The end of the world didn't begin with nuclear fire or angelic trumpets. It began with rain.
It was a Tuesday at 2:00 PM. Kael was in his small student apartment, reheating instant noodles and staring out the window in boredom. The sky, leaden grey until that moment, changed color.
It wasn't gradual. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. The clouds turned a sickly, vibrant, toxic shade of violet.
The rain began to fall. Heavy, oily drops hit the glass with a sound that was too solid.
Kael frowned. The air seeping through the aluminum window frame smelled strange. It smelled of old copper and static electricity, like the air right before lightning strikes too close.
Down on the street, traffic stopped. People got out of their cars, looking up at the sky with their mouths open, letting the violet rain soak their clothes and skin.
"What the hell...?" Kael muttered, instinctively stepping back.
A man on the opposite sidewalk, a guy in a suit with a briefcase, started screaming. It wasn't a scream of panic. It was a guttural howl, as if his vocal cords were tearing apart.
The man fell to his knees. His back arched in an anatomically impossible way. The sound of snapping bones—crack, crack, CRACK—reached Kael's third-floor window, overcoming the noise of the rain.
The man's skin turned grayish and taut. His suit ripped apart as the muscles in his shoulders swelled grotesquely, doubling in size in seconds. When he lifted his head, his eyes were gone. There were only two pits glowing with the same violet light as the sky.
Chaos erupted.
In less than a minute, half the people on the street were convulsing. The other half were being devoured.
Kael pulled away from the window, his heart hammering against his ribs. His analytical brain tried to process the madness. A virus? A chemical attack? That didn't explain the instantaneous transformation.
He headed to the door to throw the deadbolt.
BOOM!
Something hit the door from the hallway before he could touch the knob. The cheap wood creaked ominously.
"Mrs. Petrova?" Kael asked, his voice tense. His neighbor was a sweet old lady who always brought him cookies.
BOOM!
The second blow splintered the frame. A grey hand, with fingernails elongated and black like obsidian claws, punched through the wood.
Kael didn't scream. The fear was there, cold and paralyzing, but something deeper triggered in his brain. A primal instinct that modern life had buried.
He ran to the kitchen. He grabbed the chef's knife, the only good one he owned, a gift from his brother. The 8-inch blade was sharp.
The door gave way with a final crash.
Mrs. Petrova entered. Or what used to be her. Her jaw was dislocated, hanging loose, and a black, viscous substance dripped from her mouth. She lunged at Kael with horrifying speed for a seventy-year-old woman.
Kael reacted on pure reflex. He dodged the clumsy sideways swipe and kicked the creature's knee. There was a wet snap, and the thing fell.
He didn't hesitate. He threw himself on top of her, driving the knife into the base of her skull, right where it meets the spine.
The blade entered with difficulty, scraping against hardened bone, but Kael pushed with all his weight, roaring. The violet light in the old woman's eyes flickered and died out.
Kael fell back, panting, covered in black blood that smelled of ozone.
"Shit... shit..." he tried to wipe the knife on his pants.
It was then that it happened. The world seemed to stop. Immense pressure settled in his skull, and lines of glowing blue text, translucent, materialized directly onto his retina.
[Initial Synchronization Complete.]
[Mana has saturated the terrestrial biosphere. The Trial Phase has ended.]
[Welcome to the New Ecosystem.]
Kael blinked, trying to brush the letters away. They weren't a hallucination. They moved with his sight.
He looked at Mrs. Petrova's corpse. The black blood staining the floor began to bubble. It wasn't drying. It was moving.
As if drawn by a magnet, the viscous substance crawled toward Kael, climbing over his sneakers, penetrating the fabric, and sinking into his skin.
Kael tried to shake it off, panic-stricken, but the absorption was instantaneous. Intense heat, almost painful, rushed through his veins, concentrating in his chest.
A new window appeared. Smaller, more personal.
[You have eliminated a Level 0 Vector.]
[Unique Innate Ability activated: {Biomass Harvest}.]
[Biomass acquired: 5 units.]
The heat subsided, leaving a strange sensation of satiety. As if he had just eaten a heavy meal after days of fasting.
Kael looked at his hands. They hadn't changed, but they felt different. Denser.
He looked at the floating interface again. There was no experience bar. No spell list. There was only a brutally simple menu.
[USER STATUS: Kael]
[Species: Human (Unadapted)]
[Available Biomass: 5]
[RAPID EVOLUTION OPTIONS:]
> Reinforce Muscle Tissue (Cost: 5 Biomass)
> Harden Epidermis (Cost: 5 Biomass)
> Improve Visual Acuity (Cost: 5 Biomass)
The outside world roared with the sounds of the massacre. Kael gripped the handle of the knife until his knuckles turned white.
This wasn't a game. There were no save points.
It was the food chain, reset.