The thing that emerged from the rift wasn't meant to exist in a world with geometry.
It stood—if standing was the right word for something that violated the concept of up and down—over five stories tall. Its body was a writhing mass of obsidian chitin that seemed to absorb light itself, plated with scales that breathed, expanding and contracting like a thousand diseased lungs. Where the plates separated, something wet and purple glistened underneath—not skin, but something that pulsed with its own nauseating rhythm.
Its head—heads—Christ, it had multiple heads, but they kept shifting, merging, splitting apart like a tumor that couldn't decide what kind of cancer it wanted to be. Eyes—dozens of them, hundreds maybe—opened and closed across its body at random. Not where eyes should be. On its chest. Its legs. Its teeth. Some were human-sized. Some were small as pinpricks. All of them saw. All of them hated.
The sound it made wasn't a roar. Roars came from throats. This came from everywhere, a frequency that made reality itself want to vomit. Windows didn't just shatter—they liquefied. People's ears bled. Some collapsed, their brains unable to process the audio equivalent of malicious geometry.
Its mouth—mouths—fuck, the mouths—opened vertically along its torso like obscene wounds. Rows upon rows of teeth that curved inward, designed not to kill but to keep you alive while it fed. Teeth made of what looked like bone but moved, writhing like maggots, hungry and endless.
When it walked, each step left craters that smoked with chemical burns. The asphalt didn't just crack—it melted, turning to tar that bubbled with toxins. Buildings didn't collapse when it touched them; they rotted, steel beams corroding in seconds, concrete crumbling to dust as if time itself had decided to fast-forward a thousand years in a heartbeat.
The screaming was constant. Not just from the dying—from the buildings themselves, metal shrieking as it warped, glass weeping as it turned to sand.
The world burned.
The sky was the color of a three-day-old bruise—purple and yellow and sick. Smoke so thick you could taste the dead in it. The air itself felt wrong, like breathing through a wet cloth soaked in gasoline.
Monsters—smaller ones, things that had crawled through in the kaiju's wake—tore through the streets. Humanoid shapes with too many joints. Things that used to be animals but had been improved by whatever hellscape dimension vomited them out. A dog with its spine on the outside. A bird whose wings were made of human hands. They killed with the efficiency of a natural disaster and the cruelty of something that enjoyed it.
Bodies littered the streets. Some intact. Most not. A teddy bear sat in a pool of blood, one button eye staring at nothing.
This was the end. This was how humanity died. Not with a bang, but with the wet sound of meat being torn from bone.
A hero stepped forward.
Not the hero—not yet. Just a hero. Twenty-three years old, fresh out of the academy. His name was Marcus Chen and he'd graduated top of his class with a specialization in pyrokinesis. He'd saved cats from trees. Stopped three muggings. He had a girlfriend who thought he was brave.
He looked at the kaiju—the thing—that towered above him, and some stupid, suicidal part of his brain said: You can do this. You're a hero.
His hands ignited. Beautiful flames, orange and gold, hot enough to melt steel. They danced along his arms like living things, eager and deadly.
He threw them.
Fireballs the size of cars erupted from his palms, trailing heat that made the air shimmer. They struck the kaiju's leg—the thing that might have been a leg—with the force of artillery shells.
The creature didn't even look down.
The flames splashed against its chitin like water against stone. Useless. Pathetic. A child throwing pebbles at a mountain.
Marcus Chen's face went slack. The confidence drained out of him like someone had pulled a plug. He looked up—up—at the thing that blotted out the sky.
One of its eyes—a massive yellow thing the size of a car, with a pupil shaped like a keyhole—swiveled down to look at him.
It saw him.
And then it raised its foot.
Not fast. Not angry. Just... efficient. The way you'd step on a bug. Casual. Inevitable.
The shadow fell over Marcus like a curtain. His eyes went wide—not with courage, but with the animal understanding that he'd fucked up so badly that there weren't enough words in any language to describe it.
Horror.
Pure, crystallized horror.
The foot came down.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet. Final. The kind of sound that ended stories.
