The silence didn't last long.
A loud bang 'BOOM' vibrated in the air in the far distant. A silent but uncanny humming could be heard in the darkness. Everyone flinched. One man screamed "Where the hell I'm I?,
Does anyone know what's happening???". A woman clutched at her ears. Thomas stood still, with desperate eyes, trying to remember—
"This- this is familiar. This was the start" he thought quietly to himself.
"In Chronicle Torment, Volume 2, Chapter 3: The Harvest Begins. This was the Calling, the moment the Game began."
Thomas's let out a misted sigh in the cold wind.
And then… they appeared.
Silhouettes in the mist. Tall, Elongated. Their forms flickered between humanoid and beast, their skin appeared like dark flames. No eyes. Just masks— carved in where expressions of amusement, cruelty, and indifference.
The Dreadlords.
"We welcome you, O broken ones. Flesh-born. Page-marked. You have read the prophecy. Now you live it."
A voice echoed inside the mind rather than the air.
Everyone whimpered, backed away—some dropped to their knees.
Suddenly as if a spur of adrenaline overtook a man in tracksuit, he ran. The Dreadlord didn't stop him. The man screamed mid-stride, fell, and convulsed—tortured by his skin boiling from the inside out before finally dying, his body turned to ash.
NO WARNING. NO MERCY.
Thomas didn't move. He knew. You don't run during the Calling, you don't oppose either. Right now they are like insects to this supernatural beings.
Another voice echoed—this one higher, almost musical.
"Your world was dull. Your lives insignificant. But now, we have graced you with an opportunity. Each of you will be tested. You will face Trials. You will bleed. You will break. YOU WILL DESPAIR. And if you amuse us… you may yet survive."
"May. Not will."
A pale woman in the tank top looking around her mid-thirties sobbed softly. A boy beside her—no older than seventeen—was whispering something under his breath. A prayer maybe.
Fear had engulfed everyone.
Thomas forced himself to speak, with clenched fists and a voice hoarse. "Where are the Trials?"
The Dreadlords tilted their heads in eerie unison, as if amused by the display of courage.
"The first has already begun, Look beneath your feet."
The earth cracked.
The ground collapsed.
Swallowing them.