They didn't fall from the ground.
They opened in the sky.
At first, people thought it was weather—an ugly bruise spreading across the clouds. Then the bruise split, and the air peeled back like a scab torn too early. The sound that followed wasn't thunder. It was the kind of silence that makes your teeth ache, the kind that tells your body to run before your mind can name the danger.
Over Tokyo Bay, a gate appeared like a vertical wound. Over the Andes, another. Over the Sahara, a third. Above suburbs and seas, above mountains and highways, above nations that didn't know each other's languages, the same impossible geometry unfolded: a slit of darkness so deep it ate the light around it.
And then something moved inside.
The first witness reports were all the same.
Too big.
Too wrong.
Not an aircraft.
A shadow slid forward—then a shape—then a full silhouette, vast enough to blot the stars. It was not a dragon. Not a bird. Not a god, not a demon.
It was a beast.
It came through with the calm inevitability of a natural disaster, like the world had always belonged to it and was only now remembering to return what it had borrowed.
That night became a date no one needed to ask about later. A line in history drawn with shaking hands.
They call it the Great Calamity.
Thirty years ago, the sky tore open all over the world.
—
There are people who insist it was a single moment. That's the comforting version. A clean story: the world was normal, then the world was not, and then everyone adapted.
In reality, the Great Calamity lasted seven days.
Seven days of gates—some large enough to swallow skyscrapers, others no wider than a doorway—opening across every timezone. Seven days of beasts drifting down like falling islands. Seven days of things that did not belong to Earth spilling out and testing what would break first: steel, laws, or faith.
They came in types.
There were the ones that flew—massive, drifting bodies with limbs that looked like smoke until they struck, and then smoke became claw and claw became catastrophe. There were the ones that crawled from the edges of shattered streets, leaving behind trails where asphalt softened like wax. There were swarms that moved like weather and made cities cough themselves empty. There were things that wore faces and spoke like people, and there were things that didn't have mouths at all but still whispered into your dreams.
People fought them like you fight a storm. With everything you have, and no guarantee it matters.
Military footage from the first day exists, but most of it is out of focus. The camera operators were shaking. You can hear someone crying behind the lens. You can hear a commander screaming numbers into a radio as if numbers can save you.
A missile hits one of the flying beasts and blossoms into fire across its flank.
The beast doesn't fall.
It turns.
That's the part that ruins the footage every time—the casual way it turns, like it noticed an insect.
Then the screen goes white.
—
Kyoumei didn't exist yet.
Not in the way it exists now.
Back then, it was a city with a different name, stitched into the map like any other. Neon and concrete, trains that ran on time, people complaining about rent and exams and deadlines.
On the second night of the Calamity, one of the gates opened above the bay like a second moon.
This one didn't tear the sky.
It pressed it.
The air bent around it. Rain fell sideways. Sound dulled. The ocean below went still as glass, as if it was holding its breath.
And the beast that came through wasn't the largest, not by a long shot.
It was simply the one that looked down and recognized the city.
That recognition is important. That recognition is why people who survived the Calamity still wake up sweating when the wind changes.
There are horrors you can endure if you believe they're blind.
This one wasn't.
—
On the waterfront, a line of emergency barricades had been thrown up in an hour—metal fences, parked buses, anything with mass. Police stood beside soldiers. Medics waited behind them. Someone had a megaphone that kept dying.
The crowd was too large for the street. People shoved. People prayed. People screamed at each other to stop pushing.
Above them, the gate widened.
It was hard to look at directly. Not because it was bright, but because it felt like staring into a thought you weren't meant to have. The edges shimmered with something that wasn't color. The world around it looked… thinner.
And then the beast descended.
It didn't flap wings. It didn't roar.
It drifted, trailing ribbons of pale smoke that curled and folded like calligraphy written by a hand that had never learned fear.
Its eyes opened.
That's when the crowd broke.
A child fell in the stampede. A stranger tried to pick him up and got kicked in the ribs for the effort. Someone's phone hit the ground and recorded nothing but shoes and panic, and in the audio you can hear it—a low, steady sound like a temple bell being struck from the inside of your skull.
The beast's shadow washed over the street.
And then the air itself—the air—pushed down.
People collapsed. Bones cracked. Not all at once. Not like an explosion. Like pressure. Like being reminded that gravity is not a law; it's a choice the world makes.
A soldier lifted his rifle, hands shaking so hard the barrel wagged like a tail. He fired.
The bullet hit the beast's mist and vanished.
He fired again, and again, and again, until his magazine ran dry and his eyes went wide with the terrible, human realization:
This is not something that belongs to the same rules as me.
Somewhere behind the barricade, a man in an old suit stepped forward.
He didn't wear armor. He didn't carry a gun.
He held a strip of paper between two fingers.
A charm.
It should have looked ridiculous. It didn't.
His voice was calm, but not comforting. It was the voice of someone who has already decided what must be done and only regrets that the world won't thank him for it.
"Everyone behind the line," he said, not shouting, and somehow the people nearest him obeyed. "Do not look into the gate."
The soldier stared at him like he was insane. "Who the hell are you?"
The man didn't answer.
He lifted the charm.
For a heartbeat, the paper fluttered like it was breathing.
Then the air around the beast caught.
