Countries no longer existed. The map of the world, once drawn and redrawn through bloodshed and diplomacy, had been erased, fragmented, and torn apart until it no longer bore the semblance of a planet united by lines, names, or flags. What remained were cities—just cities. 234,891 cities, each one standing alone or trembling under the shadow of another. There were no borders, no passports, no governments to appeal to. Each city had become its own sovereign entity, a breathing, growing mass of ideology, vengeance, survival, and ambition. The world had fractured, and with that fracture came a strange, new order.
By the rules of this chaotic reality, if one city conquered another—whether through brute force, tactical manipulation, or slow erosion from within—that conquered city ceased to exist independently. It became an extension of the victor. Like how bones fuse together after a break, two cities would meld, with one dominant, the other submissive, until no trace of the latter's sovereignty remained. It was war, but not one fought with tanks, diplomacy, or treaties. It was war reduced to its raw, trembling core—one power swallowing another to stay alive.
It had not always been this way.
In the year 2026, something inexplicable had begun to creep into humanity, something primal, violent, and dark. It was as if something ancient had awakened in the blood of man. People began to murder with no discernible reason. Sons slaughtered mothers, lovers turned on each other, and communities collapsed under the weight of distrust and betrayal. They called it the Year of the Rouge. There was no disease, no mutation of the flesh, no virus under a microscope—only the quiet madness that made rational people sharpen knives and whisper to themselves while staring at sleeping siblings. People had stopped being human in the way history remembered. They had become rouges—feral, aimless, violent beyond comprehension.
And it did not stop.
By 2035, the world was a lit powder keg. The rouges were no longer nameless killers; they were organized. They formed groups. Clans. Syndicates. Militant arms of philosophies that had no grounding in sanity or future. They believed in chaos. They worshipped death. Cities became battlegrounds where loyalty was a currency and betrayal was the highest form of art. Terrorist attacks had escalated into daily rituals. Assassinations, bombings, burnings—every corner of the earth was fire. Every language learned to scream in the same pitch of pain.
Governments tried to respond. Military forces clashed with rebels in the streets. But how do you fight ghosts made of conviction and madness? Every country attempted to quarantine the insanity, to stamp it out before it spread too far. But the poison had already soaked into every root. Their failure was inevitable. By 2057, not a single nation remained standing. Monarchies collapsed. Democracies imploded. Dictators fled or were gutted in their palaces. What rose from the ashes was not a better system but a fractured reality. Rebels ruled the ruins, and then others rebelled against them, forming their own splinter groups, which in turn fractured into new divisions—until the world was a web of feuding tribes, each calling itself something new to hide the stench of old blood.
Eventually, they tired of the word "nation." It no longer meant anything. It had no authority, no permanence, no sacredness. Instead, they called their territories cities. These cities, however, were not the cities of the old world. They were bastions of power, surrounded by jagged walls made of scrap metal and broken ideals. Each one was a microcosm of ideology, run by the strong, governed by the cunning. Some called themselves holy cities, others called themselves machines, others simply bore the names of those who founded them. The chaos never truly ended, but it hardened into something recognizable, like scabs on a body that could no longer bleed.
By 2089, the warfires dimmed. There was no peace—peace had died long ago—but the storms of revolution had passed. People had settled into their new roles. Cities existed in silent tension, trading with one another, threatening each other, forming temporary pacts that would inevitably crumble. They were cities without innocence, bastions built on bones and memories of better days. For the first time in decades, the world was no longer changing rapidly. It had grown comfortable with its madness.
But the gods had not.
Whether they were real or only a myth born of desperation, no one knew for sure. But something watched humanity from beyond the veil of understanding. Something ancient, hungry, and bitter. It watched and judged, and, in time, it acted. As if furious that the species they once perhaps championed had not perished completely, the gods—if that was what they were—unleashed something that changed the shape of existence forever.
The Black Spheres.
Perfect in form. Cold in presence. They descended like omens, not with thunder or fire, but with the silence of inevitability. One day there was nothing—and the next, there was a Sphere. Pitch black, motionless, humming with the energy of death and trial. No one knew what they were. No one dared approach at first. But eventually, people did. Humanity had always been cursed with curiosity.
And what they discovered was horror.
Each Sphere was a door—a portal to a world that defied logic and sanity. Entering a Sphere meant leaving behind everything you knew and stepping into a realm of beasts, labyrinths, and nightmares crafted to kill. A person who entered could not leave unless they defeated the entity at the heart of the Sphere—the Boss. If they succeeded, the Sphere would vanish, collapsing into nothingness like it had never existed. If they failed, the Sphere would crack open and its horrors would spill into the real world. Monsters of twisted flesh, eyes without number, voices like storms—they would burst forth and slaughter everything in their path.
Cities fell overnight when a Sphere broke. Families vanished. Walls turned to rubble. And yet people still entered them. Not for glory. Not even for power. They did it because they had no choice. Because when a Sphere landed in your city, ignoring it was a death sentence.
The irony of it all was that by 2089, people no longer remembered video games. The comparison was lost on them. The concept of fictional battles with digital bosses in glowing worlds of fantasy was a relic buried beneath decades of war and loss. To them, the Sphere was not a game. It was punishment. Trial. A test laid upon them by forces too great to comprehend. A story told to children in hushed tones, like fairy tales once were—a tale of Spheres and heroes, monsters and madness.
Children knew that when a Sphere came, death followed.
They were born into a world that whispered of legends not to inspire but to warn. Legends of cities devoured whole, of people turned into monsters, of heroes who never returned. This was not fiction. This was the world they inherited.
And in the smoldering ruins of what once was civilization, beneath skies that no longer knew peace, stories like these were the closest thing anyone had to truth.
This was the beginning.
The end of nations. The rise of cities. The descent of Spheres.
And the birth of a new kind of nightmare.