Across the city, similar tears were appearing. Small ones, barely noticeable, but each one disgorging creatures that defied every law of physics humanity thought it understood.
The first emergency broadcasts began at 14:37 Seoul Standard Time.
"This is Seoul Defense Command. We are experiencing... an unusual phenomenon in the downtown district. Citizens are advised to remain in their residential zones while we investigate."
By 15:00, the "unusual phenomenon" had spread to twelve cities across three continents.
By 16:30, the first military response teams were deployed.
By 17:45, they were dead.
---
"Sir, conventional weapons have no effect," Colonel Park reported, his voice tight with barely controlled panic. "Plasma rifles, quantum disruptors, even the fusion charges – they just pass right through these things like they're not there."
General Nam Jong-su watched the feeds from New Tokyo, where a creature the size of a building was flowing through the streets like sentient smoke, absorbing everything it touched. Cars, trees, people – all of it simply vanished into its dark mass.
"What about nuclear response?"
"We tried that on the Lagos incursion, sir. The blast just... fed it. The thing doubled in size."
Nam felt something he hadn't experienced in decades – genuine fear. Humanity had eliminated every threat they'd ever faced. Disease, aging, resource scarcity, even the theoretical risks of first contact with hostile aliens. They had contingency plans for gamma-ray bursts, rogue AI, dimensional instabilities...
But not this. Never this.
"Sir!" Lieutenant Yi burst into the command center, her face pale. "Seoul – there's been a development!"
The main screen shifted to show downtown Seoul, where the small shimmer in the air had grown, and grown, and grown.
What had started as a minor distortion was now a gaping wound in reality itself, easily fifty meters across. Through it, they could see... nothing. Not darkness, not empty space, but true nothingness – the absence of existence itself.
And things were coming through.
First came the smaller entities, the scouts that had been probing their defenses. But behind them, moving with predatory grace, came something that made the building-sized creature in Tokyo look like a pet.
It emerged slowly, deliberately, like a mountain deciding to walk. Its form was impossible to describe – constantly shifting between states of matter, sometimes solid, sometimes energy, sometimes concepts given physical weight. Where it stepped, reality cracked like thin ice.
The thing raised what might have been a head and looked directly at their observation satellite, despite being 400 kilometers below it.
General Nam felt its attention like a physical weight pressing down on his consciousness.
Then it opened its mouth – or the space where a mouth should be – and screamed.
The sound traveled through quantum foam, through encrypted military channels, through the neural links of every enhanced human in the hemisphere. It was the sound of entropy accelerating, of order collapsing into beautiful chaos.
Across Seoul, three million people clutched their heads and cried out in harmonious agony.
The scream echoed for exactly thirteen seconds.
When it ended, half the city's floating districts had fallen from the sky.
---
Far below the Earth's surface, in places where ancient magma had cooled and forgotten the warmth of creation, something stirred.
It was not alive – yet. Just fragments of consciousness scattered like seeds in fertile darkness, each piece carrying memories of a life cut short by random violence in an unremarkable alley in unremarkable 2024.
Yoo Seung-yoon had been twenty-eight when the gang crossfire took him. A game developer with dreams of creating worlds that mattered, of building stories that could change how people saw reality. He'd been walking home from his studio, mentally designing a character progression system, when bullets meant for someone else found him instead.
His death had been quick, meaningless, forgotten by everyone except his grandmother within a month.
But death, it turned out, was not always permanent.
The clash between Order and Chaos, the collision of cosmic forces playing their game above, sent ripples through dimensions humanity couldn't perceive. These ripples found the scattered fragments of his soul and began to pull them together like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
Each piece carried memories: the satisfaction of debugging code, the taste of his grandmother's kimchi, the frustration of publishers who didn't understand his vision, the moment he realized he was dying and felt cheated of all the stories he'd never tell.
As the fragments coalesced in the deep places of the Earth, they began to resonate with the energies above. Order tried to impose structure on his reformation. Chaos sought to scatter him back into nothingness.
Instead, they created something new.
Something that pulsed with potential no cosmic being had intended to unleash.
In the darkness below Seoul, as monsters poured through dimensional tears and humanity's golden age crumbled into chaos, Yoo Seung-yoon's scattered soul began to dream of being born again.
---
The game above continued, unaware of the anomaly it was creating in the depths below.
Aethon contemplated its next move while Chaos whispered entropy into the spaces between atoms. Their chessboard hung in dimensions folded so tightly that human perception couldn't even detect their presence, let alone comprehend the scope of what they were doing.
"The mortals adapt quickly," Aethon observed, watching as human scientists began analyzing monster remains. "Perhaps too quickly for optimal entertainment value."
"Let them adapt," Chaos purred, its form rippling with dark amusement. "The higher they climb, the more spectacular their fall. Besides... can you feel it? Something unexpected is stirring below."
Aethon's attention focused downward, probing the planet's core with senses that could perceive the quantum structure of reality itself.
There – in the deep places where souls went to rest, something was gathering. A consciousness reforming from scattered fragments, charged with energies from their cosmic game, becoming something that had never existed before.
"Interesting," Aethon mused. "Should we intervene?"
"No," Chaos responded immediately. "Unknown variables make for better viewing. The Supernovas will pay extra for genuine surprises."
So they let it be, returning their attention to the game.
Neither Order nor Chaos realized they had just made the most significant mistake in cosmic history.
In the depths below Seoul, Yoo Seung-yoon's reforming soul pulsed once, twice, then settled into a rhythm that matched the heartbeat of reality itself.
His time was coming.