Raguna_Est

This world has always been ordinary. Ancient myths and whispers through campfire tales, was never real. Only a reflection of longing, fear, and wonder passed down through generations. In truth, the world moved forward untouched by the supernatural, devoid of mystery.

Belief, however, lingers.

It settles quietly in forgotten corners of the mind, dormant in fiction and ritual, waiting for a spark. Stories may press against the edges of reality, but they are never capable of crossing it. For generations, the boundary has held firm—until now.

As inexplicable events ripple across society—subtle at first, then undeniable—the world begins to bend. Old stories reemerge with new weight. Monsters once trapped in myth are glimpsed in alleyways. Symbols gain power. And every lie told with conviction becomes harder to distinguish from truth.

The world is changing.

And no one—not the skeptics, not the authorities, not even those who set it in motion—can stop it.

Fabricating History from Behind the Scene

Dante watched the news reports from his luxurious New York penthouse. The sheer, overwhelming might of the American Military Industrial Complex had, as expected, quickly exterminated the monster he had created. It had taken a month of meticulous work to fabricate these ooze creatures as NPC and implement them across the unsuspecting city of New York. His chosen targets were precise: mostly around the less wealthy areas with rundown housing or apartment complexes, places less secure or vetted.

His creation was a bizarre, yet perfectly functional, hybrid of fantasy and sci-fi. He'd developed it akin to a slime, liquid-like, capable of holding a form, but infused it with sci-fi horror characteristics: assimilation, rapid growth, and mimicry. It also possesses a debilitating weakness to fire and high temperatures, as if it were germs being treated with heat. Its genetic information, should any human scientist ever manage to fully analyze it, would be unlike anything on Earth, completely random by design, a chaotic scramble of sequences that, in any known biological species, would undoubtedly collapse into inert matter. Yet, his creation just worked, purely because he believed it would.

Just as the last news report faded into another talking head spouting the government's flimsy cover-up, his comm device, humming softly on the glass table, indicated a new flurry of activity from The A Association. The New York incident had, predictably, caused a significant buzz among them.

Dante leaned back, his thoughts drifting. The situation in Japan, for instance. A hostage takeover of Sakura Academy had been rather sudden and entirely unexpected. Even for him, the architect of so much chaos, it was a blind spot. He had no direct involvement in it. Japan, after all, was considered a rather safe, orderly country; such a brazen act was almost unfathomable.

Dante recalled the reports from a few years back: the Killing Stone, infamously linked to Tamamo no Mae, the legendary nine-tailed fox yokai, had cracked. Perhaps, he mused, a new piece was being set on the stage. A new act, hinted at in the briefings from the United States' Paranormal Division.

Dante thoughts drifted back to the A Association. Over the past months, the developments within it had been truly beyond his initial expectations. G. Hawthorne and AluM7, for instance, with their uncanny blend of science and magic, had managed to develop working prototypes of his puppet creations. Beyond that, they had even managed to create a virtual reality-like technology by using mental magic to link the senses together. Elsewhere, Diamond_Diva9 had already leveraged G. Hawthorne and AluM7's tech to create a company, New World Inc. On the surface, it began developing seemingly innocuous games for the new virtual reality tech, but secretly, it was already producing the prototype dolls and pouring money toward it research and developments.

Street_Law had expanded his criminal empire, now controlled a good portion of Europe and slowly inched towards Russia and China, his reach growing ever wider. Cipher was developing something akin to an Assassin organization with his unique brand of magic. And John Curator, true to his nature, seemed to have found an ancient, untouched tomb in Egypt using his earth magic, and was currently consumed with documenting its contents. The rest of the Association members were likewise up and about, improving themselves, pursuing plans of their own, each a potent, unique force in the world.

Compared to the profound loneliness Dante had experienced for so long, the solitary burden of his extraordinary existence, this was... not bad at all. His path was the right course of action after all.

The Realized Ideal