Prologue: The Day of the Sundering
The sky cracked. Not with thunder, but with an icy sound, like a cosmic mirror shattering from end to end. From the fissures, of a blackness deeper than night, fell a terrifying silence. Then, they came.
Dragons with obsidian scales that eclipsed the sun. Titans of living stone that made mountains tremble. Cruel flocks of griffins and hunter-elves with eyes of icy disdain, followed by hordes of fierce warrior-dwarves who sought not to forge, but to conquer. It was not a planned invasion; it was a spillover. Realities leaked, and Earth became the bloody battleground of a thousand mythologies.
Humanity was swept away. Armies disintegrated, cities became nests of strange creatures, and survivors hid like rats, pleading for a quick death. But with the Sundering, something else seeped through: an ancient, dormant energy. And humanity, in its moment of extreme agony, awakened.
Some developed strength to split rock. Others, speed to dodge poison. Some ignited fire with their minds or healed wounds with a touch. They were the first Awakened, fragile beacons in the darkness. But in a small tenth-floor apartment on the outskirts of a city now in flames, the Awakening took a... different form.
Absolute Sloth
Arturo did not wake with a shout of power or a flash of energy. He woke because the roar of a three-headed drake demolishing the communications tower next door was, finally, louder than his sleep.
With a grunt, he opened one eye. The building shook. Broken glass. Distant screams. Monsters in the sky. "A rough day," he thought, with the vagueness characteristic of someone who considers going out to buy cereal an epic expedition. He was twenty-eight, with a physique where thinness flirted with malnutrition, and a simple life philosophy: movement is an option, and rarely the correct one.
He felt a strange tingling in his veins, a sensation like champagne bubbles rising through his bloodstream. It was the Awakening. His body, his mind, his very soul, were flooded with a power that would make the gods now walking the Earth weep with envy.
Arturo yawned.
The power sought an outlet, an expression. He just wanted to go back to sleep. His mind, fogged by chronic laziness, processed the information: Noise. Danger. Annoyance. I need... silence. Safety. To be left alone.
And so, he simply wished it.
There was no dramatic gesture, no incantation. It was a sigh of existential annoyance. A lazy, absolute thought: "Push all of this away."
Unconsciously, the immeasurable power that had just germinated within him obeyed. Not to attack, nor to destroy. For what Arturo always used his energy: to isolate himself, to protect himself, to create an impenetrable comfort zone.
A translucent pulse, almost imperceptible like a giant soap bubble, expanded from his body lying on the couch. It passed through the apartment walls, went down the floors, and stabilized, forming a perfect dome with a two-hundred-meter radius around the building.
Inside that radius, something changed.
Downstairs, the Rodriguez family, hiding under the table, saw a creature with lizard-like skin and saber teeth struggling to break their window suddenly stop. Its fierce eyes clouded with confusion, then with a primal fear. It felt a crushing, ancient, and lethally bored presence emanating from the floor above. It turned and fled, crawling away from the building as if it were the center of a volcano about to erupt.
The same happened with the wind spirits tearing up cars, with the goblins looting stores. All of them, down to the most powerful being prowling about, felt Arturo's faint snore as the roar of a cosmic predator. Their sharp instinct screamed: Something sleeps here. Do not wake it. Stay away.
Arturo's apartment became, by accident and sloth, the safest place in the post-Sundering world.
And he, after creating the ultimate barrier, scratched his cheek, turned to the more comfortable side of the couch, and fell deeply asleep again.
While his body lay on the couch, fueling the barrier with each slow breath (a barrier that, unbeknownst to him, grew microscopically stronger with every minute he slept and every crumb of cookie he had eaten three months prior), Arturo's mind did not rest.
He sank into a dream. But it was no ordinary dream. It was an overlapping plane of existence, a psychic battlefield where the consciousnesses of the most powerful beings from all the now-colliding dimensions clashed.
There, Arturo was not skinny or lazy. He was a figure of blurred silhouette but overwhelming presence, a beacon of pure, unrefined power. And he was immediately attacked.
The nightmare of an ancestral dragon, a being that devoured galaxies in its own reality, lunged at him with soul-burning fire. The drowsy Arturo, in his dream, blinked. With a gesture of annoyance (they even bothered him here!), he raised a mental hand. No epic clash, just a mental "go away". The dragon's dream-form disintegrated like smoke, its essence devoured and assimilated by Arturo's abyssal passive defense.
A titan made of neutron stars threw a punch. Arturo, in the dream, yawned. The fist stopped, then cracked, and its power was absorbed, added like another brick to the foundations of his growing, unconscious fortress.
And so, night after night, dream after dream. Elf lords of magic, enraged minor gods, entities of the void... all were drawn to the new "light" on the dream plane, and all were defeated not by skill, but by the simple, raw, overwhelming difference in scale. Arturo did not fight; his presence was a wall. And every attack he repelled, every entity his unconscious psychic defense "digested," made that wall taller, thicker, more real.
His power grew exponentially, not because he trained it, but because his very lazy nature made him a passive black hole for energy and challenges.
Three months after the Sundering, the two-hundred-meter bubble was a legendary oasis. Humans and some non-hostile races (a few exiled dwarves, some peaceful forest spirits) had found refuge there, feeling an instinctive calm near the building. They called it "The Sleeper's Dominion." No one had seen Arturo. They only knew that something powerful slept upstairs, and that its slumber protected them.
In the apartment, Arturo opened his eyes. He was hungry. Really hungry. It was the biological impulse that, every quarter, managed to overcome his lethargy.
He sat up with a groan, his bones cracking. The barrier, which had been running on autopilot, flickered slightly. Upon waking, Arturo's presence, now infused with the digested power of a thousand nightmares, became active for a microsecond.
A faint tremor, not physical but perceptual, ran through the land within a five-kilometer radius. It was not an earthquake, but a shudder in the fabric of reality, as if the planet had taken a deep breath under the weight of something. All beings, human and monster, felt an inexplicable chill.
Arturo dragged himself to the kitchen, found a dusty can of chickpeas, and devoured it. With each bite, the invisible barrier, now linked to his most basic vital functions (eating, sleeping), received a surge of energy. When he finished, he yawned.
The radius of the protective barrier, which kept monsters at bay and purified the air of aggression, expanded from two hundred meters to two hundred and fifty.
Unknowingly, Arturo, the most powerful being on Earth, perhaps in the multiverse, had taken his first active "step." He had eaten. And the world, literally, had become a little safer around him.
He collapsed back onto the couch with a sigh of satisfaction. The dream war awaited him. And outside, in the sundered world, legends of the lazy god who protected without meaning to were beginning to be born.