All stories have a beginning. It is simply the principle of life—one must begin to meet the end. Yet, if there were one truth Vali could never admit to, perhaps due to its preposterousness, it is the fact that his life only truly began when his world ended.
January 1st, 2001.
Expansive hordes of monsters covered the skies as if they were dark clouds of rain and storm hiding the sun. The sun's light seemed to brighten the world barely; after all, a single candle seldom brightens an entire mansion in darkness.
"Quick, citizens! Get to safety. We are under the threat of an IK class scenario," a robotic voice kept announcing on repeat, its voice booming across the multitude of speakers across the wreckage that we can barely call a world anymore.
The remainders of civilization, particularly what we call technology, hardly resembled what they had once been. The only exception to the eye of the common man seemed to be these speakers... the scions of true technology. Connected to a semi-sentient Artificial Intelligence, every announcement from these speakers heralded the collapse of whatever remnants of society we had left.
Vali belonged to this world. A world plagued by these monsters that seemed to arrive from large portals called "Gates". These monsters killed organisms in their sight, polluted the environment exponentially within hours to such a level that mankind on its own would have needed a millennium to accomplish, and devoured resources at an even higher rate.
Yet in this world, there were a few mortals who carried a responsibility to slay these monsters that plagued their world like cancerous growths; they were called Hunters. Vali was such a Hunter.
"That clanker is clearly malfunctioning. Gates are worse than anything we have ever seen." Vali thought.
Class IK scenarios were a term reserved for natural disasters devastating enough to collapse society. In a way, he was exaggerating, most Gates were indeed successfully stopped by Hunters when they managed to kill the titan leading the monsters of a gate called "Boss" but the ones that couldn't be stopped initially ended up causing devastation beyond proportion and were barely closed when Hunters of the entire world united as one determined to close it and willing to pay the price with incalculable causalities.
In such a world, the survival of humanity so far was simply a miracle forged by determination, discipline, and tyranny. Vali became a hunter when he was nothing but 14 years of age; some became hunters even younger. Child soldiers were not uncommon in this world; what was uncommon was their surviving the training required to be hunters, and even so, a handful of them did survive by a mixture of incredible will and talent.
Orphans and children of Hunters did not even get a say in this; they were immediately drafted as soon as they turned 12. Vali's own parents were hunters; he had only managed to avoid the draft for 2 years due to their having some level of influence. Now, despite being 19, he had more nightmares of his time training than dealing with Gates.
Yet, he knew that if he were to die in this world, it would be due to a Gate, and one was just here. So he forged ahead, gripping his sword tightly to fulfil his responsibility as a Hunter for perhaps the last time.
The gusts of wind from the wings of the many monsters he must face blew his silky black hair, perhaps an anomaly in this world where people are generally covered with oil, dust, and grease from living in wreckages. His golden light brightened up with both fear and determination as if they were glowing searchlights used by the people here to find the corpses of their loved ones who were unfortunate enough to be living near a Gate.
Vali used his grappling hook to swing atop whatever was left of electrical lines and buildings to hunt these monsters so far above him. He had once heard from his father that before the Gates, mankind flew across the sky in vehicles called Aeroplanes, and a well-trained and privileged few even breached the stratosphere in Rockets. All Vali had was his Sky Accel, a standard-issue harness-based mobility gear to navigate the sky and allow three-dimensional movement. Yet for the world's current situation... this was perfect.
He swung and propelled across the air, slicing these winged abominations like a butcher cutting chicken. He had cleared the entire gates as a Hunter; this was perhaps close to no work for him. Were it not for their sheer quantity, he could have dealt with them faster. The more he killed, the more he got attacked.
And he had killed enough to grab the attention of every single monster left alive. Each of them pecked his body with brutal efficiency; they kept him alive and tore skin and flesh asunder from his neck, wrists, and knees.
When he finally noticed a single fleeting moment to fall from a height enough to fracture some of his bones, but at least let him survive this ordeal, Vali jumped with no hesitation. A testament to what Hunters had lost to be what they are was, after all, their first sacrifice in training - hesitation.
Quite a bold sacrifice, you might think, but Vali's heroics for the day could simply not meet their end at the hands of a few fractured bones. Even with shaking legs, he ran towards inflammable materials in the wreckage as the monsters followed his trail.
As he ran past his targeted point, he lit a barely functioning lighter and threw it into the pile of inflammable wreckage, perhaps a trap left behind by some unfortunate hunter who already met his end.
Many monsters perished, and the few that remained flew back into their Gate. There were times mankind showed curiosity about the nature of Gates, leading to some level of research initiative, but whatever went in never seemed to return. Some chose to meet what seemed to be their likely end by simply jumping into an active Gate, but most of them were simply killed by the monsters surrounding the Gate area. The hopelessness of the situation simply demanded that humanity focus back on surviving rather than researching the true nature of Gates, and from whatever he knew so far, Vali was sure that those monsters wouldn't return.
He walked a few steps further before finding a quiet place for some rest, the rusted metal chassis of a flattened car.
"A few moments of respite is perhaps the only luxury a Hunter can claim," Vali exclaimed after groaning in pain with his injuries. He closed his eyes and rested for a few minutes, atop the rusted car chassis and perhaps under a shade of some kind?
His partially closed eyes opened to a new sight.... The "Boss" of this Gate staring at him from above. It was a horrifying sight, a colossal blasphemy with a humanoid torso and head with avian beaks in place of it's eyes and wings in place of limbs. It's jet black feathers and crimson beaks would've terrified many a Hunter. Each feather of this monster was a little larger than a small building.
The mere sight of this Boss was confirmation that Vali's previously exaggerated assertion was probably right. This was no IK Class Scenario
Vali let out a quick grunt and arose to the challenge, sword in hand. He used his grappling hook to swing across the sky again. Perhaps some might find this almost self-destructive but to Hunters, this would be akin to a sportsman playing through injuries. Very daring, but nonetheless possible.
Yet his stroke of courage only seemed to be met with a single feather from this abomination, like a cruel human child flicking an ant for entertainment. A single feather, with more than enough strength to tilt a building pushed his body towards the cruel fate of death, perhaps by crashing into a building or falling into the wreckage. He doubted he could survive another fall regardless, considering his prior injuries.
"This is it. It is all the same." Vali thought nihilistically, he was not fuelled by confusion or rage at his fate. In the uncertainty of death, nihilism seemed to provide a little more comfort to him than hope. After all, he had spent enough of his life combating the apocalypse to know that Hope would only keep the battle alive another day and pragmatically, he did not seem to think he had one.
In his head he recited a poem that his father told him was from better times.
"Some say the world ends in fire.
Some say in ice.
From what I have tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
to say that ice is also great
and would suffice."
He wondered how the poet would have felt if he knew that the world ended in neither desire nor hate, but simply a failure of survival.
Despite muddling his head with these pointless thoughts at a time where survival should have been his only focus. Vali was quick to notice that he would perhaps die by crashing into a building considering he was now close to one.
Yet, in this fairly predictable outcome, an inconceivable surprise factor seemed to delay his demise. Another Gate had opened, a Gate far larger than the one the current Boss had stepped out from and it opened right in front of the building he was going to crash into.
"Perhaps.... I live." Vali thought.
The last thought he would have in his home world seemed to be one clearly made out of Hope. Hope - the force that lays wake in man to keep the battle going on for another day.