Kim Raon was seventeen when the first Gate appeared.
Just a regular high school senior. Quiet. Average. Orphaned at age ten. Spent his afternoons at a part-time convenience store job, saved his money for gaming, and avoided fights like they were the plague. He had no relatives, no friends to speak of, and no goals—just the simple desire to survive day by day.
But the world didn’t care about his simplicity.
When the Gates opened, they didn’t just stay in the sky.
They spilled.
Monsters poured through. Creatures of nightmare and myth—dragons made of bone, trolls that tore through buildings like cardboard, beasts with eyes that hypnotized and claws that shredded tanks. Cities fell in a matter of days. Governments collapsed. Chaos ruled.
And with the chaos came something else—Hunters.
Ordinary people began awakening to supernatural powers. Some gained the strength of titans, others could summon fire with a whisper, bend gravity, speak to spirits. These awakened humans—Hunters—were humanity’s only hope against the invasion.
But Kim Raon wasn’t one of them.
No matter how much he wished. No matter how many times he prayed. He never awakened. He remained the same powerless boy, running through crumbling streets, ducking under rubble, trying to survive the apocalypse with nothing more than quick feet and sheer dumb luck.
Until the day he fell into the Gate.
It was purely by accident. He had been running from a wyvern attack, the sky filled with screaming flames, the ground trembling from explosions. And then—bam. A collapsed building gave way under his feet. Raon plummeted into darkness, swallowed by a rift in space.
That was the last time he saw Earth for the next ten years.