Zombie Stage Timeline: Where the AU Sits Next to Alien Stage

If you have been trying to slot Zombie Stage into the Alien Stage timeline and getting frustrated, the answer is that it does not slot in. It runs alongside. This guide draws the picture.

TL;DR

• Mainline Alien Stage is a finished arc — Round 1 → KARMA → Wiege epilogue.
• Zombie Stage is an AU (alternate universe), not a continuation.
• Both start from the same cast but diverge before Alien Stage’s Round 1.
• Watch mainline first, then Zombie Stage. Nothing spoils anything the other way.

Mainline Alien Stage

Mainline ALNST completed its main run over the course of 2022–2025. The full televised order:

Round 1 → Round 2 → Round 3 → Round 5 → TOP 3 → Round 6 → Final Round (KARMA) → Wiege (epilogue)

A few notes on that sequence:

• Round 4 never aired as a numbered Round; it was folded into Round 5’s staging.
• KARMA is the Final Round. It is the emotional and mechanical endpoint of the mainline story.
• Wiege is a short epilogue released after KARMA. It is canon, but not a Round.
• Everything released after Wiege under the Alien Stage banner is either supplementary (sub-songs, official comics, artbooks) or AU (Zombie Stage being the first).

So when a viewer new to the fandom asks “does the story continue after KARMA?” — the honest answer is: the mainline story does not. There is more media, and some of it is AU.

Where Zombie Stage branches off

Zombie Stage does not pick up where KARMA left off. It branches earlier — before mainline Round 1 — and asks a different what-if:

What if the losers of each Round weren’t killed? What if they came back?

The moment the branch takes, roughly, is the point at which mainline’s Round 1 loser (Sua) would have died. In the AU she doesn’t — she is reanimated. Everything downstream in Zombie Stage flows from that single change: the arena rules, the audience, the economy, even the colour palette.

This is why the Zombie Stage cast look and sound so familiar. Mizi is still Mizi. Sua is still Sua. Their history exists. But the events of KARMA never happen in Zombie Stage, because the tournament that leads to KARMA never resolves the same way.

Visual timeline

Alien Stage (mainline, finished)
R1 ─ R2 ─ R3 ─ R5 ─ TOP3 ─ R6 ─ KARMA ─ Wiege
│
└─── divergence point
│
▼
Zombie Stage (AU, ongoing)
R1 (Jun 2026) ─ R2 ─ R3 ─ R4 ─ R5 ─ R6
Mizi vs Sua      ↑ Round 2 unannounced

Two things worth noting on the diagram:

1. The branch happens once. Zombie Stage’s Round 1 is not “mainline R1 retold” — it is what would have happened if the loser rule was different from the start. Every subsequent Zombie Stage Round diverges further.
2. Zombie Stage restarts the Round count. Its Round 1 is not mainline Round 1 with corpses. It is a new Round 1, with its own two songs (Little Bunny and Candy Scar) and its own staging.

Watch order

The two orders that work, ranked:

1. Mainline → Zombie Stage. Recommended. Watch mainline in televised order (Round 1 → KARMA → Wiege), then start Zombie Stage from its Round 1. This is the order in which VIVINOS built the emotional payoff.
2. Zombie Stage → Mainline. Technically fine. Zombie Stage is designed to work cold. You will lose some weight — the “did they really do this to Sua again” reveal in particular — but nothing is unwatchable.

The order that does not work: interleaving. Watching mainline R1, then Zombie Stage R1, then mainline R2, etc. will hurt both stories because the AU keeps referencing beats mainline hasn’t hit yet.

Do the timelines ever cross?

Officially: no confirmed crossover exists. VIVINOS has described Zombie Stage as “the first” of multiple planned AUs — implying more branches, not a merge.

Speculation among fans has focused on three moments the timelines could touch:

• Hyuna’s arena memory — Hyuna in Zombie Stage remembers events that seem to correspond to mainline Round 3. Nothing official confirms this is a genuine crossover; it may just be VIVINOS reusing shared backstory.
• Isaac as stage manager — In Zombie Stage, Isaac appears to be alive and running the arena. Mainline Isaac dies. Fans have argued this makes Zombie Stage’s Isaac a “pre-Round 2 mainline” version. There is no VIVINOS statement supporting this.
• The Wiege silhouette — the epilogue closes with a distant silhouette some viewers read as an early Zombie Stage tease. VIVINOS has not confirmed or denied this reading.

Treat all three as fan reads, not canon. If any of them get confirmed we will update this page.

FAQ

The FAQ block below answers the most-asked timeline questions in one place — hit any question to expand its answer.