PRESENT DAY
72ND SENTINEL BASTION
The first rays of sunlight slipped through the clouds as a boy stirred awake. He had black hair, brown eyes, and a lean but muscular build, the result of a year's labor at the construction camps.
The boy's name was Palin.
Yawning, he scratched his bare chest and gazed out at the dirt road beyond his shack. Workers were already on the move, their boots kicking up dust. A woman called after her husband, handing him a piece of bread wrapped in cloth.
Palin sighed.
'Another day of work. God, let this end already,' he thought.
He got up and knelt before an old metal chest—stolen years ago from a moving company—and pulled out a brown, long-sleeved coverall, the uniform issued by his employer. He slipped it on and ran a hand through his hair, fixing it in the cracked mirror hanging on the wall.
A photo was taped to the mirror, its surface smudged with time. Despite the damage, the smiling faces of a family could still be made out. Palin bit his lower lip, breathing out slowly, and glanced at the battered watch on his wrist.
"Time to get to work," he said.
As he was about to leave his shack, he paused.
'Am I forgetting something?' he thought.
He shook his head and stepped outside. The door banged shut behind him, the sudden gust of air causing the photo on the mirror to flutter.
He was forgetting something.
But he wouldn't realize it until later.
By the time Palin crossed into the urban sectors where the construction sites loomed, a massive screen flickered to life above the city streets. The daily Sentinel advertisement blared to the crowd below.
"JOIN US TODAY," said a woman's voice. "JOIN THE FIGHT FOR HUMANITY!"
Palin rolled his eyes and sighed, 'Not this again.'
Still, considering the state of the world, maybe constant recruitment wasn't such a bad idea. Even now, humanity stood locked in a stalemate against the Chaos creatures. The tide hadn't turned. If anything, it was dragging them down—fewer soldiers, fewer civilians, fewer people left with each passing year.
Fifty years ago, humanity's nightmare had begun.
The first Chaos creature had emerged from the Indian Ocean. Soon, they started appearing all around the world. A mountain-sized elephant, a house-sized lion, beasts beyond imagination. They appeared across the world without warning. In response, the world's nations cast aside old rivalries to form a single force: the Global Defence Coalition, or GDC.
Bullets, missiles, tanks—none of it worked. Humanity's population plummeted from eight billion to five billion. Governments fell. Landscapes turned to battlefields. Cities became graveyards.
In desperation, the GDC conceived the Bastion Project.
Massive walled cities were built, fortified with towering guns and thick defenses. Countries ceased to exist; only Bastions remained. Self-sufficient, isolated, and heavily armed—each a desperate island in a sea of monsters.
And still, the Bastions fell.
One by one, until the brink of extinction loomed. But just as despair took root, two discoveries changed everything.
First, through the remains of fallen beasts, scientists found something: these monsters were mutated animals, not alien invaders. Somehow, nature itself had twisted them.
How—or why—remained a mystery.
But it offered a strange comfort.
At least they were of this world.
The second discovery was far worse.
A being appeared—one beyond reason or understanding.
Those who encountered it died.
Those who survived could not speak.
Those who tried to describe it lost their minds.
They called it Chaos.
The 15th Bastion fell in a single night. Hundreds of millions perished. Not a single survivor escaped. The GDC sent elite teams to investigate the ruins. None returned.
Only a single broken voice transmission made it back:
"God! He's killing all of us—just one creature! He's so strong! P-Please, please save u—"
The transmission cut off. Silence reigned.
In terror, the GDC erected the Terror Walls, massive structures the size of countries, sealing off the 15th Bastion and whatever horror lurked within. They prayed that time and distance would contain it.
They called the creature Chaos.
And they dared not disturb its prison.
But outside the Terror Walls, humanity continued to lose ground. Deaths mounted. The population dwindled once again.
When all hope faded, humanity turned to its oldest defense: prayer.
In mass gatherings at sacred sites, they begged for salvation.
They got an answer.
The clouds broke. Blinding light bathed the earth.
From the heavens, winged beings descended—angels.
They had no faces, only blank perfection. Yet everyone recognized them. Hope flared in every heart.
But the angels did not fight.
Instead, they sought faces—and found them in masks.
Religious masks, tribal masks, even party masks—any face would do. Merging with these masks, the angels offered humanity a gift: divine power.
Yet not everyone could bear this gift.
Divinity, the key to harnessing an angel's power, only awakened at age eighteen. Some possessed it. Most did not. Those with high divinity received stronger masks; those without could only support from the sidelines—building weapons, crafting armor, planning strategies.
But it was enough.
The tide of war shifted.
The creatures of Chaos began to fall.
Humanity, though wounded, stabilized. Life resumed, though changed forever.
The mask-bearers became known as Sentinels. They led the charge against the monsters, armed with weapons forged from the very beasts they defeated.
Society rebuilt itself around them, and order returned, in a new and fragile form.
As Palin trudged through the bustling streets, lost in thought, something jolted him.
'What was I forgetting?' he thought, then the realization struck him like lightning.
Today was his birthday. Today, he had turned eighteen.
Today, he would know more about his divinity.