ARIZONA, SITE ALPHA - JUNE 14, 2027. 2:24 PM.
Humanity has discovered a once unimaginable existence, but at a cost.
A cigarette slowly burns in an ashtray.
The room is cramped. Bookshelves. Stacks of scientific journals and documents.
An older man sits quietly at a desk, meticulously sifting through the pages of a document detailing 'Project Isorropía', a highly classified initiative researching a device referred to as 'ANCHOR-ALPHA'. He pauses, running a finger over a particularly intriguing entry recorded mere hours earlier.
Upon the realization of what the entry detailed, the older man's eyes widen. He stands up abruptly, knocking his chair over in apparent fright. He rushes out of the office, sprinting down the expansive corridor while reaching for a device attached to his belt.
"Evacuate the facility, now!" the man's voice barks into the hand-held device, a frantic, lingering feeling tinging every syllable. "This is an emergency!"
2:28 PM.
Sirens blare overhead as red light flashes side to side.
Somewhere deeper within the facility's confines, sits a device within an expansive room. It is massive, overstretching, bending and twisting; forever. The esoteric material culminates nowhere, as if at one point it had vanished into oblivion, yet persists nonetheless. Liquid is pumped to and from the machine, itself. But it's pumped elsewhere, too, from these tubes; things, funneling inwards, felt; then heard, processed, grinded, smashed, binded. Conveyer belts escape from the thing, left, right, centre, above; cauldrons, feeding countless things of indiscernible origin into it.
Labeled across the device: 'ANCHOR-ALPHA'.
The anchor is said to anchor reality itself, rendering all forms of matter, particles, and energy static and unmoving at a designated target. It's a device to counter any disaster, natural or otherwise. But, a device like that comes at a grand cost, now divulged.
Dzzzzzz. Crack!
***
Approximately 74 hours before SITE-ALPHA's disaster.
The room is dim; bright light pouring in from the guarded hallway melts silhouettes within the dark. The figures at the entrance are researchers, as is the person who operates the device. To a man, some wear the same expression: unease, while others, excitement.
Tongues move to form arguments and concerns. Voices rise and fall.
The monitor shows a slumbering young man. Sounds worm their way into his sleep. It's as if they are trying to force a bud to bloom in winter.
One is a deep, rhythmical noise akin to a bothersome bell—a terribly inorganic sound. Others are profane undulations that arrive and vanish without warning, disturbing the rhythm. And finally, voices. Many voices.
Within the massive machine, the young man sleeps alone in the electronic cradle. His hair, glossy like wire, sways to and fro.
[Consciousness is successfully implanted.]
Tightly shut eyelids gradually loosen. As his consciousness sharpens, so too do the sounds he hears. The aching pulsing comes from a device meant to wake him. Tubes are secured to the man's body with straps; as fluids are taken in and expelled from him.
A terrible noise compromises his hearing. Machines sound overhead, deafening and incessant. He has been hearing them for hours.
[System is processing...]
Just as his consciousness sharpens, it wanes. He falls back still.
***
At 2:30 PM, 6/14/2027, government satellites orbiting the Northern Hemisphere detected unprecedented spikes of energy emitting from SITE-ALPHA.
At 2:34 PM, all contact with SITE-ALPHA, as well as the entirety of the state of Arizona, is lost. Approximately 7.8 million lives are lost. Arizona is now covered in a dense frost, ice, and various other unnatural elements that had seemingly simultaneously appeared after SITE-ALPHA's disaster, presumably caused by the exposure and destruction of 'ANCHOR-ALPHA'.
It is believed that the state is now uninhabitable for human life due to the unnatural elements that have enveloped it. Search and rescue attempts have proven to be futile, and the government has halt any sort of entry.
Approximately three hours following the fall of SITE-ALPHA and the state of Arizona, numerous reports flood in detailing bizarre happenings worldwide. Reports indicate people accessing a "system," which grants them supernatural abilities.
***
Years. Seven years after the disaster that caused the complete lost of Arizona and gave humanity access to supernatural and unimaginable powers.
His tired eyelids part to reveal infinity yellow-gold irises that glowed vibrantly within the room, catching the sunlight in a place where sunlight would never reach. He has long, ashen-black hair. His body is slender, but not overly toned. He is short, no older than nineteen, maybe twenty. Black eyebrows seemingly drawn by a single, uninterrupted stroke of a famed artist's brush. His pale skin, flawless, almost like a porcelain doll's. A mundane human would've certainly mistaken him for one.
The young man ripped one of the tubes from his being, hissing as he did so; he glanced around the room of confinement. Reinforced, one way glass was splayed out ahead of him, and yet, despite this, he could still see beyond it. A corpse hangs on the opposing side, seemingly skewered through by a jagged arc of ice, from the wall. The corpse wore long white attire stained with blood.
'Where am I?'
Raising his left hand, he examined the palm; then, the back of his hand; and then, slowly, trailed his eyes up his arm. Unfamiliarity.
This felt nothing like his previous body. It was too young. It felt too foreign.
[System has finished processing.]
'The System. Intriguing.'
