Gates hadn't appeared with warning.
One day, the sky simply tore.
Rifts opened in the air like badly healed scars, spilling creatures that ignored laws humanity had assumed were permanent. Weapons failed. Armies collapsed. Cities burned. Then, just as suddenly, people began to change.
THEY AWAKENED.
Some could bend fire. Some could reinforce their bodies beyond human limits. Others heard things no one else could, or saw patterns where chaos should have been. They were called Hunters, and the world reorganized itself around them with desperate speed.
Ranks followed. E to S. Survival demanded structure.
Dungeons became routine. Casualties became statistics. And humanity learned how to keep going.
He awakened at seventeen.
No spectacle. No dramatic surge of power. Just a moment of vertigo, a tightening behind his eyes, and the sensation that the world had moved a fraction too slowly.
Then it happened.
Three seconds into the future, he saw his own hand fall and catch a glass before it shattered.
Time snapped back into place.
He didn't understand what had chosen him until later—until the dreams started. Dreams where a presence observed him without speaking, where moments stretched and folded like thin paper.
On the seventh night, the presence finally spoke.
Not with words.
With certainty.
He had been chosen.
An apostle of the God of Time.
The power granted to him was simple, absolute, and cruelly limited:
Foresight.
A few seconds ahead. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Enough to survive. Never enough to rebel.
Now, years later, he stood at the center of Foresight—the party named after him, though he'd never asked for that.
He looked exactly like the image the public adored.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Clean-cut. Pale skin unmarred by scars. Short dark-red hair that never seemed to lose its shape, no matter how violent the fight. Sharp features softened just enough to pass for handsome instead of threatening.
Reliable. Calm. Untouched.
They trusted that look.
His teammates were proof of that trust.
There was Kade, the tank—built like a wall, loud when relaxed, immovable when it mattered. Mira, their mage, precise and meticulous, her spells always measured, never wasteful. Jin, the assassin, quiet to the point of invisibility, eyes always watching angles no one else considered. Others rotated in and out over the years, but this core remained.
Unbroken.
Until the dragon.