The air in the Northern Capital was crisp, carrying the heavy, sweet scent of Glazed Snow-Pears and grilled meats from the gas-lit stalls lining the cobblestone promenades. High above, the skyline was a jagged silhouette of clockwork towers and steam-belching chimneys, a Victorian-era marvel fueled by modern mana-cores. Two men, Kael and Jaxon, walked briskly through the crowd, their heavy wool overcoats flapping against their legs. They were journalists, men who made their living documenting the "Script" of the world, but today, the ink was running thin.
"The wire just went dead for three minutes, Jaxon," Kael whispered, biting into a steaming skewer of honey-glazed boar. The fat dripped onto the stone, freezing instantly. "Then a single ping came through from the Eastern Continent. The aether-meters hit a spike we haven't seen in a century. Analysts suspect it's a 'Level 6' Causality."
Jaxon stopped mid-step, his wooden skewer nearly slipping from his gloved hand. He looked up at the Great Clocktower; its gears seemed to stutter for a fraction of a second. "What?! A Level 6? I haven't heard that classification used in ten years—not since the Great Erasure of the Southern Isles. That's not just a disaster, Kael... that's a Revision. It means the world's narrative is being rewritten at the source."
Before Jaxon could finish, the streetlamps flickered with a violent violet hue. Their handheld receivers—brass-encased mana-comms—vibrated so violently that the glass screens shattered, spraying shards onto the slushy ground.
"Jaxon... wait," Kael stammered, staring at the dead, smoking tech. "It's not just the East. Look." He pointed North, where the sky over Frost-Bite Peak was no longer blue or black. It was bruising—a deep, sickly purple-black, like a fresh bruise on the fabric of reality. "The sensor at the Peak just hit the same frequency. The sky is bleeding over the mountains."
Fear, cold and sharp, gripped the street. The heavy iron bells of the capital began to toll a rhythmic warning. The reporters didn't finish their meal. Terrified of the "Coordinated Erasure" occurring on two continents at once, they tossed their nearly full skewers into a nearby cast-iron bin and vanished into the thickening fog, desperate to find a way out of the city before the border-wards were sealed.
Beneath the glow of a flickering, salt-crusted streetlamp, sitting on a piece of soggy, frozen cardboard in the mouth of a damp alleyway, was Arthur. His shirt was little more than a collection of half-torn rags, his skin a pale blue from the biting frost that settled on the brickwork like a shroud. Once a name that commanded respect, he was now a "Null"—a ghost in the machine of a Victorian world that only valued those who could fuel its gears with mana.
"Another one... one more causality," Arthur sighed, his teeth chattering a frantic, rhythmic beat against the silence. He watched the panicked crowds in the distance. "If this continues, the planet won't last a decade. Like it matters to me... forget a decade, if I don't find a place to rest tonight, this cold will definitely make me leave my body. The 'Script' is ending, but I'm just a footnote they're erasing first."
His stomach let out a sharp, painful growl that seemed to echo off the damp alley walls. His eyes drifted to the trash bin where the reporters had thrown the Nordic Honey-Glazed Boar. In this part of the city, that dish was the daily gold of the middle class—succulent, sugar-crusted meat that people traveled across provinces just to scent.
"If only I could eat it," Arthur thought, gulping down a mouthful of cold, thin saliva.
He had predicted their wastefulness; the wealthy always feared the unknown more than they loved their bread. He scrambled toward the bin on hands and knees, his frozen fingers clawing the skewers out from atop the frost. "Finally," he breathed, the steam of the meat hitting his face like a miracle.
SNATCH.
A stray hound, a gaunt beast with ribs showing through matted fur, bolted past with the speed of a predator and ripped the meat from the sticks. Arthur lunged, but his legs, numb and devoid of the mana-circulation that protected others from the cold, failed him. He collapsed into the icy slush, watching his only hope for a warm meal vanish into the dark, steam-filled vents of the backstreet.
"Even the beasts are faster than a Null," he rasped, his voice cracking like dry parchment.
With no other choice, he dragged himself toward his usual food source—the industrial dustbins behind the central market where the heavy steam-pipes provided a modicum of warmth. After a frantic, desperate search through frozen rinds and bitter vegetable husks, he found a crust of blackened rye bread and a small, discarded jar with a smear of greyish protein paste at the bottom. He sat back in the deep shadows of a brick buttress, dipping the hard bread into the paste and chewing slowly, forcing the grit down his throat.
"Not the best," he muttered, leaning his head against the freezing, soot-stained wall. "But always edible."
Arthur had just finished licking the last smear of the grey paste from his fingers when the heavy clanking of enchanted metal and the low, thrumming hum of high-density mana broke the silence. Two men stepped into the light of the market's rear entrance, their presence radiating a localized heat that made the frost on the nearby bricks melt and hiss into steam.
They were Hunters, the celebrated protagonists of this steam-powered era, draped in leather and brass armor etched with glowing blue runes.
"Check the seal on the Phase-Shift Plate, Leo," the taller one said, his voice echoing with a metallic resonance. He adjusted a breastplate made of Liquid-Cinder Alloy, which glowed with a faint, rhythmic orange pulse. "If that Level 6 Causality rips open, we aren't just dealing with Class-A shadows. We're talking about Transfigured Humans—beings whose DNA has been rewritten by the leak. You need your armor's 'Temporal Anchor' active or you'll be edited out of existence the moment you step into the fog."
