Everything was white.

  There was no ground, no sky, no horizon. Only an immense emptiness that surrounded everything, as if the world had been erased on purpose.

  In front of that nothingness, two figures observed each other.

  One of them was a young boy — with a serene, almost curious face — dressed in simple clothes, floating without any weight. The other, sitting cross-legged on the void, emanated a presence impossible to describe. He was large, imposing, but his face was covered by a shadow so dense that not even the white light of that place could pass through it.

  “I would like… to know more about him… about you all, what happened,” the boy asked, breaking the silence.

  The imposing figure simply watched him for a moment.

  “It is not necessary for you to know. You can follow your own path without having to follow in their footsteps. You are a different person.”

  The young man frowned.

  “I want to know. Not because of… that, but because I want to know everything they went through. I want… to be able to know him at least in that way.”

  For the first time, the imposing being let out a deep, almost amused laugh.

  “That curiosity… always leads to the same places.”

  “I don’t care,” the boy replied firmly. “Tell me their story.”

  The being leaned forward, resting one arm on his knee.

  “Very well, then. But remember… this story does not begin with heroes, nor villains.”

  He paused for a moment, and the white of the place began to crack, like glass breaking.

  “It begins with three… fools talking about even greater foolishness… heh.”

  The man’s laughter echoed one last time before the white world completely collapsed.

  Sunlight streamed between the leaves, warming the damp grass. Three boys were walking in the middle of a field, doing nothing productive, talking about nonsense.

  “I’m telling you, in a fistfight, if we’re well covered, we survive a zombie apocalypse,” one of them said, laughing.

  “Yes, but no, how do you cover your body without losing mobility?” another replied. “Besides, it depends on the type of zombies.”

  “I mean, that’s what we say now, but we don’t know how we’d really behave in a world like that,” the third said. “We could become heroes or be cowards who hide, or die because of something stupid. I honestly, even though I’m in good shape and all, don’t think I’d last long in a zombie apocalypse.”

  The other two boys laughed at each other, gesturing as if to say their friend was just pretending to be serious and humble. The three of them clearly knew each other well.

  The silence that followed while they kept walking calmly lasted only a few seconds, but it felt longer than any conversation.

  In the distance, a slight vibration traveled through the air.

  The wind blew through the trees, moving the leaves as if the field breathed along with them. The boys kept walking aimlessly, laughing at anything.

  One of them began to lag slightly behind. Something caught his attention: a large leaf hanging from a low branch, with small red berries shining in the sun.

  He didn’t know why, but something in his body felt different. Light. Almost electric.

  “Could it be…?” he murmured to himself, looking up.

  Without warning, he stepped back, took a breath, and without thinking much, lifted his leg to kick the leaf.

  His leg rose with perfect precision, so high that the movement cut through the air with a soft whistle. The kick struck the leaf directly, tearing it off effortlessly.

  For a second, everything went silent.

  “Since… when…?” he whispered, surprised, looking at his leg as if it weren’t his.

  Then a smile escaped him. He couldn’t believe it.

  “Look, Will!” he shouted.

  The most relaxed of the group approached, laughing, impressed.

  “Hey, nice!” he said with a smile. “Your kicking skills improved a lot, huh?”

  He seemed more impressed by how high he had lifted his leg than by the strength or technique.

  “No, but seriously,” he continued. “Wasn’t it just a week ago that you almost injured yourself trying to stretch your legs too much? What did you do?”

  The boy kept smiling, though inside he felt something strange… as if his body hid something as powerful as it was dangerous within him.

  Then they heard a groan behind them.

  “Hm? What’s wrong?” Damián asked, worried about his friend.

  The third of the group, a more solid but shorter boy, was rubbing his eyes again and again with noticeable discomfort.

  “I don’t know…” he replied. “My sight bothers me. I see shapes. Like letters.”

  “Letters?” the other repeated.

  “Yes… like from a computer. As if they were floating in the air,” he said, blinking multiple times to see if it would stop.

  The other two looked at each other, trying to find a logical explanation.

  “It must be the sun,” one said. “Maybe the sun is too strong and you got heatstroke.”

  “Yes, must be too much photosynthesis,” the other added, trying to make a joke. For him it wasn’t very worrying.

  “Let’s go home. My head is starting to hurt,” Dante said with slight discomfort or… fear. There was something he wasn’t entirely sure about and hadn’t yet told his friends.

  They decided to return to their homes, joking as if nothing had happened, like any other day of their lives—lives that, while not very boring, were not particularly extraordinary either.

