The sky tore open on a Tuesday.
Ethan Vale remembered that detail with perfect clarity, not because Tuesdays held any special significance, but because it was the last normal thing he would ever experience. He'd been sitting in his high school chemistry class, half-asleep while Mr. Peterson droned on about molecular bonds, when reality itself decided to shatter.
It started as a sound. Not loud, but wrong. Like glass cracking in reverse, or the whisper of something vast taking its first breath. Every student in the classroom felt it in their bones; that primal instinct that screamed danger before the conscious mind could catch up.
Then the sky split.
Through the classroom window, Ethan watched as a jagged line of absolute darkness appeared above the football field. It wasn't black like night or shadow. It was the absence of everything: light, color, hope. The tear spread like a wound, edges crackling with violet energy that hurt to look at.
"Everyone stay calm," Mr. Peterson said, but his voice shook. His hands trembled as he pulled out his phone. "I'm sure it's just..."
The creature came through before he could finish.
It was wrong. That was Ethan's first coherent thought. Every angle of its body defied geometry. Too many limbs. Eyes that spiraled inward forever. Skin that seemed to exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. It stood fifteen feet tall on the football field, and when it opened its mouth, the sound that emerged wasn't a roar; it was the scream of a thousand dying stars.
The school's fire alarm triggered. Chaos erupted. Students ran, screaming, trampling each other to reach the doors. Ethan found himself pressed against the window, frozen, watching as more tears opened across the city skyline. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
Through each tear came nightmares.
"Ethan!" His best friend Marcus grabbed his arm. "We have to move!"
But Ethan couldn't look away from the creature on the field. It had noticed the fleeing students. Its head, if that twisted mass could be called a head, tilted with alien curiosity. Then it moved.
Fast. Too fast for something so large.
It caught the football team's star quarterback, David Chen, in three strides. Ethan would never forget David's face in that moment: the incomprehension, the terror, the split second of recognition that he was about to die. The creature's limb (claw? tentacle? something without a name) pierced through David's chest like paper.
David's scream cut off abruptly. His body convulsed once, then went limp.
The creature dropped him and moved toward the main building.
Toward them.
"RUN!" someone screamed.
The hallways became a stampede. Ethan lost Marcus in the crowd, swept along by bodies pressed too close, air thick with the smell of sweat and fear. Behind them, the sounds of destruction: glass shattering, metal tearing, that awful wrongness getting closer.
Ethan burst through the front doors into Hell on Earth.
The city was burning. Not with fire, but with that same violet energy from the tears in the sky. Buildings collapsed in slow motion, their structures unraveling at the molecular level. Cars floated upward, defying gravity, before exploding into particles of light. And everywhere, everywhere, those creatures poured through the tears.
Some flew. Some crawled. Some seemed to phase between existence and non-existence. All of them were hunting.
A woman's scream cut through the chaos. Ethan turned to see a smaller creature (only six feet tall, almost humanoid except for its backwards-jointed legs and eyeless face) dragging a middle-aged woman into an alley. Her fingernails scraped against concrete as she clawed for purchase, leaving bloody trails.
Ethan's body moved before his mind could stop it. He grabbed a fallen stop sign, its metal pole bent but still solid, and charged.
The creature's head snapped toward him. No eyes, but Ethan felt its attention like ice water down his spine. It released the woman and lunged.
Ethan swung. The pole connected with a sound like hitting frozen meat. The creature stumbled but didn't fall. Instead, it smiled, a lipless gash that split its face too wide, revealing rows of crystalline teeth.
He was going to die. Ethan knew it with absolute certainty. Fifteen years old, and this was how it ended. Torn apart by something that shouldn't exist.
The creature's claw came up, dripping with something black and viscous.
Then light exploded between them.
A woman appeared (no, materialized) in a burst of golden radiance. She wore tactical gear that glowed with intricate patterns, and in her hands was a sword that hummed with power. Her hair was silver-white, tied back in a practical ponytail, and her eyes blazed with an inner fire.
