The First Collapse of Order
The sky was not meant to bleed.
Yet it did.
Crimson fractures spread across the heavens like cracks in a dying mirror, and the world below trembled under the weight of forces that should not have existed in the same reality.
Mountains no longer looked like mountains.
They looked like broken bones rising from the earth.
And in the valley of shattered stone, two armies stood at the edge of extinction.
The Derthals
Giants among giants.
Their bodies towered like ancient pillars carved from flesh and will. Some reached eight meters in height, their skin etched with glowing primal patterns that pulsed with the rhythm of the earth itself.
When they moved, the ground obeyed.
A single step was a quake.
A single breath stirred storms of dust.
At their front stood war-chiefs whose presence alone bent gravity into submission.
They did not wear armor.
They did not need it.
The Manos
Opposite them… something far worse.
The Manos did not stand in formation.
They shifted.
Their bodies were unstable, as if reality struggled to decide what shape they should be. Flesh twisted into weapon-like structures, limbs forming and unforming like broken thoughts given form.
Where Derthals were order through strength…
Manos were chaos given life.
One of them laughed, and the sound split into multiple tones that did not align with human hearing.
"You still believe the earth belongs to structure?" it said.
Its head tilted unnaturally. "Then let it break."
The War Begins
No trumpet sounded.
No command was given.
Because neither side believed in ceremony anymore.
They had been fighting for centuries.
And now… they were only finishing what had already been decided.
The first Derthal moved.
The ground responded instantly—rising into a colossal stone spear that launched forward like the judgment of a dying world.
But before it could land—
The spear forgot it was stone.
It collapsed into dust mid-air.
A Manos had touched it.
Not destroyed it.
Changed it.
The battlefield erupted.
Derthals shattered mountains into weapons, hurling them like divine artillery. The earth screamed with every impact.
Manos dissolved into shadows of distortion, appearing inside formations where they should not exist, rewriting matter with touch alone.
Reality itself began to degrade.
Somewhere Beyond the War
Deep within the unseen layer of existence…
The Veil flickered.
A system not yet understood by either race strained under the pressure of imbalance.
Something was missing.
Something essential.
And for the first time since its creation—
The Veil did not remain stable.
It breathed.
The Observer Appears
Far above the chaos, on a fractured cliff of suspended stone, a figure stood alone.
Not Derthal.
Not Manos.
Not Sirin.
He simply watched.
His eyes reflected the war without emotion, as if he were studying patterns instead of slaughter.
He tilted his head slightly.
"…This is inefficient," he murmured.
His voice did not belong to this age.
To this world.
To this war.
A wind passed through him, but he did not move.
Because he was not reacting.
He was calculating.
Behind him, the sky cracked further.
And somewhere in the distance, something far larger than war itself began to awaken.
But the observer—Arlin Grey—only narrowed his eyes slightly.
As if he had already seen the ending.
And simply arrived early.