The cola had just reached Marcus Chen's lips when reality tore itself apart.
It started as a sound—or rather, the absence of sound. A pressure that built in his ears like descending too fast in an airplane, except it kept building, and building, until the entire office floor of Wang & Associates seemed to hold its breath.
Then the sky cracked.
Marcus stood frozen as he stared at the sky from his cubicle on the forty-second floor, watching as a line of pure wrongness split the air above. It wasn't black, wasn't white—it was the color of static on an old television, if static could hurt to look at. The rift spread like lightning frozen in time, branching across the sky in jagged, impossible angles.
His cola can slipped from his fingers. It hit the floor without a sound—because there was no sound anymore. The entire city had gone silent.
Then the mana came.
Marcus didn't know that's what it was called, not yet. All he knew was that something flooded through those cracks in reality, something that made his skin prickle and his lungs burn with each breath. The air itself seemed to shimmer, becoming thicker, heavier, charged with an energy that made his teeth ache and his vision blur at the edges.
Around him, his colleagues stumbled away from their desks. Jennifer from accounting clutched her chest, gasping. David, in the cubicle opposite him, had collapsed to his knees, staring at his hands as if they belonged to someone else.
And maybe they did. Because Marcus could feel it—something fundamental had changed. The world he'd woken up in this morning was gone.
The silence shattered.
Not with sound, but with presence. A voice that wasn't a voice, words that bypassed his ears entirely and resonated directly in his skull, in his bones, in the deepest parts of his consciousness. Everyone heard it. He knew this with absolute certainty, because he could feel seven billion minds recoiling in unison.
"GREETINGS, PEOPLE OF EARTH."
Marcus grabbed the window frame to keep from falling. The voice was vast, impossibly vast, like an ocean trying to speak through a human throat.
"BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE DIMENSIONAL COVENANT AND THE ACCORDS OF MERGED REALITIES, WE, THE VANGUARD LEGION OF THE FOURTH QUADRANT DOMINION—PROUD MEMBER OF THE GRAND INTERDIMENSIONAL ALLIANCE—HEREBY MAKE FORMAL CONTACT WITH YOUR WORLD."
The rifts in the sky pulsed with each word, spreading further. Marcus could see them now all across the horizon—dozens, maybe hundreds of tears in space-time, each one bleeding that strange, shimmering energy into Earth's atmosphere.
"AS PER THE PROTOCOLS OF FIRST CONTACT ESTABLISHED BY THE UNIVERSAL GENEVA CONVENTIONS, YOU ARE HEREBY GRANTED ONE STANDARD CYCLE—666 EARTH DAYS—OF PROTECTED STATUS. DURING THIS GRACE PERIOD, NO HOSTILE ACTION MAY BE TAKEN AGAINST YOUR WORLD BY ANY SIGNATORY OF THE COVENANT."
Two years. They had a little less than two years. Marcus's mind latched onto that detail even as panic clawed at his throat. Protected status. That meant after the period ended...
"YOU STAND AT A CROSSROADS, INHABITANTS OF EARTH:
PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FOURTH QUADRANT DOMINION AND JOIN OUR GLORIOUS KINGDOM AS THIRD GRADE CITIZENS WITH SOME RIGHTS AND PROTECTIONS UNDER ALLIANCE LAW.
REMAIN INDEPENDENT AND FACE THE CONSEQUENCES WHEN YOUR PROTECTION EXPIRES, LEAVING YOU VULNERABLE TO CONQUEST BY ANY FACTION THAT CLAIMS YOUR WORLD.
RESIST, AND BE SUBJUGATED AS THRALLS UNDER THE RIGHT OF CONQUEST."
Thralls. The word hung in Marcus's mind like a death sentence. Slaves. They were talking about enslaving humanity.
"CHOOSE WISELY. THE CLOCK BEGINS NOW.
MAY FORTUNE FAVOR THE BOLD, AND MAY YOUR WORLD PROVE WORTHY OF THE MANA THAT NOW FLOWS THROUGH IT."
