The Earth of 2107 was not the Earth of old. The blue planet had long transcended the limitations of its primitive past, becoming a Type 1 civilization under the Kardashev scale. Energy flowed seamlessly from sun, wind, and the molten core beneath. Towers scraped the sky, invisible networks hummed with the collective power of billions, and travel between continents was instantaneous. Mankind had mastered its environment—at least, it believed so.

Ryan Korrin was insignificant in this sprawling marvel of human progress. He was a technician, just one of millions. His hands rarely worked on anything more glamorous than the maintenance of the sprawling energy grid that powered cities like Neo-Tokyo and Horizon New York. Yet even in his anonymity, Ryan found satisfaction in his work. The machines made sense. The world, though impossibly large and complex, still adhered to rules that could be understood, calibrated, fixed.

That was until the sky broke open.

It happened on what should have been an ordinary day. Ryan was overseeing an energy redistribution node on the outskirts of Europolis. The air was thick with the static hum of machinery, the kind of steady, reliable sound that lulled him into a rhythm. Until it wasn’t.

The air shifted, almost imperceptibly at first—a wrongness that slithered into the atmosphere like a slow poison. Then the hum of the machinery stuttered. Ryan snapped his head up.

“System malfunction?” He muttered to himself, fingers tapping on his wrist console to run a diagnostic. Everything seemed normal, but the noise… no, it was something deeper.

Suddenly, the ground trembled beneath his feet, and he stumbled backward, catching himself against a nearby railing. His eyes darted to the sky.

The clouds above were twisting. No, not clouds. The air itself was bending and spiraling, creating shapes that shouldn’t have existed. It was like the fabric of reality itself was unraveling, a vortex forming in the distance—dark, swirling, and full of chaotic energy.

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He had heard the reports. The Infinitum Phenomena, they called it. Pockets of the world consumed by unnatural storms, appearing without warning and violating the very laws of physics. But Europolis was supposed to be safe. He had thought—naively, perhaps—that the chaos was only a threat to the edges of the world, far from the core of civilization.

Now, that chaos was here.

The wind roared, no longer natural, but alive—an angry, monstrous force pulling everything toward the twisting anomaly in the sky. Ryan’s heart raced. He grabbed his communicator, but the connection was gone. Of course, the system was down. He was on his own.

Without thinking, he bolted toward the underground shelter entrance, his instincts screaming at him to flee. But the storm had other ideas.

With a thunderous crack, the anomaly fractured, releasing an impossible energy—a violent tornado-like force that tore through the world around him. Buildings crumbled as if made of sand, the sky flashing with bursts of otherworldly light. The vortex was everywhere and nowhere, moving with a mind of its own, seeking destruction. And it found him.

A shockwave hit Ryan, throwing him into the air like a rag doll. The wind snatched his breath away, and for a moment, all he could hear was the deafening scream of the storm. He was weightless, spinning, falling toward the annihilation. This was it—this was how it ended.

But then, just as suddenly, everything stopped.

Ryan’s descent slowed, the whirlwind around him halting. He hung suspended in the chaos, the storm mere inches away from devouring him, yet something unseen held him back. His mind struggled to comprehend. A force, a presence—something beyond his understanding—had intervened.

In the eye of the storm, Ryan floated, untouched by the destruction swirling around him. The world had gone silent, the anomaly crackling with an energy he couldn’t describe, vibrating in colors that didn’t exist. And there, in the center of it all, something reached out. Not physically—but he could feel it, in his mind, a presence. It was vast, unknowable, but… protective?

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm released him. Gravity took hold, and he crashed back to the ground with a bone-jarring thud, gasping for air. The storm had passed, dissipating as if it had never been there.

Ryan lay in the rubble, dazed, his mind unable to grasp what had just saved him—or why.

Far above, the anomaly in the sky faded, leaving nothing but a dark, rippling scar in the atmosphere. And in its wake, Ryan knew that this was only the beginning. The world had changed. The Infinitum Phenomena had arrived, and nothing would be the same again.