Tuesday afternoon. Just another slice of ordinary life. People shuffled along the sidewalks, lost in their phone screens or hurried conversations. The Han River flowed placidly, reflecting the dull, overcast sky. Nothing out of the usual.
Then, the sky above the Han River didn't just cloud over. It split.
Imagine a tear in the fabric of reality, a jagged rip that bled impossible colors – violent purples swirling with electric greens, fiery oranges clashing with glacial blues. It wasn't the gentle parting of clouds; it was the world itself screaming open. And from that cosmic wound, things began to fall.
Creatures ripped from the deepest recesses of nightmare plummeted into the unsuspecting city. Twisted shapes with too many limbs and eyes that glowed with malevolent intelligence. Their screeches were not of this world, and the ensuing chaos was immediate and absolute. Panic erupted like a tidal wave, people scattering, screaming, their normal Tuesday afternoon dissolving into a scene of unimaginable terror. The reassuring rumble of the city was drowned out by the guttural roars of the invaders. The army arrived, tanks and helicopters roaring, but their conventional weaponry seemed pitifully inadequate against the otherworldly onslaught.
But amidst the terror, something else began to happen. A strange phenomenon centered around the initial rupture. Teenagers, caught in the immediate vicinity of the Sky-Rift, suddenly felt an alien surge within them. It wasn't a feeling they could explain, but it was undeniable. And then, blue words, stark and luminous, burned themselves into their vision. Not on a screen, but directly onto their retinas.
[Awakening initiated]
They had become the Awakened. The Hunters. They wielded impossible powers – flames danced at their fingertips, the air crackled with their touch, and some moved with a speed that defied human limits. They became humanity's desperate countermeasure, the only ones capable of fighting back the tide of monsters.
Eighteen-year-old Kang Jin-Woo? He was nowhere near the Han River when the sky tore open. He was stuck behind the counter of a brightly lit convenience store miles away, scanning lukewarm drinks and stale snacks. He watched the news reports with a detached sense of awe and a bitter taste of uselessness. Young teenagers, barely out of school, suddenly becoming heroes, bathed in the flickering glow of emergency lights as they battled monstrous figures. He’d clung to the naive hope that it was a singular, terrifying event. But more rifts, smaller and larger, began to appear across the globe, each spewing forth more horrors. The Awakened teenagers became the new celebrities, the saviors, the apex of a suddenly brutal world.
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Weeks bled into months. Society struggled to adapt, forming Hunter guilds, establishing academies to train the newly Awakened. A new hierarchy emerged, with the superpowered youth at the top, and the ordinary like Jin-Woo firmly at the bottom. He continued his routine: work, helping his perpetually ill mother, watching the increasingly grim news, feeling more and more like a relic of a forgotten age.
Then, one rain-slicked night, as Jin-Woo hurried home through a dimly lit alley, it happened. Not a world-shattering tear in the sky, but a small, almost insignificant ripple in the air ahead of him. One moment, there was nothing but the oppressive darkness and the drumming of rain on the pavement. The next, a shimmering distortion appeared, as if someone had flicked a switch on a tear in reality.
Before Jin-Woo could even register the impossible sight, a low growl ripped through the silence. A creature, vaguely canine but twisted into something monstrous with razor-sharp claws and glowing yellow eyes, lunged out of the nascent rift, directly at him.
Jin-Woo froze. Pure, unadulterated panic seized him, locking his limbs. He threw his arms up in a futile gesture of defense, his eyes squeezed shut, bracing for the inevitable, tearing pain.
But it never came.
Instead, a bizarre tingling sensation spread through his chest, a cool energy blooming outwards. His eyes flickered open, and then, there it was. Burning blue words suspended in his vision:
[you have awakened]
Jin-Woo blinked, utterly disoriented. The monstrous dog-thing hung suspended in mid-air, as if caught in an invisible net. More words bloomed into existence, one line after another.
[System Loading… Late Awakening Protocol: Online.]
[Welcome, Player. Unique System Detected: Endgame Sequence Initiated.]
Jin-Woo stared at the glowing text, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was a Hunter. Finally. But "Endgame Sequence"? The words tasted like ash in his mouth, a premonition of finality.
As he watched, the frozen monster shimmered, its grotesque form dissolving into motes of black dust that swirled together, coalescing into a single, obsidian key that hung suspended in the air before him, radiating a faint, unsettling energy.
[Item Acquired: Shadowed Canine's Fang Key.]
[New Main Quest: Don't Kick the Bucket on Day One.]
[Objective: Use the key to enter the Baby Rift and take out the target inside.]
[Time Left: 72 Hours.]
[Lose Condition: You Die. Seriously.]
Jin-Woo stared at the quest window, his mind reeling. This wasn't the heroic narrative he'd seen on the news. This felt raw, immediate, and terrifyingly real. A game where the stakes were his very life. His awakening had come, not with glory, but with a death clock and a monstrous first assignment.
