Seven scientists gather in the shadows: Kent Lockhood, Vila Kington, Quan Warden, Lisa Paloma, Garry Black, Clarke Freeman, Layla Olfe.
They discover a mysterious energy leaking from an abandoned house.
Kent: Prepare Protocol: S.H.A.T.T.E.R. Now, Dr. Hann.
Vila: Human evolution is coming… really soon.
The scientists begin kidnapping humans, experimenting, dumping them into cages.
Garry: Fucking monsters. Always screeching and screaming.
Lisa: I know, right. Useless. I think we should take the mutagen for ourselves.
Garry: Yes… haha. I love that plan.
Lisa: We'll be the strongest of all!
A mutant overhears them. Kent walks past.
Mutant: Hey… he… hey…!
Kent: What, bro? Damn.
Mutant: The other two… they want the mutagen… for themselves…
Kent's face shifts from confusion to rage.
Kent: What? Who?!
Mutant: Na…me… Gar… something… The mutant collapses unconscious.
Kent [THINKING]: Garry. Of course. And someone else… I need to find out who the fuck is plotting this. But first…
Kent confronts Vila.
Kent: We need to shut this down.
Vila: This is human evolution!
Kent: Vila—!
Vila screams, pulls a gun, and shoots Kent in the chest. Kent falls, bleeding.
Kent: I will… fi…nd you… and kill you… Kingto… His body goes limp.
Vila drags him into a tunnel.
Vila: Don't be a bitch about it, Kent. You'll be okay.
2 DAYS LATER — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17.THE ELDION INSTITUTE MASSACRE.
The lab explodes. Humans scream, bleed, plead. Supernaturals tear through the halls.
Roars. Growls. Screeches.
On the burning bridge: Garry, Lisa, Quan, Clarke, Layla. Clarke trips, falls into fire.
Quan: FRANK—NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Garry and Lisa betray Layla and Quan. They run.
A monster devours Lisa brutally. Garry: OH MY GOD! The monster eats Garry alive.
Garry: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
The monster roars.
Quan: Layla, run! Now!
Layla: No… I can't leave you!
Quan pushes her as the door explodes. Layla runs, crying.
Quan sits on the burning bridge. His arm glows faintly — blue veins.
Vila searches Kent's body for the keycard. But Kent's corpse is gone.
Vila: Shit… oh my god…
Clarke appears behind her, holding an iron bat.
Vila: Clarke! Help me, please!
Clarke: You killed my colleagues…guess i have to do the same you whore
Clarke bashes vila's head with a bat brutally.
The Eldion Institute burns. Screams echo through collapsing halls. Blood stains the walls, cages split open, monsters unleashed.
Layla runs into the night, her tears swallowed by the roar of fire. Quan's faint blue veins glow brighter as the bridge crumbles beneath him.
Vila stumbles backward, staring at Clarke's iron bat raised high. Her breath catches.
Kent's body is gone. The keycard is gone. And somewhere in the ruins, something far worse has awakened.
The Garden waits… behind the fence.
Episode 0: The First Shatter
Rain hammered the cracked sidewalks of East Hollow like it was trying to wash the town off the map. Kevin Leister hunched under the rusted awning of the old arcade, shoulders drawn tight, eyes darting to every shadow that moved between the flickering streetlights. Fifteen years old and already convinced the universe had a personal vendetta against him.
They're watching again, he thought, fingers twisting the strap of his backpack. The tall one by the bus stop. The woman in the gray coat who's been three steps behind me since the library.
Paranoia wasn't new. It had been his closest companion since his mom disappeared two years ago. Wyatt called it "Kevin's superpower." Kevin just called it Tuesday.
The arcade's neon sign buzzed and spat, half the letters dead. Inside, ancient machines flickered with pixelated violence. Wyatt Freeman was already there, waving him over from the Galactic Rampage cabinet like a golden retriever in human form.
"Yo, Kev! I got next life on you. Come on, before Peter shows up and starts yelling at the ghosts in the machine again."
Kevin forced a smile and slipped inside. The smell of stale popcorn and ozone wrapped around him like a damp blanket. For a minute, the noise and lights pushed the shadows back.
Then the power flickered.
