The sky was eerily silent that day. There was no storm to warn us, no thunder to herald the end. Yet, the world felt suffocated, as if reality itself had stopped breathing.
Then, the heavens fractured.
A sudden, violent burst of celestial light tore through the clouds and collided with the earth. It wasn't an explosion; it was a blinding erasure. The brightness burned into human retinas, freezing the flow of time. For a single heartbeat, the universe stood still.
From the heart of that radiant wreckage, a figure emerged. It spoke—a voice like grinding gears and distant stars—but humanity, in its arrogance and terror, never tried to understand.
The next moment, the light vanished. Everything returned to a haunting normal. The world looked the same, but the soul of humanity had been poisoned.
Eight days later, the trembling began.
It started as a shiver in the night. People felt unseen eyes crawling over their skin. Then came the first drop of blood. A boy—scarcely more than a child—killed another boy. There was no motive, only a primal, infectious fear.
Fear spread like wildfire, turning brothers into butchers. Governments, desperate and blind, issued execution orders to maintain order, but they only fueled the chaos. Cities echoed with the rhythmic screams of the dying. Rivers ran thick and red, choking on the sheer volume of the fallen.
In the blink of an eye, half of the global population vanished. And then… only silence remained.
Fifty Years Later.
A heavy, exhausted voice narrates the ruins of the past.
"What destroyed the world wasn't war... it was the fear of the unknown."
A new hierarchy had risen from the ashes. Some people now carried a strange, glowing ring floating above their heads—a Hallow. It was a mark granted to those whose minds were filled with the stories of old—those who had watched anime or read manga. To the survivors, these marks were the brand of the 'other.' Those without the Hallow could see it clearly, glowing like a beacon of hatred.
On that day, power was granted to the few. And with power came the ultimate, cruel decision:
"Those unlike us do not deserve to live."
The Anime Watchers were hunted, isolated, and branded as filth. A separate zone was carved out of the wasteland—The Anime Watcher Zone. Leaving its borders was a death sentence. To the world outside, those within were no longer human. They were livestock waiting for the slaughter.
In a rain-slicked, dark alley, the sound of rhythmic thuds echoed. Several men were brutally beating a small child. The boy didn't cry. He didn't scream. He simply stared at the mud, his head lowered in a silent, broken dignity. Above him, a faint, flickering Hallow hovered.
"His parents were filth, and he is no different," one of the men spat, kicking the child's ribs. The scene faded into a suffocating darkness.
Inside the cramped, decaying walls of the Zone, another child stared at a torn, faded poster. The name 'Naruto' was barely legible on the weathered paper. The boy whispered softly, his voice trembling with a desperate hope, "If only someone like that existed here… someone to save us."
Far away, in the skeleton of abandoned megacities, groups of survivors hid in the shadows. Their Hallows hovered above their heads—some small and dim, others so massive and radiant they shattered the courage of anyone who dared look at them. The hunters who went into those ruins to kill… never returned.
But amongst all the legends and the horror, there was one city. A city where only one anime watcher lived.
His name was Akuma.
By the next dawn, not a single soul in that city remained alive. The few survivors who witnessed the carnage fled to the corners of the earth, spreading his name in terrified whispers before ending their own lives. They couldn't live with what they had seen.
To the world, Akuma was no longer a man. He was a reckoning.
He was an oath. An oath written in blood.
And this… was only the beginning.