There was a time when gods walked the earth.
Not as stories.
Not as symbols.
But as something real.
They were not silent.
They were not distant.
And they were not kind.
The skies burned when they willed it.
The oceans rose at their command.
Mountains split, cities vanished, and entire civilizations fell under forces they could neither understand nor resist.
To humanity, they were not protectors.
They were inevitabilities.
And yet, they disappeared.
No war marked their end.
No final battle etched into history.
No record, no proof, no clear explanation.
One day, they were there.
The next, they were gone.
Time passed.
Centuries turned into myths.
Myths became stories.
Stories evolved into belief.
And belief slowly faded into nothing more than imagination.
Until something changed.
It began with a single incident.
Then another.
And another.
A man crushed beneath debris stood up without a scratch.
A girl, cornered and desperate, reduced everything around her to ash.
A boy, moments from death, simply refused to die.
At first, the world called them miracles.
Then anomalies.
Then threats.
But the truth was much simpler.
And far more terrifying.
The gods had never truly disappeared.
They had only been waiting.
Not in the skies.
Not in some distant realm.
But within something much closer.
Humanity.
No one understood why it happened.
No one could explain how it began.
But patterns emerged.
Clear.
Unmistakable.
Every case—every single one—occurred at the same point.
When a person reached their limit.
Not physical.
Not emotional.
Something deeper.
Something beneath fear, pain, and thought itself.
A breaking point. A threshold.
And in that moment, when the human mind stood on the edge of collapse, something answered.
Not loudly.
Not violently.
But with absolute certainty.
A presence.
Ancient.
Unfamiliar.
And yet, terrifyingly aligned.
That was the moment they changed.
They became known as Carriers.
People who did not just gain power but became vessels of something that once ruled the world.
And just like that, everything changed.
At first, there was fear.
Cities locked down.
Governments denied everything.
Religions called it judgment.
Science labeled it impossible.
But fear does not last.
It evolves.
It becomes acceptance.
Then reliance.
And finally, hierarchy.
Carriers became the backbone of the modern world.
They healed what medicine could not.
They stopped disasters before they began.
They enforced law with absolute authority.
With that power came something inevitable.
Superiority.
No law declared it.
No system announced it.
But everyone understood.
A Carrier could end your life before you could react.
A Carrier could reshape entire cities.
A Carrier stood where no normal human ever could.
And so, the world split.
Those who carried gods, and those who did not.
The difference was never spoken.
But it was always there.
In the way people looked at each other.
In the way doors opened for some and closed for others.
In the way one group was feared, and the other was forgotten.
Not all Carriers were the same.
Some remained stable.
Controlled.
Human.
Others did not.
Because power did not just grant strength.
It changed people.
It shaped them.
It pulled them closer to something ancient.
Something inhuman.
No one could predict who would stay themselves and who would become something else entirely.
So the world did what it always does when faced with something it cannot control.
It built a system.
Institutions.
Facilities.
Schools.
Places designed to monitor, train, and contain those who carried something beyond human.
And then, for the first time in history, an experiment began.
A place where both sides of this divided world would be forced to coexist.
Aegis Academy.
A symbol of unity.
A promise of balance.
A future where power and powerlessness could stand side by side.
That was what the world believed.
But belief has never matched the truth.
Because in a world where gods began to awaken once more, power did not create equality.
It created distance.
And sometimes that distance was enough to decide who lived and who was simply left behind.