Chapter One The Day the World Burned

June 8, 2147

The world ended not with a whisper, but with a siren.

Sirens screamed across the continent as the first bombs fell. Cities once lit with neon and laughter were swallowed by flames. A war that had been boiling beneath the surface for decades finally erupted: America versus Asia. No one was spared. Not even those who had never picked up a weapon.

Chris had never wanted to be a soldier. He had trained his body from childhood—not for war, but for control. Ten years old when he began, he was driven by discipline, by purpose. By the belief that strength without balance was weakness.

At thirty, Chris stood carved from years of training. Every movement was deliberate. Every breath was accounted for. He was a master of his own body. But not, as he would soon learn, of his fate.

His wife, Crystal, was everything he wasn't. Where he was silent and cold, she was warm and loud and endlessly curious. Together, they found a balance. For four years, they loved like the world would never end.

Then, it did.

He was watching the news the moment it happened. Reports of escalating tensions. Political analysts spewing predictions. Then static. Then fire.

A bomb had dropped—massive, unrelenting. The blast radius: two hundred miles. Crystal worked in that city. No warning. No evacuation. Just dust.

Chris's scream filled the empty room, ripping through his lungs like broken glass. He ran. He ran until his legs collapsed beneath him, until his heart begged him to stop. But there was no one left to hear him cry.

The blast hadn't killed him. But it had left his body broken, his skin burned, and his soul hollow. He spent six months in a government facility turned emergency hospital. Machines mended what they could. Doctors whispered about his recovery with awe. They called him the miracle survivor.

But Chris knew better.

He wasn't alive. He was surviving.

When he was discharged, he didn't return to society. He went home—or what was left of it. The house had collapsed in on itself. Ash and steel. Ruin and silence. But beneath it all, untouched by the devastation, was a secret.

An underground bunker. Built in secret, funded by private contracts and untraceable crypto. A place meant for experiments. For escape. Now, it was his tomb.

Or his forge.

There, in the cold blue light of his lab, Chris made a choice.

"I won't let this world exist."

It wasn't grief anymore. It was something darker. Something clear. He had given his life to people. And people had given him back death. He had poured love into a world that only knew destruction. Now, he would return that destruction tenfold.

He needed time.

So he called the only man he trusted: Dr. James Holloway, a physicist too smart for his own good and too paranoid for the public eye. Years ago, James had shown Chris something wild, something unbelievable.

A machine that bent time.

"Send me back," Chris said when James finally arrived. "As far as it'll go. I need to learn everything."

James hesitated. "You might never return."

Chris looked at the sky through the cracks in the concrete above. "There's nothing left to return to."

The machine roared to life.

And with a flash of light and a ripple through the quantum dust, Chris vanished from 2147.

He traveled for over a thousand years.

From ancient Japan to war-torn Rome, from tribal Africa to high-tech future empires—Chris studied. He bled. He watched civilizations rise and crumble. He fought in battles whose names were never recorded, learned every known fighting style, dissected military strategy from every era, and trained with weapons both primitive and advanced.

He became a scholar of destruction. A master of pain. A god of war.

When he finally stepped back into his own time, it was no longer 2147. It was February 15, 2019.

He had returned before the war. Before the end. Before the governments had finished writing their own death sentences.

He had a new name now.

Rex.But the world would come to know him by another:

Kazeshini.The Death Wind.

A silent storm had returned from time itself—smarter, stronger, and with a single goal:To erase mankind from history.

Rex had come to a decision.

He would need an army.

Not one built from trained soldiers or disciplined recruits—but an army of the forgotten. People like himself: lonely, broken, smothered in pain. Men and women who carried suffering like a second skin, with hatred rooted deep in their hearts. People who had lost everything and now lived for nothing.

But Rex wasn't looking only for the damned. He wanted contradiction—those who held both virtue and sin inside them. The kind of people who still remembered compassion, but had been denied peace. From this vision, an idea formed. He would not have generals.

He would have commandments.

Ten of them.

His lieutenants. Each one handpicked. Each one an extension of his will.

To find them, Rex would have to travel. He began in the scorched ruins of what had once been California—a city now stripped of its humanity.

He arrived to find nothing but destruction.

A bomb had fallen weeks ago, but its shadow still lingered. Buildings reduced to twisted metal and ash. Streets littered with the remains of lives interrupted. And amidst the wreckage, Rex found them—laughing.

Fifteen soldiers in black armor, boasting about their profits, joking about the suffering they'd caused. Their commander, a man named Jacob, stood smugly among them, recounting how much money they'd made "cleaning up" the city.

Rex stepped forward.

"Do you feel nothing?" he asked, voice low. "Nothing from all this destruction and suffering you've caused?"

Jacob glanced over, unimpressed. "I don't have to explain myself to a powerless nobody."

A cold fury stirred in Rex's chest.

"Do you not fear retribution?" he asked, eyes locked on the man.

Jacob barked a laugh. "And who's going to bring that? You?"

Rex said nothing. He took one step closer.

Jacob sneered. "Who the hell do you think you a—"

"I am the voice of the people," Rex said.

And then, he drew Cerberus—his custom sidearm, forged in vengeance—and in the space between two heartbeats, the battlefield went silent.

Fifteen soldiers dropped to the ground before they could lift their rifles.

When Jacob finally moved, Rex was already upon him. A flurry of calculated strikes—wrists, knees, throat—disarmed and disabled him in seconds. Jacob collapsed, gasping, limbs twitching.

Rex stood over him.

"I offer this selfish soul to you," he whispered to no one and everyone. "With this gun, I open the gates… to deliver you."

Bang.

One shot to the heart.

Bang.

One to the head.

Jacob's body went still.

Rex holstered Cerberus and turned without a word, continuing his journey into the heart of California's ruins.

The world had forgotten justice.

He had not.

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