"I think the sky's bleeding..."
An old man said it first, standing outside a small noodle shop downtown. He clutched a styrofoam bowl in one hand, chopsticks shaking in the other, eyes fixed upward like he'd forgotten the food entirely.
At first, nobody paid attention.
There was just a hum—so quiet it was easy to think you were imagining it. A faint vibration at the edge of hearing, like an engine idling somewhere far away.
The birds stopped singing, and dogs started barking at nothing. Phones buzzed without incoming calls, and televisions flickered with static in living rooms, convenience stores, and anywhere a screen was left on.
Then, without any warning, the sky split open like glass under pressure.
A green light—soft and ghostly—leaked from the cracks.
People stopped in the middle of the streets. Conversations died midsentence. Cars stalled, horns blaring into silence. Children looked up, their eyes reflecting an unfamiliar world.
A woman held his daughter in fear as they looked at the cracking sky.
"Mommy, is the world going to end?" the girl asked in fear.
The woman didn't answer. No one else did either.
The same scenario happened everywhere. Be it at the beaches of California or at the top of the Himalayas.
It was too bright yet too creepy as it stretched from one side of the world to the other.
Even the most brilliant minds in the world had no idea what was happening. Everyone had the same thought that it was the end of the world.
All eyes watched in silence. Some people trembled, while some kneeling and praying.
Some were smiling as they believed the world ending meant their suffering would end as well.
The world changed before their eyes.
The day came to be known as The Shattering.
At first, it wasn't violent.
The light came in waves, descending from the sky like a mist made of stars. It touched the surface of the Earth gently—almost lovingly—like it was claiming what had once been its own.
The land responded.
Within days, everything started to change.
New mountain ranges rose overnight, tearing through old roads and farmlands. Islands appeared in the middle of open oceans like they'd always been there. Forests burst out of parking lots. Deserts swallowed entire cities without warning.
Even the air shimmered differently—colors deeper, sharper—like the whole world had been repainted by a hand that didn't care what had been there before.
The Earth was rebuilding itself.
Scientists barely had time to issue warnings before the final broadcast from New York cut out.
"It's like the world's been painted over," someone said right before the screen went black.
They weren't wrong.
Earth's size had grown—massively—twenty times larger than before. New continents formed. Old maps became worthless overnight.
The old Earth wasn't just changing.
It was being erased.
Then came the monsters.
The first generation wasn't what anyone expected. No towering behemoths. No dragons.
Just... rabbits.
And chickens.
And sheep.
It was almost laughable—until they started to kill people.
The rabbits were the first real threat.
They weren't enormous—maybe the size of a large dog—but their speed was unnatural, and their claws could tear through Kevlar. Their eyes shimmered gold like heated glass, and they hunted in swarms.
The chickens came next. Taller than wolves, bone-light but wired with muscle. They shrieked as they moved, leaping rooftops and slashing through flesh with curved talons sharp enough to sheer metal.
Then came the sheep—heavier than SUVs, packed with mutated muscle. They crashed through walls, upturned armored vehicles, and trampled civilians and soldiers alike beneath hooves like concrete sledgehammers.
By the end of the first week, the death toll had reached over seventy thousand. And the monsters kept coming.
Still, humanity didn't fall overnight.
At first, the soldiers fought back—and they actually won more battles than they lost.
Standard weapons still worked on the monsters, especially when they fought in organized squads. Some cities reacted fast enough to clear out the early infestations, setting up defense lines and refugee zones.
For a little while, it looked like humanity might have a chance.
But it didn't last.
There were just too many breaches. Too many monsters pouring in from too many directions. Every day brought something new—creatures that mutated faster, hit harder, moved smarter.
The world couldn't keep up.
Governments had to make impossible choices. Which cities to protect. Which ones to abandon.
The capital zones and major military bases were secured first. The rural towns, the scattered villages, the places too far from anything important… they were left behind.
They called it "tactical reallocation."
The people who lived through it called it betrayal.
And trust in world powers didn't just erode—it shattered.
Borders started to blur. Some neighboring cities, even across different countries, joined forces just to survive.
Others turned inward, cutting ties with the outside world. Treaties meant nothing anymore. Alliances crumbled faster than anyone could rebuild them.
Even the strongest armies couldn't predict where the next breach would open—or how bad it would be when it did.
Humanity's strength wasn't enough.
Not anymore.
That's when the first Tuners appeared.
Nobody really knows how the first one awakened. The records are scattered—lost in the chaos, twisted by fear and half-remembered stories.
Some say it happened in the ruins of Busan when a boy crushed a collapsing wall with his bare hands to save his sister.