When the foot lifted, what remained looked like modern art painted by a serial killer. Red and pink and white, spread across the concrete in a radius that used to be a person with hopes and dreams and a girlfriend who'd never stop waiting for him to come home.
The kaiju didn't pause. Didn't acknowledge. Just kept moving, each step a funeral for someone's child, someone's parent, someone's everything.
The world was ending.
And then—
The sky split.
Golden light poured through reality like God had decided to check on his failed experiment. It wasn't warm. It wasn't comforting. It was absolute—the kind of light that made shadows obsolete.
A figure descended.
No cape. No dramatic pose. No theatrics.
Just a man who'd seen enough bullshit for one lifetime.
Atlas Sterling.
He hit the ground and the shockwave shattered windows for three blocks. He looked up at the kaiju—at the abomination—with the expression of someone who'd just found dog shit on their shoe.
"Yeah," he said. "No."
The kaiju turned. All those eyes—every single fucking one—swiveled to focus on him. It knew. Some primal instinct in whatever passed for its brain understood that this wasn't prey.
This was a predator.
It roared—that reality-breaking sound—and charged.
Five stories of weaponized nightmare, moving faster than physics should allow, claws extended, mouths opening, every eye burning with hate—
Atlas moved.
One moment he was there. The next he was gone, and the kaiju's claws carved through empty air, the force of the swing leveling a building.
Atlas reappeared on its back.
He pulled back his fist—
And drove it into the thing's spine.
The kaiju screamed.
Not a roar. A scream. High-pitched, agonized, the sound of something that had never known pain suddenly learning what it meant to hurt.
It whirled—impossible speed for something that massive—twisting its body in ways that violated topology. Its mouths opened wide, all of them, and energy gathered.
Not fire. Not lightning. Something worse. Reality itself bent inward, light curving toward those throats like water circling a drain. The air turned cold. Frost formed on rubble. People's breath crystallized.
The beam that erupted from its collective mouths was annihilation.
Pure concentrated fuck you given form. The kind of attack that didn't destroy buildings—it erased them from having ever existed. Space folded around it. Time stuttered.
It hit Atlas dead-center.
The shockwave flattened everything in a half-mile radius. Cars flipped. Buildings that were still standing decided they were done. The sound was the sky breaking.
When the dust cleared—
Atlas Sterling stood in a crater fifty feet deep.
His jacket was gone. His arm was smoking. His expression hadn't changed.
"Huh," he said.
The energy that should have killed him crackled around his body. Golden light wrapped around his limbs like living tattoos. He'd absorbed it. Every ounce of that reality-ending blast, taken in and converted to—
"My turn."
He pulled back his fist. The energy condensed, compressed, screaming to be released. The air around him ignited just from proximity. The ground beneath his feet turned to glass.
And he fired.
The beam that erupted from his hand was five times—no, ten times—the size of what the kaiju had thrown. It was vengeance. It was finality. It was the full stop at the end of a sentence that read: Humanity doesn't die today.
The beam caught the kaiju in the chest.
For a moment—one frozen, perfect moment—nothing happened.
And then the kaiju's torso simply ceased to exist.
Not exploded. Not destroyed. Just... gone. Deleted. The beam carved through it from chest to tail like God had taken an eraser to reality.
The top half of the kaiju hung in the air, its eyes wide with what might have been shock if such things could feel shock.
Then gravity remembered its job.
The creature fell.
Its guts didn't spill—they erupted. A tsunami of ichor and organs and things that didn't have names in human biology flooded the streets. Gallons. Tons. An ocean of viscera that splashed against buildings and made the earlier carnage look tasteful by comparison.
The stench hit like a physical force. Sulfur and rot and something sweet that made it worse. People three blocks away vomited.
Atlas Sterling descended slowly, his feet touching down in the river of alien blood. Around him, survivors emerged from hiding. From rubble. From the nightmare.
Someone started clapping.
Then another.
Then a roar—a human roar—that shook what was left of the city.
"ATLAS! ATLAS! ATLAS!"
He raised one hand. Not in triumph. Not in victory. Just... acknowledgment. There were six more of these things across the globe. This was just the beginning of a very long—
"YOU MADE ME LOSE MY RANK, ROBERT!"