Year: 2025
Month: October
Day: Unknown
The sun rose angry that morning.
It didn't bathe the Earth in its usual warmth or gentle gold. No, this sunrise came with a flicker. A pulse. A tremble in the skies that went unnoticed by the world beneath it — unnoticed, but already too late.
People walked to work with coffee in hand and earbuds in their ears. Children laughed on their way to school. Planes sliced through clean blue sky. Cities buzzed, unaware they were living their final moments in light.
Then it came.
A blink.
A flare.
A storm, not of clouds — but of fire, light, and radiation.
No warning. No sirens. No time to pray.
It began deep within the sun — a monster hiding in its heart.
A series of violent magnetic eruptions, more powerful than anything recorded in history, twisted and collapsed inward, building pressure until the surface split open. Scientists would later call it the Helios Scourge — a Class-X90 Solar Flare, the first of its kind.
But that meant nothing in the moment. Because when the flare hit Earth, names didn't matter. Only the consequences did.
In less than 8 minutes, a wave of electromagnetic destruction slammed into Earth's magnetosphere like a cosmic hammer. The skies cracked. Satellites blinked out like dying stars. Global positioning systems failed. Communications died.
In another 2 hours, the planet's power grids began to implode.
Across oceans, electrical transformers melted. Planes lost guidance and fell from the sky like dead birds. Nuclear reactors went dark. Hospitals flatlined. Internet? Gone. Phones? Dead. Every city that stood on the foundation of digital breath... choked.
Humanity had no backup plan. No second sun.
And certainly, no god was listening.
It was 9:43 a.m. in New York City when the power went out.
At first, people laughed. "Rolling blackout," someone said.
By 10:00 a.m., cars stopped working on the expressways.
By 10:05, phones refused to switch on.
By 10:10, the panic began.
The news died before it could report the news. Television networks flickered into silence. Radios let out nothing but cold static. And when people looked at the sun through the clouds, it no longer looked warm — it hissed. Pulsated. Bled gold and red in sickening ripples.
In Tokyo, a full commuter train derailed inside an underground tunnel. Over 700 lives lost.
In Berlin, air traffic control failed — three major crashes, all within 10 minutes.
In Cairo, rioting began when ATM machines stopped working.
In São Paulo, power grids exploded in chain reactions, setting blocks ablaze.
And in Nairobi, a woman gave birth in darkness while her husband tried to light the room with a dying phone battery.
The world collapsed not in a single moment... but in billions of small tragedies.
In a decaying research lab 90 meters below the surface of Colorado, Zach Kreaks stood still — watching the screens above him lose signal one by one. He was 35 at the time. A solar physicist and synthetic engineer — mocked once for his "doom theories." A loner. A genius. A man no one wanted to listen to until the sun proved him right.
His research had always revolved around deep solar cycles. He had warned the U.N. council years ago that Earth was entering a magnetic vulnerability phase — that the weakening magnetosphere combined with unusual sunspot formations could spell disaster.
They'd laughed. Called him "Solar Boy." Called his theories fear-mongering sci-fi.
But now?
He stood alone, his underground bunker powered by salvaged thermals and emergency batteries, staring into the abyss of silence. His lab partner had fled two days before. His wife… long gone from a divorce he hadn't fought. And the rest of the world?
Dying.
Outside, the world cracked.
The super storm didn't just kill electricity — it did something worse.
It mutated the atmosphere.
Days passed. Then weeks. Fires burned unchecked. Dams failed. Cities flooded. Satellites fell like meteors. But the worst change wasn't the destruction of society.
It was the way the storm changed people.
Radiation pockets — silent, invisible — drifted across the globe. They didn't burn skin or melt faces like old nuclear tales. No, this was solar-borne mutation.
Some who survived the initial chaos began to fall ill. Then... change.
It started with tremors. Then fever. Then the hallucinations came. Days later, their skin paled or blackened, their eyes glowed with unnatural light, and they turned feral — attacking anything, everything.
The first ones were called "Sun-Lost."
Later… they were called Black Flares.
Zach didn't die in the storm. Nor did he die in the silence afterward.
Instead, in the underground lab surrounded by his dwindling food rations and broken instruments, he studied.
His geoscanners picked up unusual signals beneath the Earth — electromagnetic pulses rising from the crust, not the sky.
It made no sense.
Until he realized… the sun had changed more than the atmosphere.
It had awakened something deep within the Earth. A latent, primal power reacting to solar radiation.
A second light.
Buried. Hidden. Alive.
He called it Solaris Essence — a radiant lifeform-energy source, unlike anything human science had known. It flowed like liquid, glowed like plasma, and whispered in his mind when he got too close.
It wasn't meant to be touched. But the world was already dying — and Zach had nothing left to fear.
He injected a drop into a mechanical exo-frame he'd been building. It roared to life.
He poured it into dead batteries — they surged again.
He placed a drop on his skin…
He didn't sleep for three days.
By the end of Year One, the Earth was a different place.
Over 60% of the global population was either dead or turned.
Forests burned. Oceans warmed. Skies dimmed with haze.
Cities collapsed into skeletal remains. The air grew thick with ash and silence.
But out of that silence, Zach rose.
He scavenged. He rebuilt. He found others. Survivors who hadn't turned.
He taught them. Led them.
And with Solaris Essence as his foundation, he began building the first citadel — a place where the sun couldn't reach them anymore. A haven amid the ashes.
He called it Aegis One.
And in that moment, the Aegis Dominion was born.