Since about 1305, the world has been on a yearly decline, but always somehow pulling through.
That was the year the first warp gate had appeared, tearing a hole in the sky above what had once been reported as the south pacific. No warning. No prophecy that survived translation. No divine heads up. Just a sound like the universe was snapping bones that it had been leaning on for too long.
People thought it was a divine event at first. Angels. Demons. Judgement. The reckoning.
They seemed to stop thinking that when the monsters came through, however.
At the beginning, the gates were small. Flickers in the air, or small obelisks that appeared at random around the world. They were shimmering ovals that bent light and made animals refuse to go near them. When the first creatures stepped out, they were barely more than curiosities, not quite the creatures they apparently tried to look like. They were wrong-looking things that bled oddly and died to steel and fire like anything else.
Humanity adapted.
Humanity always does.
But the gates kept opening. And each century, they grew larger. Hungrier. More violent and volatile.
By the time we understood that the gates were not just openings but mouths to worlds we did not understand, it was already too late.
Earth fought back with the tools it knew. Cannons. Bombs. Nuclear fire. We burned cities to ash trying to cauterise the wounds being ripped across the globe, only to discover the gates didn't care. Radiation meant nothing to things born in places where physics was optional.
Civilisations would rise and fall in waves. Empires learned to fight monsters instead of each other. Magic returned to the world, not because it had been lost, but because it had never belonged here to begin with. Warp energy leaked through the cracks in reality, warping biology, rewriting rules, gifting miracles and curses in equal measure.
By 2085, Earth was unrecognisable.
The continents were scarred with exclusion zones where the gates clustered thickest. Cities had become fortresses or graveyards, some turned to ruins, treated as examples. The sky no longer belonged to us. It wore colours that shifted when you weren't looking directly at them, like a bruise that refused to heal.
And me?
I was standing alone in front of a warp gate that had decided today was feeding time.
The wind pulled toward it, tugging at my baggy attire, whispering in a language that made my head pound, and stomach twist. The gate stretched from the ground to above the ruins like an eye that refused to blink, its edges folding in on themselves, space tearing and stitching back together in slow, nauseating rhythms.
I checked my readings. Warp saturation high. Rising fast.
Of course it was.
I tightened my grip on my weapon.
Calling it a weapon felt wrong. It was more like a last ditch attempt to negotiate for our lives. A cage built out of desperation and math so advanced it bordered on prayer. We had learnt the hard way, that warp energy couldn't be destroyed. It could only be redirected. Harnessed. Forced to destroy itself.
That discovery had changed everything.
Plasma weapons powered by warp siphons became the only things that truly worked. Not bullets. Not blades. Condensed otherworldly energy, turned into a raw power source that was fed directly into the guns and swords wielded by those of us with a death wish or stupid enough to call it bravery and honour. Those weapons powered by the same energy that birthed the monsters we fought.
Using them shaved years off your life, if you were lucky not to just die to one of the monstrosities.
I thumbed the activator, this was the fourth one in almost a decade.
The frame hummed awake, light crawling along the channels carved into its body. Plasma began to condense, screaming softly as if it resented being shaped, or harnessed by someone not as deserving.
"Easy," I murmured, more to myself than the weapon. "We'll both get through this." the statement seemed to cause the scream to turn to a soft buzz.
The gate pulsed with a light that had never been seen before now.
Something felt off, like today was different. That was when something large fell out.
It hit the ground hard enough to crack the street open, concrete folding like damp paper. The thing dragged itself upright on too many limbs, joints bending in ways that made my vision blur if I stared too long.
Its skin was deep red, thin, and slightly luminous, veins glowing crimson with stolen warp-light. It raised what passed for a head and screamed.
Its animalistic cry seemed to warp into something akin to my language, "Feed ME...Feed US"
The sound went straight through me. Not loud. Intimate. Like it was trying to speak directly into my skull.
Plasma sword in one hand and a plasma pistol in the other, I take aim with the scrapped together, barely considered repaired, pistol. I hope this doesn't backfire...literally.
I fired.
The bright blue light coming from the tip of the pistol turning a deep red as the plasma bolt punched through the goliath of a creature...and didn't slow it down. The bolt detonating behind it in a bloom of white heat. What was left of the creature's face came apart mid-air, sloughing off in sticky masses. Its body reduced to drifting ash that never quite touched the ground.
The fragments of its face fell hard however, smaller creatures crawling out of the flesh like they were hatching from grotesquely squishy eggs.
They seem to stand still. Waiting. Soon, more monsters poured out of the gate in waves, crawling, leaping, flying. Some looked almost humanoid, like cruel parodies of things that had once been us. Others defied categories entirely, bodies folding and unfolding as if they were still deciding what shape to be.