Others say it was a girl in Morocco who, cornered by a monster, lifted a car with a wave of her hand and slammed it down to block its path.
But no matter where it happened, the signs were always the same.
A burning light.
A strange new symbol, glowing on the back of the right hand—a Mark.
Proof that they had awakened a Force.
And with it came power. Real power. The kind that could change everything.
The most widely accepted story of the first awakening happened during a breach near the ruins of old Moscow.
A herd of mutated elk had broken through the northeast perimeter—monstrous things, their antlers twisted with crystal, their hooves striking sparks from the cracked pavement with every step.
Soldiers rushed to stop them, throwing together barricades from burnt-out cars and sandbags. Civilians screamed from half-collapsed apartment blocks as the beasts tore down the main boulevard.
Caught among the evacuees was a man in his thirties—Pavel Morozov, once a mechanic, now just another soul trying to outrun death.
He had no weapon. No armor. Just his bare fists, a racing heart, and the raw panic climbing up his spine.
One of the elk locked onto him.
It bucked once, scattering soldiers like paper. Then it lowered its jagged antlers and charged straight at him.
"Move!" someone shouted.
But Pavel couldn't. His legs wouldn't listen.
He clenched his fists—desperate, terrified—and that's when it happened.
Pain lanced through his right arm like fire under the skin.
He gasped, falling to one knee. Light burst across the back of his hand—searing, alive.
A Mark had appeared.
It was sharp and circular, burning bright orange against his skin. Etched inside the ring was the symbol of Fire—a jagged flame curling upward, simple but fierce, as if carved by heat itself.
Beneath the symbol of flame, smaller and just as bright, was a number: 01.
The proof.
Something inside Pavel Morozov had awakened.
His palm burned with fierce heat—but it didn't hurt. It wasn't pain. It was power, alive under his skin, thrumming like a second heartbeat.
"What the hell is that on your hand?!" a soldier shouted from behind cover.
"I... I don't know!" Pavel yelled back—but his voice cracked, and his gaze locked on the approaching elk.
It was too close. He couldn't run. Couldn't think.
So he did the only thing that made sense in a world that no longer did. He aimed. He raised his burning palm, heart hammering, and thought of fire.
Not a prayer. Not a wish. A command.
The result was instant.
A fireball was shot from his hand—wild, bright, and hot enough to melt the front of a car. The elk shrieked as the fire caught its chest and drove it backward, crashing it through a rusted-out storefront.
Everyone nearby froze.
Even Pavel.
He could only stare at his burning hand.
"What... is happening?"
Before he could even process his thoughts, another elk charged.
However, it was as if something had whispered to him. Pavel moved his hand once again and another fireball shot out. The beast exploded into embers mid-stride.
The watching soldiers didn't speak at first. Then one of them muttered,
"Holy shit…"
Another lowered his rifle. "He has a superpower?"
"That's not possible. He's just a guy—"
"But..."
Word spread like wildfire.
The footage came from a soldier's helmet camera and was broadcast across a secure evacuation channel.
By the next day, every surviving major Bastion had seen it—a man with no weapon, no armor, standing alone in the street, unleashing real power for the first time. Like something straight out of a comic book.
That moment changed something deep inside people. More began to awaken.
When the Mark flared into their skin, they didn't just panic anymore.
They stayed.
They fought.
They remembered what they had seen—the man who stood his ground—and some of them, somehow, managed to do the same.
They were known as the Tuners—those who could control the Forces—and became humanity's first defense.
Their powers weren't confined to fire or lightning.
Some bent gravity like thread. Others molded shadows into blades. There were those who turned skin to stone, summoned constructs of glass, or vanished from sight altogether.
The Forces, it turned out, were vast. Elemental. Abstract. Conceptual. Physical.
Some claimed they heard whispers when they fought—like the Force itself spoke through them.
Others just followed the feeling in their bones or mimicking superheroes.
But all of them shared one truth. They were no longer bound by the laws of the old world. And they would be the reason humanity survived.
But for every Tuner that rose, there were thousands who never awakened.
The Untuned.
Ordinary humans. Powerless in a world that no longer obeyed human logic.
They became normal people or refugees, servants, and worse of all, targets.
The world had splintered into something new.
Some cities, the strongest and best defended, became Bastions—massive fortress-cities where humanity could still cling to survival.
Outside their walls, smaller groups formed Factions—bands of survivors, soldiers, scientists, and pioneers—each with their own goals, rules, and ways to survive the new world.
The powerful ruled, the weak obeyed, and the old world faded into rumor.