  A little later, they were already at one of the boys’ houses. Dante was resting on the couch, a cold bottle on his head and his eyes closed.

  “How do you feel?” his friend asked, sitting on the other couch.

  He nodded without opening his eyes. But when Damián turned to look at his other friend to ask him something, he suddenly jolted at what he saw on his face.

  “Will, look at your eyes! They’re… yellow.”

  “Yeah, sure, probably from the computer,” he exclaimed without giving it much importance, but the other shook his head immediately.

  “No, seriously. Your pupils are… yellow. Or golden.”

  Thinking it was a joke, the boy went to look at himself in the mirror, where he remained staring for long seconds, trying to understand what he was seeing, because indeed his pupils had turned a bright golden tone.

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  “What the hell…” he muttered.

  When he returned to the living room, the three debated whether to go to the hospital, but before that they decided to search their symptoms online, maybe it wasn’t something so out of the ordinary—or so they hoped.

  They found many recently uploaded videos filled with people talking about strange symptoms, physical changes, and even paranormal abilities. The more they read, the more uneasy they became.

  Then, seeing that television channels were seriously talking about these cases, the boys ran to the house of the friend who had a television with Chromecast. They turned on the news.

  On every channel, they were talking about the same thing: unexplained physical and psychological transformations in people all over the world.

  Images appeared of people with eyes of different colors, metallic shining skin, or impossible movements.

  Will, whose eyes were now golden like a sunflower, watched the television attentively.

  “On every channel they’re talking about these things—”

  “It seems like it’s happening everywhere… all over the—”

  Before they could finish the sentence, the broadcast suddenly changed.

  The presenters’ words were cut off without knowing what to say, as the scene change was just as sudden for them, and the screen filled with static for a few seconds. Then an aerial, shaky image appeared, captured by a drone. A nervous news voice tried to describe what was being shown: a colossal crack, an open wound splitting an entire mountain in two.

  The drone descended slowly, showing the fractured edges of the terrain. Trees uprooted and a faint glow emanating from the apparent origin of the crack. It was an impossible scene, almost unreal, but completely visible to millions of eyes.

  “Look, you can see someone,” one of the boys whispered.

  At the point where the abyss began, between mist and dust, a human figure could be seen.

  One of the boys, with the remote in hand, leaned toward the screen.

  “Look… there’s a person there,” he said, pointing at the figure that somehow reminded him of a fictional character from some series he had watched.

  It was a thin man, with tight skin shining under the sun. He was naked, partially covered in dust, observing his own fist with unsettling calm, as if rediscovering his own body. Around him, the air vibrated, distorted, as if heat emanated from him.

  The camera zoomed in slightly before losing signal, leaving on the screen only a frozen echo of that image: a man alone and with terrifying calm staring at the unsettling power of his fist, while the entire world trembled around him.

  None of the three said anything. The silence became heavy, almost unbearable.

  They could hear their own heartbeats and the hum of the television, still flickering.

  “That… can’t be a person, can it?” one of them murmured with wide eyes and a trembling voice.

  No one knew how to answer.

  At that moment, without knowing it, the three boys had witnessed the beginning of something much bigger than them, something they would soon see up close.

  Hundreds of kilometers away from the boys, a new event began to arise in silence, away from the cameras, slowly leaving its mark on the surfaces of places used by society to display its admiration for those it constantly chooses as its new idols, symbols, and stars.

  For this reason, on the floors of stadiums, tracks, and stages all over the world, burning marks began to emerge, consuming any material in such a way that they would be indelible, forming scars in the earth that seemed to be words written in an unknown language, words that emitted an increasingly stronger supernatural glow.

  From that light emerged small spheres or domes, and as the letters changed, these grew larger and larger until they covered a large area of the place where they were located, as if the site were being prepared for something—or someone…

  —inside the dome of Camp Nou stadium (Barcelona, Spain)—

  Inside that desolate and catastrophic place, a broad-shouldered blond man materialized.

  “Where… what the hell…” seeing his surroundings in confusion, he could only make out a large dome surrounding him, completely isolating him from the outside, until his gaze focused on another black-haired man who had also been “summoned” there. But before any interaction could begin, a voice started invading their thoughts.

  Let the strong rule

  “What?” they looked around in confusion.

  Let the strong rule

  It resonated louder and louder in their heads, causing them pain and making them twist while holding their ears in a useless attempt to stop the voice.

  Let the strong ruleLet the strong ruleLET THE STRONG RULE!

