Chapter 1: FFF
So it all started... what, seventy years back? When the first Gates just... showed up.
Nobody really knows what the hell caused them. Could’ve been natural, some weird space-time oopsie daisy, or maybe we screwed something up, you know how humans are with technology. Always poking at things they shouldn’t.
Though there’s this other theory... that something old was sleeping and we woke it up. Maybe it’s a God? Well, that’s a terrifying thought.
Anyway, these Gates, they’re basically tears in reality. Just rips that connect our world to... somewhere else. And inside of these motherf*ckers? Complete and utter madness.
Forests growing where there’s no sun, ruins just floating in midair like gravity forgot how to work, entire ecosystems that make zero sense... well, it does, but who cares.
The thing is, they didn’t just sit there looking pretty.
Monsters came through, and yes, unfortunately, theres a lot of them. The First Dungeon Break — that’s what they call it in the history books now, all clinical and neat. But it wasn’t neat, like at all. Cities turned into hunting grounds overnight, millions was dead before anyone even figured out what was happening. Entire regions just... gone.
But here’s where it gets weird. The early explorers — crazy bastards, really — they found these things called Relics inside the Gate. Cores of pure energy that somehow kept the whole mess stable. And these cores, they had... data, and it was definitely not humans that created this sh*t. It was like finding a computer program written in a language you’d never seen but somehow your brain could still read.
The data could sync with people, like actually change them. Making them stronger, faster, harder to kill, and suddenly, you could survive in those nightmarish landscapes.
Governments got involved eventually, of course they did. Then started studying the relics, trying to figure out how they worked. And what they found... well, it became everything. The raw interface was a mess though, it was unstable and dangerous.
So they... cleaned it up. Sanitized it, one could say. Stripped out anything they didn’t understand, which was probably most of it. What was left got packaged into something they called the World Hunter System, which sounds official, doesn’t it? Like they actually knew what they were doing.
Now anyone can take an Awakening test, get ranked, train in simulations, clear dungeons for a living. It’s all very organized. The ranks go from E — basically useless — all the way up to SSS, which is... well, there’s maybe five people in the world at that level.