Chapter 0.5 – The Night the Sky Tore
The sky split at 3:17 a.m.
I wasn't supposed to be awake. My shift at the steel plant ended at midnight, and I'd fallen asleep on the rooftop with a cheap cigarette between my fingers. The first thing I noticed was the light — not sunlight, not a flare. A violet-white crack, like glass breaking in the air, stretching across the city from east to west.
People stopped. Cars stopped. Somebody laughed, thinking it was a festival drone.
Then it screamed.
The rift bled.
Black shapes poured out. They weren't animals. They weren't human. Their skin looked like scorched stone, a single yellow eye in the center of their faces, and wherever their feet touched the ground the asphalt hissed and melted.
Panic hit a second later.
I ran.
The streets turned into a river of bodies. A mother dragging a child, an old man falling and not getting up, a kid screaming for his dog. The creatures moved fast, cutting through crowds with claws that left long, glowing gashes.
I had no weapon. Just the training sword I kept in my locker at the plant — a dull "Meteor" blade we used for practice. I grabbed it, my hands shaking so bad I could barely hold the grip.
My first kill was an accident.
The creature lunged, I swung, the blade caught its neck. It didn't bleed blood. It bled black smoke, and the smell was like burnt plastic. Its eye went dark, it collapsed, and I vomited on the sidewalk.
I killed two more before I realized my hands weren't shaking anymore.
Three blocks away, in the Academy of Healers, Ilin was running too.
She was 25, her blonde hair tied back in a practical knot, blue eyes sharp with fear and focus. Instructors were shouting, "Healers to the shelters! Healers to the shelters!"
She didn't go.
A trainee a year younger than her had his side opened from shoulder to hip, blood pooling under him. Ilin dropped to her knees, pressed her palm over the wound, and forced ether into the crystal of her training staff.
The crystal flared white. The wound closed — not perfectly, the skin was pink and scarred, but he was breathing.
She passed out from the drain.
When she came to, the hall was empty. Half the building was on fire. She picked up the staff, her arm trembling, and kept moving.
The city fell in seventeen minutes.
I was in the east district, covered in soot and black blood, when the emergency sirens changed tone.
"Rift Class 5. All volunteers report to Sector 7."
I didn't know who Ilin was.
She didn't know who I was.
But three days later, we'd be assigned to the same squad.
And neither of us would be the same after that.