Not just the arcade—the whole block. Streetlights died. Traffic signals blinked out. A car horn blared somewhere down the street and cut off mid-wail.
Kevin's heart slammed against his ribs. Not now. Not here.
A low vibration rolled through the floorboards, up through his sneakers, into his bones. It wasn't an earthquake. It felt… personal. Like something ancient had just noticed him.
Wyatt frowned. "Dude, you good? You look like you're about to puke."
Kevin opened his mouth to answer when the pain hit.
It started behind his eyes—a white-hot needle driving straight into his skull. He gasped, staggering into the Rampage machine. The screen warped, pixels bleeding into strange fractal patterns that hurt to look at. For a split second he saw something inside the glass: a vast, fractured pillar of white and blue crystal spinning in an endless void, bleeding light like a dying star.
Then the voice came. Not through his ears—inside his mind. Calm. Ancient. Exhausted.
"The Matrix has chosen. The Rampager mantle awakens."
Kevin clutched his head. "What the hell—"
The world tore open.
A shard of iridescent light—no bigger than a marble—ripped through the arcade ceiling like it wasn't there. It hovered for a heartbeat, spinning, singing in frequencies that made his teeth ache. Then it slammed into his chest.
Agony. Pure, cleansing fire.
Kevin screamed as the Glimmer bonded. Memories that weren't his flooded in: a cataclysm eons ago, a pillar shattering across realities, fragments raining like judgment. The Shattering. Glimmers seeking hosts. Power shaped by trauma, by rage, by the raw screaming core of whoever was unlucky enough to be chosen.
His fear twisted. His paranoia sharpened into something vicious. His desperate need to never be hurt again ignited into something far worse.
Destruction.
The arcade lights exploded in a shower of sparks. Machines warped and crumpled as if crushed by invisible hands. Wyatt stumbled back, eyes wide.
"Kev?!"
Kevin rose from the floor. His hoodie was shredded. Across his chest, glowing lines of white-blue energy pulsed like circuitry carved into his skin. When he looked at his hands, they trembled—not with fear, but with barely contained force. The air around him rippled, reality itself flinching.
For the first time in his life, Kevin Leister wasn't afraid.
He was angry.
And whatever had just bonded with him was hungry.
The door to the arcade burst open. Peter Shotstock stormed in, rain dripping from his scarred face and military jacket, shotgun already in hand like he'd been expecting the apocalypse on a Monday night.
"The hell is that noise—Jesus Christ, kid!"
Behind him, Nathan Moya materialized out of thin air, illusion shimmering away like smoke. The older boy's eyes narrowed at the glowing sigils on Kevin's chest.
"Glimmer resonance," Nathan muttered. "Strong one. Mythical tier, if the readings are right. White-Blue signature… That's not supposed to happen twice in a century."
Kevin's voice came out rough, layered with something that wasn't entirely human.
"I… I think it picked me."
Wyatt stepped forward despite everything, loyal to a fault. "Whatever it is, we got you. Always."
Peter racked the shotgun. "Yeah, well, the things that hunt Glimmers don't care about friendship bracelets. We need to move. Now. They'll be coming."
Outside, the rain had stopped. The streetlights were still dead, but something else moved in the darkness—shapes that didn't belong to this world, drawn by the fresh awakening like sharks to blood.
Kevin felt the destructive mantle settle into his bones. The Supernatural Rampager. A force of ruin wrapped in the body of a terrified fifteen-year-old.
He looked at his friends—his only friends—and for the first time, the paranoia felt useful.
"They're coming for the Pillar," he whispered, the knowledge arriving unbidden from the Matrix. "The White-Blue Heart. And the Garden behind the fence… it's waiting."
Nathan's smile was sharp. "Then we make them regret waking you up."
As the first unnatural howl split the night, Kevin Leister took a step forward. The ground cracked beneath his shoe.
Terror had finally found its match.
And its name was Rampage.
---
**Derek Crosley — East Hollow, same night**
The storm had knocked half the grid out, and Derek Crosley was the poor bastard on call.
Thirty-four years old, three cups of gas-station coffee deep, harness clipped to a pole that groaned every time the wind hit it. Derek hated storm shifts. Hated the cold, hated the rain finding its way down his collar, hated that his supervisor never picked up the phone when a transformer started arcing blue in the dark.