She moved like water, like lightning, like poetry written in violence. One strike. That's all it took. Her sword passed through the creature's neck, and its head tumbled to the ground, dissolving into black smoke before it hit the pavement.
"Get to the shelters," she commanded, not looking at Ethan. Her voice carried absolute authority. "Bunkers are opening at every school and major building. Move. Now."
"Who... what..." Ethan stammered.
"I'm someone who can fight these things. You're not." She glanced at him briefly, those burning eyes assessing him in a heartbeat. "Live, kid. That's your job today. Just live."
Then she was gone, leaping impossible distances toward the next cluster of creatures.
Ethan helped the woman to her feet. She was crying, thanking him incoherently. Together, they ran toward the school's basement where teachers were herding students into what looked like reinforced bunkers that definitely hadn't existed yesterday.
The next six hours passed in a blur of fear and confusion. Hundreds of students and faculty packed into the bunker, listening to the sounds of battle overhead. Phones had no signal. The lights flickered constantly. Children cried. Adults tried to maintain calm while their eyes betrayed their terror.
Marcus found him eventually, collapsed beside Ethan against the concrete wall. "Did you see her? That woman who saved us?"
"Yeah," Ethan whispered.
"They're calling them Hunters on the radio," another student said, holding up an old transistor radio that somehow still worked. "People who can fight the monsters. They're saying the military's useless, conventional weapons don't work right. But these Hunters, they've got powers or something."
The radio crackled with an emergency broadcast: "...not an isolated incident. Reports confirm similar spatial anomalies (designated 'Fractures') appearing worldwide. Tokyo, London, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro. All major population centers affected. Casualties estimated in the millions. The President has declared a state of emergency. Citizens are advised to..."
Static consumed the rest.
When they finally emerged, the sun was setting on a different world. The creatures were gone, killed or driven back through the Fractures, which still hung in the sky like wounds that refused to heal. But the damage remained. Entire city blocks were rubble. Bodies lined the streets, covered with white sheets. The air smelled of ozone and something acrid that made Ethan's eyes water.
And everywhere, those glowing warriors (Hunters) stood guard. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Each one radiated power that made Ethan's skin prickle. They weren't celebrating. They looked exhausted, haunted, like soldiers after a war they'd barely won.
Ethan found his mother and brother at the designated family reunification point. Kai, only seven years old, clung to their mother Lydia with a death grip. She was crying, crushing both her sons in an embrace that hurt almost as much as it comforted.
"Your father," she said between sobs. "Your father was downtown when it happened. I can't reach him. I can't..."
They would find Daniel Vale's body three days later in the wreckage of his office building. He'd been crushed when the structure collapsed. The funeral was held alongside thousands of others in a mass ceremony that felt more like processing casualties than honoring the dead.
But that came later.
That first night, Ethan stood on his apartment balcony and stared at the glowing Fractures that dotted the sky like cancerous stars. The news was calling it "The First Outbreak." The government promised they were working on solutions. Scientists claimed they were studying the phenomenon. Religious leaders said it was judgment day.
Ethan didn't care about any of that.
He only cared about the helplessness he'd felt. The terror of watching David Chen die. The certainty that he was about to die. The shame of being saved by someone else.
Never again, he thought. Never again will I be that powerless.
He didn't know it then, but the universe was listening.
Twenty years later, those Fractures would still scar the sky. Humanity would adapt, as it always did, building a society around the new reality. The Nexus System would emerge, granting ordinary people extraordinary powers. Hunter Academies would train the next generation. Guilds would form. The world would continue.
And Ethan Vale would discover that his wish for power came with a price far greater than he could have imagined.
But on that Tuesday night, watching the world burn, he was just a fifteen-year-old boy who had seen too much, lost too much, and made a promise he would spend his life keeping.
The Abyss was already watching.
It had been waiting for someone like him.
It would not have to wait much longer.