The sky over Seoul splits open at 3:47 AM, and the world learns what the end looks like.
It doesn't come with trumpets or divine proclamation. It comes with silence—the kind that precedes a guillotine's drop. For exactly seven seconds, every System user on Earth feels their interface flicker. Blue screens stutter. Status windows collapse into static.
Then the notifications arrive.
[CATACLYSMIC CONVERGENCE: INITIATED]
[DIMENSIONAL RIFTS: 7/7 ACTIVE]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETE EARTH SATURATION: 100 DAYS]
[RECOMMENDATION: PRAY TO YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR]
The last line appears in blood-red text that pulses like a heartbeat, mocking in its corporate politeness.
In the Seoul S-Rank Guild headquarters, Director Kim Hae-Jin reads the message three times before his hands start shaking. He's led the Azure Dragon Guild for fifteen years. He's survived the Outbreak Wars, the Pacific Rift Crisis, the Siberian Nightmare. His System rank—SSS, the pinnacle of human achievement—should make him one of the seven most powerful individuals on the planet.
The notification doesn't care about his rank.
It simply tells him he has one hundred days to live.
"Get me President Zhao," he says to his assistant, voice mechanical. "Get me Guild Master Volkov. Get me—"
The window behind him explodes inward.
Not shatters. Explodes. As if the glass remembered it was once sand and decided to return to that state immediately. The fifty-third floor of Gangnam Tower opens to the night air, and through the gap comes something that makes Director Kim's SSS-ranked instincts scream one word:
RUN.
It stands nine feet tall, wrapped in armor that looks like crystallized midnight. No System interface appears above its head—no rank, no name, no health bar. Just absence, as if the System refuses to acknowledge its existence.
Behind Director Kim, his five vice-directors—all S-rank or higher—move into formation. Fire blooms in one's hands. Lightning crackles around another's fists. A third begins chanting a defense spell that could stop a nuclear blast.
The creature tilts its head, almost curious.
Then it moves.
Director Kim will later tell investigators he saw nothing. One moment the creature stood at the window. The next, Vice-Director Park's head was rolling across the marble floor, body still upright, still channeling the defensive spell that never completed.
The four remaining vice-directors don't die quickly.
They die thoroughly.
When the creature finishes, it stands in the center of the executive conference room, surrounded by bodies that the System can no longer recognize as human. Blood paints the walls in patterns that seem almost deliberate, like a signature.
Director Kim is still alive, though he wishes he wasn't. His back presses against the conference table, SSS-rank power trembling in his hands, utterly useless. The creature hasn't touched him. It's simply... waiting.
For what?
"Status window," Kim gasps. "Identify. IDENTIFY!"
Nothing. The System, humanity's salvation and master for thirty years, cannot—or will not—tell him what stands before him.
The creature reaches up and removes its helmet.
The face beneath is human. Young, perhaps mid-twenties, with features that suggest mixed East Asian and European heritage. Dark hair. Sharp eyes the color of old smoke. A small scar above the left eyebrow that looks like it was drawn with a ruler.
Most terrifying: the man is smiling.
"Hello, Director Kim." The voice is soft, polite, the tone you'd use when meeting a colleague at a morning meeting. "I apologize for the mess. Your vice-directors were very dedicated. I respect that."
"What..." Kim's voice cracks. "What are you?"
"Me?" The young man steps over Vice-Director Choi's body without looking down. "I'm nobody, according to your System. But you can call me Veyron."
He extends a hand, as if to shake.
Director Kim stares at it like it's a loaded gun.
"You killed them," Kim whispers. "Five S-ranks. In twelve seconds."
"Fourteen seconds," Veyron corrects, lowering his hand. "I'm getting slower. Age catches everyone eventually." He says this like a man in his twenties talking about age is the most normal thing in the world.
"The System will—"
"The System will do nothing." Veyron's smile doesn't change, but something in his eyes does. A flicker of something ancient and tired. "Because I'm not part of its game. None of what's coming is part of its game. That creature you saw?" He gestures to the empty armor, which has collapsed into dust. "That was me, by the way. I needed to test something."
"Test what?"
"Whether the System would recognize the Ancient Arts if they were used as raw force. It didn't." Veyron walks to the shattered window and looks out at Seoul. The city glitters below, forty million people sleeping beneath a sky that's quietly tearing itself apart. "That's good. That means they don't know what I'm doing yet."