"Just a reset," he muttered to himself, gloved hands working the panel. "Flip it, log it, go home."
Somewhere across town, though the sky didn't show it, the world had already cracked open. Derek didn't know that. Derek didn't know that a boy named Kevin Leister was screaming inside an arcade, that a shard of impossible light had just torn a hole through the sky and slammed home like a verdict.
He only knew that the panel sparked wrong. Too bright. Too alive.
"What the—"
The surge hit him before he finished the thought.
It went through the glove, through the harness, through every nerve in his body at once—white light behind his eyes, the smell of burnt copper and ozone, his own heartbeat turning into a drumbeat he couldn't keep up with. He should have died right there, forty feet up, convulsing against a pole in the rain.
Instead, something answered.
A second shard, smaller than the one that found Kevin, coasting on the same shattered wavelength that had rippled out from the Pillar's ancient death—it found the current already burning through Derek's body and rode it in like a lightning bolt following a rod.
The pain didn't stop. It changed.
Derek's vision went white, then blue, then nothing at all. When it came back, he was lying in the wet grass at the base of the pole, harness snapped, smoke rising off his jacket—and his own hands were crawling with static, threads of electricity chasing themselves between his fingers like they were looking for a way out.
"Oh," Derek said, very quietly, staring at his own palms. "Oh, that's not good."
The nearest streetlamp guttered once, and then blew out entirely, glass raining down thirty feet away like it had personally been insulted by his existence.
Derek started laughing. It was not a sane laugh.
"Boss is gonna dock my pay for this."
---
**Earth 66 — The Iron Industry's Era**
The foundry district never truly went dark. Even at night, the smokestacks breathed orange into the sky, and the ground hummed with the endless labor of a thousand furnaces. It was here, in the shadow of the Ironworks Spire, that Zach "Ferrum" Ironfist earned his name—not given, but forged, the way everything in this world was forged.
His fists came down like falling girders, iron-plated knuckles screaming sparks against the beast's hide.
It had no eyes. It didn't need them.
The thing had crawled up from the slag pits an hour ago, skin the color of dead ash, its face a smooth ruin where sight should have been—just old scar tissue pulled tight over a skull that shouldn't have existed. It hunted by sound, by heat, by the tremor of footsteps on steel grating, and right now it hunted Zach.
"You picked the wrong district, ugly," Zach growled, planting his boots as the beast lunged.
It moved wrong—too fast for something that mutilated, joints bending at angles that made Zach's stomach turn. Its claws raked across his forearm, iron plating shrieking as three gouges tore through metal like wet paper.
Zach didn't flinch. Ferrum never flinched.
He drove his elbow into the beast's skull-ridge, felt bone crack beneath iron, and used the momentum to slam it into a support pillar hard enough to buckle the steel. The beast shrieked—a sound with no mouth behind it, just raw pressure forced out through a ruined throat—and lashed out blind, claws finding nothing but air.
"That's the problem with you things," Zach said, circling, fists raised, iron gauntlets steaming faintly in the foundry heat. "No eyes. No fear. Just hunger."
The beast's head snapped toward his voice.
Too late.
Zach's fist connected like a wrecking ball, iron-forged knuckles meeting ash-gray flesh with a sound like a bell tolling underground. The beast crumpled against the pillar, twitched once, and went still—smoke curling off its ruined hide.
Zach exhaled, rolling his shoulder, iron plates grinding faintly where the claws had scored him.
"Another one," he muttered, looking down at the corpse. "They're getting bolder."
Behind him, the foundry lights flickered—not from any storm, not from any failing grid, but from something deeper in the world's bones, shifting.
Somewhere far beyond Earth 66, a Pillar's ancient wound pulsed once, and the ash-beast's death rippled outward like a stone dropped in still water.
The Ironworks Spire loomed over him, indifferent as always.
Zach Ironfist didn't know about Kevin Leister. Didn't know about Derek Crosley, sparking and laughing in the rain on some other Earth. Didn't know the Matrix had chosen twice in one night.
But something in his iron-plated chest ached anyway, like a bell that had just been rung somewhere very far away.