THE ISLAND
I thought becoming a Hunter meant I had finally seen the worst the world could offer.
I was wrong.
The First Breach taught us how to fight.
The Expedition taught us how little we actually knew.
The Beginning: Farewell to the Familiar Shore
I still remember watching the Central Continent disappear behind us.
For three years, that continent had been everything. The place where we trained. The place where we fought. The place where we learned to survive.
Now it was nothing more than a dark line behind the mist.
The ceremony was still fresh in our minds when the ship caught the first strong wind.
Someone celebrated.
Someone prayed.
Someone was already seasick.
Most of us pretended not to be afraid.
We were Hunters now. We had survived The Culling. We had survived the First Breach.
But none of that prepared us for being alone in the middle of an ocean no one had crossed in decades.
Ocean Horrors: The Violet Mana Fog
After a month, the ocean stopped behaving like an ocean.
The first sign was the fog.
Violet.
It spread across the water until the horizon disappeared completely. The sky seemed to bleed into the sea, and the mana around us became impossible to read.
Then the dreams began.
At first, nobody talked about them.
Then we realized we were all dreaming about the same things.
The longer we remained inside the fog, the harder it became to tell what was real.
Arguments became more frequent.
People began keeping secrets.
Even the crew stopped trusting one another.
There was no enemy we could point our weapons at.
Only the fog.
Only the ocean.
And the feeling that something was watching us from beneath it.
Survival Test: The Sentinels
By the time we saw the creatures, we were exhausted.
The wind changed first.
Then the sky darkened.
They came down in a swarm.
Colossal butterflies.
At least, that was what they had once been.
Their wings were enormous, corrupted by the lingering chaos of the First Breach, and there were so many of them that they blotted out the sky.
They tore through our sails.
The ship shook beneath the impact.
We fought from the deck while the crew desperately tried to keep us moving.
For two months, we had been trapped together in a wooden ship.
We had argued.
We had laughed.
We had become afraid of one another.
But when the Sentinels attacked, none of that mattered.
We stood together.
We had learned that much from the First Breach.
Historic Milestone: Charting the Unknown
Then, through the storm of wings and torn sails, someone shouted.
Land.
At first, I thought it was another hallucination.
Then I saw it.
The Exiled Continent.
After twenty-four years, humanity had finally reached the shore.
The ship dropped anchor in shallow water.
For a moment, nobody moved.
We simply stared.
Then one of us stepped over the side.
His boots touched black sand.
Another followed.
Then another.
We had done what generations before us had failed to do.
We had crossed the ocean.
We had found the continent.
We had made history.
None of us knew yet that the continent had already found us.
Something was watching from the treeline.