Fifty years ago, the world stopped turning as we knew it. It was not a war between nations, nor a creeping pestilence, nor even the silent anger of the Earth. No, no. It was an invasion, out of nowhere, as sudden as it was inexplicable.
One morning like any other, the sky was torn apart in seven strategic places around the globe. Not through explosions, but through silences. Columns of nothingness, so dark that they seemed to swallow the light, rose from the ground to pierce the heavens. When the echo of their appearance had dissipated, seven towers stood unchanging and hostile, each one hundred stories high, defying all the laws of physics and reason. The Sahara, New York, Brazil, Paris, Japan, Sydney and Antarctica: these names, once symbols of diversity, became the epicenters of the same nightmare.
From their gaping doors, the scourge poured out. Nightmare creatures with corrupt, innumerable, bloodthirsty forms and powers. The world's armies, with their tanks and missiles, faced the threat. It was a massacre. The bullets ricocheted off stone skins, the steel melted under fiery breaths, and the soldiers' will broke in the face of a tide that knew neither fear nor pity.
In just a few months, a third of humanity was wiped off the map. The lights of civilization were going out one after the other, drowned in a sea of screams and chaos. Hope, that precious fuel, was coming to an end. The fight seemed lost, a slow and inevitable descent into hell.
Then, six months into the end, the impossible happened.
In the midst of the fray, as refugees fled from a horde of scribbled beasts, a man, a simple worker named Samuel, stood up to a monster that was about to attack a child. Surrounded, unarmed, he raised his hands in a desperate gesture of defiance. And the light answered his call. A golden aura, pure and burning, exploded around him, reducing the creature to ashes. Samuel had become the first of the Awakened Ones.
Others followed. All over the world, under the pressure of extinction, men and women discovered a dormant power within them. They channeled lightning, bent steel with thought, healed the wounded in an instant. They weren't many, but they were a bulwark. For the first time, the monsters were retreating.
This hope was short-lived. For the Towers, like living organisms, continued their work. Every year, a new floor opened up, releasing increasingly powerful waves. The Awakened Ones struggled with the fury of despair for ten long years, but they could not prevent the human population from falling within half of what it was.
From this collective agony came an outsized project, a final challenge for humanity to survive: the Megapoles. Four fortress cities, built with the ruins of the old world and the science of the new, erected as strongholds against darkness. It took fifteen years of sacrifice and fierce battle to complete them.
Today, twenty-five years after their founding, these four concrete, steel and ether arches are home to the last survivors of the human species. A new society, born into adversity, has organized itself there, with a single goal: to reconquer. But the Towers are still there, imposing and mysterious, their peaks lost in the clouds, waiting for humanity to find the strength to climb them, or for it to finally collapse trying.
The last chapter of our history is not yet written. It is forged in the hearts of the new Awakened, in the metal of etheric weapons, and in the menacing shadow of the Towers. The fight for the future is about to begin.