The world ended quietly.
Not with fire, not with war, but with a whisper.
No one knew when the first Spirits came. Some claimed they were grief with nowhere else to go. Others said they were nightmares given shape, memories that refused to die. What mattered was this: they fed on fear. And fear was endless.
Cities fell. Nations fractured. Humanity would have been swallowed whole—
if not for the Nocturnes.
---
They were the broken ones. The chosen.
Humans whose bodies twisted when touched by the dark, granting them the ability to channel EN—Emotional Negativity.
Fear, Sadness, Anger, Despair: emotions that weakened ordinary people became fuel for Nocturnes.
That fuel was measured as EN (Emotional Negative Energy)—a volatile current that burned through veins like liquid fire.
But every drop carried risk: push too far, and the body began to fracture under it. The soul cracked. They called it Corruption.
A Nocturne's strength was chained to their downfall. EN gave them power to fight Spirits… but the Corruption Gauge marked how close they were to becoming one.
---
Some used EN gently, like medicine.
Mourners, who turned grief into shields of calm.
Ravagers, who sharpened anger into claws and blades.
Despairweavers, who stitched sorrow into illusions.
And then there were the rare few—those whose gifts broke every mold.
---
In a dead city, under a sky of ash, a man walked alone. His eyes cracked with violet light, his shadow twitching as though it carried a will of its own.
Where others consumed fear, he built with it.
Where others carried sorrow, he wove it into labyrinths.
When the swarm came for him, he didn't fight. He designed. Streets bent into impossible corridors. Windows screamed with faces that were not there. His enemies drowned in nightmares shaped from their own panic, until terror itself devoured them whole.
And when the city was silent again, the survivors whispered a name.
Fear Architect.
---
Chiel Veylen remembered another life.
A life of deadlines, neon lights, sleepless nights. A life spent designing stages of horror for players who could always turn the screen off.
Now, in this world, there was no pause button. No escape. Only EN, Corruption, and the abyss waiting at the end of the Gauge.
And him.
The deeper he built, the stronger he became.
But every labyrinth he shaped brought him closer to something else—
something watching.
Something whispering in the dark.
And as his cracked eyes glowed brighter, one truth bled into the silence:
Fear had chosen its Architect.
And the world would never sleep again.