Old Calendar, Year 997

In recent years, the portals to the dark world scattered across the globe were smashed.

Their overlords in the dark world grew restless, like hornets smoked from a nest.

If every portal falls, finding the human world's coordinates becomes a blind hunt in shifting fog.

Space coordinates don't stay still; the world moves like a tide, moment by moment.

Even a tiny ripple can tilt the map.

Even the alchemists linked to our world could only sigh under that law—rooted in creation, beyond human hands.

Even the dark world's horrors admit they aren't omnipotent before it.

Yet the human world was branded and shamed by those portals for millennia, like scars that refused to fade.

Legend says the portals began thousands of years ago, back when words were first carved into wood and stone.

Totem grotesques glared like storm-signs, telling that the dark creatures already walked our soil.

Every few decades, or centuries, a dark-world portal opened on earth, timing fickle as weather.

In the age before modernity, they opened slow and hidden, like sinkholes under moss.

Thus the stage and the novel birthed ‘Dracula’ and ‘the werewolf,’ masks for older nightmares.

What they didn't know: in the shadowed margins, someone had already stood up to fight, guarding the last line for mankind.

Under that false calm, like gauze over a wound, humanity hurried into Old Calendar 980.

It was a year of blazing progress, new stars rising across every field like sparks.

The Leviathan-class airship that airdropped Aphelia and the Order of the Sacred Lion was born in that sprint.

New-pattern alchemical firearms stepped into the public eye, gleaming like fresh-forged steel.

Another wave of innovation loomed, or else war's next, harsher season.

Sure enough, in the third year of that boom, the Iron Cross Empire couldn't sit on its hunger.

With technology warped by speed, it lunged at its neighbor like a wolf at the fence.

Under night’s cloak, swarms of airships dropped soldiers like iron rain.

The historians named it the Blitz.

Their neighbor was a border small-state; it couldn't stop the Iron Cross's modernized engine.

Fire spread across that land like grass aflame in dry wind.

Indiscriminate airship bombing and crosshatched heavy fire showed a new shape of war.

Nations on the continent felt the wrongness, like ash in the mouth, and knew this couldn't go on.

Even if it did, they vowed it must not burn their own fields.

For the first time, most countries shared a silent pact, like eyes meeting across a table.

Escalation brought sights of ruin, a landscape pitted like a diseased lung.

Just then, as the human nations moved to strike back, a massive dark-world portal opened inside the Iron Cross.

A white-robed maiden stepped out, pale as moonlight over water.

While all were spellbound by her beauty, she melted into a puddle of blood.

The weird power unleashed by her death rolled outward like a shockwave.

Countless portals opened first along the continent's rim, like mouths along a cliff.

Monsters surged like tidewater into the human world, devouring the small rim-states whole.

Lands they reached turned to blight and ash.

The dead returned in a god-spiting fashion, reborn as vicious yet brittle ghouls.

They bared fangs at their former kin, like dogs gone rabid in a drought.

People named that disaster the Dark Tide.

Boundless darkness poured from the Abyss, a sea trying to drown the mortal shore.

It looked and felt like hell from the old myths.

The Iron Cross suffered worst.

Several dark-world portals bloomed inside its top-tier military factories, the sharpest tools of the nation.

Almost overnight, the capital lost nearly all its elite alchemists and scientists, like candles snuffed in a gale.

The dark creatures cut roads and rails to the capital, severing arteries.

The glittering city became an island, ringed by shadow, in one brutal turn.

Help couldn't get in; civilians couldn't get out.

The siege lasted half a year.

Soldiers and townsfolk joined hands, hearts beating like drums, to wrest a few sturdy buildings as bastions.

They hauled up weapons buried under the streets, old bones of the city.

Death hung close; survival came first.

Even if some of the city had to be broken, it was a price they accepted.

Yet the dark creatures moved like they had a commander.

They didn't storm; they fished.

They raided the human bastions now and then, netting ‘trophies’ and hauling them back.

They guarded the remaining food like wardens, making every attempt at supplies a blood-price.

Over the capital they kept a massive ward, a dome no outside shell could crack.

Later, strategists and alchemists studied that battle.

They judged that grand duke–tier figures, like Cain and Abel, must have overseen it.

Only such power could keep a ward intact for so long.

To seize the Iron Cross capital, the dark world must have paid dearly.

For what aim, no one yet knows.

If it was only to intimidate, the ‘dead zones’ on the rim already wrung fear from every nation.

They also drove waves of refugees at borders, like rivers battering dikes.

There was no need to waste strategic assets here; striking the Gospel Church’s Holy State would have hit harder.

In a hell like this, faith is a rope thrown to ordinary folk.

In the end, the Iron Cross capital turned into a cannibal hell.

Food ran short and foul, and a city that could have held for months collapsed.

No one guessed the dark creatures would guard bacteria-laced stores with care.

They also seeded food with tiny virus-bearing bugs, like black pepper that crawled.

The first civilian who ate them showed nothing.

Rumors of man-eating spread through the bastions like smoke through rafters.

People on the brink finally lost control.

In the end-times, a full belly is fortune, but it sat under the army’s iron hand.

With the dark creatures whispering and the plague spreading, civilians rose against military rule.

The infected turned into bombs of blood and meat, spattering disease through the crowds.

More and more civilians who ate the stores were taken.

Inside the walls, a mass of ghouls was born like a midnight crop.

As the proverb goes, fear the rot within more than blades without.

Think how many civilians and soldiers packed those bastions.

The infected weren’t only civilians; many officers ate more and fell early.

They became the dark world’s own, stones in its wall.

One link tugged the next; the plan meshed like gears, perfect down to each screw.

It took half a year, and the dark creatures lost less than a fifth by the end.

When the ward finally broke, one survivor carried the message out like a spark in cupped hands.

He wasn’t some paragon; he’d been an intelligence man before the war.

After the fighting began, he hid in a sewer safehouse under the Iron Cross capital.

It was a place the dark creatures overlooked, treating the tunnels as breeding nests.

That gave him time to record their methods and traits, like a patient tracking stars.

He even risked everything to dissect a hybrid banshee bat.

His notes fueled the later counteroffensive.

The compiled report was named for his surname: the Clover Dossier.

That battle taught humanity the dark creatures weren’t mindless beasts.

They had war-wise commanders, and magic and flesh as twin blades.

That revelation jolted governments into reform, guarding against collapse if their leaders were infected.

Where there are dark creatures, there are hunters to cull them.

Families who had long kept to the shade rose into view, sworn to guard mankind’s last line.

The most famed was a house down to one mistress and one servant.

Few in number, unmatched in record.

The ‘poor’ mistress was named Aphelia Elizabeth.

Rumor called her the Iron Cross Empire’s last princess, a shadowed exile to save mankind.

Her surname was one the Iron Cross royals shared, a brand only they could wear.

Her fierce hatred for dark creatures seemed to confirm the tale, like iron ringing true.

Others said her bloodline’s branch came from Red Rose, the island nation by the sea.

Someone even found ‘Aphelia Elizabeth’ in Red Rose’s royal genealogies.

But gender, age, kinship—blank lines, like fogged ink.

After ten thousand words of rumor, one title remained: the Queen of Hunters.

In her trophy hall, the Dark Spider queen’s severed head hung high in the House of Elizabeth.

The manor had almost become a museum of the dark.

Whatever the truth, it didn’t stop the queen of hunters from standing against the dark.

After the Dark Tide, hunter families sent her talent by every path, like rivers feeding a lake.

Countless skilled hunters gathered under Aphelia’s banner.

With state support, they became a bulwark against the dark creatures.

Once more they turned into shadow, striking for the world’s four corners.