The sound was beyond anything he had ever experienced. Not the roar of any beast, not the rumble of distant thunder, not the crash of a cliff face collapsing. The sound seemed to originate from the very sky itself, as if the heavens themselves were being torn asunder by some titanic force beyond human comprehension. The young man's hands instinctively flew to his ears, but it made no difference—the sound reverberated through his entire body, vibrating his bones like a struck gong, rattling his skull with intensity that made thought nearly impossible.
The earth shook violently.
The cave walls trembled, and loose stones cascaded from the ceiling in a terrible rain of mineral debris. Dust exploded into the air, thick and choking, reducing visibility to mere meters. For a terrifying moment, he thought the mountain itself was collapsing, that the very earth was splitting open to swallow him whole.
But the shaking subsided. The cave stabilized. The dust settled slowly, creating an eerie twilight darkness.
The Descent
Without thinking, driven by instinct alone, the young man bolted from the cave entrance. He scrambled through the vegetation barrier and out into the open air, his powerful legs propelling him forward with supernatural speed. The earth was still vibrating beneath his feet, making him stumble and nearly fall, but he recovered with reflexive grace.
He raced down the slope of the escarpment, his bare feet sure and swift despite uneven terrain. Behind him, the forest canopy seemed to ripple with the aftershocks of the massive impact, trees swaying and groaning as if in agony. Ahead, in the distance, he could see an unusual glow illuminating the night sky—a luminescence that had no natural source, something that violated every principle he understood about how the world worked.
The young man slowed his approach as he drew nearer to the epicenter of the disturbance, his predatory caution overriding his desperate curiosity. The ground became increasingly disturbed—vegetation flattened and scorched, trees snapped like kindling by invisible force, the earth carved into an enormous pathway of destruction.
The acrid smell of burning wood filled his nostrils, mixed with something chemical and utterly foreign—something that made his hindbrain scream that this substance did not belong to Earth's natural chemistry. The aroma was acrid and wrong, speaking of processes and reactions that had no place in the natural world.
As he crested a rise in the terrain, he saw it.
The Arrival
A crater.
The young man had no name for what he was seeing, no framework in his primitive mind to comprehend the object that lay burning before him. It was a massive depression in the earth, perhaps thirty meters across and several meters deep, the scale suggesting a violence beyond anything he had witnessed in his nineteen years of violent life. The soil and stone had been violently displaced, creating towering lips of disturbed earth around the perimeter—ramparts created by the sheer kinetic energy of impact.
In the center of this crater, partially buried in the disturbed soil, lay an object unlike anything that existed in the known world.
It was roughly two meters in length, though portions of it were obscured by dirt and debris and smoke that rose from its superheated surface. Its basic shape suggested a vaguely elongated projectile—something designed for travel through hostile mediums—though it was far too massive and geometrically precise to be any rock or asteroid that the young man could comprehend.
The surface was strange—a metallic-seeming material that caught the firelight and threw it back in fractured patterns, as if the surface itself was composed of some substance that reflected and refracted light in ways that shouldn't exist in nature.
Portions of the object were still burning with flames that ranged from orange to blue to colors for which he had no name—colors that seemed to exist at the very edge of his visual spectrum. The heat radiating from it was intense enough to make his skin tingle as he stood some distance away, a warmth so profound that it spoke of temperatures far beyond anything he had encountered in his life.
The young man's intelligence struggled with comprehension. A part of him—the part that had survived through cunning and observation—recognized that this was an object of manufactured origins. The precision of its geometry, the intentionality of its design, all spoke to something shaped by intelligence rather than formed by natural processes. Yet his mind had no reference frame for what he was looking at.
This was not a spear. Not a tool. Not a weapon crafted by human hands. It was something far stranger.
And yet, looking at it, some deep part of his being recognized it for what it was: the vessel of his transformation. The instrument of his destiny.
Despite the danger that every instinct screamed at him, the young man cautiously approached. He had built his entire reputation on his willingness to face dangers that would drive lesser creatures to flee in terror. This was who he was: the one who stood firm when others ran. The one who engaged with threats rather than flee from them.