An almost six foot tall dog like creature unfolds itself, shaking off fleshy remnants, it stands in front of the horde, like a leader. But when it howls, its face splits into multiple segments, like a corpse flower that had mutated.
I moved without thinking.
This part was muscle memory. Step. Fire. Pivot. Fire again. Plasma carved glowing scars through the horde, each shot tearing chunks of flesh and questionable fur. Seeming to tear apart at the warp gate itself. The recoil wasn't physical. Though it clawed at my nerves and tried to pull my thoughts apart and scatter them across places that didn't exist, but I had grown used to the feeling.
I grounded myself. Breathe. Stay human.
One got too close. Its breath pungent, like a decaying body that was left in a boiler.
I overcharged the frame and let the plasma blade extend, a screaming arc of light that cut through flesh and bone and something else I didn't have a word for. It burst apart before it could touch me, the smell of burnt flesh, hair and iron filling my senses.
The gate pulsed harder, seeming to demand the creatures do better.
I felt it then. The shift. The pressure that meant something big was coming.
Which said a lot, given the first abomination that had graced the streets.
The lesser creatures faltered, their movements growing frantic. Fear rippled through them like a shared instinct.
Then the gate tore wider. Wider than I had seen anytime previous.
The sound of the tearing was like it screamed as something enormous forced its way through, the rift splitting further, buildings nearby collapsing as gravity lurched sideways. It landed on four limbs thicker than tanks, its body layered in plates that glowed from internal heat.
Where its face should have been was a spiral of eyes.
They moved and swam in their sockets, before stilling, seeming to try and locate their target.
They all focused on me.
The whispers started immediately.
Not words. Not quite. Memories that weren't mine pressed against my thoughts. Names. Places. Regrets sharpened into weapons.
Memories of a bright world I had never known, it had been here before, likely before the first report of the warp gates had ever been etched.
I bared my teeth and slammed the limitation buttons on my weapons, disengaging them for the fight.
"This is so not happening." I snarl.
The weapon flared as warp energy flooded the channels, warning icons stacking across my homemade visor. Structural integrity dropping. Time limited.
I loved working underpressure.
The too many eyed creature roared, a sound like continents grinding together, and then it lunged. I slid beneath it as it crashed down, severing one of its legs in a shower of iridescent fragments. The limb hit the ground and kept moving, trying to reattach itself to the severed end.
My magnetic boots locked onto its armour as I climbed, driving the plasma blade down again and again. Warp energy bled out in violent arcs, lashing at the air, tearing at the creature like it was a roast dinner and this was just a carving tool.
It bucked, slamming me into a ruined building. Concrete exploded around me. My HUD fracturing, half the display dying in static.
Pain flared through me in an instant, distant but insistent.
I pushed off the wall and rolled as another strike cratered the street where I'd been standing.
The gate surged.
More monsters poured through.
Too many. More than usual.
I already knew how this ended. I'd known before I came here. This wasn't a mission. It was a plug. A body thrown into a wound to slow the bleeding.
I planted my feet and raised my plasma sword, pressing the conductor button.
Warp energy screamed as it was torn from the gate, being funneled through the frame into a growing sphere of plasma above me. The air ionised. Hairline fractures raced across nearby surfaces as the man made structures protested against my use of the energy.
The sound in my ears momentarily going quiet.
The sphere burned brighter than anything I'd ever seen, a miniature sun boiling in place. The monsters hesitated. Some turned back toward the gate.
The big one didn't.
It dragged itself forward, sheer will forcing broken flesh to obey.
I smiled, tired and honest.
Firing a couple weakened shots at the beast to keep its attention on me.
"Come on you bitch" I said, tossing the now useless pistol to the wayside.
"They better remember me if I die here" I mutter, not because anyone would hear it. Because it deserved to be said.
I released the charge.
The world became light for a second.
The explosion erased everything in a blast radius stretching from me to the size of three football fields in front of me, flattening the horde, the creature, the street itself. The gate screamed as the feedback tore into it, destabilising its edges, forcing it to fold in on itself.
When the light faded, there was a crater where the ruined part of the city had been.
I knelt at its centre, armour scorched black, weapon reduced to a twisted, cooling skeleton in my hands. The gate flickered in front me, shrinking, its connection faltering.
I looked up.
"Go on," I whispered. "Close."
For a moment, it hesitated.
As if it was actually contemplating my words.
Then the warp gate collapsed, folding into nothing with a thunderclap that echoed across the broken street and ashen world.
Silence followed. A deafening silence.
Or at least it was silent to me, because it looked like some of the other hunters nearby, were screaming.
My body felt tired, heavy.
I finally let myself fall forward into the ash.
I think I need a vacation.