The countdown reached zero.

  The world screamed.

  Across Oneiria, a deafening thunder roared, echoing like the wrath of gods. The skies trembled with unnatural fury. Clouds spiraled into chaos, turning pitch-black as jagged lightning tore across them in veins of violet and gold. The oceans rebelled, towering waves crashed against the shores with relentless force, swallowing docks, boats, and entire coastlines. Flocks of birds shrieked, scattering in blind panic, vanishing into the storm-wracked sky. The wind howled, not like a storm, but like a scream, long, ragged, and full of death.

  CRACK!

  Invisible seams in the air began to fracture, jagged lines slicing reality like broken glass.

  CRACK!

  Again and again, the world split. The cracks spread like spiderwebs, widening each second, splitting skies, seas, and even city streets. The very fabric of reality buckled.

  Then...

  BAAAAAANG!

  With a force that shook the earth, the air itself shattered.

  From every fracture, dimensional rifts burst open with the force of exploding suns, some as small as doorways, others towering over castles.

  They pulsed in ominous hues: sterile white, glacial blue, deep violet, and gleaming gold.

  Out of these hellish tears in the world, mana surged like a shockwave. The explosion of mana scorched the land, warped the sky, and flooded the atmosphere with unnatural heat. Trees bent backward under the pressure. Rivers boiled, steam hissing as dead fish floated to the surface.

  Through the broken air poured wild, shrieking, and suffocating mana. It flooded the land like toxic gas, saturating the ground, the trees, even the lungs of every living thing. The atmosphere thickened with it, and then…

  They came.

  Ten minutes after the breach, the gates spewed the spawn of nightmares, the monsters spilled forth.

  There was no warning. No time to organize.

  Just chaos, immediate and unrelenting.

  From the ground portals oozed slimes pulsing with internal bones, dragging themselves across cobbled streets, leaving trails of melted flesh.

  Twin-headed horned rabbits ripped their way through crowds, each head fighting for meat, jaws locking on victims and tearing limbs in two.

  Three-headed dogs the size of carriages burst into villages, each jaw dripping acid, ripping humans in half in a single lunge.

  Long-limbed insects with chitinous armor and twitching eyes poured from cracks like a plague. They clicked and hissed, snapping jaws crushing bones with every lunge.

  Flesh golems, stitched from dozens of human torsos, lumbered through alleys, dragging nails behind them like farming tools, ripping up streets and mauling people alike.

  Spiked worms as thick as tree trunks burst up from sewers, swallowing crowds whole before disappearing into the ground with a tremor and a squelch.

  From above, the skies turned black with a swarm of monstrous winged creatures.

  Swarms of bats screeched in bloodlust and descended like a black tide, their leathery wings blotting out the moonlight.

  Wasps the size of barrels jabbed their barbed stingers through armor and bone alike.

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  Beasts with eagle heads and lion bodies dove from the heavens, talons eviscerating crowds in a flurry of feathers and flesh. They swooped into a crowded square, each landing accompanied by bloodcurdling crunches, skulls flattened, torsos impaled on stone spikes as they crashed down.

  Angelic figures with skeletal wings and eyeless faces sang distorted hymns as they descended, their hands crackling with magic that turned victims to ash.

  Dragonflies the size of horses zipped through towers, their wings shrieking like buzzsaws. One ripped a guard's head from his body mid-flight.

  From the seas, horror erupted.

  Venomous jellyfish floated ashore, their tendrils lashing out like whips, flaying skin from bone.

  Tentacled sharks leapt onto fishing villages, dragging screaming victims into the surf.

  Winged fish with glowing eyes flew in frenzied shoals, lacerating flesh with crystalline fins.

  And rising from the depths came the kraken. It was towering, black-eyed, and covered in barnacles.

  Behind them followed the leviathans, the serpentine monstrosities that coiled around entire islands, crushing them with contemptuous ease.

  And worse still, the intelligent ones came.

  A four-armed banshee queen drifted over a forest, her screams cracking trees and bursting eardrums before her claws found a heart to stop.

  A wolf-headed warlord, clad in bone armor, led a hunting pack that flayed and wore the skins of their prey.

  A headless knight with a flaming cleaver the size of a door hacked through platoons of mercenaries, collecting their skulls for a belt.

  Dragons, scaled titans with fire-breath and claws like swords, swooped down, setting forests ablaze and smashing towers to rubble.

  People ran.

  They ran through narrow alleys and wide boulevards, but nowhere was safe.

  Villages were reduced to smoldering ash. Fields once golden with grain ran red with blood. Mansions collapsed beneath dragonfire and tremors. Palaces split open like rotted fruit under the crushing weight of descending horrors.

  People screamed, screamed, and screamed.

  Swarms of fire-bugs buzzed through open city gates, exploding into bursts of shrapnel on impact. Shards embedded in civilians, who dropped mid-run, screaming and twitching as their insides were turned to shreds.

  Some awoke to blazing heat and the crackle of flame, only to be devoured before their feet touched the floor. Some died in their beds, throats torn out by things they never saw coming.

  A mother dragged her child behind her only to stop as warm liquid splashed across her face. She turned in time to see her daughter’s headless body still running for a step before collapsing, a glimmering crescent-blade monster slithering behind with a fresh skull impaled on its horn.

  A merchant’s cart was overturned by a wyvern's tail, and as his goods scattered across the blood-slick road, he scrambled to run, until his legs were caught under the corpse of his own horse, freshly decapitated. The last thing he saw was the wyvern diving, maw open wide.

  The streets became rivers of blood. Crimson flowed into gutters, pooled around fountains, and painted doorways. Severed limbs floated in the red sludge, bobbing beside corpses half-submerged, mouths still open in silent screams.

  Mages fought from rooftops, casting wide-area spells that seared the skies in flame, but when the monsters fell, so did their carcasses, still burning and alive. They landed on the casters with explosive force, igniting robes and skin alike. One screamed as a still-burning wasp melted through her skull, flame and stinger alike erupting from her eye socket.

  A young squire charged bravely at a dog-beast twice his size. He sliced its leg, and it laughed. The beast tackled him down and ripped his limbs off one by one. His screams lasted longer than they should have.

  Knights fought valiantly, cutting down monsters by the dozen, until they were pounced from above, skulls shattered, spines snapped.

  Tentacled sharks smashed into harbor towns, tossing boats and bodies into the air. Slithering sea-beasts with hooks for jaws coiled through coastal roads, wrapping around buildings and dragging them into the water. A man screamed from a tower window as a leviathan's tail flattened the entire structure into a crater of blood and rubble.

  Even the nobles, cloistered in their gilded castles and hidden bunkers, found no refuge. Some hid in basements, only to be suffocated in a web of massive, shimmering silk as spiders the size of oxen descended. Others retreated to underground sewers, where slimes thicker than oil poured in, engulfing them slowly, melting flesh from bone in silent agony.

  Elsewhere, a royal court that refused to act sat smug in a fortified keep… until the roof was torn off by a dragon’s claws. They barely had time to scream before the beast’s maw unleashed a cone of molten breath, instantly turning them into blackened statues, mid-panic.

  It was a massacre.

  A genocide.

  The nobles, the knights, the commoners…

  It didn’t matter.

  There was no mercy. No sanctuary. No salvation.

  Only monsters. And blood. And death.

  Smoke veiled the moon. Screams drowned the wind. Fire devoured the skies.

  That night—

  The dream land bled.