chapter 0

Prologue: Before the Fall

By Chapt

Before the world ended, Kai was just a boy with too many passwords and not enough sleep.

His life was a quiet loop—school, gaming, reading manga late into the night, and avoiding too much social interaction. His small room smelled faintly of instant noodles and laundry detergent, walls plastered with posters of space, anime, and one faded photo of him, his mom, and his younger sister, Amara. He kept that one near his desk, where his laptop always hummed softly like a second heartbeat.

He wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t invisible either. Kai belonged to that in-between group of students who didn’t bother anyone and were rarely bothered in return. He liked it that way.

His best friend, Felix, used to joke that Kai was “soft-coded for apocalypse survival,” mostly because he always carried a power bank and a mini flashlight. Kai would laugh, rolling his eyes—but a part of him enjoyed the idea. He liked being prepared. He liked having control.

Control was comforting.

His mother worked long shifts at the hospital, her hugs always smelling of hand sanitizer and cheap vanilla lotion. She called him “her little moon,” said he was the calm in her chaos. Amara, younger by three years, followed him everywhere like a shadow, always asking him questions he pretended to be annoyed by but secretly loved answering.

Back then, the world was ordinary. The kind of ordinary you don’t realize is precious until it’s gone.

The first sign that something was wrong came in headlines—distant cities, faraway outbreaks. People dismissed it like a seasonal flu, a hoax, a government ploy. Kai remembered watching livestreams of chaos unravel in countries he'd never visited. He thought: It’s not here. We’re safe.

Then the news stopped being foreign.

Hospitals overflowed. Schools shut down. The streets grew tense. Grocery stores turned into battlegrounds. Kai’s mother stopped coming home.

And one day, the sky changed.

The sirens never stopped. The internet died quietly in the middle of the night. Power followed. Kai and Amara waited days in the dark. Then the neighbors screamed.

And then there was silence.

He didn’t like to remember what came next.

Not the running. Not the blood. Not the way Amara cried until her voice gave out. Not the way she went silent when—

No.

Not that.

Kai had built a wall inside his mind. Behind it lived the people he couldn’t bear to remember. The life he had before. The sound of his mother humming in the kitchen. The feel of Amara’s tiny hand in his. The crack of laughter during movie night. Felix messaging him memes at 2 a.m.

It all felt like a dream now. Something fragile and glowing and far too warm for this cold, broken world.

Now, all he had were ashes and echoes.

And the haunting hope that maybe—somewhere—someone else had survived

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