The war did not begin with a formal declaration or a grand, sweeping speech. It began with the sky tearing open.
Dawn had just begun to paint the sprawling spires and crystalline bridges of Hybrid Zone One. As the largest settlement in the network, it was a breathtaking testament to coexistence, housing millions of entities from across the fractured cosmos. But serenity is fragile.
At exactly sunrise, the clouds did not part; they shattered.
Kael'thar's zealots—the primordial enforcers who violently rejected their master's newfound uncertainty—bled through the ragged tears in the suppressed realities. They descended like a localized apocalypse. Their physical forms were fractal nightmares, twisted by eons of isolation into shifting, jagged geometries of light and shadow. They didn't move in formation, but their intent pulsed through the cosmic substrate with sickening synchronicity.
They had not come to "correct" the anomalies. They had come to erase them.
