It began with silence.
The kind of silence that doesn't belong in a city. One moment, horns blared, footsteps pounded, people argued over the crosswalk. The next, nothing.
That's what made me look up.
The sky had cracked. Not cloud, not lightning. A fracture—like a jagged scar across heaven itself. At first, people thought it was an eclipse or some military experiment. Phones went up, voices buzzed.
Then something fell through.
It hit the street like a meteor, flattening a car. The smoke cleared, and we saw it wasn't a rock. Too many limbs. Too many eyes. And when it moved, the screaming started.
The second one fell a block away. Then a third. Then the sky poured monsters like rain.
Chaos. Absolute chaos. Cars collided. Windows shattered as people rushed indoors. Someone next to me kept praying; someone else shoved past, trampling whoever was in the way.
I stood frozen with a paper cup of coffee in my hand, thinking: This isn't real. This is a movie. This can't be real.
And then the message appeared.
A glowing panel hovered in the air, right in front of my face.
> [System Initiated.]
[Welcome, Candidates.]
[Survive.]
That was it. No tutorial. No guide. Just one word that boiled down to: good luck, you're screwed.
The monster closest to me shrieked and lunged. My brain didn't think—my legs did. I ran, shoving through the crowd, the taste of coffee still bitter on my tongue.
Behind me, people were screaming. Bones breaking. Flesh tearing.
And the whole time, that glowing message stayed fixed in the corner of my vision.
> [Survive.]
---
That night, I hid in a half-collapsed bookstore with a dozen strangers. None of us slept. None of us knew what was happening. But every one of us had seen the same thing:
The cracks in the sky.
The monsters.
The floating words.
A man asked, trembling, "What do they want from us?"
Nobody answered.
Because the truth was, we all felt it: something was watching us.
And survival… was only the beginning.