The world was silent.
Kaelix couldn't understand fully what happened the exact moment the Advent swallowed him—only that the sky collapsed into itself and the very air turned to smoke. And then, nothing. No pain. No light. No time.
Now, he opened his eyes.
And the world was different.
Wrong.
The vibrant green field from before was now reduced to a dead grey plain, the grass bleached as if time had drained the color from every blade. A suffocating black and grey sky stretched overhead, not like night or storm clouds, but like colored oils smeared across glass, smothering the heavens. It rippled occasionally—like something was pressing against it from the other side.
Kaelix slowly rose, his back aching from the awkward angle he'd collapsed in on the tree branch. The tree itself, once alive with rustling leaves, was now hollow, its bark dry and flaking like ash. The leaves had turned to curled paper, fragile and burnt at the edges, some still hanging despite the tree being clearly dead. The branch cracked as he shifted, and he quickly climbed down before it gave way beneath him.
The air tasted like rust.
Everything around him was familiar, but... wrong. Twisted. The stone walls of the school buildings not far from him were melted on the surface, their mass now speckled with crystalline growths. The glass windows of the school's building shimmered with odd images, glitching faintly like a corrupted hologram. The water fountain not far, had solidified mid-splash, droplets frozen in time, but fused with metal wires that coiled through them like veins.
His breath hitched in his throat as he tried to make sense of the warped reality.
Then he saw her.
The security guard—the woman who had shouted at him from the base of the tree not even five minutes ago—was there. Or what was left of her.
Her body was lying a few meters away, but it wasn't human anymore. Her torso was made of bricks, jutting out unevenly where skin used to be. Her arms were transparent, flesh turned to cracked glass, revealing malformed bone. One of her legs had melted into rotting meat, crawling with flies, while her other leg was split open to reveal orb-like eyes, staring outward. Unblinking. Mismatched. Watching everything and nothing.
Kaelix felt his chest tighten, breath shallow as he stared.
"No… fuck, no…"
He took a step back, the reality of what he was seeing crashing into him.
He was really in an Advent.
And there were only three outcomes for living beings caught inside one.
They were either:
Left untouched, although common, it was hardly the desired outcome.
Killed. Their bodies malformed by the raw chaos until they simply… died.
Or they became something else. Adversaries.
Monsters born from distorted forms, consumed by madness, no longer human or their original race in anything but shape. Entities that defied reason and screamed against reality.
As Kaelix stared at the single lifeless eye within the horror that used to be a woman, he froze. The possibility of her rising up and screaming in alien tongues paralyzed him.
But then—thud.
Her glass arm hit the ground, unmoving.
She didn't move.
She was dead.
He staggered back a step, a cold sweat trailing down his spine. His mind reeled, panic looping inside him like an endless scream he couldn't let out.
"This is real. This is really happening. That... was a person. A whole person. A human being. She was just talking to me!"
He turned away, bile rising in his throat as he resisted the urge to vomit. He needed to move.
Keeping a wide berth around the malformed corpse, Kaelix stumbled forward, trying to gather his thoughts. His fingers clenched and unclenched without him realizing.
An Advent. This... this is an Advent.
Even someone like him—Unmarked, worthless—knew the tales.
Advents were pockets of warped reality, triggered by unstable concentrations of raw chaos from the realms beyond Aurmyth. Dangerous, unpredictable, and lethal. They could be small—confined to a room—or massive enough to consume cities. The only people who entered Advents willingly were the Worldforged, or Clergy Of The Churches, armed to the teeth and sanctioned by the gods.
Though even they didn't always make it out.
But this… this was a school. In the heart of the minor realm Aexel, a safe zone.
Advents weren't supposed to spawn in safe zones.
And that was what made this all impossible.
Unless...
Kaelix's eyes widened, dread sinking in like a blade of ice. Unless the Advent didn't spawn on its own.
He flashed back to the image of his brother—Nick, in his graduation uniform—speaking to that strange figure in the blue coat.
The coat of the Church.
And the object. Thick. Rectangular. Like a book.
"No... no, no, no. That couldn't have been it… could it?"
A Tome.
The kind of dangerous weapon that could rip open the boundaries between Aurmyth and wherever the Advents came from.
His eyes snapped toward the direction of the graduation platform—the place where everything had started.
And his heart stopped.
"Nick…"
He didn't even feel his feet moving. He was running before the thought completed, breath sharp, mind spiraling. The horror of what might've happened—of what his brother might've done—screamed in his chest louder than anything else.
He had to find him.
He had to know.
Whether or not his brother was still—
alive.
Kaelix ran as fast as he could.
Or tried to.
His lungs burned. His legs ached. Despite the adrenaline in his veins and the fire in his heart, his body betrayed him. Years of poor nutrition, lack of training, and living as an Unmarked had left him physically frail. He wasn't fast. He wasn't strong. And even now, when his world had quite literally broken around him, he could feel the weight of that weakness dragging behind every step.
But still, he ran.
"Nick… please. Please be okay…"
The thoughts battered his mind harder than the fatigue. Questions swirled in circles with no answers, only mounting fear.
Why did this happen?
Where did the Tome even come from? They were literal banned weapons of destruction...
Why would he even use it?
Did he even mean to?
Did the person in the cloak make him do it?
None of it mattered right now.
He just wanted to see his brother again.
As he approached the ceremony grounds, things began to go wrong.
