HALO: NAMA'EL

The textbooks in 2029 call it an "evolutionary leap." The grieving call it a "culling." But to those who saw the sky turn the color of a bruised lung back in ’57, it was simply The Selection. They didn't see a miracle coming. They saw an obituary. It arrived as a ghost on the radar. A massive, light-bending anomaly the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States both tried to nuke out of the atmosphere. They failed. The fancy name in the classified files was the Non-Baryonic Event Horizon Flux, but science didn't matter when the cloud touched the ground. They expected the end of days. They predicted the total extinction of the human race as the dark matter rearranged the very atoms of the air. But humanity was stubborn. Ten percent of the world, Two hundred and ninety million people ceased to exist in the first seventy-two hours. Their biology hit a wall it couldn't climb, and they simply dissolved into the soil. The other ninety percent? They were the ones who had to live with what came next. For seventy-two years, that dark matter has been a slow-acting poison, or a slow-burning fuel, depending on who you ask. With every passing generation, the "Flux" in the blood has grown denser. What started as people being able to see in the dark, or an old man who is never tired in the 60s became the "Prime Heroes" of the 90s. And now, in 2029, the third and fourth generations are hitting the streets with powers that make the old gods look like parlor tricks. In this new America, the "Enhanced" aren't just celebrities, they are a different subspecies. The mutation gets stronger every year, and the gap between the survivors and the titans is widening into a canyon. But while the world watches the sky for the next bright light, they’re missing the shift in the dirt. They think they understand the Flux. They think the Dark Matter was a gift. They don't realize that when the Selection happened, it didn't just change our DNA. It broke the seal on a basement door that had been locked since the beginning of time. And something in that basement just realized the latch is gone.