In the year 2142, the heavens shattered.
The skies all over Earth split open in thousands of ugly gashes, revealing the strange worlds beyond them.
But stranger still were the creatures emerging from within those spatial scars.
Mythic monsters appeared across the globe; legendary beasts invaded every country; mutated animals prowled their cities.
Aliens, demons, yokais, rakshasas, they were feared by many names.
The armed forces of each nation shielded their respective territories from these unearthly entities, employing all their destructive firepower to protect their homelands and its peoples.
But soon enough, it became apparent every military was made up of mere mortals. So, for every drop their weapons shed, their bodies shed a hundred more.
And, no matter the cause, you cannot bleed forever.
Preyed upon by deadly creatures capable of withstanding even artillery and explosions, humanity collectively prayed for salvation after their soldiers fell under the showering splinters of the cracked ether, hoping for their own preservation and that of their loved ones.
However, as the apocalypse continued its cruel course of indiscriminate devastation, the people arrived at a stark realization: there was no one even listening to their selfish prayers.
A third of the entire mankind was wiped out within the first year the heavens shattered. Yet even afterward, the hunger of the cataclysm for terrified souls wasn't satiated.
That left humanity with only one choice, born from the most primal of instincts: survival.
To not get eaten, you must kill.
And if you can't kill, serve.
Aum Khayal was brutally reminded of this bleak reality on his seventeenth birthday, when the indifferent universe gifted him only pain and suffering as his reward for somehow surviving its twisted games for the past four years.
As if he hadn't had enough already.
As if he hadn't scrambled day and night for the tiniest crumbs of food and the littlest drops of water and the smallest spaces of shelter.
As if he hadn't already lost enough of his loved ones who weren't granted even that much; as if he hadn't already experienced enough horrors of monsters lurking out there and even those lurking within the hearts of men.
"Gods," prayed Aum Khayal hollowly to the deities he never believed in when death finally caught up to him. "Just answer me this and I'll never want anything ever again." He clutched his knife in a shaking hand as the nightmarish rakshasa lunged at him, its gaping maw bloody, same as its sharp claws. "What was it all for?"
The boy of seventeen got taken down by the striped demon, pinned to the stone bricks with a heavy paw on his chest, a hundred shadowy tentacles wrapping about him as a pair of serrated canines snapped at his throat.
"What was it all for?" Aum Khayal wondered absently, never loosening the grip on his knife even as the demon spoke to him. "Give me something to hold onto while I'm still awake. Some answer. Some meaning. Some… hope."
But the gods remained silent as ever, and the universe indifferent to it all like always.
"The Law of Karma," Aum Khayal realized numbly. "Now I finally understand what you meant, Ma."