The sunset made the city look softer than it really was.
From the pedestrian bridge, Kael could see the avenue stretching out in both directions like a river of light—cars, buses, neon billboards, people crossing between them when they shouldn't. The air smelled like exhaust, fried food, and the first hint of night chill.
He adjusted his grip on the cheap plastic bag dragging at his fingers. Takeout box, one drink, paper-wrapped fork. Dinner. Birthday dinner, technically, though he'd done nothing special.
Twenty wasn't supposed to mean anything. Just another year.
He checked the time on his phone out of habit. 6:41 p.m.
Messages:
His mom: Call me later.
His friend Sami: U still coming Sat?
His older cousin: Happy 20th, old man 😂
He typed back, Yeah, probably, then deleted it. He'd answer later. After food. After quiet.
A breeze pushed past, making the cheap banners on the light poles flutter. An ad for some new VR series flashed overhead. A kid below tugged their father's sleeve, demanding ice cream.
Normal.
Kael exhaled slowly, shoulders loosening. Long day. Boring job. Too many people. His chest always tightened a little in crowds—the noise, the unpredictability, the way one small thing could go wrong and everything would chain off it.
He put one earbud in, not both. Music at half volume. Enough to blur things, not enough to lose track.
He'd taken maybe three steps along the bridge when someone gasped.
It wasn't loud. Just… wrong. Enough that he looked up automatically.
The sky had a line in it.
A vertical crack, thin as a hair, starting somewhere above the western towers and running down toward the horizon. Not clouds. Not a plane trail. Just… a line, black against orange, like a screen with a dead pixel that suddenly expanded.
"What is that?" someone said behind him.
"Oh my God," another voice.
Phones came up. A car horn blared and then kept blaring, someone too distracted to move.
The line spread.
It didn't move like anything natural. It didn't drift or curve. It split. One became three became ten, branching out in jagged shards that crawled across the sky.
The sunlight dimmed, as if something behind the cracks was swallowing it.
Kael's heart did that anxious double-beat thing. He pulled his earbud out.
"This a projection?" a man nearby asked no one in particular. "Some kind of ad?"
"Government test," another voice said. "Has to be. They've been quiet for weeks—"
"It's the end," an older woman whispered, fingers tightening on her grocery bag. "Oh God, it's the end, it's the end—"
A kid pointed straight up and screamed, voice high and panicked, "Dad, what's wrong with the sky?!"
No one had an answer.
The cracks all converged toward a point almost straight overhead, like a shattered windshield focusing on where the stone had hit. For half a second, the city held its breath.
The sky broke.
Light poured through.
Not sunlight, not electricity. Something else. A raw, white-gold brightness that burned without heat and erased shadows in an instant. Kael's eyes slammed shut on reflex. It didn't matter. The light wasn't just seen; it was in him, like someone had turned up a lamp behind his forehead.
He heard people scream. He heard metal grind. Somewhere, glass exploded like a gunshot.
Words appeared in his vision.
They weren't on his phone. They weren't on a building. They didn't have a font or a screen or pixels. They were just there, hanging in front of everything else, too big and too close all at once.
[GLOBAL THRESHOLD REACHED]
[SPECIES: HUMANITY]
[STATUS: ELIGIBLE FOR DIVINE ASCENSION]
His breath caught in his throat.
No. That doesn't mean anything. That's—hallucination. Flashing lights. Migraine aura. Something.
The words didn't go away.
More text dropped down like a system log:
[INITIATING MASS AWAKENING…]
[ASCENSION CRITERIA: AGE ≥ 20 YEARS]
[TARGETS: 3,984,201,779]
Someone right next to him muttered, "The hell is 'target' supposed to mean?"
"I told you!" the older woman shouted, voice shrill. "Judgment day! It's judgment day! He's separating us!"
"Oh my God, it's aliens, this is an invasion, we're tagged—"
"It's gotta be some military simulation, they hacked everyone's eyes, it's—"
The noise flooded in from every direction, different narratives crashing into each other.
"What about the kids?!" someone yelled. "Why not everyone?!"
"I'm twenty-one, does that mean I—"
The light hit him.
No warning. No buildup. One second he was standing there, heart racing, surrounded by people shouting at the sky; the next second, something like a hammer made of light slammed straight into his chest.
His vision blew out white. His knees almost buckled. The plastic bag slipped in his fingers. The world muted, like someone had put him underwater.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing except a new pulse, deep and alien, thrumming inside his ribs.
Then sound rushed back in, jagged and too loud.
Someone was sobbing. Someone else was laughing in a way that didn't sound right. A car at the intersection below levitated half a meter off the ground and started spinning slowly.
Inside his chest, the pulse continued. A vibration. Subtle, constant. Like a tiny engine had been installed behind his sternum and set to idle.
A new panel layered itself over the first.
[INDIVIDUAL ASCENSION COMPLETE]
Name: Kael Arden
Biological Status: Human → ???
