PROLOGUE — "THE WORLD THAT FELL SILENT"
No one remembered the day it began only that the sky cracked.
A sound, neither thunder nor divine, roared across the continents.
Buildings bent, seas boiled, and every satellite orbiting above the earth blinked once before vanishing into static.
And then, silence.
It wasn't the end of the world.
It was its reset.
Across that still horizon, something else awakened a flicker of code that shimmered in the air like a dying star. Lines of light twisted across the sky, engraving words no human could read, and from the heavens descended the Aegis Console a structure not built, but born.
No one knew who created it. Some whispered of gods, others of men who dared to play them.
What was certain was this: the moment the Aegis Console took root, the laws of reality ceased to be human.
Creatures began pouring out of portals monsters born from corrupted fragments of the Console itself. Cities were swallowed, nations vanished overnight, and those who survived found strange windows of light flickering before their eyes.
> [ You have been chosen. ]
[ System initializing... ]
Thus began the Era of Hunters humans bound to invisible systems that granted them unnatural strength, spells, and power beyond reason. They called it a miracle. They were wrong.
Because power, when given to the desperate, becomes its own curse.
The strong built walls. The weak built graves. And out of the ashes rose a single banner
The Regime, humanity's self-proclaimed salvation.
Under the Regime, all systems were monitored. Every hunter, registered.
Currency changed, faith was forgotten, and survival itself was licensed.
Those who defied control were erased. Those who submitted were chained by laws of their own design.
But among the countless systems scattered across the world, one remained untouched
the Prototype that had never been meant to exist.
The first and the last.
A system that the gods failed to delete.
A console whose creator vanished with the dawn of ruin.
And one day, buried beneath the ruins of forgotten machines, it chose its host
a boy with nothing left to lose.
A boy whose name would one day be whispered in fear and awe.
> [ Aegis Console Prototype — Activation Complete. ]
[ Codename: Zero. ]
And with that single command, the balance of the new world began to crack once more.