Dead Silence.
Even the wind held its breath. The cavern, carved by centuries of blood and darkness, now trembled—not from force, but from presence. A
pressure so dense it felt like the stone itself would crack under its weight.
The demons stood frozen. Not one dared move. Their claws twitched. Eyes wide. Something unnatural had shifted.
The leader—a towering creature of obsidian flesh and molten scars—took one uneasy step back. His voice cracked, barely a whisper.
"What... is this? Why am I... afraid?"
He blinked.
A single drop of cold sweat slid down his horned brow, hissing as it touched the heated rock below. Fear—real, primal—was crawling up his spine.
On the center of the stone floor... Jack lay still.
His body was twisted in pain, arms twitching with volatile energy. Blood seeped beneath him, but it didn't spread—it boiled.
Flickering crimson flames coiled around his form, pulsing with rhythm... like a heartbeat. Like something trying to wake.
The light from the surrounding candles danced erratically.
Their flames stretched toward him, bending unnaturally, as if drawn by some invisible gravity.
The demon leader gritted his teeth.
His voice wavered.
"This human... What is he? His aura—no, it's beyond aura. It's something else..."
He turned to command his warriors—only to find them paralyzed, staring.
Their bodies refused to obey. Their instincts were screaming. Not to fight. Not to run. But to kneel.
FWOOOM.
All flames died.
Black.
Not darkness. But a void.
Then... a sound.
Faint. Crackling. The sound of reality peeling.
From within the pitch-black, a pulse of red light flickered... then another... until a circle of burning glyphs began to form beneath Jack's body—ancient, cursed, divine.
And inside his mind, a single word formed — "Iris"
His fingers curled. His breath returned. Shallow. Then deeper. Then—
BLACKOUT
300 Years Ago — Tokyo — Akihabara
The city trembled in a storm of sirens and shadows.
Police lights painted the buildings red and blue, and above, helicopters sliced through the smoky air, it was the world's most terrifying mystery.
A crackling broadcast echoed from a nearby news drone, barely stable under the electromagnetic pressure:
"Day nine... and still no change in the unidentified phenomenon. The object remains sealed within the colossal anti-force field..."
The feed zoomed in.
There, floating at the heart of it all—an object not born of this Earth.
A colossal, violet-blue structure.
Egg-shaped. Silent. Pulsing.
Its glow shimmered like a heartbeat from another dimension, its surface shifting with arcane energy patterns.
Every pulse radiated a frequency that made even the air tremble. Cameras couldn't focus on it for long. Human eyes weren't meant to look at something that shouldn't exist.
Scientists, cloistered deep in underground labs, spoke in terrified tones:
"Its energy surges could erase the sun..."
But something—something ancient—had formed a field around it. A perfect sphere of negative energy, swallowing every deadly pulse.
Without that field, Tokyo would've already been ash.
The evacuation was swift.
Every living soul within a 500-meter radius was pulled out. No exceptions. The area was quarantined, silenced.
Nothing moved inside the dome—no wind, no life, no time.
Just the hum.
That low, vibrating hum that seemed to resonate with the bones of anyone nearby.
A silent anomaly.
An unanswered question.
And no one—not the government, not the military, not the desperate—
dared to touch it.
and far away a five-year-old girl on a north-bound train felt ice crawl down her spine for no reason at all.
She didn't know it yet.
But the egg had already chosen her.