In the year 2000, the world ended, not with a bug or a bang, but with silence.
On December 31st, as the planet waited for the Y2K rollover, every digital clock froze at 23:59:53. Screens flickered to black. Satellites went dark.
For seven endless minutes, humanity stood on the edge of a new millennium in unnatural quiet.
Then the sky tore open.
Rifts, later named Gates, ripped across the heavens like jagged scars in reality. Crimson, azure, violet, obsidian. From them spilled nightmares without name: beasts of fang and shadow, creatures that bled raw mana, horrors that laughed at the laws of physics.
Cities fell in hours. Governments collapsed in days. Tanks fired shells that dissolved mid-air. Fighter jets dropped like stones when their electronics died inside the mana fields.
Science failed. Faith faltered.
But humanity endured.
In the burning streets of Seoul, a 28-year-old office worker named Park Ji-Hoon lay bleeding beneath rubble as a Gate beast towered over him. Something ignited inside his chest, pure, wild energy. Mana. He stood, hands blazing with azure fire, and reduced the monster to ash with a single strike.
He was the first Awakened.
They rose after him in the thousands, then millions, ordinary people who survived the breaks and woke with power coursing through their veins.
Hunters, the world called them.
Wielders of true mana, masters of spells, body reinforcement, and artifacts carved from the corpses of the very monsters they slew.
Ranks were forged in blood and necessity.
E-ranks cleared small blue Gates.
A-ranks led teams into red dungeons that devoured entire neighborhoods.
S-ranks became national weapons, living legends guarded more closely than nuclear codes.
And above them, the almost mythical SS-ranks: gods in human skin.
For decades, Hunters were humanity's only shield.
But shields crack.
Gates multiplied. Monsters adapted. Entire regions vanished behind permanent red zones. The death toll climbed into the hundreds of millions.
Then came the corporations.
In 2035, Apex Dynamics, founded by a retired S-rank Hunter turned industrialist, unveiled their answer.
They had synthesized mana.
Artificial, controllable, injectable.
They had sequenced genomes against dungeon essence. They had forged weapons that drank this false mana and carved true monster flesh.
They called their creations Players.
Not chosen. Built.
Genetically enhanced soldiers whose strength came from laboratories, not fate. No spells, no magic, just bodies remade beyond limits and blades born from boss cores.
The world despised them at first. "Fake Hunters," the Awakened spat. "Lab rats in armor."
But when a crimson Gate swallowed half of Tokyo and eighteen S-rank Hunters died holding the breach, it was a squad of Players, equipped with Apex weapons and 79% serum fusion, who stormed in and closed it from the inside.
The tide turned. Governments invested. Corporations raced. Players multiplied.
Now, on December 21, 2041, forty-one years after the sky first broke, two powers stand shoulder to shoulder against the endless Gates.
Hunters: children of mana, born from chaos, worshipped and feared.
Players: children of science, forged in steel and serum, sponsored and scorned.
They fight the same monsters, clear the same dungeons, bleed on the same battlefields.
But they do not share glory.
Whispers spread of coming storms. Gates opening faster. Monsters growing cunning.
Black voids appearing on radar, Gates that even SS-ranks will not approach.
And locked deep within the vaults of Apex Dynamics waits a weapon unlike any other.
A sword crafted from an S-grade monster that refused death.
A blade that thinks. That speaks. That hungers.
Waiting for the hand worthy of its edge.
The age of Hunters and Players has held the line for over four decades.
But the sky is tearing wider.
And this time, something ancient is stepping through.