The notification appeared at 9:17 a.m.
It did not flicker.
It did not ask for permission.
It did not care whether anyone was ready.
A translucent blue screen unfolded in front of Rook's eyes, hovering inches from his face like a sheet of frozen glass.
[The Universal System has integrated with Earth.]
[Survival Protocols Active.]
[Initialization in progress…]
Rook's foot slammed the brake instinctively.
Tires screamed. Horns erupted. A delivery truck behind him swerved, clipping the median hard enough to shower concrete across three lanes of traffic.
"What the hell—" someone shouted.
The screen didn't move.
It stayed centered no matter how Rook turned his head, anchored to his vision with unnatural precision. He reached out on reflex—his fingers passed straight through it.
The blue text continued to scroll.
[All human participants will receive standardized attributes.]
That line made his stomach drop.
Around him, traffic had devolved into chaos. Cars sat frozen at awkward angles. Doors flew open. People stumbled into the street, waving their hands in front of their faces, shouting about screens, about hacking, about some kind of prank.
Someone laughed. Loud. Nervous.
"Is this a game?" a man yelled from a nearby SUV. "Yo, is anyone else seeing this?"
Rook didn't answer.
He stared at the next line.
[Rift Gates opening worldwide.]
The sky cracked.
Not metaphorically.
The air above the intersection folded inward, bending like heat haze under a microscope. A vertical tear split open with a sound like tearing metal, and something dark pushed through.
A shape fell out of the rift and hit the asphalt with a wet thud.
It was small. Green. Wrong.
For half a second, no one moved.
Then it stood.
The creature screeched—high-pitched and shrill—and lunged at the nearest person.
Rook saw teeth. Too many. He saw a woman trip over a fallen bicycle, hands scrabbling uselessly against the road as the thing slammed into her chest.
She didn't scream for long.
Blood sprayed across the hood of a sedan. The goblin—because there was no other word for it—tore at her throat with frantic, animal fury.
The street exploded into motion.
People ran. Some froze. A man tried to pull the creature off her and was rewarded with a slash across the face that dropped him screaming to his knees.
The blue screen updated.
[Monster Identified: Goblin (Level 1)]
[Threat Rating: Low]
Low.
Rook swallowed hard.
Screams echoed from farther down the street. Another rift had opened. Then another.
Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance—cut off abruptly.
Someone tackled the goblin with a tire iron.
The creature shrieked, flailing wildly, but three people piled onto it in blind panic. The tire iron came down again. And again. And again.
The goblin stopped moving.
The man holding the tire iron staggered back, panting.
Then he froze.
"Oh my god," he whispered. "I leveled up."
The words spread like poison.
Leveled up.
Rook looked at the corpse. Then at the spreading pool of blood. Then back at the blue screen hovering calmly in front of his eyes, waiting.
This wasn't a warning.
This was a replacement.
Above the city, more rifts tore open.
And somewhere in the chaos, as the world began tearing itself apart, the System finished initializing.