A thin boundary—transparent, barely visible—snapped into place between street and shadow. The smoke that trailed from the creature struck the barrier and curled back on itself like a wave meeting glass.
The crowd didn't understand what they were seeing. They just understood, instinctively, that something had changed.
The soldier whispered, "Magic…"
The man in the suit exhaled, and it sounded like he'd been holding his breath for a decade.
"Magecraft," he corrected.
And then the beast laughed.
Not with a mouth. Not with sound.
With the tremor in the air. With the ripple through the barrier. With the way every charm the man held began to blacken at the edges, ink bleeding like a wound.
For a moment, the barrier held.
For a moment, the beast's eyes narrowed, and the world felt like it was being judged.
Then a claw of smoke became a claw of bone, and it pressed against the boundary.
The barrier screamed.
Yes—screamed—a high, thin sound that tore into the ears and made blood bead at the corners of eyes.
The man in the suit staggered.
"Move," he said, voice finally cracking. "Move, now!"
The crowd surged again, but this time there was direction. This time there was survival.
The soldier reached for the child on the ground and yanked him up by his jacket, dragging him toward the evacuation route.
Behind them, the barrier shattered like glass.
The beast's claw cut through a bus as if it were paper.
And somewhere above, the gate widened again, as if pleased.
—
The Great Calamity ended on the seventh day.
Not because humanity won.
Not because the beasts were all slain.
Because the gates stopped opening.
That's the part people cling to. The gates closed. The sky healed. The world survived.
But the world didn't return to normal.
Some of the things that came through the gates stayed.
Not all of them were beasts.
In the aftermath—when ash still floated in the air like snow and nations tried to count their dead—new kinds of people appeared in the refugee camps and the ruined districts.
Some had ears that weren't human. Tails. Eyes that caught light wrong. They were not animals, not costumes, not a joke. Some called them Kemonomimi, half as a label and half as a prayer that naming them would make them understandable.
Others were more distant from humanity. Taller, heavier, built like predators wearing civilization like a thin coat. Juujin. Kemono. Different names in different languages, the same uneasy reality: the world's population had changed.
And then there were the ones who didn't bother pretending to fit.
Demons that smiled too warmly. Gods that did not bow. Goddesses whose beauty made you want to kneel and whose gaze made you want to vomit. Ancient things wearing modern clothing, walking into government buildings like they owned the land.
Some demanded worship.
Some demanded rights.
Some demanded nothing at all—and that was somehow worse.
War followed.
Of course it did.
Not everyone believed the newcomers were people. Not everyone believed they were enemies. Not everyone believed they were real, even as they stood in the street.
Borders ignited. Religions splintered. Governments cracked, then hardened.
And in the middle of it all, something else happened—quiet compared to the sky tearing open, but more permanent.
Human bodies began to change.
Not everyone. Not most.
A select few.
Children born after the Calamity sometimes came into the world with blood that ran a little too warm, nerves that reacted a little too fast, eyes that could see the shimmer of a boundary before it broke.
Adults who had survived direct exposure to the gates sometimes woke up one morning and realized the air had weight. That sound had texture. That symbols drawn in ink could… answer.
It wasn't "magic" the way old stories promised. It wasn't a gift handed down by destiny.
It was contamination.
It was adaptation.
It was the world's immune system trying to learn a new disease.
They called it magecraft because calling it anything else would admit the truth: that it wasn't human to begin with.
—
Japan responded faster than most.
Not because it was braver.
Because it had to.
The land had taken too many wounds in seven days. Too many gates. Too many deaths. Too many things that refused to leave.
They built walls where walls could be built.
They wrote laws where laws could hold.
And where laws couldn't hold… they created something else.
An enforcement arm that didn't rely on bullets alone.
A government-sanctioned force trained to confront what came from the Breaches, to negotiate with the divine and kill the monstrous, to seal what could be sealed and destroy what could not.
The Jutsukan.
Arcane enforcers.
Not heroes. Not priests. Not soldiers.
Something in between.
And at the center of the new world—at the place where the old map had been redrawn around a permanent wound—Kyoumei rose.
A megacity built on boundaries and bargains.
A city where humans and inhumans lived under the same sky and pretended the sky wasn't capable of ripping open again.
A city where myths walked the streets like commuters.
A city where the system worked.
Most days.
—
Here is the part nobody likes to say out loud:
The Great Calamity did not introduce monsters into the world.
It introduced possibility.
Once reality tore, it learned how to tear.
Once the world made room for the impossible, it could not unmake that room.
The gates stopped opening.
But rifts—smaller, subtler, quieter—never truly vanished.
Sometimes they appeared for only a breath, and only one creature slipped through.
Sometimes they appeared inside a building, and the building was simply… gone.
Sometimes, if you stood in the right alley on the wrong night, you could feel it: a seam in the air, a pressure behind your eyes, a whispering silence that made your teeth ache.
Kyoumei learned to live with that feeling.
It learned to build train schedules around containment zones.
It learned to sell good-luck charms beside convenience store snacks.
It learned to call the Jutsukan when the myths turned violent.
People fell in love. They went to university. They argued about sports. They posted photos. They lived.
And above them, unseen, the boundary held.
For now.
Because thirty years is a long time to believe a wound won't reopen.
And in a city built on a scar…
something is always trying to bleed again.