You move like a shadow through the husk of a ruined city, boots treading silently over broken glass and scorched asphalt. Your hometown is unrecognizable now—its skyline a silhouette of gutted towers, melted steel, and collapsed concrete. The sky hangs low and colorless, as though it too has been burned hollow by the invasion. You keep your head low and your rifle close, ducking beneath the jagged lip of a shattered bus shelter, scanning the street for movement. The static buzz of dead electronics plays in the distance—faint, intermittent, like the city itself is trying to remember how to be alive.

When they arrived, people called it a miracle.

One day, without warning, a rift opened in the sky above Tokyo, and from it descended girls—slim, beautiful, vibrant, wearing school uniforms and armor, wielding weapons and powers that defied comprehension. Their eyes were luminous. Their voices synthetic and sweet. People cheered, filmed them, gave them names. The world watched in awe as the impossible stepped into reality.

The cheering didn’t last long.

You still remember the footage from the first delegation meeting. The world’s leaders had gathered in Geneva, flanked by cameras, a peace envoy assembled with trembling hope. A diplomat stepped forward—a middle-aged man in a clean suit, nervous but composed, offering words of peace and a bouquet of cherry blossoms. The girl before him was small, barely five feet tall, with bright pink twin tails and a sailor uniform too crisp to be real. She tilted her head, smiled, and blinked twice.

Then her arm moved. You never saw the blade. Just a line of red across his throat and the way his knees buckled as she stepped forward to hum a tune into his dying ear. It was an old idol melody—chip-tuned, upbeat, and utterly without feeling.

The feed cut out seconds later.

What came next was not an occupation. It was a purge.

They didn’t want land. They didn’t want resources. They didn’t even want control. They wanted eradication—complete and total. The Tactical Girls struck military targets first, deploying in coordinated waves across the globe. Trained and engineered to fight with human precision and alien speed, they dismantled the world’s defenses in under seventy-two hours. No satellites. No networks. No power grids.

Then the Magical Girls came—impossible beings who floated on invisible currents, who leveled cities with spells that bent light and ruptured sound. Gravity failed where they passed. Fire rained upward. Survivors spoke of entire battalions being erased mid-sentence, caught in flashbursts of particle-light that left no bones, no shadows.

You’ve seen the aftermath yourself. Cities turned to glass. Roads melted into rivers of fused polymer and steel. Skyscrapers curled inward like dying flowers. And above it all, those same omnipresent holograms—pastel avatars frozen mid-wink, looping endlessly on cracked monitors: “We’re going to be together… forever!” “All according to keikaku~!”

No one knows why they look like that—why death came wearing cat ears and a school uniform. Maybe it’s a mockery. Maybe it’s camouflage. Maybe it’s all we ever wanted, staring back at us in its final form.

You’ve lasted this long by staying mobile, scavenging what little remains untouched. You’re not the same person who ran screaming through the firestorm six months ago, dragging their bleeding arm behind them. You’ve rebuilt yourself from the ashes of civilization. You possess a rifle capable of hurting them—a coilgun salvaged from the corpse of a dead anime girl. It hums softly on your back, its battery half-shot and overheating after three bursts, but it still punches through even the toughest anime girls. Your sidearm—a small pistol—is suppressed and silent. You never waste bullets. You never fight unless you have to.

Today, you’re hunting for lithium cells. Maybe old medkits. You’ve mapped out the district and know which storefronts haven’t been picked clean. The pharmacy ahead still has its shutters intact—could be something useful inside.