In an age before reckoning, when humanity knew only the certainty of mortality and the rhythm of seasons, the world fractured. Without warning, without mercy, the fabric of reality tore apart like parchment thrown into flame.
They called it the **Day of Lone**—though whether "Lone" referred to mankind's isolation in that moment of cosmic horror, or to some forgotten deity who wept at what transpired, none now remember.
The signs began subtly. Fishermen reported strange distortions on the horizon where sea met sky. Farmers found geometric patterns of scorched earth in their fields, shapes that hurt to look at directly. Children spoke of whispers in languages that predated human tongues. Then, in a single catastrophic dawn that stretched across all time zones simultaneously, the gates opened.
They manifested everywhere—in the hearts of cities, atop sacred mountains, beneath the ocean's crushing depths, even in the humble corners of forgotten villages. Some gates stood like monolithic archways carved from obsidian that drank the light around them. Others were tears in space itself, ragged wounds that bled an otherworldly luminescence. Each gate was unique in appearance, yet all shared one horrifying purpose: they were doorways for the incoming apocalypse.
From these portals poured forth nightmares given flesh. Creatures that defied the natural order—beasts with too many limbs or none at all, entities that existed partially in dimensions human eyes couldn't perceive, swarms of living hunger that consumed everything in their path. The monsters were as varied as they were deadly: some bore crystalline hides that shattered weapons, others moved through shadows as easily as fish through water, and still others possessed an intelligence that made them far more terrifying than mere beasts.
In those first brutal months, humanity bled. Cities fell in days. Nations collapsed overnight. Half the human population was slaughtered before anyone could mount an effective defense. Entire bloodlines vanished. Languages died with their last speakers. The monuments of human achievement crumbled before the relentless tide.
But humanity wasn't alone in its suffering—or its survival.
Through the same gates that brought destruction came others: beings from myth and legend, races that humanity had relegated to children's stories and ancient warnings. The **Asuras** emerged with their divine fury and warrior pride, beings of immense power who had waged wars in realms beyond mortal comprehension. The **Elves** appeared like fragments of a gentler age, bearing ancient wisdom and an affinity for the natural energies now flooding the world. **Angels** descended with their radiant wings and righteous purpose, though their divinity was tempered by the same desperation that gripped all living things. The **Dwarves** brought their mastery of craft and stone, their stubborn resilience a bulwark against extinction.
And then there were the **Rees**—a clan so mysterious that even their own kind spoke little of their origins. They possessed abilities that seemed to bridge the gap between the physical and metaphysical, their very existence a riddle wrapped in flesh.
With the gates came something else, something that would forever alter the nature of reality itself: new energies that seeped into the world like ink into water.
**Aura**—the manifestation of one's life force and fighting spirit, burning within warriors like an inner sun. Those who mastered it could shatter stone with their fists, move faster than the eye could track, and endure wounds that should have been fatal.
**Mana**—the fundamental energy of creation and transformation, flowing through the world like invisible rivers. Mages learned to shape it into devastating spells, weave it into protective barriers, or use it to unravel the very laws of physics.
**Divinity**—the rarest and most sublime power, a fragment of something greater than mortality. Those who wielded it could heal the dying, sanctify the corrupted, or smite evil with holy light. But divinity demanded absolute conviction; doubt weakened it, and corruption could transform it into something terrible.
The children born after the Day of Lone were different. Their bodies had adapted to the new energies saturating the world, mutations occurring at the genetic level that transformed humanity forever. These post-Lone humans could perceive and manipulate the energies around them. Some developed **Talents**—innate abilities unique to the individual, ranging from the subtle to the spectacular. Others possessed strong **Affinities**, natural resonances with specific elements or energy types that made certain techniques far easier to master.
A child might be born with fingers that naturally channeled lightning, or eyes that could see the flow of mana, or a voice that could compel obedience in beasts. The variations were endless, and families that once measured worth in gold now measured it in the strength of their children's abilities.