Category: Low-God
Age: 20
Authority: Echo (Rank F–)
Divine Kingdom Volume: 1 m³ (unstable)
Fate Weight: Negligible
Followers: 0
Divine Body Completion: 3%
Classification: Lowest-Tier Divine Entity
His first thought wasn't god or power or destiny.
It was: This is wrong.
The little rational part of his brain that always tried to keep him from spiraling shot up in protest.
People don't turn into gods. That's not a thing. This is a stroke. This is psychosis. This is a VR overlay gone insane. Something.
Then the overpass shook.
He grabbed the railing on instinct.
Below, the avenue had become a war zone in less than thirty seconds.
A man in a business suit stood in the middle of the crosswalk, staring at his shaking hands as flames coiled around them, growing brighter with every second. A woman on the sidewalk clutched her head and screamed as her shadow tore itself up and started ripping into the bricks.
Near the bus stop, a teenager maybe a year or two younger than him was kneeling, dry-eyed, staring up at their mother. The woman was floating three meters in the air, eyes rolled back, a storm of ice shards rotating in a sphere around her.
"Mom?" the kid yelled. "Mom! Mom, come down, what are you doing? Mom!"
She didn't answer. The shards slipped, fell, sliced through cars and bodies indiscriminately.
Kael swallowed hard, throat dry.
Okay. If this is a stroke, it's a really specific one.
The panel didn't go away. It hovered at the edge of his vision no matter where he looked.
Echo. Rank F–. Lowest-tier.
A hysterical part of him wanted to laugh. Even if the universe glitches and turns everyone into something, I get bottom-of-the-barrel.
The vibration in his chest deepened.
He focused on it for a second because it was easier than looking at people dying. It was… quiet. No glow, no aura, no dramatic surge. Just a constant, nearly inaudible hum radiating outward.
The metal under his hand buzzed back, very faintly.
That's not in my head.
He tightened his grip, trying not to freak out.
A new line slid into existence, smaller, like the system itself was trying to whisper.
[AUTHORITY: ECHO]
Description: You perceive and generate residual vibrations—physical, energetic, and metaphysical. Current rank: trivial. Current destructive capacity: negligible.
"Trivial," he muttered. His voice came out thin. "Yeah. That tracks."
There was no time to test anything.
The far end of the overpass blew out.
It wasn't a clean explosion. One second the concrete and railing were there; the next, a chunk of the bridge simply crumpled inward like it had been made of paper and someone had squeezed.
The shock traveled like a wave. People screamed and fell. A man with glowing eyes tried to spread his arms, shouting something about "stop," but the air around him warped, and everyone near him was slammed sideways into the barrier.
Kael's heart did its anxious stutter-hard again.
Move.
He let go of the railing and ran.
The bridge bucked under his feet. Someone barreled into him from the side; he stumbled, nearly went down, caught himself on all fours, takeout bag tearing open. Food spilled, forgotten.
"Sorry! Sorry!" a woman shouted, not looking back, eyes wide and unfocused.
Ahead, the stairwell down to street level was jammed with bodies. People were shoving each other, climbing over the rail when the stairs clogged.
"EVERYBODY CALM DOWN!" someone bellowed, voice booming unnaturally loud over the chaos. The sound hit Kael like a physical shove. His new sensitivity screamed that this wasn't a normal voice; the air itself shook around the man.
He couldn't even see who it was. The crowd seethed like a living thing.
If I get caught in that and someone explodes or melts or whatever, that's it. Think.
He glanced back.
The far half of the bridge was tilting, concrete cracking. Below, the avenue was no safer—cars flying, people running, flashes of fire, stone, water, light. A bus lay on its side, half-melted, passengers falling out in every direction.
His chest hum changed.
The vibration wasn't random anymore. It picked up in pulses, like a radar ping bouncing off walls, cars, people. He didn't know how he knew that; he just… felt it. The rail to his left buzzed in one pattern; the air to his right felt like dead silence.
Left = unstable. Right = less bad.
He turned right.
Instead of pushing toward the main stairs, he angled toward the maintenance ladder at the side, half-hidden behind a sign and a locked gate.
The gate was still locked. The padlock and chain rattled with the motion of the bridge.
He stared at it for half a breath.
You're a god now, apparently. Do something.
He put his hand on the lock.
The hum in his chest spiked, syncing to the cold metal. For a moment, he felt its structure in a way that wasn't sight or touch—a tiny pattern of densely packed something, stubborn and tight.
Echo.
He didn't know how to command it. There was no tutorial, no "Say THIS to activate your power." But instinctively, he thought: Shake.
Something invisible shivered out of him and into the lock.
It was weak. Pathetic, even. The lock didn't shatter dramatically or fly off. But the metal did twitch, just enough for the old, half-rusted hinge to slip.
The padlock dropped.
He stared at it, caught between triumph and disbelief.
That should not have worked.