He walked along the edge of the crater, feeling the heat from the flames intensifying with each step closer. His body gradually acclimated to the elevated temperature through sheer force of will.
The Transformation Begins
The fires were still burning fiercely when something changed.
As the young man watched in fascination and mounting dread, the flames suddenly extinguished. It was not a gradual dwindling or slow choking of fire. The fire simply ceased to exist, as though something had stolen the very combustion from the burning material, as if the very concept of flame had been revoked from that location.
A profound silence fell over the crater, broken only by the sound of settling earth and cooling metal—a gentle hissing that suggested temperatures still elevated to levels that would burn human flesh.
And something emerged from the object.
A strange gas began to seep from fissures and cracks in the object's surface, flowing outward like water seeking its level. The color of this vapor was unlike anything the young man had ever witnessed—a deep, shimmering gold that seemed to hold luminescence within itself, as if the golden hue was not merely a color but an active property of the gas itself.
The gold seemed to glow from within with internal radiance, creating a luminescent quality that made the vapor visible even in the dim starlight. It was the color of the sun captured and transformed into mist, the color of amber hardened into its most ethereal form.
But this golden mist was fundamentally different from anything natural.
The gas did not dissipate immediately into the air as natural mist would. Instead, it seemed to possess a kind of intelligence, a deliberate purpose in its movement that transcended passive diffusion. The vapor condensed into a cloud-like formation—a coherent entity rather than dispersed gas—and began to creep slowly across the crater floor toward the watching young man, as though drawn by his presence or actively seeking his location with predatory precision.
The young man tensed. Every fiber of his being screamed at him to flee. This was not natural. This was not a force he could fight with claw and strength and cunning. This was something that operated according to rules beyond his comprehension.
Yet something held him in place.
A desperate need to understand. To comprehend this thing that had fallen from the sky. To integrate this new phenomenon into his understanding of his world even as part of his mind understood that his understanding might be fundamentally inadequate to the task. What was this? Where did it come from? What did it want?
The golden cloud drifted closer.
The young man's mind calculated distance, speed, trajectory. Every scar on his body was a lesson in survival—don't flee from the unknown, engage with it, test its limits and weaknesses. Fear was for prey animals. He was not prey. He had never been prey. And if this thing that fell from the sky killed him, at least he would die knowing he had met it face to face, armed with nothing but his will and his hunger for the unknown.
He hesitated, caught between fight and flight, between advancement and preservation. Reason battled against instinct. Curiosity warred with survival sense. For a long moment, he was frozen in indecision, watching as the impossible cloud drew ever nearer, its golden luminescence casting strange shadows across his face.
And then he did something that would alter the course of his entire existence.
He reached out his hand.
His fingers—powerful, scarred, stained with the blood of countless victories—extended toward the advancing golden mist. It was not a rational thought decision. It was something more primal—an impulse, a hunger, a desire to touch the mysterious and unknown. He had not survived this long by being cautious. He had survived through bold action, through embracing danger, through meeting threats head-on with absolute commitment.
His fingertips made contact with the golden cloud.
The Invasion
In that instant—the instant his skin touched that supernatural vapor—everything changed forever. The world contracted into a single point of contact between flesh and something that transcended nature itself.
The transformation had begun.
The moment his skin made contact with the supernatural vapor, the gas responded—not passively, not gradually, but with violent, predatory intensity. It separated. It transformed. It rushed toward him with the focused hunger of a territorial predator defending its domain.
The mist invaded his body through every possible avenue—his mouth, his nostrils, the gaps around his eyes and skull, the very pores of his skin. It was as if the gas was not gas at all but a living entity determined to infiltrate and colonize his form.
The young man's survival instincts erupted into full panic.
He clamped his hands over his mouth, pressing them with desperate force. He snapped his eyes shut and pressed his palms against his eye sockets, trying to seal every orifice, every gap, every potential entry point for the invading gas. But the effort was reflexive rather than effective.
It was futile.