Facing extinction, the scattered survivors had no choice but to unite.
Thus was formed the **Inter Racial Pact**—an alliance forged not in idealism but in desperation. Humans, Asuras, Elves, Angels, Dwarves, Rees, and others who had emerged from their hidden corners of existence, all bound by a single purpose: survival. The pact was written in blood, signed by leaders who had watched their peoples die, and enforced by the simple truth that division meant annihilation.
These warriors who stood against the tide were honored as the **First Generation of Hunters**. They learned to fight together, combining human determination with elven precision, dwarven resilience with asura fury, angelic grace with the mysterious techniques of the Rees. They developed strategies for clearing dungeons—pocket dimensions that formed behind stabilized gates, labyrinths filled with monsters and unimaginable treasures. They learned that each gate had a core, and destroying it would seal the portal forever.
It was a war measured in centuries. Every cleared gate was a victory bought with blood. Every sealed dungeon was a monument to the fallen. Slowly, painfully, the alliance pushed back the tide. Cities were rebuilt. Order was restored. The surviving races carved out territories and established new nations. Children grew up knowing the gates as a terrible fact of life, but no longer an immediate death sentence.
Four hundred years passed. Four centuries of hard-won peace, though "peace" was a relative term in a world forever changed. Gates still appeared, but they were managed, controlled, cleared by professional hunters who made a living from the monster cores and rare materials found within. The horror of the Day of Lone faded into history, then legend, softened by time and distance.
Then came the second apocalypse.
The sky split open above the heart of the continent's most prosperous city, a wound in reality so vast it could be seen from hundreds of miles away. This wasn't a gate—it was something far worse, a tear in the fundamental structure of existence itself. The phenomenon lasted only minutes, but those minutes would echo through all the ages that followed.
From that cosmic wound emerged five figures.
They descended like falling stars wrapped in a miasma of wrong. The very air around them seemed to scream, and the ground beneath their feet withered and died. These beings radiated an energy unlike anything ever encountered—not aura, not mana, not divinity, but something that seemed to corrupt and consume all three. Reality itself recoiled from their presence.
Before anyone could react, they vanished. Simply ceased to exist in that location, leaving only the lingering stench of their terrible power and the dead zone where they had briefly touched the ground. Every hunter in the vicinity had felt it—that overwhelming, suffocating presence that made even the strongest warriors feel like insects before gods.
Panic spread across the continent as reports were shared through every available channel. What were these beings? Where had they gone? What did they want?
The answer came with blood and fire.
Four of the five reappeared across different regions, and the slaughter began.
They were called **Devils**, though that name felt inadequate for what they truly were. Each one possessed power that dwarfed even the mightiest hunters. They moved through armies like wolves through sheep. A gesture could level buildings. A word could drive entire crowds into madness. Their combat abilities seemed to have no upper limit—they adapted to every strategy, countered every technique, and grew stronger as the battles prolonged.
But their evil wasn't limited to simple destruction. They committed atrocities that haunted survivors for generations. Cities were razed not quickly, but methodically, with the Devils ensuring maximum suffering. They took pleasure in corruption, in breaking the strong, in defiling the sacred. Women were violated with a calculated cruelty that served some dark purpose beyond mere sadism. They turned neighborhoods into charnel houses, transformed temples into slaughterhouses, and left survivors with minds so shattered they could only repeat what they'd witnessed in endless, gibbering loops.
What made them truly unstoppable wasn't just their power—it was the strange energy that surrounded them. Attacks that should have connected simply... didn't. Spells unraveled before reaching them. Blessed weapons lost their sanctity in their presence. It was as if they existed slightly outside of normal reality, protected by the same wrongness that had heralded their arrival.
The Inter Racial Pact mobilized everything. Every available hunter, every military force, every last reserve of power was thrown against the four Devils. And all of it failed. The Devils couldn't be damaged, couldn't be contained, couldn't be stopped.
