A steel-boned fist slams chitinous armour against a Seoul rooftop slick with rain. Kang Lim is a high school student who conjugates verbs by day and stalks xenoterrans by night, his white cap pulled low, his knuckles raw. The monster screeches, thrashes into an air-conditioning unit, and only a stray cat watches the takedown before scattering. Years ago, reality cracked open and the creatures poured through, and Lim has spent every evening since hunting the things nobody else sees.

But the White Cap is no longer the planet's only quiet weapon. Saint Pearl crosses from the United States, Jane Sonata rises out of the United Kingdom, and the cryptic Nangi moves through the underworld with a purpose nobody can trace. Superhumans are surfacing globally, and not all of them share Lim's private creed of protection — some carry ideologies sharp enough to carve new borders into the earth. As Lim is dragged from rooftop skirmishes into a chess match spanning continents, the veil over the xenoterran emergence begins to fray. What he finds stitched into the fabric of the phenomenon is older and far more deliberate than a random incursion, and the creature orchestrating it has already noticed the boy in the cap.

Also known as: 초인의 시대, Choin-ui Sidae, Era of Overman, Era of Überhuman.