  Silence fell for a few seconds…

  Let the strongest rule

  They looked at each other, understanding the situation, lowering their hands, accepting what they had to do, and slowly walking toward each other with complicity.

  The blond, broad-shouldered man, bringing his hands together, materialized a large staff with golden tones that ended in a massive hammer on both sides.

  “I’m sorry to do this…”

  Spinning his hammer to generate inertia and take great momentum, creating a powerful gust of wind that abruptly stopped upon impacting the other man’s body, devastating the terrain around him, with the peculiarity that before receiving the blow he did not seem worried or even flinch.

  “Don’t worry, I heard it too,” exclaimed that man before the astonished gaze of the blond, without having received a single scratch, with total calm while the hammer’s head still rested on his head.

  “(What a monster),” in his gaze there was pure astonishment, but a small smile showed.

  Quickly he changed his weapon’s grip and struck his opponent in the chest with the other end of the hammer, generating another great impact that this time violently launched his opponent to the other end of the dome.

  Before the dust dissipated, he connected another blow to his temple followed by another to the jaw, shaking his head from side to side, this time managing to cause him some discomfort.

  “(I can’t believe someone like this exists!),” he shouted internally to himself at the overwhelming and unfair difference between him and his opponent. He came from a world where no other being could stand above him, but here… for the first time in his history, the ant was him.

  His opponent was drilled by an uninterrupted barrage of hammer strikes, making the entire stadium tremble with each blow until, in annoyance, he grabbed the weapon’s head mid-attack and shattered it before the blond’s astonished eyes. The blond had to recover instantly to defend himself from the counterblow delivered by the black-haired man, barely saving himself from taking the full impact by placing the other side of his hammer to shield himself, although it still sent him flying again to the other end of the dome, leaving his weapon in pieces.

  He had been completely surpassed, humiliated in a simple display of strength, and as if that humiliation were not enough, the opponent before him did not seem to have a single scratch, immaculate just as he arrived. What did Maximus have left? He had no chance, but at least he could try to save his pride.

  “Fine… let it be hand to hand then…” he said, wiping dirt and blood from his face, adopting a boxing stance ready to continue the fight with his own hands.

  In an instant, his contender appeared in front of the blond, ready to deliver another blow with terrifying and lethal speed. A blow he barely dodged with a head movement, delivering a counterpunch to his opponent’s face using his own force. In that moment, a fierce exchange of blows took place, highlighting the blond’s skill and technique in avoiding his rival’s strikes, since it was the only thing he could do—one well-placed hit from that terrifying power could tear his head off.

  “(So much power, he doesn’t even need a gram of technique to be lethal. One hit and I’m dead),” seconds turned into minutes inside his mind. He felt as much fear as excitement; this was the greatest wall he had ever faced, both in his world and in this one.

  Finding an opportunity, he enveloped his right arm in a light that spread along his forearm like a bright liquid, generating so much power that the mere path of his punch formed a shockwave that swept the area where he stood. It collided with his opponent’s fist, completely destroying the entire stadium area, yet showing that neither of them gave up even a centimeter.

  But when the smoke cleared, it was revealed that from the simple recoil of their blows, Maximus was covered in bruises, his fists destroyed, as the damage traveled through his entire body, tearing his flesh and breaking his bones from within.

  “You are someone very strong,” said the black-haired man with a smile while keeping his fist pressed against Maximus’s, giving him a small moment of respite, taking slight pity on his battered rival.

  “You don’t have to be so kind, you know. I must not be much to you,” he said, breathing with difficulty but smiling with a still defiant look, though already resigned to the result.

  “You truly are the strongest I have met so far,” said the unarmed man with a broad smile reflecting his calmness.

  “What an honor, I suppose now… I must live up to it!”

  The exchange intensified again, though now without any defense, receiving the blows directly on both sides. Each hit felt like a catastrophe materialized by these two men, which despite the barrier could be felt for kilometers around, making the world tremble from so much power. Until after a few painful seconds, everything stopped. Silence reigned. The dust dissipated, and the barrier slowly began to dissolve so the world could see its winner.

  “I hope we can do this again. It was fun.”

  “Yes… someday…”

  Maximus was on his knees with his arms destroyed in the middle of a crater worthy of a nuclear bomb’s fall. Closing his eyes, he fell to the ground defeated while helicopters, vehicles, and military forces could be heard heading toward his location.

  In front of his unconscious body, the symbols appeared again, but this time arranged differently, as if resetting after having a clear winner of the fight, and around them the stadium floor slowly repaired itself, preparing for the next encounter.