The first Tower grew in the middle of a shopping district.
People thought it was an art installation at first. A clean black spire, smooth as glass, rising where a fountain used to be. Five stories high, humming just beneath the range of hearing. Teenagers took selfies with it. Influencers climbed the base for clout. No one knew why their cameras sometimes froze, or why video near it filled with static.
On the third day, it opened.
The air peeled back with a sound like ripping paper. A doorway melted into existence at the base of the spire, revealing nothing but darkness inside. The news vans came. Police cordoned off the area. Scientists set up instruments and argued about radiation and gravitational distortions.
One officer in riot gear walked too close.
The darkness clawed him in.
He didn't scream. One second he was there, the next he was a silhouette dissolving into black pixels, like a bad stream buffering and then dying.
The footage went viral in seconds.
By the end of that week, Towers had erupted in a hundred cities. By the end of that month, the first wave of Glitches stepped out: twisted wolves frozen mid-frame, knights whose armor flickered between models, birds flying in jagged, stuttering paths. The world learned a new kind of fear.
Then the System activated.
It appeared in people's vision as they slept, as they showered, as they listened to the emergency broadcasts. A translucent blue window hovering in the air, ignoring walls, ignoring eyelids.
[SYSTEM ONLINE]
[QUALIFYING USER DETECTED]
[DO YOU ACCEPT THE CONTRACT?]
[YES] / [NO]
Some people said no.
They woke up the next morning as if nothing had happened. Their lives went on, smaller and dimmer and constantly in the shadow of Towers.
Others said yes.
They woke to status screens and stat points and a creeping realization that the rules of the world had changed forever. The first Hunters walked into the Towers wearing borrowed armor and shaky courage. Most of them never came back.
But enough of them did.
Enough to give humanity hope. Enough to turn Tower raids into a profession. Enough to build guilds, rankings, and reality TV shows out of daily survival.
Ten years later, people stopped asking why the System had appeared.
They were too busy trying not to die inside it.