The sky was no longer blue.
Crimson rifts painted the heavens, bleeding cracks of energy that shimmered with unstable light. Gravity fluctuated in waves. High above the jagged skyline of the city, floating monoliths from unknown dimensions hovered like tombstones in a dead sky.
What had once been a thriving megacity of twenty million people was now a chaotic sprawl of wreckage. Fissures cut through streets like claw marks, and buildings—those that hadn't been ripped into other dimensions—stood at odd angles, twisted as if time had aged them centuries in a day.
The Cataclysm Protocol had arrived like a cosmic judgment, rewriting the laws of physics and space. Reports of dimensional merging had spread rapidly before all global communication collapsed. Earth was now something else—an amalgam of realities spliced together with no guiding hand.
The ground trembled occasionally, sending tremors through the streets. Lightning crackled across the sky even in daylight, and motes of unstable mana drifted like spores on the wind. Technology flickered in and out of functionality. Magic, once a myth, had become tangible—and deadly.
Among the destruction walked Leon Veyron—once hailed as the brightest minds in the world. Betrayed by his own research team, shunned by his peers, and left for dead in the early days of the Protocol, Leon had spent the past year surviving, scavenging, and studying the new laws of this broken world.
His synthetic cloak fluttered in the turbulent wind, scavenged tech strapped to his waist and arms. A rebreather mask covered his mouth, filtering out the unstable particulates in the air. The remnants of a broken civilization clung to him like ghosts.
He stopped near the ruins of a maglev station, its once-sleek transit lines now bent into grotesque spirals. Mangled bodies—some human, some not—littered the tracks.
Leon knelt beside a control panel embedded in the side of a collapsed terminal, pulling out a pair of depleted fusion cells and an elemental capacitor. Useless in most hands, but Leon had made a life out of converting the broken into functional. His fingers moved quickly, efficiently.
He muttered as he worked, "Still charged. If I reroute the flow through the—"
A noise cut through the air—low and guttural.
Leon froze. Slowly, he turned, unholstering his makeshift pulse rifle from a magnetic clamp on his back. It was a crude thing—salvaged from pre-Cataclysm tech and jury-rigged with mana filaments—but it had saved his life more than once.
From the shadows of a nearby parking structure emerged a howler beast—three meters tall, skin a mesh of bone and sinew, its face eyeless but its movements precise. The creature sniffed the air and released a shriek that echoed through the ruins.
Leon fired a bolt of kinetic energy. The rifle sputtered, releasing only a weak pulse.
"Damn it."
The howler lunged.
Leon dove behind a crumbled wall, rolling through ash and concrete. The beast's claws tore through the space where he had just stood, rending steel like paper. Leon slashed upward with a short vibroblade, catching the beast's underbelly. Acid sprayed from the wound, sizzling on his sleeve. He hissed in pain but didn't stop moving.
His mind raced, calculating angles, distance, structural weaknesses.
Then the ground gave out.
Cracks had spiderwebbed beneath the station, and Leon's desperate evasive maneuver pushed just enough pressure on a weak point. With a thunderous groan, the concrete floor collapsed.
Leon and the howler plunged into darkness.
They fell.