NOVEL WEB Chapter 1: The Shattered Sky
The sky was not always broken.
There was a time when the heavens were whole, a time before the Rift tore across the stars. The blue canopy that once blanketed the Earth glimmered with serenity—until that day. The day reality cracked, and from the other side of existence, the Abyss answered with silence and ruin.
Mount Velyra stood silent before the storm. On its peak, the High Observatory hummed faintly—its ancient machinery long forgotten by civilization but left still functional by the enigmatic wisdom of Gaia's early mystics. It was there, at exactly 03:33 a.m. on the winter solstice, that the first fracture appeared—a thin silver line splitting the night like a crack in glass. Astronomers had no name for it. Priests trembled. Children cried without knowing why.
"No natural formation. This isn't celestial," whispered Arion Meros, the head scholar of Gaia's Arcane Research Bureau. He turned from the glass lens, eyes pale with fear. "It's...a wound."
The earth began to tremble. Winds howled, not with force, but with voices. Whispers seeped through the atmosphere like parasites of sound. Those nearby fell unconscious. The Rift widened.
And then came the first creature—an obsidian serpent made of malformed limbs and flickering stars. It did not hiss. It screamed in silent agony, its very existence offensive to reality. That serpent was later recorded as the first Rank 8 Abyssal—the forerunner.
Gaia did not act immediately. Humanity watched. Borders were sealed. Satellites fell from orbit. Technology collapsed in regions closest to the Rift. Fear, not leadership, dictated the first response. Then came the second emergence—five Abyssals of different shape and terror. Entire cities vanished.
It was only when Paris fell, and King Leonardo Serfort Granhart XI himself nearly died during a failed counterattack, that Gaia was born.
Within the temporary war camp at Grenoble, the future king stood amidst bloodied snow. Leonardo—then a younger, sharper man—wore the torn remnants of a commander's cloak, the golden lion of House Granhart stained with black ichor. His eyes were not defeated, only hardened.
"They came from nowhere," muttered his second-in-command, General Vales. "Our guns do nothing. Our tanks melt. The Abyss doesn't bleed."
Leonardo looked to the heavens. The Rift shimmered there, distant but close, hanging like a sword above the throat of the world.
"Then we forge something that does," he replied. "The old myths speak of weapons that could cut divinity itself. We'll find them. And we'll make warriors worthy of wielding them."
That night, the Project: Artifact Retrieval began.
Three weeks later, from the ruins of Vatican archives to the undersea tombs of the Lost Library of Riyora, relics were unearthed. They pulsed with ether. They resonated only to the chosen.
By the time the Rift had grown a hundred kilometers wide, humanity's response had a name:
Gaia.
And Gaia had a plan: 100 Divine Artifacts. One for each destined wielder. One chance at survival.
But even as hope was born...
The sky cracked a second time.