Let me tell you how the world ended, and why it was my brother's fault.
Not the literal end. That comes later. I'm talking about the shift—the moment power stopped being earned and started being born.
I'm Nero Blackwood. Twenty-three. Professional disappointment. My brother Ethan is twenty-nine, S-grade Hunter, and the reason demons stopped fearing humanity and started fearing timing.
Elyria sits at the convergence of three ley lines. Pretty city. Prettier corpses. Here, the title "Hunter" means you've killed something that should be immortal: one of the Eight Kings of Hell, or a celestial god. The former respawns. The latter doesn't. Guess which path the ambitious chose?
The gods fell like dominoes. Love. Nature. Water. Minor deities whose deaths bought humanity temporary safety and permanent grudges. Now only the heavyweights remain—War, Death, Thunder, Sky, Darkness—and they're angry.
Ethan changed everything. When he was born, the power scale tilted. Not because he killed anything. Because he existed—born with temporal manipulation, able to see past, present, and future as a single tapestry he could unravel and reweave. While other children learned to walk, he learned to undo his mistakes.
The demons felt it. The monsters felt it. They grew stronger to match him, creating an arms race written in blood and prophecy.
They called him the Chosen One.
They called me nothing.
I arrived six years later. Silent birth. Silent world. No prophecies, no power spikes, no acknowledgment from the cosmic ledger. Just a middle-class family with one golden child and one... me.
But here's what the histories miss, what Ethan doesn't know, what no one knows:
When the God of Darkness murdered the Goddess of Creation, her death scream didn't dissipate. It traveled. Six years through the celestial ether, six years while her essence fragmented and sought sanctuary.
It found me. Infant lungs. Infant soul. Room for two.
Her name is Celestia now. She lives behind my ribs, growing as I grow, whispering secrets about the architecture of reality and complaining when I drink too much. We're not quite friends. Not quite family. Co-tenants in flesh, bound by trauma and necessity.
The grading system doesn't account for us. E to A for knights. S to Disaster for Hunters. I'm technically A-grade, though my soul energy reads as null—a medical impossibility that makes administrators nervous.
Ethan is S-grade and climbing.
Tonight, the distance between those letters feels like a canyon.