The golden vapor was relentless and unstoppable. It found every gap in his defenses, every space between his fingers and his mouth, exploiting the architecture of his own body against him. Every microscopic opening in his skin became a breach point. It seeped in through the pores of his body, inexorable and inevitable, as if the very concept of his resistance was irrelevant to the golden gas's purposes.
The young man thrashed on the ground in blind panic, his powerful body convulsing as he fought against an enemy he could neither see clearly nor fight physically.
His lungs felt as though they were being invaded by liquid fire—not heat but sensation, not burning but a feeling like his respiratory system was being rewritten at the most fundamental level. His eyes, despite being sealed shut, felt as though they were burning from within, as if his optical nerves were being stimulated directly by the invading substance. His skin tingled and burned, as if every nerve ending were being simultaneously ignited and frozen.
The golden gas tasted of ozone and celestial light, of metal oxidizing and something utterly foreign to Earth's chemistry. It coated his throat with a sensation like liquid silk dipped in flames. His lungs burned with a sensation he had no framework to comprehend—as if the very air inside him had become hostile.
It took what felt like an eternity before the last of the golden gas finally entered his body completely. Only when every mote of vapor had dissolved into him did he manage to draw a gasping, desperate breath of untainted air into his lungs.
The young man lay on the crater floor, gasping like a beached fish, his entire frame heaving with the effort of drawing air back into his body. His mind reeled from the experience, unable to process what had happened. The golden gas was now inside him, part of him, intermingled with his blood and bone and neural tissue in ways that would reshape his very existence.
For several long moments, he simply lay there in the dirt, breathing deeply, his body trembling with aftershocks of panic.
The Metamorphosis
And then, as his panic receded, a new sensation began to manifest.
Pain.
It began as a tingling in his fingertips and toes—a sensation like renewed circulation returning to limbs that had fallen asleep. But within seconds, it transformed into something far more sinister. The tingling became burning, and the burning became agony beyond anything his nineteen years of violent life had prepared him for.
It felt as though his muscles were being torn apart from within, shredded into component parts by some invisible force. His bones felt as though they were simultaneously breaking and reforming, as though some invisible architect was dismantling his skeletal structure piece by piece only to reconstruct it into some new and alien configuration. His organs burned with a heat so intense that he thought surely his internal structures were being melted away.
The young man's scream was one of pure, primal agony—a sound so loud and so full of anguish that the hyenas in the distance went silent, alarmed by the tortured cry of another apex predator.
Through the haze of pain, a single thought crystallized in his mind: survival.
His primitive consciousness understood with absolute clarity that if he remained here, exposed in this place where he could barely move, predators would come.
Somehow, through sheer force of will, the young man forced his wracked body to move. He crawled across the crater floor, dragging himself forward inch by agonizing inch. Every movement sent fresh waves of pain through his body—pain that seemed to originate from his very cells, as if his body was rebelling against itself.
The Return
The journey back to his cave was a nightmare odyssey of agony and determination. He dragged himself through the vegetation, along the forest floor, up the slope of the escarpment. Each movement was a triumph of will over failing body. At times, the pain was so overwhelming that he lost consciousness briefly, only to have his body jolt back awake with fresh agony.
It took hours of agonized effort, but finally, just as the first hints of dawn began to touch the eastern horizon, he reached his cave. He crawled inside, deeper than usual, moving past his usual resting place into the darker recesses of the cavern system.
There, he came upon a massive boulder—something he had positioned at the entrance to a deeper chamber years ago as a defensive precaution against being cornered by multiple predators.
Using the last reserves of his strength—strength that was already beginning to change, to transform into something far more powerful—he rolled the boulder across the opening, leaving only a narrow gap for air to flow through. The size of the gap would prevent any large predator from entering.
Once satisfied with his defensive position, the young man collapsed onto the cool stone floor of the deeper chamber. His entire body convulsed and twitched violently as some internal transformation began to take place—a metamorphosis that would reshape not just his body, but his mind, his existence, and everything he would one day become.
In the darkness of that deep stone sanctuary, as dawn broke across the African savanna outside, the young man known as "The Beast" began his ascension into something far more terrible.
The golden mist within him had only just begun its work.
The age of gods was about to begin.