No one remembers the exact moment the first Rift opened.

  Not truly.

  Some say it started with a pressure drop—a silence so absolute it choked out all sound. Others recall the sky itself trembling, darkening until it cracked like glass, a jagged wound bleeding across the firmament. It split the heavens in two, and from that void came something the world had no name for.

  The First Rift was not fire or destruction.

  It was emptiness.

  The absence of meaning.

  The world responded with fear. Not because they understood it, but because they couldn’t. And when the Riftborn came—shapes that blurred the edge of sight, whose touch stole voices and whose shadows moved against the light—fear became survival.

  Governments fell. Militaries failed. Entire cities were devoured in silence, their populations vanishing overnight, their streets left untouched but wrong. Something in the architecture—something in the air—twisted ever so slightly. It wasn’t destruction. It was… rewriting.

  And then, as if by accident, the first response was born.

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  A boy in Cairo lit up the air around him, wind screaming through his veins, hurling back the Riftborn that tried to claim him.

  A girl in Kyoto walked into the darkness and returned unscathed—her body trailing blue flames, her eyes burning with knowledge that wasn’t hers.

  Soon, more emerged.

  All of them connected to a force scientists would call Essentia—a living, reactive energy drawn from within and shaped by will, instinct, emotion. A force the Riftborn could not control… but feared.

  For the first time, humanity had a weapon.

  But a weapon is only as stable as the hands that wield it.

  So the world built systems.

  Academies.

  Schools with walls like fortresses and testing grounds like battlefields. They took the gifted—children, teens, anyone who survived Rift contact without breaking—and molded them into warriors. Soldiers. Operatives.

  Protectors, in name.

  Weapons, in truth.

  And of all those institutions, one rose to the top:

  KISA – the Korean International Strider Academy. Situated on the edge of the Seoul Essentia Zone, KISA trained elite candidates to enter, observe, and eliminate Rift activity. Its students were the best of the best.

  The kind the world prayed for and feared at the same time.

  The kind that didn’t break when everything else did.

  But even among KISA’s ranks, not all were created equal.

  Some were chosen through legacy. Some by recommendation. Some through sheer, raw power.

  And one… was never supposed to be there at all.