Hundreds of thousands died in the initial attacks. Millions more perished as the Devils continued their rampage across the continent. Entire species that had survived the Day of Lone found themselves pushed to the brink of extinction once more. The mysterious races suffered worst of all—their smaller populations meant that even limited casualties threatened their continued existence.
As hope withered and the alliance teetered on the edge of total collapse, a desperate solution emerged.
Hundreds of the strongest hunters—veterans who had survived countless dungeon raids, masters who had spent lifetimes perfecting their techniques, heroes who had saved cities single-handedly—came together for a final sacrifice. They would perform a technique never before attempted: the simultaneous self-destruction of their energy cores.
Every hunter possessed an energy core, the source of their power located in the center of their being. It was the crystallized manifestation of years or decades of cultivation, the wellspring from which they drew aura, mana, or divinity. Destroying one's own core was considered the ultimate taboo—it was death, but worse, it was the annihilation of everything the hunter had built, learned, and become.
These hundreds of heroes gathered at four different locations, each group targeting one of the Devils. They knew they wouldn't survive. They knew their deaths wouldn't even be quick. But they also knew it was the only way.
The rituals occurred simultaneously, coordinated through magic and desperation. Each hunter ignited their core, transforming themselves into a living bomb of condensed energy. The explosions were visible from space—four blossoms of apocalyptic light that briefly turned night into day across half the continent.
When the light faded and the shock waves finally settled, four of the Devils were dead, their forms obliterated down to the molecular level by forces beyond even their ability to defend against.
But victory came with a terrible revelation.
As one of the dying Devils' essence dispersed, its last words manifested in the minds of every living being within a thousand miles—a psychic curse that none could block:
*"You celebrate... but you understand nothing. We are not dead. We are merely... scattered. When vessels of sufficient quality are born... we shall return. Again and again, until this world drowns in despair. Four may fall... but five shall always walk. Hunt for the fifth... before it hunts for you."*
Then came the laughter—terrible, echoing laughter that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, fading only slowly as the Devil's consciousness finally dispersed.
The implications were catastrophic. These beings weren't truly dead. They could return. And somewhere, the fifth Devil still lurked, waiting, planning, perhaps already moving pieces on a board none could see.
The predictions proved horrifically accurate.
Once every era—roughly once per century—certain individuals would be born across the continent. At first, they seemed normal, possessing the usual hunter abilities and talents. But as they matured, something terrible would awaken within them. Their energy would take on that same wrongness, that same reality-distorting quality. Their personalities would shift, twisted by the foreign consciousness taking root in their souls.
These unfortunate individuals were the **Vessels**—humans (or occasionally other races) whose spiritual and physical attributes aligned in such a way that they could house fragments of the original Devils. The process wasn't immediate; the Devil's essence would gradually consume the Vessel's original personality, rewriting them from the inside out until only the Devil remained, wearing the Vessel's flesh like a stolen coat.
The Vessels possessed only a fraction of the original Devils' power—perhaps half at most, as their mortal frames couldn't contain the full essence. But even half the power of a Devil was enough to slaughter cities. Even a fragment of that malevolent intelligence was enough to orchestrate nightmares.
Every century, the cycle would repeat. Four Vessels would awaken, would transform, and would begin their campaigns of systematic cruelty. The Inter Racial Pact would mobilize. Heroes would rise. Battles would be fought. And eventually, through immense sacrifice, the Vessels would be destroyed.
But they always returned.
Over the generations, patterns emerged. Scholars dedicated their lives to studying the phenomenon, trying to predict where Vessels might appear, what signs to look for. They discovered that Vessels often showed unusual talents from birth—not necessarily evil, but different, touched by something that didn't quite belong. Some nations implemented brutal policies, executing children who showed suspicious characteristics. Others tried more humane approaches, attempting to suppress the Devil's awakening through sealing techniques or spiritual purification.
Nothing worked permanently. The Devils always found a way.