But that was a hundred years ago.
Now, the world had adapted.
Not rebuilt, not restored—but stabilized. Bastions stood where old cities once crumbled, fortified, and humming with power.
Most had grown into actual governments. Trade routes were reestablished. Technology hadn't vanished; it had evolved to meet the world's new shape.
Drones circled perimeter zones, powered rails cut across the wilderness, and defense towers scanned for monster traces in real time.
Most people lived packed into designated regions separated by walls within the Bastions, watched over by Tuners who served as soldiers and enforcers.
Life wasn't easy.
It was strict, rationed, and full of rules.
Comfort was a luxury few ever tasted.
But that safety only existed inside the walls of the Middle and Inner Regions.
And just outside of those walls, in the Outer Region... people like Raith existed.
He was sitting in the corner of a transport truck, the one he had been in too many times. He would sit in the same pose every single time.
Back hunched, in the corner with his arms always close to his body. His eyes were low and he would sway with every bump in the road.
There were twenty Untuned, including him. Boys, girls, some younger and some older. The same thing about all of them other than being Untuned, they were all dressed in the rough gray jumpsuits.
None of them spoke. None of them needed to.
They were Untuned.
The truck's interior was clean, with brushed metal walls and a low ceiling for support. Air vents quietly circulated recycled air throughout the cabin.
Raith could see parts of the city through the narrow openings in the walls. Far ahead, Haven Bastion loomed—its towers sturdy and cold beneath the clouds.
Along the skyline, Field Stabilizers rose like crooked spires, humming faintly with a power that kept the chaos of the outside world at bay.
But Haven Bastion wasn't for people like Raith.
He had no powerful family. No Mark. No rights.
He'd been left outside the wall as an infant, wrapped in cloth that smelled like burnt fabric and old blood. No one ever came to claim him, so he was taken by the soldiers.
He was then processed by the Outer Camp, assigned a number before a name, and raised alongside fifty others in Camp 07, on the far southern edge of the Bastion.
The first ten years were routine: nutrient packs, recitation drills, and labor preparation.
But after the first scan came back blank—no Force response, no resonance—his status shifted.
From "Orphan" to "Untuned."
The second scan came at twelve. The third at fifteen. Each time, the same result: no Mark.
That was all it took.
No Mark meant no Force.
No Force meant no use.
By sixteen, Raith was reassigned to the Outer Labor Sector—not expelled from Haven Bastion, but pushed to the city's outer belts, where the Untuned were packed into tight dormitories and assigned to "low-priority labor service."
He mined raw Force Crystal shards from the safer edges of the Fields. Hauled reinforcement materials to frontier barricades that separated human zones from the monster territory. Cleared debris from abandoned checkpoints and maintenance hubs no longer considered worth a Tuner's time.
It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't safe.
But it kept the Bastion running.
And for the Untuned... that was enough.
Now, at seventeen, Raith was on his way to Extraction Sector 7-C—a labor deployment zone infamous for one thing:
Its proximity to the Shatterveil Field.
Two Bastion soldiers stood near the front—half-watching the cargo, half-talking between themselves.
"You know where they're sending this group?" one asked, voice low and casual.
The other shrugged. "Extraction Sector 7-C."
"Seriously? Does it mean they're being sent into the Shatterveil?"
"Yeah. Drift zone. Multi-Force contamination."
The first soldier leaned back against the wall, arms folded. "Untuned sent to mine shards in an unstable Field. Sounds about right."
"Perimeter work only," the second said. "No deep Field runs. Just surface skimming. Safer than it sounds—as long as they stay in the Safe Zone"
One of the soldiers snorted, tapping the side of his helmet. "Surface work's safe enough. Safer than starving, anyway."
He didn't even glance back at the Untuned crammed into the truck.
Raith heard it all. So did everyone else. No one spoke. The truck kept moving. He shifted in place, chains tugging tight as he leaned back against the wall.
He was lean. Wiry. The kind of strength that came from doing too much with too little for too long. His hair was matted, dark brown, and uneven from a field cut. His face bore no scars—only silence.
His left eye twitched when the truck hit a pothole. A girl across from him flinched. Her wrists were thinner than his. She couldn't have been more than sixteen.
Raith looked away.
The transport truck slowed. The brakes hissed. Boots crunched outside. Voices murmured. Raith knew that the exit gate was close.
Raith exhaled once. Not because he feared what was coming. But because he didn't believe in miracles.
Not for people like him. Not for the forgotten. Not for the Untuned.
But that belief was about to break.
And when it did, so would everything else.