The world flickered.
One second, Kaelix saw rows of students seated on white chairs just by him, smiling up at the stage in bright sunlight, applauding.
A blink later—glitch—half those people had no faces. Their bodies twisted into metal limbs, glass torsos, and objects. Then—glitch—they were all dead, slumped over with their forms unrecognizable.
Another glitch, and they were back. But seated in different chairs, in different positions. Some were clapping. Others were gone. The sky pulsed from black to blue, and the grass flickered between grey, green, and liquid white, as if the very concept of "grass" was breaking down.
Reality was looping, resisting, breaking.
Kaelix stumbled, falling hard against the jagged, pulsing ground. When he looked behind him to see what he'd tripped on, there was nothing.
But he'd felt it. It was a log. Or a rock. Maybe.
Then it was gone.
He looked forward, trying to keep his eye on the goal but found he was staring back instead. The dead tree he had just left a fair distance away was in his vision.
It kept happening—phantom objects, glitching structures, entire pieces of space popping in and out of existence like a broken simulation. He ducked beneath a floating bench that wasn't there, then reappeared several feet ahead, now turned upside down and fused with a mailbox.
One second, he was desperate, running forward to save his brother, then he was calm, like going for a run. Then he was angry, he's going to kill that piece of shit brother of his who did this.
"This isn't just corruption… the Advent is clashing with the world around it. It's not fully settled."
He pressed forward.
By the time he reached the outskirts of the ceremony ground, Kaelix collapsed to one knee, gasping. He had never felt so out of breath in his life.
And then he saw them.
A crowd. Silent. Still.
Dozens of people. Students. Teachers. Attendees. Not all humans—some of the other races of the Eight Realms were present too. Elven with their elongated ears, Merfolk with their semi-liquid skin, and even a towering troll judge.
But none of them looked right anymore.
Some had long, twisted horns made of metal piercing through their skulls like mockery-crowns. Others had their eyes replaced with chunks of salt, crumbling slowly every time they blinked. A few were bent backward in unnatural arcs, bodies stitched together by vines made of hair or thread.
None of them moved.
None of them breathed.
But they were alive.
Kaelix could feel it. Their pulses didn't match the rhythm of the world anymore. They weren't dead like the security guard. They weren't lucky either. They were worse.
They had become Adversaries.
He could barely swallow, his throat suddenly dry as sand.
Because despite how horrifying they were… they weren't attacking. They weren't screaming or charging or doing any of the things Adversaries were known for in the stories.
They were all… looking.
Their heads were tilted toward the stage.
Kaelix's eyes followed their collective gaze.
And his heart nearly stopped.
Standing at the center of the stage was Nick.
Or at least, something that looked like him.
His brother's figure was shrouded in a flowing distortion, as if his body was wrapped in a cloak of fractured glass. One moment, he was a boy in his ceremonial robes—black-haired, green-eyed, just like Kaelix remembered. The next, he was a silhouette of jagged lines and howling wind, his features shifting like smoke.
But the face… that brief flash of face—it was him.
Nick.
Kaelix's breath hitched, a cold sweat trailing down his back as he stared at the stage. There, at the center of it all, stood his brother—or at least, something that looked like him. But it wasn't.
Nick's form shimmered like a projection under static, his edges hazy, flickering between sharp and ghostlike. His face remained intact—Nick's face, soft and warm in Kaelix's memory, now an eerie island of calm amidst the chaos of his ever-shifting body. The rest of him was a mess of contradictions. One arm was a long, jagged blade of obsidian glass, flickering into serrated bone and then into a gunmetal spike. His torso twisted as though trying to make sense of organs that no longer belonged to a human—muscles moved like gears, bones like hollow piping. His legs occasionally flickered into insectile limbs, clanking metal stilts, or a pulsing mass of tendrils tipped with iron nails.
It was monstrous—but not aimless. Unlike the Adversaries below, whose transformations were chaotic, mindless, disturbing but random, Nick's body held a theme. Every piece was designed to kill.
Kaelix couldn't move. His mind raced, desperately trying to grasp what he was seeing. His breath came in short gasps as something deeper stirred on the stage behind Nick's standing form. A figure began to coalesce, not from flesh but from the environment itself.
At first, Kaelix thought the being was just more of the glitching landscape. But the more he looked, the more he saw intention. The world around this new being seemed to bow inwards—like glass pulled toward gravity. Wherever it stood, the ground shimmered and shifted, transforming into materials that didn't belong there: glass, polished stone, blood-waxed metal, velvet draped in ash. Even the light felt corrupted, bending unnaturally around its presence.
It held a book.
An ordinary book—at first glance. But as Kaelix focused, its cover twisted. Words rippled off the pages like oil on water. The spine stretched and shrank. The air around it whispered, not with sound, but memory—fragments of voices Kaelix didn't know he knew.
And the being holding it... it wasn't like the Adversaries. It wasn't even like Nick.
Kaelix felt something ancient in its presence, something higher. Not holy, no. It wasn't like looking at the statue of the Emperor of Humanity—that had felt noble, eternal. This was more like staring into the abyss and realizing the abyss had laws of its own. Laws that didn't need to acknowledge your existence to affect you.
It began to walk.
Its feet made no sound, but every step it took warped the world beneath it. Trees aged and then withered to dust. Stone became grass then fur then water. Kaelix backed away instinctively.
Then he bumped into something.
He froze.