It began in the year 2020. The world watched in horror as a strange illness swept across continents, its symptoms deceptively mundane: fevers, aching limbs, shortness of breath. They called it COVID—grappled with masks, lockdowns, and whispered panic—but they were wrong.

  It wasn’t a virus.

  It was mana.

  And it was only the beginning.

  Mana sickness crept into the world like a poison in the air—silent, invisible, alive. At first, it mimicked a common flu. But those who were most sensitive, most attuned to the shift in the world's energy, began to rot from the inside out. Livers blackened. Hearts withered. Lungs filled with something not quite fluid, not quite flesh. Their eyes burned with unseen light, their skin blistered, their screams peeled the paint from the walls. There was no cure. Only death... or silence.

  Within a year, 20% of the world’s population was dead.

  Some died choking. Others clawed at their skin, trying to tear the burning magic from their blood. Hospitals became morgues. Streets ran red beneath flickering streetlights. No one knew what was happening—until it was far too late.

  And then came the portals.

  They did not open with thunder or glory. They tore. Like wet paper splitting at the seams of reality, they appeared in forests, oceans, the deepest deserts. Massive gashes in the sky that bled darkness and whispered in tongues no man should understand. They pulsed with a nauseating hum, a lullaby for the damned, drawing animals mad and killing plant life within miles. From them came more mana—thick, cloying, ever-churning. The air around them shimmered like oil on water. Sometimes, people who got too close simply evaporated, their forms unraveling thread by thread into the howling void.

  As the flood of magic rose, so too did the world twist.

  With enough exposure, some did not die.

  Some awakened.

  They called these people “The Hollowed”. The world, desperate to understand, began to categorize it. Each individual who survived mana saturation began to develop Classes—predetermined, unchanging paths etched into their very souls. These weren’t skills learned through practice. They were branded into the body and mind. Some awakened with the power to manipulate fire. Others could move without sound, strike with unnatural precision, or command the bones of the dead. No one chose their Class. It chose them.

  Their powers were ranked by intensity:

  D Grade – Barely above normal. Useful. Dangerous. Disposable.

  C Grade – Capable. Survivable.

  B Grade – Powerful. Military grade. Often watched.

  A Grade – Terrifying. Controlled. Heavily regulated.

  S Grade – Unknown. Unreadable. Gods in human skin.

  Only a handful ever reached S Grade. These were not heroes. They were anomalies—walking calamities with unique abilities that defied classification, reshaping the battlefield, and sometimes… reality.

  The world had changed.

  The age of man had ended.

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  This was the rise of something else.

  Something born from mana, death, and the abyss beyond the gates.

  The world was no longer sick.

  It was transforming.

  The first portal was a curiosity.

  The tenth, a pattern.

  The hundredth… a sentence.

  Scientists failed to understand them. Priests failed to banish them. Governments failed to hide them. The gates—those pulsing, jagged rends in the fabric of the world—could not be closed by will, prayer, or science. But there was a way. An instinct buried deep in the soul of the awakened whispered of it:

  Raid the gate. Kill the horror that sleeps within. Seal the wound with blood.

  Inside each gate was a pocket of twisted reality—nightmarish dungeons stitched from madness and memory, where time bent and light fled. The deeper one ventured, the worse it became. And

  at the center, always, was the source. A boss—a thing that did not belong on Earth. Something wrong.

  Those who failed to close the gates in time... paid.

  After a set time—seven days, thirteen, sometimes less—the gate would begin to pulse. Like a heartbeat. Fast. Loud. Furious. Then, without warning, the wound split wide.

  And the monsters came through.

  Not beasts.

  Not animals.

  But nightmares given flesh.

  Vampires with glowing eyes and wet, red mouths that whispered names they had no right to know.

  Kitsune, their illusions perfect, smiling with a thousand faces stitched from the corpses of loved ones.

  Shapeshifters who tore themselves apart and rebuilt from writhing bone and shadow. Werewolves, massive and gaunt, their howls warping glass, their claws dragging souls behind them like toys.

  Skinwalkers, wearing the skin of the dead like cloaks, grinning with stolen voices.

  Djinn, made of fire and salt and spite, granting twisted wishes before incinerating the beggar. Wendigos, emaciated horrors with eyes that wept hunger, gnawing the bones of screaming prey. Ghouls, bloated and pale, who ate children whole beneath the floorboards.

  Khan Worms, massive and eyeless, their segments pulsing as they burst from the earth, coating everything in acidic bile.

  Wraiths, silent and formless, draining heat, light, and hope.

  They came howling from the gates, drowning the world in screams and smoke. Cities burned in the span of a breath. Streets slicked with blood. Survivors were torn limb from limb, or worse—taken alive.

  These were not mindless beasts. They hunted. They remembered. Some spoke.

  They would spill out, wave after wave, until someone—anyone—rose to stop them.

  And only death could seal the gate once it opened.

  Sometimes, heroes emerged. Awakened warriors in bloodied armor. Mages who had bartered their sanity for power. Assassins who moved like shadows, leaving trails of mutilated corpses. They fought. They burned their lives away to push back the tide.

  But they were never in time to save everyone.

  Only to avenge.

  And for every gate that was closed, two more would open somewhere else.

  The world, once bright and arrogant in its ignorance, now lived in fear of the pulse.

  Of the flickering shimmer in the air.

  Of the silence before the scream.

  It wasn’t an invasion.

  It was evolution, written in blood.

  This was no longer Earth.

  It was a hunting ground.