Eighty years ago, life on Earth mirrored the everyday rhythm most would recognize.
Cities pulsed with activity, traffic jams snarled the streets, kids darted through playgrounds chasing soccer balls, and office workers trudged through their routines, clutching steaming mugs and muttering about deadlines.
Markets buzzed with vendors haggling over prices, while families bickered over grocery lists or whose turn it was to cook.
It was a world of mundane chaos, predictable, flawed, and alive. The sun traced its arc across the sky, seasons shifted, and time marched forward as it always had.
...That is until one day it didn't.
One particuar ordinary afternoon, the ground suddenly shuddered, not with the familiar jolt of an earthquake, but with a deep, resonant hum that prickled the skin.
People paused, glancing around, puzzled, until the sky split apart.
Fissures ripped through the atmosphere, jagged and glowing with a sickly, iridescent light.
Portals, they'd later be called, tears in reality itself.
They erupted everywhere: above skyscrapers, over rural fields, across oceans. And from those gaping rifts, horrors unlike anything humanity had ever faced poured forth.
Creatures emerged, each a nightmare given form of various types.
Some were hulking brutes with reptilian scales and claws like scythes, slashing through crowds and leaving trails of gore in their wake.
Others were twisted versions of elves, their pointed ears and sharp features deceivingly beautiful, until they raised their bows and shot arrows straight through the skulls of anyone in sight, laughing in eerie, melodic voices.
And then there were those that had no physical form at all.
Wraiths. Living gas, creeping through the streets like a slow, moving fog, swallowing people whole. The screams of their victims would last only seconds before they were dissolved from the inside out, leaving behind nothing but empty clothes and echoes of horror.
These invaders spread like a plague, portal by portal, reducing cities to rubble and turning survivors into prey.
Scientists raced to make sense of it.
"It's a collision of dimensions." One exhausted physicist explained on a crackling news feed, his tie askew and eyes bloodshot. "Two worlds, ours and another which was a conglomeration of thousands of small worlds, existing on the same plane, smashing together."
"And these portals are the result, like...like tunnels forming where the boundaries broke. Their creatures are crossing into our reality, and theoretically, we could cross into theirs...But they've got the upper hand. And..." He swallowed hard, voice faltering. "...They're tearing us apart."
And they totally were. Humanity's defenses buckled under the assault.
Armored convoys roared into battle only to be crushed by the mamoth-like beasts sheer strength.
Helicopters buzzed overhead, but the insectoids acid chewed through metal, sending them spiraling in flames.
The ghost-like creatures drifted untouched through barrages of bullets, their wails reducing soldiers to whimpering husks.
And just like that entire nations fell silent, their populations decimated or scattered, while the creatures kept coming, relentless and infinite, and despair settled in.
Extinction loomed, a grim, inevitable shadow.
But then, when hope had all but crumbled, a spark of salvation ignited.
In that other world beyond the portals which they came to call 'The Broken Planes', there existed something called Mana, a shimmering, intangible force that permeated everything.
It was the lifeblood of those creatures, fueling the lava apes brute power, the insectoids corrosive spit, and bringing about the phantoms impossible speed.
And when the worlds crashed together, that Mana began leaking through the rifts into Earth.
At first, it was subtle, a faint hum in the air, a tingle on the skin. Then it surged, saturating the planet, and a handful of humans began to change.
They weren't ordinary anymore.
They became extraordinary.
A factory worker in a small county clenched his fists and unleashed a vortex of shadow tendrils, snaring a horde of bony, six-legged beasts with glowing spines that had been shredding through a marketplace, crushing them into silence.
A teacher in a slum raised her hands and conjured a blinding wave of light, disintegrating a flock of bat-like creatures with razor wings that screeched as they dove at fleeing crowds.
A fisherman in a village roared, and a torrent of water surged from his palms, sweeping away a pack of lumbering, stone-skinned giants that had been toppling buildings with their fists.
And across the globe, others like them began to emerge.
Ordinary people touched by Mana, transformed into something incredible and they called them the 'blessed'. A name whispered with both awe and desperation as humanity clung to their newfound champions.
And with these powers as varied as the individuals themselves, they fought back against the relentless tide of invaders pouring through the portals.
Some stood alone, solitary figures hurling lightning or weaving barriers of thorns against the encroaching horrors.
Others banded together, forming ragtag groups that roamed the ruins, sharing tactics and pooling their strength.
A few aligned with crumbling governments, lending their abilities to organized strikes against the enemy.
But no matter how they fought, solo, in packs, or under official banners, their goal was the same: push back the invaders, protect what was left, and survive.
And just like that, for fifty six long, brutal years, the war raged on.
It was a grueling stalemate, a seesaw of victories and losses that left both sides bloodied but unbowed.