The presence vanished as suddenly as it had come, leaving behind a ringing silence that was somehow worse than the voice. Marcus sagged into his chair his reflection staring back at him—a thirty-two-year-old corporate slave who'd been worried about a proposal five minutes ago.
That world was gone.
"Marcus?" Jennifer's voice cracked. "What... what was that?"
He turned to face his colleagues. Twenty-three people scattered across the office floor, all of them looking to him for answers he didn't have. Through the windows behind them, he could see chaos erupting across the city. Cars had stopped in the streets. People poured out of buildings, pointing at the sky. In the distance, something that looked like lightning but wasn't arced between two of the larger rifts.
His phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. And again. Within seconds, every phone in the office was screaming with notifications—emergency alerts, news updates, messages from loved ones.
Marcus pulled out his own phone with shaking hands. The screen was flooded with alerts.
Marcus stared at his phone screen. Dozens of messages flooded in—his mother in Vancouver, his college roommate in New York, his ex-girlfriend asking if he was okay. Everyone reaching out, trying to make sense of the impossible.
He looked up from the phone. Through the window, the rifts continued to spread across the sky like cracks in a windshield. That strange energy—mana, they'd called it—continued to pour through, making the air shimmer and dance.
"We need to get out of here," someone said. Marcus turned to see Tom from IT, already grabbing his jacket. "We need to go home, be with our families."
Others nodded, moving toward the elevators in a daze. But Marcus hesitated, his eyes drawn back to the rifts. Something about them was changing. The edges were stabilizing, solidifying. And through the largest one, directly above the city center, he could see... something.
A structure. Massive and impossible, floating in whatever space existed beyond the tear. It looked like a fortress carved from crystal and shadow, pulsing with that same strange energy.
"Marcus, come on!" Jennifer grabbed his arm. "We have to go."
He let her pull him toward the elevators, but his mind was racing. 666 days. Less than two years to decide humanity's fate. Join them as third-grade citizens—whatever that meant. Stay independent and risk conquest by anyone who wanted Earth. Or resist and become slaves.
The elevator ride down was silent except for Jennifer's quiet sobbing. Marcus wanted to comfort her, but what could he say? That everything would be okay? They both knew that was a lie.
When the doors opened to the lobby, chaos greeted them. People pushed and shoved, trying to get outside. Security guards shouted for calm, but no one was listening. Marcus and Jennifer were swept up in the crowd, carried through the revolving doors and onto the street.
Outside was worse.
The mana was thicker here, visible now as a faint golden haze that hung in the air. Marcus could taste it—copper and ozone and something else, something that made his tongue tingle. People ran in every direction, some screaming, others standing frozen as they stared at the sky.
A car had crashed into a storefront across the street. The driver sat slumped over the wheel, whether dead or unconscious, Marcus couldn't tell. No one stopped to check.
"I need to get home," Jennifer said, her voice barely audible over the chaos. "My daughter—she's at school. I need to—"
"Go," Marcus said. "Go get her."
Jennifer nodded and disappeared into the crowd. Marcus stood alone on the sidewalk, buffeted by the panicking masses, trying to think. His apartment was only ten blocks away. He could walk it. But should he? Should he go home and hide, or...
Or what? What could anyone do against an interdimensional empire?
A scream cut through the noise. Marcus turned to see a woman pointing at her hands. They were glowing—actually glowing, with a soft blue light that pulsed in time with her heartbeat. She stared at them in horror, shaking them as if she could fling the light away.
"It's the mana," someone nearby said. "It's changing us."
Marcus looked down at his own hands. They looked normal. Felt normal. But that tingling sensation was still there, stronger now. Like electricity running just beneath his skin.
A boom echoed across the city, and Marcus looked up to see one of the rifts expanding. It swallowed a skyscraper whole, the building simply ceasing to exist as the tear in reality passed through it. Where the building had been, there was now... nothing. Just empty space and that static-colored wrongness.
People screamed and ran. Marcus ran too, his body moving on instinct even as his mind struggled to process what he'd just seen. An entire building. Gone. Just gone.