No time to celebrate. He yanked the chain aside, squeezed through the gate, and grabbed the ladder, boots clanging against the metal rungs as he descended toward the alley below.
Above him, someone shouted, "FLY, I CAN FLY—" followed by a sickening crunch.
He didn't look up.
Halfway down, the panels flickered again.
[HIDDEN STRUCTURE DETECTED]
Analyzing divine architecture…
His stomach clenched.
"Don't do anything weird while I'm on a ladder," he muttered under his breath.
The text glitched. The lines bent, as if something behind them resisted being seen.
[ORIGIN: INFINITE AMPLIFICATION]
Status: SEALED
Requirement: Absorb foreign Divine Fragment
Scope: All owned attributes, authorities, domains, entities, and systems are subject to unbounded multiplicative scaling.]
His grip tightened on the rung until his knuckles hurt.
"Unbounded," he repeated faintly. "Scaling." The words tasted numb in his mouth.
He wasn't a genius, but he wasn't stupid. Amplification, scaling—those were clear enough. The rest—
The text blurred, then reformed into smaller, dimmer lines, tucked into the corner of his vision like the system had decided he'd seen too much.
[PASSIVE ANOMALY: FAITH CASCADE]
Description: Incoming faith is subjected to extreme random multiplicative factors (×10 → ∞ per event).
Stability: Very low.
Note: You are not designed to handle this.
A short, humorless breath escaped his throat. Not quite a laugh.
"No kidding."
He dropped the last few rungs and hit the alley floor harder than he meant to, knees jolting. The alley was dim, lit by a single malfunctioning wall light flickering on and off. Trash cans, a delivery door, a parked scooter knocked on its side.
He leaned against the wall for a moment, sucking in air, heart hammering.
Slightly anxious realist or not, there was only so much the human part of him could process at once:
The world had turned into something out of an apocalypse movie.
He'd been told by floating text that he was a "Low-God."
His power was a glorified vibration.
Something called Infinite Amplification was welded into his existence, locked.
It wanted him to absorb a "Divine Fragment"—which, given the words, probably meant a piece of someone else. Another god.
The urge to sit down and refuse to move flickered through him.
Do nothing. Stay here. Maybe this stops.
A tremor ran through the ground. Not from outside—he would've said that ten minutes ago. Now he realized he could tell the difference.
There was a distant crash, then a muffled boom. The building beside him shuddered; dust rained from a windowsill.
Out in the main street, someone yelled, "—NOT HUMAN ANYMORE!" another voice screamed, "IT'S A VIRUS, IT'S IN THE SKY—" someone else shouted, "PRAY, JUST PRAY, HE'LL SAVE US—"
A new notification flashed:
[GLOBAL UPDATE]
New Divine Entities: 1,872,399,042 (and rising)
Early Terminations: 8,204,119
End of the world as they knew it. Eight million people gone in minutes.
His stomach churned.
You can't fix that, the rational voice said. You can't even use your own power properly. You try to be a hero right now, you are dead in five seconds.
Another part, the one that didn't like leaving anything unresolved, whispered: That fragment requirement isn't going away. Whatever that amplification origin is, it's in you whether you want it or not.
He slid down the wall until he was sitting, forearms balanced on his knees. The brick felt solid and reassuring under his palms. The hum inside his chest synced with it, tiny echoes bouncing back and forth.
He closed his eyes and let himself actually feel the fear for a moment instead of trying to outrun it.
His hands were shaking. His breathing came just a little too fast. There was a tight, thin line at the back of his mind muttering about how one wrong move, one wrong doorway, one wrong person with one wrong power, and he'd evaporate or explode or turn into stone.
But you didn't freeze, the same annoying rational part pointed out. You got off the bridge. You didn't run into the main stampede. You opened a lock with literal noise.
"Thanks, I guess," he told his own brain.
The hum under his ribs steadied.
He reopened the panel with a thought, more deliberately this time.
Name: Kael Arden
Category: Low-God
Authority: Echo (Rank F–)
Divine Kingdom: 1 m³ (unstable, unentered)
Fate Weight: Negligible
Followers: 0
Divine Body: 3% complete
Passive Anomaly: Faith Cascade (unstable, poorly understood)
Hidden Origin: Infinite Amplification (SEALED – Divine Fragment Required)
A normal person, dropped into this with no warning, no training, and no context, did not become a mastermind in five minutes.
Kael didn't.
He did something smaller, more reasonable:
He set one simple priority.
"Don't die tonight," he said quietly. "Figure out the rest later."
The words grounded him more than any motivational speech would have.
He pushed himself back to his feet, hand sliding along the wall, feeling for those faint micro-vibrations that hinted at what was about to collapse and what wasn't.
The city roared on around him—people screaming, buildings breaking, gods being born badly.
He was, according to the universe, at the very bottom of a brand-new food chain.
Sooner or later, the thing inside him that called itself Infinite Amplification would wake up.
For now?
He just had to survive long enough to decide what kind of god he was going to be.