The world is a shitty place, it always had been and it always will be there's no changing it.
We all know that.
Some pretend they don't, but deep down? Everyone's accepted it one way or another.
Because this world, our world has always been ruled by the same things such as Greed. Power. Hunger.
Not the hunger that makes bellies rumble no, no. It's the kind that gnaws at souls and makes men do desperate things they never thought they'd do.
The kind that demands, consumes, and devours anything standing in its way.
It's the hunger that wears a tie in the morning and a crown at night. The hunger that signs policies by day and sells lives by evening.
The hunger that calls itself progress while grinding entire societies to dust beneath polished shoes.
Suffering and misery?
Those are the only universal languages we all speak fluently.
And the poor? Well they don't just know it, they live it, breathe it and most of the time they drown in it.
There have always been boundaries, clear as day:
The strong, perched atop towers of privilege…The weak, clawing for scraps just to make it to tomorrow…
And everyone else is just smacked and stuck in the middle, pretending stability isn't just a polite word for survival.
Humanity built empires tall, glittering monuments of ambition, all raised on the backs of the desperate.
And when we finished, we called it civilization.
We worshipped it, trusted it even and worst of all, we believed it would last forever.
It's a funny thing isn't it?
Civilization cracks just as easily as ice. And no one, no president, no scientist, no prophet could agree on the exact moment the world went to actual hell.
Some blamed climate change, others blamed government conspiracies and some blamed divine punishment.
However, only one fact remained uncontested. It all began with the melting giants.
When the northern ice shelves finally cracked and that wasn't all for they didn't break quietly.
Oh, they screamed.
The sound echoed across the poles like the dying cry of an ancient beast.
Kilometers of ancient ice, older than humanity, older than history splintered and collapsed into the churning black sea.
And from that cold tomb, something spilled out in an uncontrollable wave of pale, shimmering mist.
Soft at first. Beautiful even.
Rolling over the ocean like a ghost waking up from a thousand-year sleep.
People posted photos of it online and speculated. Videos went viral and everyone called it "pretty."
A natural wonder.
A once-in-a-lifetime event.
Scientists took this as an opportunity and rushed to explain it.
'The Super-cooled vapor,' they said.
Something that should not be feared for it was harmless, natural and even inevitable.
Oh, how funny that was.
Because the problem wasn't that the mist existed.
The problem was that the mist didn't behave like mist, It clung, crept and spread rapidly.
Not with the wind and not even with the tides.
It slid over oceans like a living veil, rolled up coasts and crawled into cities.
It entered subway tunnels, slipped through ventilation systems and seeped into forests and clung to mountains.
Within weeks, it had wrapped around entire continents like a slow, deliberate tidal wave no one could outrun.
NASA, environmental agencies, universities, everyone who mattered scrambled to analyze this new phenomenon and why it exists.
They dissected every molecule, ran simulations, wrote frantic reports with trembling hands.
And finally…
they all reached the same conclusion.
The mist was alive.
Its molecular structure was shifting in an unpredictable, reactive, and somehow impossible way. And all this points to one simple fact and that is it, was evolving.
It was just changing and was learning.
At first, only a few were aware of this.
The governments kept it quiet and the news outlets were muzzled.
Experts were silenced under "national security protocols."
But then the world found out the hard way.
Animals along coastlines began to behave strangely.
Their aggression level spiked up drastically, their nervous systems fired uncontrollably like broken circuits.
Birds began to fall from the sky in flocks, wings twitching violently before rising back up.
Whales beached themselves in record numbers.
Fish washed ashore, glowing faintly blue like bioluminescent corpses.
Trees twisted away from the mist… branches bending at unnatural angles, bark splitting like wounds.
While other plants grew toward it hungrily and finally mutating, thickening, growing tendrils like searching fingers.
And then, the sky changed.
The clouds began to glow from within it a thin, crackling streaks of electric blue etched across the heavens like veins.
Those who saw this first, called it 'The Second Aurora.'
For a while, the world pretended it was beautiful.
Like everything was fine.
Like everything wasn't seconds from collapse.
Then one day, without warning, the trigger happened.
A worldwide tremor Shuddered through the planet.
Every satellite flickered into static.
Every monitoring station recorded the same impossible spike.
That was the moment the mist became active, Truly active.
It wasn't passive or drifting like it once was.
The people finally noticed something was astronomically wrong when the animals warped into monstrous, efficient predators with instincts sharpened into weapons,
some growing too fast, some sprouting limbs where no limbs should exist, some developing shrieks that never belonged on Earth.
And humans…
…humans inhaling too much mist became something else entirely.
They called them Rabids, they were fast, savage and infectious.
Their minds fractured… but not completely gone.
They became predators of their species and had enough cognitive functions to stalk prey.
When the mist fully woke up, the world fell not in days but In hours.
Cities turned into what looked like war zones.
Hospitals became slaughterhouses.
Streets ran with the blue luminescent stain of corrupted biology.
Governments collapsed within the first week alone, communication networks died, airlines fell from the sky and borders became meaningless.
The concept of civilization didn't just fall, it was outright erased.
Swallowed whole by the creeping disaster.
And this, this nightmare… started for Mason Brooks on what should have been the most boring morning of his life.
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