He made it three blocks before he had to stop, gasping for breath. The mana-thick air burned in his lungs. Around him, the city was transforming. Cracks spread through the pavement, and from them grew vegetation that Marcus had never seen before—plants with crystalline leaves that chimed softly in the wind, vines that glowed with bioluminescence even in the afternoon sun.
"This isn't real," someone muttered nearby. "This can't be real."
But it was. Marcus could feel the truth of it in his bones. The world had changed. In the span of minutes, everything humanity had known, everything they'd built, had become obsolete.
His phone buzzed again. A news alert: EMERGENCY BROADCAST - ALL CITIZENS ADVISED TO SHELTER IN PLACE - MILITARY MOBILIZING - PRESIDENT TO ADDRESS NATION AT 6 PM EST
Marcus checked the time. It was 2:47 PM Pacific. Three hours until the President spoke. What could any world leader possibly say that would matter? They'd been given an ultimatum by beings who could tear holes in reality itself.
Another boom. Another rift expanding. This one was closer, only a few blocks away. Marcus could see through it now—see the alien landscape beyond. A world of purple skies and floating islands, connected by bridges of pure light. Beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
Something moved in that alien vista. Something large.
Marcus didn't wait to see what it was. He ran.
The streets were a maze of abandoned cars and panicking people. The mana grew thicker with each passing minute, and Marcus could feel it affecting him. His senses felt sharper, more acute. He could hear conversations from blocks away, smell the fear-sweat of the crowd, see details in the distance that should have been impossible to make out.
He was changing. They all were.
By the time Marcus reached his apartment building, his legs were shaking and his lungs felt like they were on fire. The lobby was empty, the doorman's desk abandoned. He took the stairs—didn't trust the elevator—and climbed to the eighth floor.
His apartment was exactly as he'd left it that morning. Breakfast dishes in the sink. Laptop open on the coffee table. The TV still on, now showing nothing but emergency broadcasts and shaky phone footage of the rifts.
Marcus collapsed onto his couch and stared at the screen. A reporter in New York was trying to maintain composure as she described similar phenomena happening worldwide. Rifts over every major city. The same announcement in every language. The same countdown.
666 days.
His phone rang. His mother.
"Marcus? Marcus, thank God. Are you okay?"
"I'm okay, Mom. I'm home. Are you—"
"We're fine. Your father and I are fine. But Marcus, what's happening? The news is saying—they're saying—"
"I know, Mom. I heard it too. Everyone heard it."
Silence on the line. Then, quietly: "What are we going to do?"
Marcus had no answer. What could anyone do? Fight? Against beings who could tear holes between dimensions? Hide? For 666 days, and then what?
"I don't know," he admitted. "But we have time. Almost two years. We'll figure something out."
It sounded hollow even to his own ears.
They talked for a few more minutes before his mother made him promise to call again soon. After he hung up, Marcus sat in the silence of his apartment, listening to the city outside. Sirens. Screams. The distant sound of something collapsing.
The world was ending.
Or maybe it was just beginning.
Marcus stood and walked to his window. From here, he could see three of the rifts, their static-colored edges pulsing with that alien energy. The mana haze had grown so thick it looked like fog, golden and shimmering in the afternoon light.
As he watched, a bird flew past his window. Except it wasn't a bird anymore—not entirely. Its feathers had taken on a metallic sheen, and its eyes glowed with the same blue light he'd seen in that woman's hands. It sang a song that sounded like wind chimes and thunder.
Everything was changing.
Marcus pressed his palm against the window glass. That tingling sensation was stronger now, almost painful. He could feel something building inside him, like pressure waiting to be released.
666 days until the protection ended.
666 days to decide humanity's fate.
666 days to learn how to survive in a world where magic was real and Earth was just another conquest for an interdimensional empire.
Marcus Chen had been a corporate drone this morning, worried about proposals and deadlines and office politics.
Tonight, he was something else.
He just didn't know what yet.
Outside, the rifts continued to spread, and through them, Marcus could see other worlds. Dozens of them. Hundreds. An infinite multiverse pressing against Earth's reality, waiting to flood through.
The invasion hadn't started yet.
But it was coming.
And humanity had 666 days to get ready.