Director Kim's mind races through options. Attack? Run? Negotiate? Every instinct says this man—this thing—could kill him before the thought completes.
"Why are you here?" Kim asks instead.
Veyron turns back, and for a moment, Director Kim sees something in his face that's worse than malice. He sees pity.
"Because in seventy-two hours, something is going to come through that rift." Veyron points up, toward where the sky fractured. "Something that will kill every S-rank and higher in Seoul. All forty-three of them. I know because I've watched it happen before."
"That's impossible. The System would warn—"
"The System wants it to happen." Veyron's voice goes flat. "The System is running a show, Director Kim. And you're all actors who forgot they were performing."
He moves toward the elevator, stepping through the carnage without a backward glance. At the door, he pauses.
"I'll be at the Han River tomorrow night. Midnight. Come alone, or don't come at all. I'll tell you how to survive what's coming." He glances back, and his smile returns—but it's different now, touched with something that might be regret. "Or you can trust the System to save you. See how that works out."
"Wait!" Kim scrambles to his feet. "Who are you? Really?"
Veyron considers the question for a long moment.
"I'm the man who's going to kill your god," he says finally. "But first, I need to save his favorite toys. Can't have the game ending before I'm ready."
Then he's gone, vanished into the elevator shaft without pressing a button, moving with speed that makes Director Kim's SSS-rank perception look like a child's.
Alone in the room of corpses, Kim stares at the blood-written patterns on the wall. Up close, he can see they're not random. They're words, written in a language no translator can identify:
THE FIRST PIECE IS PLACED
NINETY-NINE REMAIN
LET THE GODS WEEP
His System interface finally flickers back to life, cheerfully displaying his status window as if nothing happened. But there's a new notification, one he's never seen before:
[ANOMALY DETECTED: VEYRON ASHCROFT]
[RANK: ERROR]
[THREAT LEVEL: UNDEFINED]
[RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ENGAGE]
[SECONDARY RECOMMENDATION: PRAY]
Director Kim stares at the words for a long time. Then he looks up at the fractured sky, where seven rifts are opening across the planet, and realizes with crystalline certainty that the notification is right.
Prayer might be all they have left.
Somewhere in the city below, in an apartment in Hongdae with walls so thin you can hear neighbors breathing, a young woman wakes from a nightmare. Lee Ji-Yeon, F-rank, bottom tier, barely worth the System's acknowledgment. She's dreamed of a man in dark armor standing in a river of light, placing chess pieces on a board made of stars.
In the dream, he looked directly at her and said: Soon.
She doesn't know why, but she's crying.
The System interface in the corner of her vision—usually a comforting blue presence—flickers red for just a heartbeat.
Then returns to normal.
Everything is fine, the System promises.
Everything is absolutely fine.
In a coffee shop that won't open for another six hours, a barista wipes down tables and hums an old song. She doesn't notice the man sitting in the corner booth, hasn't noticed him for the three hours he's been there, even though she's walked past him forty times.
Veyron Ashcroft sits in the darkness, a cup of black coffee growing cold in his hands, and watches the sunrise begin to paint Seoul in shades of gold and amber. Beautiful, he thinks. He always forgets how beautiful the world is before it burns.
Behind him, standing in positions no civilian should be able to maintain for hours without moving, are six shadows. To normal eyes, they look like tricks of pre-dawn light. To those who know where to look, they're something else entirely:
Six generals waiting for orders.
Six pieces on a board the System doesn't know exists.
Six legends about to become history.
Veyron takes a sip of cold coffee and smiles.
"Begin Phase Two," he says to the empty air.
The shadows move.
And somewhere in the System's infinite databases, a single line of code appears that should be impossible:
[PROTOCOL OVERRIDE: ACCEPTED]
[ANCIENT SEQUENCE: INITIATED]
[WARNING: PLAYERS OUTSIDE GAME PARAMETERS DETECTED]
[ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR]
High above Earth, in a space between dimensions where the System's true form exists as pure information and malevolent consciousness, something ancient and vast and utterly confident in its dominance over reality feels something it hasn't felt in ten thousand years:
Surprise.
Then, impossibly, it feels something else:
Fear.
END CHAPTER 1