Raising his hand, fingers splayed, he caresses the now sweltering air. Though the concept of a 'system' was foreign to him, it wasn't to his body, as if second nature. Before him, a second dimension surface unfurls, filled with text. This is the system.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
[SYSTEM INTERFACE LOADED]
Designation: [Anomaly]
Status: [Unregistered] . . . [Hollow]
Primary Directives: [N/A]
System Integrity: [COMPROMISED]
[WARNING: UNSANCTIONED ACCESS DETECTED]
//: >
Core Attributes
Vitality: [Perfect]
Cognition: [Stable]
Dominion: [Rewriting]
Resilience: [Fluctuating]
//: >
Abilities
[Rejection of Written Fate]
Immune to precognition, prophecy, and deterministic control.
[Spiritualist]
[0/100]
Due to the subject's origins, he has an affinity towards spirits. Occasionally, he may see and communicate with spirits, possibly influencing, or even going as so far to consume them.
[Made Divinity]
"Gods are not born. They are made—through faith, through fear... or through theft."
After absorbing the remnants of the goddess's divinity, the subject's very essence has been forcibly reshaped. Though not a true god, they now carry the weight—and curse—of stolen godhood.
Deific Healing:Mortal wounds regenerate unnaturally fast; however, the healing is imperfect, leaving faint golden scars. Death by conventional means becomes unlikely—but damage from sacred or anti-divine sources is amplified.
Wretched Curse: The mind is constantly compromised by fragmented memories, emotions, and impulses that once belonged to the goddess. Occasionally, her unforgiving voice seeps through—whispering promises, threats, or truths better left unknown.
Imbued Divinity: The body is unnaturally strengthened, blooming with divinity. Muscle fibers now carry traces of divinity. The subject's strength reaches beyond natural limits—bones won't snap under pressure, and his strikes hit with the force of a siege weapon. Blades still pierce him, and fire still burns, but pain becomes distant. His skin holds an unnatural warmth, like sun-heated stone.
//: >
Incoming Message:
"You were never meant to exist. Yet, here you are. An error, a flaw in my 'code'. I wonder, will you erase yourself, or will you erase everything else?"
______________________________________________________________________________________________
His gaze trails slowly and attentively across the text. His status, his core attributes, and abilities. 'How delightful,' he thought with an apparent hint of sarcasm, glancing down at his right hand and clenching it tightly. 'That vile bitch's remnants are in me.'
Instead of being ecstatic, he is instead repulsed and irritated. After all, this wasn't his power, but something he was unintentionally given. It nauseated him to his core, to have any semblance of that woman's power in him.
Although...
"There isn't anything I can do about it now."
He'll simply have to deal with it.
What worries him more is the message sent to him through the system. '...Is there an existence higher than that wretched woman? And are they a threat? What do they mean by their code?' There is many things that could've meant, but one thing was clear to him. 'They're definitely a threat.'
He'll worry about that later. Letting his right hand loosen and fall listlessly to his side, his gaze trails up.
Despite the enveloping darkness, he seems unperturbed. Peering to his right, he examines a massive reinforced door. Fortified and locked, it seems unopenable, even with his body. He looks back to the reinforced glass, which seems frosted over on the opposing side, then raises his fist. Striking the glass, a thud resounds. Again, then again. Slightly painful, it is. Uncaring, he remains. Blood marks his fist as, slowly, the glass begins to fragment and split.
After about six strikes, the reinforced glass cracks further and shatters, raining shards into the adjoining room. The man glances at his fist, noting how the skin peeling away, only to vibrantly glow and heal within moments.
He vaults into the next room, his eyes examining the technology that surrounds him. It's all so advanced, so strange.
He looks up at the dangling corpse, then kicks the icicle that's impaling it, shattering it and allowing the corpse to fall. He steps forward, removing the clothes from the corpse to wear them himself. They were quite oversized. Despite the ever-evident cold, he seems unperturbed and unaffected by it.
Glancing back down at the corpse, he examines it, momentarily. The corpse itself is unrotting and fresh, as if the individual had died just hours before.
Spirits: invisible, incorporeal things. In his past life, he had encountered many. Once the body, or vessel, decays and succumbs to natural elements, the spirit is said to leave. Yet, in this place, the spirit is trapped, for the vessel does not decay.
Reaching out with his right hand, his splayed fingers pulls and tugs at the existence that is dark, but present. And he places it into his mouth.
[1/100]
Indifferent to the fact he has just consumed a human spirit, he stands up.
Turning on his heel, he approaches the door, casting a brief glance around the room. Frost and dense ice is seemingly spread everywhere, consuming most of the room.
Despite such a thing, he seems unperturbed.
Halting in front of the door, he reels back his fist and smashes the door open, sending it spiraling off its hinges with a resounding impact.
Gazing past the doorway, an awe-dropping scene greets his eyes. Light, abundant, shines down from the clouded skies, illuminating an expansive crater.
The entire expansive facility is cratered, save for a few rooms being left relatively unscathed, as if a nuclear warhead had gone off, leaving behind a eerie absence of life. And In the crater's very center, a tower of churning ice and frost rests still, cascading sunlight pouring down on it.
"Interesting."
***
Ascension/Ranking System
Ⅰ. Hollow
"Empty shells, breathing only because the world hasn't noticed them yet."
Ⅱ. Kindled
"The first spark in a sea of cold ash."
Ⅲ. Ascendant
"They no longer walk among men. They walk above them."
Ⅳ. Paragon
"Neither man nor god, but something in between."
Ⅴ. Transcendent
"The world bends to their will. The heavens curse their name."
Ⅵ. Apotheosized
"They do not rise to heaven. They build their own."