The sky didn't break all at once.
It cracked—quietly, like porcelain under pressure.
Somewhere above the stratosphere, a shimmer pulsed—faint, almost beautiful. Astronomers called it a distortion. The military called it a threat. But no one truly understood what it was.
And by the time they tried to name it, it was already too late.
The Rift wasn't an explosion, not in the traditional sense. It was an unraveling. A wound in reality that stretched open and bled something unseen and ancient into the sky. Like a void, but not empty—humming, alive. Unknowable.
All around the globe, it happened at once. One moment, the sun shone over broken cities and rotting governments. The next, the heavens screamed.
---
Cities fell.
No warning. No salvation.
The beasts came first—creatures that defied Earth's logic. Some walked on limbs too long, some flew with wings of torn fire. Others dragged themselves with hands like obsidian, their mouths stitched shut and still screaming. They tore through homes, streets, minds.
Rank 1s overwhelmed what was left of human defense. Rank 2s broke through bunkers like they were built from sand. Rank 5s—dragons, leviathans, burning chimera—carved paths of fire across continents.
Humanity didn't fall in a year. It fell in a day.
And yet... the real horror wasn't the beasts.
It was what came after.
---
That same night, every sixteen-year-old vanished.
They didn't fade or evaporate. They were taken. One blink, one breath, and they were no longer on Earth.
They awoke elsewhere.
An island in the clouds, endless and small at once. The sky above them swirled in grey light. The ground trembled as if it held in its belly something ancient. The ruins—tall, cracked, overgrown—sang without voices. And the wind never stopped.
They would call it Anubis.
Because only death welcomed you there.
---
Noah Stray opened his eyes to that cursed place.
There was no warmth in the dirt beneath him. No softness in the grey mist that swallowed the horizon. He was a ghost in a land of bones, an orphan among thousands who vanished in the night.
Others screamed when they awoke. Some ran. Some cried. Most tried to find each other. That first hour on Anubis was chaos—a thousand terrified children thrust into a world older than fear.
But not Noah.
He didn't cry. He didn't run. He found a rock, crawled beneath it, and waited.
Because something deep inside him whispered: Survive.
---
Anubis was not merciful. It was not just a land—it was a trial.
There were no rules. No map. Only clouds at the edges, monsters in the trees, and ruins that promised either salvation… or a more creative death.
The longer one stayed, the worse it became. Beasts grew stronger. Night came quicker. The ruins spoke louder. Those who wandered too far would hear things whisper in languages not meant for human minds.
But there were rewards for those who survived. Artifacts. Power. Essence. Mana. Abilities that awakened only when one was broken enough to bleed them into being.
Most lasted three days.
Noah stayed for six months.
---
No one knew how he survived.
Not the boy with the rich family who'd burned alive by day seven. Not the girl with the charming smile who had vanished by day ten. Not the warlord's son whose corpse was found impaled on a forgotten altar.
But Noah?
He ran. He hid. He learned.
He learned how to move when the ground breathed beneath him. How to eat the red-leafed fruit that didn't kill you. How to set traps with bones. How to hear when the trees were watching.
He didn't look for people.
And when he found a shadow wolf—alone, growling, dying—he didn't kill it.
He fed it.
They became one. Silent. Cold. Alive.
---
The day the Rank 2 beast found him, Noah didn't think.
He ran.
Lightning cracked from the sky. Not natural. Not divine. His. Born from fear. Born from fury.
He didn't remember killing it. Only waking up beside its smoldering corpse, breathing in burnt fur and blood. The storm inside him awakened that night, and from then on, he didn't just survive.
He hunted.
---
One month later—on Earth—he woke up.
He coughed lightning. He could feel the storm beneath his skin, twitching with every heartbeat. The hospital walls were too white. The sky outside looked wrong. Too quiet.
They told him he had been gone for a month.
He had lived half a year.
They asked him questions. He didn't answer.
They poked him. He didn't flinch.
They said he was lucky.
He knew better.
He had come back with an artifact—a piece of metal from the ruins that had shifted when he touched it. Now it slept in the form of a blade, beautiful and terrifying, crackling faintly with the storm he barely understood.
He didn't tell anyone what he had seen.
Not about the ruins.
Not about the whispers.
Not about the feeling that something in Anubis was watching them… struggle to survive.
---
The world Noah returned to was colder.
The sky was dimmer. Beasts still roamed. The military barely held lines across fractured zones. Cities had turned to camps. Families into factions. Food into power.
And the Awakened—those who survived Anubis—were now the frontlines.
Hunters. Warlords. Soldiers. Mercenaries. Tyrants.
Some were gods in their minds, ruling over broken cities. Others wandered alone, haunted by what they brought back. Some fell in love again. Many died quietly, not from wounds, but from silence.
They said humanity had a chance.
Noah wasn't so sure.
---
He kept moving.
He named his wolf Echo.
He trained alone, lightning dancing between his fingers, practicing the sword style he would come to name Storm Void—a form built from instinct and death, every strike forged by memory and silence.
He avoided others. Until the day he met Lyra—alias: Silver.
She was everything he wasn't. Fire and wind. Sword and command.
She fought like she was born to lead, but looked like she never wanted to.
And she reminded him that survival wasn't always enough.
---
The Rift still looms in the sky.
It pulses once in a while—almost like it's breathing. Watching. Waiting.
People think it's a path to power. A curse. A trial. A prison.
Some whisper that something is coming. Something worse than beasts.
Something humanoid. Rank 10s that speak. That think. That hunt.
And in the ruins of Anubis, there is still a throne no one dares sit on.
No one except the boy who once hid under a rock… and came back with a storm in his chest.