The only hope for true peace was to find and kill the fifth original Devil—the one that had never manifested, never been destroyed, never revealed its purpose. Hunters had searched for centuries. Some claimed to have found traces of its presence—locations where reality seemed thinner, where the wrongness was palpable. But the fifth Devil remained a ghost, a shadow, a promise of horror yet to come.
The cycle had one other terrible consequence—one that would give birth to an entirely new race.
When the original Devils had committed their atrocities, the women they violated had invariably died. The Devil's energy was simply too toxic for mortal flesh to endure, especially in such intimate contact. Their bodies would wither within days, consumed from within by the corrupting force.
But rarely—perhaps once in a hundred such tragedies—an offspring would survive.
These children were born marked. They possessed a fraction of Devil's blood, usually less than forty percent, diluted by their human or other-race heritage. Their energy had a slight taint to it, a whisper of that same wrongness, though vastly diminished. They often developed unusual abilities, powers that didn't quite fit into the normal categories of aura, mana, or divinity.
They were called **Demons**, and they were despised.
It didn't matter that they hadn't chosen their parentage. It didn't matter that many were as horrified by their origins as anyone else. They bore the blood of the world's greatest evil, and that was enough for most people to condemn them. Demon children were abandoned, driven from villages, or killed outright by mobs who saw them as monsters waiting to happen.
For generations, Demons existed on the margins of society—hunted, feared, legislated against. They formed hidden communities in places others wouldn't go, protected each other because no one else would, and developed their own culture born of shared suffering.
But Demons weren't Devils. They didn't share the originals' appetite for cruelty, didn't possess the reality-warping power, didn't carry the corrupting influence. They were simply people—people with a cursed heritage, yes, but still people capable of choice, of compassion, of heroism.
Slowly, painfully, this truth became accepted. It helped that many Demons became hunters, proving their worth by fighting against the gates and dungeons, by protecting the same populations that had once tried to exterminate them. It helped that some Demons were there when Vessels awakened, fighting against the very Devils whose blood they shared, dying to protect innocents.
After centuries of persecution, Demons were finally recognized as a distinct race, separate from Devils. They were granted membership in the Inter Racial Pact, given legal protections and rights, allowed to integrate into society. The old hatreds didn't disappear overnight—prejudice rarely does—but at least Demons could now live openly, could aspire to something beyond mere survival.
By the modern era, some eight centuries after the Day of Lone and four centuries since the Devils' first appearance, the world had settled into its new reality.
Gates still appeared but were managed by professional hunters through a complex bureaucracy of guilds, government agencies, and private contractors. Dungeons were raided regularly, their resources fueling an entire economy. The various races of the Inter Racial Pact had established their territories and trade networks, sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, but always bound by the shared memory of near-extinction.
The mysterious races that had been pushed to the brink during the Devils' first rampage numbered only a few thousand individuals now, their ancient knowledge and unique abilities carefully preserved by those who remained. The Rees, in particular, had become almost mythical, as their population had dwindled to the point where most people would never meet one in their lifetime.
And always, hanging over everything like a sword suspended by a thread, was the knowledge that the cycle would continue. That somewhere, four Vessels were growing up, unaware of the horror waiting to awaken inside them. That somewhere, the fifth Devil watched and waited, pursuing whatever incomprehensible goal it had set for itself.
The world had survived two apocalypses. It had adapted, evolved, grown strong in the broken places. But survival wasn't victory. It was just another day of not dying, another century of holding back the dark.
And in the shadows of this transformed world, new stories were being written—stories of hunters who would rise above their origins, of heroes who would face impossible odds, of ordinary people thrust into circumstances that would forge them into legends.
This was the world of **Saint's Odyssey**—a world of power and peril, of ancient evils and eternal hope, where every sunrise was a small miracle and every sunset a reminder of what had been lost.
The gates remained. The Devils would return. The cycle would continue.
Until someone found a way to break it forever.