlooker, it was as if something was planned to have been built, but was left abandoned.
No more than the remains or the ruins of something that would once, or once was.
It didn't take long, however, for them to appear in more unusual places.
Inexcusable places.
At the time, there were a bunch of pranks circulating.
Gates floating in the middle of a busy street, even without any cables attached to it, weren't anything that absurd.
The definition of absurd had already changed in most minds.
If it were only this much, there would barely be a reason to pay it any mind.
But more of them kept appearing, floating midair, as if intentionally trying to defy everything in their vicinity.
Reports emerged of gates in uninhabited places. Lands where humans could hardly survive, much less build.
The scale was undeniably too large. Even with abilities, no prankster had come even close to something of this magnitude.
I can only imagine how people felt while this happened, but it is often said that... A foreboding feeling lingered in the air.
A month after the gates appeared, fate bared its fangs against humanity once more.
Suddenly, almost as if arbitrarily, the Gates opened their doors on a day that became forever known as "The First Reminder".
The connection with the First Contact was obvious, but also...
As the name implies, it was to be a reminder of a stain in our history.
Whether or not we accepted it... Whether or not we could explain it...
The fact remained.
Humanity found the opponents it had been searching for.
Monsters poured forth in waves from the gates' doors.
No matter whether they had used their power for good or bad.
There wasn't anyone alive who had developed their Gifts enough.
Humanity fought.
Or rather, struggled.
But that day, among the countless lives, we lost our pride.
Still, even to tell the tale of our own hubris, we had survived.
And we learned.
The First Reminder was a periodic event.
For as long as we inhabited this planet, we'd have to live with it.
As for how to do so...
We had to stop the Gates from releasing all the monsters inside them.
There were two methods to accomplish this.
The first was to reduce the number of monsters inside a Gate.
As long as they were not overpopulated, the normal monsters couldn't leave and wreak havoc in our world.
The second method was harder.
We had to kill a "Boss", a stronger monster who resided in a special room inside the Gate.
To this day, the conditions are still unknown, but sometimes, these "Boss" monsters can leave their rooms.
Not only that, they can traverse the insides of a Gate freely, meaning they can ascend or descend floors, and even invade our world without the need for a Rampage to occur.
Simply put, we know we can't leave a Boss alone for too long...
In any case, since the Gates seemed to imprison monsters within, their interiors became known as Dungeons.
Over the years, it's estimated that the Dungeons claimed more lives than the First Reminder itself.
The Lesser Dungeons, which were later called "Easy Dungeons", rampaged roughly once a month, with slight variation depending on their "Dungeon Level".
More difficult Dungeons, thankfully, had a longer wait period between Rampages.
However, due to these inconsistencies in time frames and the constant appearance of new Gates...
New Rampages continued to happen almost every day after The First Reminder.
They were smaller in comparison, but to a scarred humanity, they were equally tragic moments to remember.
Yes.
Scarred.
Not yet defeated.
Most monsters, especially the ones from Easy Dungeons, were ferocious, almost completely driven by instinct alone.
However, they were not much stronger than an average, unarmed man.
Against someone prepared, armed with whatever they could find, the odds turned against the puny creatures.
We were caught off guard.
It was a tremendous hit.
But we weren't going to stay on the ground.
The first time, we didn't resist. We couldn't.
However...
We had fought and conquered every other species in our world.
Hunters by nature, conquerors by will.
Once we knew we were in a fight, the invaders understood the price of their decision.
The weak monsters, those who, even without the use of special abilities, could be killed with fists alone, found that firearms spelled doom.
As a collective, we now had an opponent.
So, we showed them the reach of our greatest weapon.
The societies we were so proud of.
The armed forces and the people, together, took back the world...
For the most part.
Although many places are still dangerous and challenging...
Mountains and islands, inaccessible places such as underground caves or the bottom of the oceans... Even the sky is not an exception...
To this day, in many places, Rampages still occur.
Our fight is continuous.
There are cities still lost to us.
Underwater monsters attacking make maritime trading incredibly expensive.
Away from cities, it's not rare to see stray monsters roaming around.
We have not yet won. The Dungeons and the monsters have not been defeated.
We only learned how to survive.
And even that took us a while to figure out...
The first plan was to use the armed forces to raid and hunt the monsters inside, but this didn't work.
There were too many Gates, their locations were completely random, making it too expensive and impractical to contain every single one like this.
Not to mention... Firearms were only effective against monsters below a certain level.
We had no choice but to adapt to fight the stronger ones...
Emboldened by their own fight for survival, the memory of lost ones, or a desire to prove themselves, the common folk took it into their own hands.
The government tried to argue for our protection, but they couldn't prohibit access and guard every Dungeon, so inevitably, a new job appeared.
Adventurers started risking their lives to enter the Dungeons... To hunt the monsters and uncover the mysteries about them.
Although... It would be unfair of me to say that the government only wanted to protect us when they first tried to monopolize the Dungeons.
It was quickly discovered that monsters, when killed, had a chance to leave something behind.
There was quite a variety, but most commonly, weapons or small stones.
The stones, in particular, had an interesting quality to them.
They could be used as an alternative energy method.
Questioned about why they tried to prohibit people from entering the Dungeons when the adventurer system was working well to prevent more Rampages, the government responded by striking a deal to buy the "Monster Cores", as the stones were later called, from the adventurers.
Not only that, other goods found in the Dungeons, such as minerals and crystals, also became items the government was willing to buy since they all had value as research material.
Thus, offices were set up to facilitate trading materials obtained inside the Dungeons.
This led to a surge in people becoming adventurers, and in turn, a problem started due to the exodus of the workforce from almost every other job.
Eventually, supply surpassed demand, and the government also made it less profitable for adventurers so that things could return to a sense of normalcy.
Still, even considering such efforts, the world was barely recognizable.
There were also no clues as to what could change next.
All we had was the knowledge that our existence could, in a moment, change completely.
The only certainty was uncertainty now that reality and fantasy were closer than ever.
As for me...
I wasn't part of that story.
I was born 18 years ago.
This fantasy-like reality was the only one I experienced. It was my common sense.
And it was the stage on which my story began.