Descent of the Unseen Shades
Volume 1: Shadows in the Rift
Prologue
The sky cracked.
Not with thunder, but with light.
A violent rift split across the stars, swallowing galaxies and bleeding colors that didn't exist in any known spectrum. It was as if the cosmos had torn open a scar too deep to mend. Suns collapsed without warning. Planets blinked out of existence, replaced by fragments of ancient ruins and landscapes foreign to both man and machine. Time convulsed. Reality twisted. And from this rupture, a new nightmare was born.
This was the day the universe broke.
This was the Descent of the Unknown.
What began as tremors in the skies soon became global hysteria. People vanished mid-step, only to reappear weeks later in strange realms—deserts made of crystal, forests lit by floating embers, cities suspended upside-down. Others awoke in lands with no stars, surrounded by things that whispered their names without mouths. Entire civilizations from alternate worlds came crashing into Earth's timeline, blending together in chaos.
Borders were meaningless now. Timezones collapsed. Calendars could no longer be trusted. The sun might rise in one part of the world and never set in another.
The dead returned first.
They emerged not with rotting flesh or hollow eyes, but as clear and complete as the day they left the world. Their presence chilled the air. They didn't shamble or cry. They stood.
They spoke.
They remembered.
"I was drowned. Tied to a stone and left in the river," said the first.
"I was betrayed. Poisoned during the feast meant to honor me," said another.
Their words were undeniable. People collapsed to their knees at the revelations. Secrets buried generations ago spilled into the streets, shattering families, kingdoms, and alliances. Some sought revenge. Others begged for forgiveness. But none could ignore them—for these were not spirits. These were the Returned.
But not all that crossed over spoke.
Some simply watched.
They lingered in doorways. Stared from alleys. Their forms shimmered like heat waves, colorless and yet present. They were not aggressive, not malevolent—but there was something wrong about their silence.
They came to be called the Unseen Shades.
The scholars and mystics scrambled to understand what was happening. Ancient texts from merged realms were unearthed. Prophecies once thought metaphorical were now studied as literal blueprints. The consensus was grim: reality itself had become a puzzle with missing and mismatched pieces.
As the year of tremors unfolded, humanity adapted as best it could. Magic, once a fantasy, now bloomed within certain bloodlines. Those attuned to the new harmonics of the world could manipulate elements, summon weapons, or even pierce through rifts in space. Cities became hybrid zones—technology fused with enchantment. Hovercrafts powered by dragon cores. Weapons that responded to thought.
But with power came war.
New factions rose. Old governments fell. Kingdoms that once ruled other worlds began to stake their claim on this one. Some people called it the Age of Integration.
Others called it the Beginning of the End.
At the end of the year, the tremors ceased. The universes stabilized into a strange and twisted whole. A new world was born—a stitched-together corpse of multiverses, pulsing with unstable energy.
In this world, the dead still walk.
And truth is no longer hidden.
But somewhere within the chaos, beyond the borders of broken nations and endless war, a single man stood apart.
He was not a king. Not a sorcerer. Not a chosen hero of prophecy.
He was a killer.
His name was St4.
Or rather... that's what they used to call him.
And in this new world of fused realms and broken fate, he would be forced to confront the ghosts of both others and his own past.
Because some Shades do more than watch.
Some follow.
And they only ever follow him.
Chapter 1: A Script With No Author
[0001 - Unknown Sector]
I opened my eyes.
The first thing I felt was silence. Not peace. Not calm. Just silence, suffocating and loud, like I'd fallen through a world that had forgotten how to breathe.
The second was the cold steel of my knife, still sheathed at my back. That meant I hadn't died. Yet.
Above me, a city floated upside-down—its skyscrapers rooted to the clouds, waterfalls cascading upward into nowhere. The streets I stood on were familiar. They used to be Sector V. Now it was a mess of neon shards and crawling vines, half-dissolved between two realities.
[You have entered a stabilized convergence zone.]
The voice wasn't real. Or maybe it was. I'd stopped differentiating between hallucination and information a long time ago.
I adjusted the sheath on my back. No contracts today. Not anymore.
"Still alive, KA?"
Rey's voice. Crackling over a channel that shouldn't work anymore.
"Barely," I replied.
[Dialogue detected. Identifying Subject: Rey - Former Handler]
I ignored the system. Whoever made it, whatever powered it, I had no interest in bending the knee.
"What do you see?" Rey asked.
"Truth," I muttered. "And it's ugly."
Below me, a crowd had gathered.
A man stood at the center, translucent and pale.
"I was buried alive by my wife," the ghost said. No emotion. Just facts.
Gasps rippled through the crowd. Then cries. Then anger.
I turned away. It wasn't my business. Not yet.
The Unseen Shades hadn't appeared. That was the real warning.
[Notice: You are being watched.]
Of course I am.
I moved along the rooftop, boots barely making a sound. This world had become a theater without an audience. Or maybe the audience was already dead.
That's when I saw it.
A flicker of something—not quite human, not quite shade. Just watching.
It stood on the next building. Eyes like pits of light. Robes fluttering in a wind that didn't exist.
It pointed at me.
[Shadeseer identified: Hostile intent unknown. Caution advised.]
"Noted."
I drew the dagger.
This wasn't about missions anymore. Not about money. The lines had vanished.
And I had a feeling I was the only one still reading the script of a story no longer being written.
My name is KA.
And they only follow me.
Chapter 2: A Name Buried
The guilds knew nothing of him. The sorcerers marked him as an anomaly—untouched by the fusion, yet wholly shaped by it. He had no aura. No divine trace. Just skill. And silence.
But the world had changed.
And it was watching him.
In a derelict cathedral turned trade hall, KA—his real name, not yet revealed—met a woman named Valea. Her eyes were silver. Her sword was older than steel. She could hear the dead. All of them.
"You walk like a killer but smell like a ghost," she told him.
"I walk because I survived."
"Survival doesn't explain why the Unseen Shades follow you."
He didn't answer.
Because he didn't know.
The Shades were different from the Returned. They did not speak. They did not beg.
They watched.
They waited.
And they only ever followed him.