The world ended the day the sky split open.
No warning. No prophecy.
Only a jagged wound of light tearing across the clouds.
From that rift came the first beast—claws that shattered stone, jaws that swallowed a hundred lives in a single night. Cities burned, soldiers fell, and in the chaos, humanity learned a cruel truth: the old world was gone.
Then came the System.
Cold, merciless, absolute. Words that appeared in people's vision, assigning them classes, skills, and levels. Power that turned ordinary survivors into hunters—and corpses into nothing more than numbers.
Thirteen years later, the System ruled all.
Strength meant survival. Weakness meant death.
But in a quiet corner of the fractured world, far from the endless wars of hunters and guilds, two siblings lived in obscurity. Forgotten. Ordinary. Powerless.
At least, they should have been.
That night, beneath a blood-red moon, the stars seemed to pulse with a strange rhythm. The air thickened, heavy with something ancient. And then—
A voice whispered.
"System initializing…"
Astra Vale's breath caught.
Kael Vale stumbled back, clutching his chest.
And in their vision, lines of light flickered into being. Not clean and perfect like those of the hunters they had seen before, but broken—glitched—like something that should not exist.
Astra stared at the trembling words, heart pounding.
Kael raised his eyes to the sky, as though searching for the source.
Somewhere beyond the stars, something unseen was watching.
And smiling.