Cities became battlegrounds, then graveyards, their skylines jagged with broken steel and ash.
The blessed clashed with monsters in sprawling, chaotic skirmishes, blasts of fire scorching the earth, winds howling through shattered streets, shadows twisting to strangle the enemy.
The invaders gave no quarter, and neither did humanity, both sides killing one another with no care whatsoever.
People whispered in the dark, huddled in shelters, that this would last forever, a war without end, stretching until both worlds crumbled into nothing.
"It'll outlast us all." An old woman muttered to her grandson one night, her voice hoarse as she watched a distant explosion light up the horizon. "Monsters and men, killing each other until there's nothing left to kill."
But that grim prophecy shattered on the exact day that marked the 56th anniversary of the portals emergence.
Something miraculous happened, something no one could've predicted.
To humanity's utter shock, five blessed rose up, all teenage girls, each wielding powers so staggering they dwarfed even the mightiest of their predecessors.
They weren't just stronger; they were a force of nature unto themselves, a leap beyond what any blessed had ever achieved.
Where closing a single portal once demanded an entire legion of blessed working in unison, dozens of lives risked, and often lost, these five could do it alone.
They swept through the wardfield with an almost terrifying ease, their abilities rewriting the rules of the fight.
One girl snapped her fingers, and a tsunami roared into existence, towering waves crashing down to drown an army of serpentine mermaids with barbed tails and venomous fangs that had been dragging ships under the sea.
Another lifted her gaze to the heavens, and the sky split as asteroids rained down, obliterating a legion of gaunt, bat-winged vampires that had blotted out the sun with their swarms.
A third clapped her hands, and the earth itself erupted, swallowing a horde of skeletal wraiths that shrieked as they clawed at the living.
These girls didn't just hold the line they broke it.
Alone, each could annihilate entire waves of monsters that had once taken squadrons to repel. Together, they were unstoppable.
And with that, in just five years, they turned the tide.
They didn't merely push the invaders back through the portals; they chased them.
With a ferocity that stunned even the most hardened blessed, they stormed into the broken planes, a twisted realm of multiple realms that were connected by multiple portals and endless dark, hunting down every last creature that had dared cross into Earth.
Their power was relentless, carving through the enemy like a blade through silk.
They felled titanic beasts with molten hides that breathed fire, shattered crystalline horrors that reflected death back at their attackers, and silenced chittering swarms that burrowed through stone.
And finally, the war climaxed when they faced Yzarael Primodorius, The World Eater, a towering, grotesque colossus king wreathed in shadow and crowned with horns, the half-god who had brought about the collision of the two worlds and the one who was manipulating all the lifeforms to attack the Earth.
But even he fell, brought low by the five in a battle that shook both worlds.
When the dust settled, the portals dimmed, then closed.
The invasions stopped.
For the first time in over five decades, silence reigned, no screams, no roars, just the slow sound of a world catching its breath.
Peace, hard, won and fragile, had returned to the human world.
The people rejoiced, spilling into the streets with tears and cheers, raising makeshift banners scrawled with the names of their saviors.
"The five battle angels!" They cried, voices hoarse with gratitude. "They saved us! They saved the world!"
The five became legends, idolized as more than heroes, goddesses in human form, divine protectors who'd snatched humanity from the brink.
Statues rose in their honor, songs were sung, and their story was etched into every corner of the world.
Even now, nineteen years after the five battle angels had slammed shut the portals and ended the invasion from that other realm, the world's adoration hadn't dimmed.
If anything, it had grown, a flame kept alive by memory and myth.
One could see it in the way people still spoke their names with reverence, in the festivals held every year to mark the day of peace, in the children who dressed up as the angels who were now reffered to as goddesses now that they had grown up for school plays, capes fluttering as they pretended to summon storms or shatter mountains.
And you could see it right here, right now, in the park where the crowd fixated on the weeping girl, Charlotte Dimitrivitch Heavensblade, daughter of one of those legendary five, the Blade Maiden, who was known for her terrifying ability to summon and control dozens of blades and swords in battle, capable of conjuring a storm of steel that could slice through and obliterate any enemy, while completely ignoring the boy who'd just given his life to save her and another.
Their idolization was evident, a living thing that hummed in the air which could be seen by hoe the boy lay slumped against the tree, but his sacrifice was already fading into the background of their collective consciousness.
All eyes were on her, her long pink hair tangled from the chaos, her blue eyes shimmering with tears, her every sob a magnet pulling them in.
She was a piece of divinity in their midst, a direct link to the goddesses who'd saved them all, and that connection trumped everything else. They didn't just admire her; they worshipped her, their gazes locked in awe and hunger, as if her presence alone could bless them.
...But sometimes, that worship went too far.