The Dimensional Fracture

Before there was a Taonere, there was only the Unbroken — a single reality, whole and sleeping, that had never known a wound. Then something cut it. [ ARCHIVE FRAGMENT 001 — THE UNBROKEN ] Access: PUBLIC · Clearance: MASTER · Integrity: 62% No record survives of what struck first: a god's dying wish, a war fought before language existed, or a mistake no one was arrogant enough to claim. What's certain is the result. The Unbroken did not shatter into pieces — it split into depths. Each cut sealed itself into a pocket of existence with its own sky, its own laws, its own hunger. The Progenitors, first among the survivors, gave these pockets a name: Dimensions. Thousands of them. Then millions. Now, no one is counting anymore, because the wound has never stopped opening. [ CLASSIFICATION PROTOCOL — DIMENSION ] » Depth is measured in Floors. Floors are grouped into Arcs. » Everything that lives inside is assigned a Challenge Rating on sight. » The ceiling rises with every floor you clear. Nothing ever lowers it. Every Dimension rots differently. Some freeze mid-collapse, trapping oceans in the sky. Some loop the same century forever, unaware they've already ended. Some are quiet — for now. All of them grow monsters suited to their particular flavor of ruin, and all of them, eventually, spill outward. A Dimension left unattended does not stay contained. It reaches. That is the world the Masters inherited: not a war to be won, but a wound to be managed, forever, one expedition at a time. No living person can walk into a Dimension and survive it. The pressure alone unmakes an unprepared mind before the first monster ever shows itself. So the Progenitors built another kind of answer — not soldiers born, but heroes summoned. Pulled sideways out of the space between realities, given shape, given a name, given just enough of a soul to fight and just enough of a leash to come back. [ SUMMONING PROTOCOL — RANK TABLE ] ★☆☆☆☆ ── ★★★★★ » Rank is set the moment they arrive. It is never re-rolled. » Race, Class and starting Skills come attached. None of them are chosen. » No hero is ever summoned twice. There are no duplicates to shard. Every summon is a gamble. You do not choose your hero — you provoke the space between worlds and see what answers. Sometimes it answers with a farmer's son who somehow bends light. Sometimes a war criminal from a dimension that no longer exists. Sometimes something that isn't sure it's a person at all, wearing a person's shape because that's the only shape the rift had on hand. Rarity is not virtue — a five-star blade-saint and a one-star herbalist both came from the same reaching-into-the-dark. The only difference is how loud the echo was when the dark reached back. What they carry with them — race, class, the strange scatter of skills stitched into their bones — isn't chosen so much as salvaged. A piece of whatever dimension they were dragged out of, still clinging to them like debris in orbit. A hero with claws remembers a world that needed claws. A hero who can talk to fire remembers a world that was, or is still, burning. Skills sharpen the way scars form: by use, on the floor, with something actively trying to end you. There is no training yard in Taonere. There is only the next floor. [ EXPEDITION TERMS — ACKNOWLEDGEMENT REQUIRED ] » Heroes act on their own initiative. You give the order; they decide. » Death is written to the record and cannot be rolled back. » There is no revive. There is no retry. There is only the next summon. This is why a Master's job is never just command. It's translation. You are the only fixed point a summoned hero has in a reality that isn't theirs — the one voice that remembers who they were between one expedition and the next. Lose that thread, and even the strongest hero starts to come apart at the seams the rift left behind. [ UPLINK ESTABLISHED · MASTER REGISTERED ] Welcome to Taonere.