Beneath the world's last sunset, the sky cracked open. On New Year's Eve, humanity waited for fireworks—but what fell was death. From the void above, hundreds of meteor-like vessels streaked toward Earth, each trailing violet luminescence. One by one, they struck.
In Paris, the Arc de Triomphe vanished in a roar of blinding white, its gilded reliefs vaporized into ash before falling tourists could scream. The streets liquefied into molten cobblestone; bodies melted into pavement, their final breaths solidifying as silent, eternal shrieks frozen in agony. In Cairo, the Pyramids—ancient sentinels immune to millennia—turned to dust in an instant, the desert wind carrying powdered limestone like funeral flour across the Nile. A woman's scarf drifted upward, then disintegrated before her eyes. The air filled with the sickly scent of glass and burnt hair; scorpions boiled alive in the sand.
At China's Great Wall, mountains shuddered as the stone ramparts crumbled, tumbling into ravines with the final groan of a dying world. Entire villages that had clung to the rim were swallowed beneath boulders carved from centuries of labor. A child's toy car lay half-buried in rubble, its bright red paint smeared with dust and blood. Farther east, in Tokyo, neon signs flickered once, then burst into shards of incandescent plasma, splashing alleys with sparks that set vending machines ablaze like bonfires.
In New York, the Statue of Liberty's torch winked out as if snuffed by a cosmic hand. Steel plates peeled off her crown, rain of copper petals tumbling onto empty streets. Skyscrapers buckled in slow-motion collapse, windows exploding outward like shrapnel; office workers caught in mid-sentence fell through glass rain, their bodies impaled on twisted beams. A subway train, suspended in darkness, rolled backward out of its tunnel, disgorging passengers who stumbled onto the tracks only to be seized by clawed shapes emerging from the void.
Across the Indian Ocean, the Taj Mahal's marble walls blackened, veins of obsidian cracking its pristine façade. Pilgrims beside the reflecting pool were engulfed by a pulse of scorching wind; their silhouettes burned into the marble long after they'd turned to ash. In Rio de Janeiro, the Christ the Redeemer statue cracked at the shoulders and pitched headfirst into Guanabara Bay, sending shockwaves through the water that capsized yachts and dragged swimmers into whirlpools of debris.
The oceans themselves rebelled next. Rogue waves—tall as apartment blocks—rolled ashore without warning, swallowing coastlines from Sydney to San Francisco. Fishing boats were capsized like matchsticks, nets laden with bones. Ports lay silent, cranes bent like broken spiders, and the siren of one lone coast guard ship faded as it was dragged beneath the waves.
Argwan forces poured from their meteor vessels, emerging in droves: violet-skinned commandos who needed no air, whose bodies had been reforged for this night. In underwater bases once thought impregnable, sailors woke to find the hulls flooded, metal groaning under clawed assault. Submarines erupted in underwater firestorms—turbines torn apart from within—sending shock tremors that pounded the sea floor like seismic bombs.
Every military installation became a tomb. Bunkers vented steam and blood. Missile silos fired their warheads skyward in a futile volley that split the darkness with tracer arcs, only to be met by Argwan shields that shimmered and absorbed the blasts, sending them cascading back onto launch crews. Armored convoys were overturned by living beasts—Argwan war-hulks whose bare hands crushed tanks like toys, their roar rattling the air like rolling thunder.
Cities fell in sequence: London's Tower Bridge sheared in half, spanning a chasm of molten asphalt; Moscow's Red Square was hoisted bodily into the sky by gravity-null fields, then dropped to shatter in a cloud of glinting rubble; Mumbai's Dharavi slum burned in a forest of flaming huts, the smell of singed humanity hanging thick as smog. Even remote outposts in Siberia found themselves under siege—fortified research stations overrun by nightmarish scouts who crept through permafrost tunnels, dragging screaming scientists into the snow.
By the end of the night, only pockets of humanity remained, huddled in underground bunkers and abandoned subway tunnels. The sky above was a black wound, pierced by Argwan vessels hovering like vultures. No dawn came. Instead, an unholy twilight lingered as their ship fleet unleashed a signal that silenced every radio, every phone, every plea for mercy. A single broadcast flickered on screens worldwide: the Emperor's visage—a shifting, crystalline horror crowned in living bone—proclaiming, "This world is ours. Your era is dust."
And across the devastated planet, the only answer was the rustle of ash-laden wind and the distant echo of ruined stone. Humanity's story had ended with a violet slash across the sky—the first and only chapter in the age of Argwan domination.
On January 3rd, pre-dawn, a colossal Argwan vessel pierced the horizon and descended into the charred ruins of Shinjuku. It hovered, impossibly vast, its hull dwarfing the skeletal skyscrapers. A pulse of violet energy radiated outward, and the entire city dissolved into nothingness: asphalt, steel, flesh—reduced to drifting ash that rained down in suffocating clouds.
From the heart of that living dread-castle emerged Ryu Argwan, eldest son of Mei. He stood atop a platform of writhing veins and bone, dark armor fused to his skin. His voice carried without sound: "This world is ours. Your era is dust." As he spoke, a wave of disintegration rolled across the horizon, turning Mt. Fuji's foothills into a boiling mire of glass and debris.
In the endless night that followed, city after city fell. London's Tower Bridge snapped in half, its towers collapsing like broken tusks. Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue cracked at the base and tilted into Guanabara Bay, submerging worshippers beneath twisted fingers of coral and blood. In New Delhi, the Taj Mahal's marble turned black, its once-pristine walls weeping dark ichor as the Argwan swept through the Ganges embankments, drowning refugees in the holy river.
Humanity's bones lay bare under the moonless sky. No prayer could shelter them. No barricade could hold.
And throughout it all, the Argwan did not celebrate. They marched onward, their golden eyes unblinking, clawed feet silent on the rubble. They spoke no words of victory. Their silence was the triumph.
When dawn finally broke—if dawn could still exist—it revealed a world remade. Rivers ran with ash; forests stood petrified; oceans glowed with phosphorescent carnage. The last radio signal fizzled out in the wasteland once called London: a child's voice saying, "Mama, where are you?" before the static swallowed her plea.
The invasion was complete.
Earth belonged to the Argwan.
And in the new silence, the only sound was the slow heartbeat of the planet—echoing beneath the ground, waiting for its new masters to claim their throne