They called it salvation.
A coordinated strike executed across continents—nations aligned, governments conscripted, and every city's underworld purged with surgical ruthlessness. In just forty-eight hours, villain dens, rebel cells, and rogue awakeners were silenced in flame and steel.
There was no hesitation. No room for mercy.The Association, once fractured by internal politics and courtroom squabbles, now moved with terrifying cohesion. From F-rank rookies to the legendary SSS elite, all ranks converged beneath one unified directive. Not to save the world.
But to isolate the one anomaly they feared the most. The one they could never predict. The one they only recognized by color.
Crimson-black.
He had never issued a warning. Never declared intent. His name was never whispered across battlegrounds, because he had never fought where witnesses survived. And yet, his presence lingered like a prophecy.
They built walls of mana, towers that choked aether flow, and barriers so dense they bent the atmosphere itself. Every city official called it a fortress. But they were wrong. It was already a grave.
Nightmare arrived without signal. Not because he was stealthy—but because the world around him simply ceased to acknowledge the rules. Light faded prematurely. Time grew elastic. And no one could point to the moment they first saw him.
There was no dramatic entrance. No cinematic flare. Just a dawning awareness. A quiet paralysis of the soul.
The explosion wasn't a sound—it was an absence. The sky didn't burn—it recoiled. The world didn't cry out—it forgot how to move.
Color bled across the horizon. Deeper than void, sharper than blood. A chromatic wound that didn't expand—it consumed.
Two hundred and forty kilometers of land were swallowed not in fire, but in memoryless erasure.
Steel turned to vapor. Towers unraveled into grains finer than ash. Roads bent upward like paper and dissolved midair. At the perimeter, elite-ranked heroes prepared defenses only to vanish before their spells even began casting.
There were no screams. No last stands. They weren't defeated. They were omitted. Artifacts shattered in silence.
Legendary formations collapsed before they could be named. Even the most feared warriors didn't fall.
They ceased.
The only ones who lived were five young heroes hurled from the epicenter by dying hands—SSS-Ranked mentors who had made their final decision. A desperate choice. Not to win. But to preserve the future.
Those five awoke to silence. Their wounds were severe, but their memories were worse. There was no city anymore.
This was no battlefield. Only a horizon of blackened glass—molten, smooth, and endless. And at the center stood a man.
He neither looked around nor acknowledged the ruins. His posture betrayed no triumph, no remorse. Just stillness, as if even thought had stopped trying to reach him.
Around him, hundreds survived—not because they fought well, but because they no longer fought at all. Civilians, deserters, heroes who collapsed in surrender… he passed them without pause.
To him, they no longer existed. They had relinquished relevance. He rose. Weightlessly and Slowly. As if the atmosphere itself had deemed him untouchable. He disappeared into cloud—not vanishing like a ghost, but ascending like a truth too vast for the world to carry.
Silence followed.
And a world that finally understood what EX truly meant. The world didn't end that day. It simply stopped pretending it could survive.
Governments tried to contain the fallout. Hero Association officials issued sanitized press statements—"collateral containment," "rogue mana surge," "controlled discharge." But satellite footage told another story.
A city? Gone.
Two hundred and forty kilometers of life—erased without residue. The census department broke down when faced with the math.
No injured, No missing, Just Erased.
And then came the aftermath. Not the rise of villains, but their starvation. The black markets collapsed. Dungeon circuits, once sustained by hero oversight, withered. Economies that relied on bounties and relics turned cannibalistic.
But worse than the politics, worse than the economics, was the silence inside the rifted lands.
The dungeons were left unchecked. Most of the Hero's died. Especially, the higher Ranking ones. The SSS-Rank gates were left unguarded.
Social media broke open. Every feed, every trending post, every whispered conversation was stained by one name:
Nightmare.
But it wasn't just fear anymore.
"The Hero Association provoked him."
"They sacrificed our cities for pride."
"How many innocents died for their failure?"
What was once blind belief began to crack. Not because people loved the villain. But because they hated the ones who claimed to protect them… and failed.
***
The last five SSS heroes never gave a statement.
They didn't post, They didn't argue, They vanished. But behind the world's silence, their rage had not burned out. It had gone inward. molten, slow, and patient. They remembered the moment they were thrown a like cargo.
Watched their mentors smile with blood in their teeth. Watched the world disappear in crimson-black light.
They were Powerless. They were Helpless.
And worst of all—
Spared.
That hurts the most.
***
Now, they stood in a subterranean lab buried beneath the western edge of the Great desert. Nothing around but scorched dust and wind. The lab hummed softly. White lighting. Mana-sealed doors.
The lab was a in a secret location. Guarded by the smartest mind in the world, Madelina Know. An S-Rank hero in power but the strongest in terms of intelligence. She changed the whole world single handedly with her inventions. No body could match her in terms of intellect.
Madeline stared at the screen. Her coat hung off one shoulder. Her eyes hadn't rested in days.
The others stood behind her, arms crossed. Eyes dark. Some still healing.
Roughly one month ago, Madelina had come to them wite an offer. To kill Nightmare mare before he was one. They didn't understand at first but later realised what she was talking about.
They had been preparing ever since. Well, it was mostly Madelina the others just did some light chores. They'd refined the temporal folding array. Finalized anchor calibration to prevent soul rejection.
Mapped the timelines precisely enough to land within a three-day range.
They would arrive 33 years in the past.
Back when he was still a nobody, find him for who he was before becoming Nightmare and kill him.
"We find him. We end it before it begins again."
That was the plan. Six women and along with the world who had failed to kill a man at his strongest… were now going to try again when he was weakest.
But none of them called it revenge. That word was too small. To them, this wasn't about emotion. It was a correction. A desperate, unholy undoing of the moment the world broke.