Much later. Elsewhere, elsewhen; Elira wakes gasping. She's been having these kind of blury heartpounding dreams for quite sometime now.
Her hands tremble. Her chest aches with a grief she does not understand. A longing too. But also peace.
She smells ash and blood that is not there.
She hears silence that should not exist.
In her dreams, golden light is always running from her. But golden people wanted to destroy her.
In her dreams, worlds end without noise.
And sometimes, just before waking, she feels it. The call of unknown from deep within.That distant pause.
That moment where she almost remembers why everything feels like it is already over.
She presses a hand to her chest.
Something inside her stirs. Not hunger. Not intent. Recognition.
~~~
Erin lifted his dark gaze to the sky.
It was a bright spring day, the air clear and soft, the sun hanging high and merciless. He squinted, eyes watering as he stared a moment too long into the light, then raised a hand to shield them.
That was when he saw it.
Far above the clouds drifted something that should not have been there.
At first glance, it resembled a floating island but the comparison failed the longer he looked. It was vast, impossibly vast, nearly the size of an entire continent. Only half of it was visible. The rest vanished into a jagged line in the sky itself, as though the heavens had been split open like a colossal door leading into another existence.
The air around it shimmered faintly, distorting light, bending clouds away from its edges.
It had appeared several years ago. Not fallen. Not formed.
Appeared.
On the same day, a second anomaly had emerged an enormous, rock-like planet hovering unnervingly close to the world, as if gravity had simply forgotten its place. It never moved. Never drew closer. Never drifted away.
Its surface glowed with a constant reddish hue, unchanged by sunrise or nightfall. It looked like a moon, but ten times larger, unnaturally sharp against the sky, its details far too clear—like something meant to be seen, not admired.
People had learned to live beneath them. Learned to adjust with the horror it brought.
Erin hadn't.
Those things changed human life completely.
Human wars gave way to wars of survival—first against each other, then against alien conquerors. They appeared everywhere across the world: in deserts and cities, across oceans, and in the frozen lands of the far north. No place was untouched.
Then came the monsters.
Creatures once confined to games, films, myths, and light novels stepped into reality. Beings that should have remained fiction became flesh and hunger overnight. The transition was brutal—too real, too fast.
Humanity was not ready.
Smaller and weaker nations collapsed almost immediately. Others resisted, holding the line with modern military firepower. Missiles and bombs could erase some threats—but not all. There were monsters that ignored even the most devastating weapons, horrors drawn from ancient nightmares and forgotten myths.
In response, a unified authority was formed.
A World Government, built from allied nations that retained their sovereignty while pooling resources, intelligence, and command. Its purpose was survival: defend humanity, destroy the invaders.
It wasn't enough.
Even with global coordination, hundreds of thousands still died.
Then the sky changed again.
A night of brilliant meteor showers swept across the planet, burning paths of light through every atmosphere. In the days that followed, a new phenomenon emerged.
They were called the Marked.
Men and women who received the falling lights began to display abilities that defied science—strength beyond human limits, unnatural perception, powers that felt borrowed rather than earned.
They turned the tide of battle.
They became humanity's greatest weapons.
The World Government welcomed the Marked.
Registered them. Trained them. Deployed them.
Officially, they were humanity's saviors.
Unofficially, they were something else.
And no one could say where their power truly came from.
Erin's gaze drifted downward to his right hand.
Etched into the back of it was a small mark—half of a star intersected by a thin triangle, its lines faint and easily overlooked. From a distance, it was almost invisible, something one might mistake for a smudge or an old scar.
But Erin knew better.
It marked him as one of the Marked.
His dark brown hair hung messily over his forehead, perpetually unkempt, shadowing eyes that rarely met anyone else's for long. He was twenty years old and not attending university—not by choice, but because he could not afford to. Of average height and slim build, he blended easily into a crowd. Timid. Unremarkable. Not someone people remembered.
Not charming.
But he was quick-thinking. Observant. Smarter than he let on.
He sighed and tugged at the hem of his jacket, unconsciously pulling it lower to cover the back of his hand. The Mark itched again—an uncomfortable, crawling sensation beneath the skin, as if something beneath it was stirring, reminding him that it was there.
He might be Marked, but he wasn't proud of it.
Among the Marked, he stood near the bottom. His resonance hadn't even reached a full star, barely registering at half-star classification. The kind that earned little respect and fewer opportunities.
Still…
Even a half-star Marked was far beyond an ordinary human.
His strength exceeded natural limits. His senses were sharper, his reflexes faster, his recovery unnaturally quick. Against normal people, he was already something else entirely; a one-man force, whether he wanted to be or not.
~~~
Erin slouched a little more as he reached his destination.
The entrance was hidden beneath a sprawling, brightly lit shopping mall—buried deep in its basement, past food courts, fashion stores, and the constant hum of laughter and music. Above him, people drifted through their lives with shopping bags and idle conversations, blissfully unaware of how fragile that peace truly was.
They never looked down.
Down here was where the Marked gathered.
While civilians enjoyed normalcy, it was the Marked who trained, deployed, and bled to make sure that monsters didn't tear reality open again without warning. The dangers could appear anywhere, at any moment—and when they did, it wouldn't be the crowds upstairs who answered the call.
It would be them. Like right now.
The work paid well. On paper, at least.
Mission compensation scaled with risk and classification, and even someone like Erin earned more in a single deployment than most people did in months. But the money never stayed with him long. Almost all of it vanished the moment it arrived—redirected to creditors whose names he had learned to recognize by heart.
His parents were gone. Both of them.
Only after their deaths did the truth surface: layers of debt piled so deep Erin still didn't understand how it had been accumulated, or why. Loan after loan. Contracts he had never seen. Figures so large they felt unreal.
No matter how many missions he completed, no matter how many times he risked his life, the debt never shrank. It felt bottomless. Like pouring blood into a well that refused to fill.
"Erin!"
The voice cut gently through his thoughts.
Soft. Bright. Familiar.
He looked up.
Standing a few steps away was Elira, waving at him, smiling gently as she always did; warm, effortless, as if the weight he carried simply didn't exist in her world. One of his oldest childhood friends. Someone who still said his name like it meant something good.
For a moment, the underground facility, the debt, the Mark burning faintly beneath his skin—all of it faded.
And Erin found himself queitly smiling back before he even realized he was doing it.