The world ended in thirteen seconds.
Dr. Kim So-young's fingers froze over her keyboard. Her sensors had just detected something impossible — spatial coordinates appearing 400 kilometers directly above Seoul.
Not from space.
From somewhere else.
"That's... that can't be right." She adjusted her glasses, ran the diagnostic again. Same result.
The air above the city tore.
Not metaphorically. Reality split like fabric, and through the wound came things that shouldn't exist.
Shadow-spiders the size of buses, their legs made of crystallized darkness. They descended on threads that weren't there, touching down 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.
The weapons passed through the creatures like smoke.
One spider turned its head — if that mass of eyes and mandibles could be called a head — toward a helicopter.
It gestured.
The helicopter folded in on itself, compressing from thirty meters to thirty centimeters in half a heartbeat. The wreckage dropped like a stone.
"Oh god," So-young whispered. "Oh god oh god oh—"
Her screens flickered. 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, each angle precise, light refracting through its form in mathematical patterns.
The other was its antithesis — churning chaos, boundaries undefined, matter and energy interchangeable.
Aethon. Chaos.
So-young didn't know their names yet. Nobody did.
But watching them settle into position like gods preparing a board game, she understood one thing with perfect clarity:
Humanity was the game pieces.
Aethon moved first.
The crystalline entity reached down — down through layers of reality, through dimensions humans couldn't perceive — and touched a point near Saturn.
One of the planet's moons shifted. Not by collision. It simply was somewhere else now, like reality had been edited.
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 — 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 — power equivalent to nuclear weapons.
The creature stepped through the rift.
Humanoid, roughly. Four meters tall, skin like volcanic glass, eyes burning with internal fire. It surveyed the city below with ancient intelligence.
Then it screamed.
The sound wave was visible — ripples in the air itself, cascading outward at supersonic speed.
Buildings in a three-kilometer radius fell.
Not collapsed. Fell upward, defying gravity, tumbling into the sky before disintegrating into component atoms.
Half of Seoul simply ceased to exist in the span of that scream.
So-young's lab was outside the immediate radius, but the shockwave still hit.
Windows shattered. Equipment exploded.
She dove under her desk, hands over her ears, and felt her teeth rattle in her skull.
When silence returned, she crawled out.
Her monitors were dead, but through the broken windows she could see the orange glow where Seoul's center used to be.
The golden age was over.
Humanity had ruled Earth for ten thousand years. Built cities that touched the clouds. Reached for the stars. Believed themselves masters of their world.
Thirteen seconds proved them wrong.
Thud.
So-young's head snapped toward the new sound.
Something had landed on her lab's roof. Heavy. Moving.
Thud. Thud.
Footsteps. Coming toward the emergency stairwell.
She grabbed the pistol from her drawer — useless against monsters, but holding it made her hands stop shaking.
Backed toward the far wall. Waited.
The door exploded inward.
The creature that entered wasn't one of the shadow-spiders.
This was smaller, almost human-sized. Its body kept shifting — now furred, now scaled, now somewhere between.
Eyes that reflected no light at all.
When it opened its mouth, she saw teeth arranged in patterns that hurt to look at.
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. They even penetrated the creature's flesh.
It looked down at the wounds with something like curiosity — then backhanded her almost casually.
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.
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.
Something 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'd seen thirty cases like this in the last hour. 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 fragment of soul — scattered 823 years ago across dimensions, dissolved into void, presumed lost forever — felt the pull of the game's massive energies.
Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the pieces began to coalesce.
They found the dead fetus.
And filled the void where its soul should have been.