The younger hunter, Leo, was checking a pair of Gravitational Gauntlets that hissed with pressurized steam. With a sharp click, the gauntlets engaged, and the air around his fists began to distort, lifting small pebbles and trash off the ground in a localized zero-G field. "Relax, I've got my 'Spatial Slash' at Level 4 now. And my Cryo-Neural Scythe is fully charged with S-Rank crystals. I'm more worried about the beasts. They say the 'Ink-Born' wolves don't just kill you; they delete your history from the minds of everyone who ever knew you."
Arthur watched them from the darkness of his cardboard shelter, his eyes reflecting the neon glow of their gear. A 'Temporal Anchor.' 'Spatial Slashes.' To him, these weren't just tools; they were the weapons of a species that had evolved past him.
"Must be nice," Arthur whispered to himself, huddling deeper into his torn shirt. "To have enough mana to keep the air warm around you. To have a scythe that can cut reality while I can barely cut through this bread."
He felt no envy—only a deep, exhausted sense of neglect. He was a Null, a human-shaped hole in the world's power structure. He knew that when the Causality fully opened, the Hunters would be the ones to fight for the "Script," while the "Negatives" like him would be the first ones to be "erased" or turned into mindless thralls.
"If the monsters are coming, this market is a graveyard," he muttered, his mind spinning with survival instincts. "I need to move. Somewhere deep. Maybe the basement of the abandoned textile factory near the docks."
He stood up, his joints popping like dry twigs. He didn't care about the raid. "Safety first. And then... I need a blanket," he said, eyeing the sprawling, fog-covered city. "The Causality might kill the world in ten years, but if I don't find a way to trap my own body heat, this 'Revision' won't even need monsters to finish me off."
Arthur moved through the shadows of the outskirts until he found it: a skeletal remains of a Victorian-style manor, its grand bay windows shattered like jagged teeth and its ivy-covered stone walls crumbling. Inside, tucked beneath a rotted oak floorboard in what used to be a nursery, he found his treasure—a heavy, moth-eaten wool blanket. It smelled of damp earth and forgotten years, but as he wrapped it around his shivering frame, it felt like the finest silk.
He huddled in the corner of a pantry, pulling the wool up to his chin. "This will do," he whispered, his eyes heavy with exhaustion. "Let the heroes have their glory. I just want the warmth."
Miles away, the atmosphere at Frost-Bite Peak had turned into a literal slaughterhouse. Led by Commander Vane, an A-Rank Hunter whose skin was partially grafted with Bio-Reactive Steel, the strike team moved with lethal, mechanical precision through a castle that seemed to be melting into black fluid.
"Focus fire on the left flank!" Vane roared, his voice amplified by his Sonic-Pulse Lungs. He swung a massive Thermal Claymore, the blade vibrating at ten thousand cycles per second, cauterizing a pack of six-legged beasts into ash before they could even screech.
"Commander, the Transfigured Humans are evolving mid-combat!" shouted a scout, her eyes glowing neon blue as she used Aura-Sight. "They're absorbing the mana from our discarded shells! They're rewriting their own combat logs!"
"It doesn't matter!" Vane countered, his boots crushing the skull of a chimeric horror. "We push to the castle. That Gothic monstrosity at the summit is the source. If we take the Boss, we stabilize the region. Leave nothing alive!"
The team moved like a harvesting machine, their high-tier abilities—Molecular Combustion and Plasma Chains—turning the battlefield into a strobe light of carnage. They were clearing the path to the Boss Residence with arrogant ease, convinced they were the peak of existence.
Back in the city, however, the air suddenly grew thick. Not with cold, but with a terrifying Stillness.
In the Association's mobile command center, the Mana-Fault Readers—specialists trained to detect the 'cracks' in reality—screamed in unison as their brass needles snapped off the dials.
"Report!" the Director barked. "Is the Peak destabilizing?"
"No, sir!" the lead Reader gasped, his face draining of color. "It's not the Peak. Something... something else has just opened. Coordinates: Sector 4. The residential outskirts."
"Give me a classification! Is it another Level 6?"
The Reader stared at his monitor, which was now showing a flat, horizontal line that defied all known laws of energy. "Sir... I can't give it a level. The sensors aren't reading it as a Gate. It's as if a piece of the world was just deleted and replaced with something... older. It's the most violent distortion in recorded history. If the Peak is a storm, this is the End of the Ocean."
Inside the abandoned manor, Arthur was jolted awake. The moth-eaten blanket suddenly felt weightless. He looked down and saw the floorboards turning into a translucent, shimmering grey. There was no sound. No roaring monsters. Just a hum that vibrated in his very marrow.
"What... what is this?" Arthur stammered, trying to stand, but his legs were caught in a swirl of air that felt like liquid glass.
The walls of the house began to peel away, not falling down, but drifting up into a sky that had turned a color he couldn't name. The reality around him was folding in on itself, like a piece of paper being crumpled by a giant hand.
"Help!" he cried out, but his voice was swallowed by the sudden, deafening silence.
The "Greatest Gate" didn't just open; it claimed him. With a sudden, violent lurch, the house and Arthur were pulled into the center of the fault. He wasn't being taken to a dungeon to fight for his life—he was being pulled into the True Source, a place where the rules of Hunters and Mana meant absolutely nothing.
Arthur vanished into the shimmering fracture, leaving behind nothing but the cold wind and the distant, useless sounds of the heroes' battle.