Mere fragments of what happened in the apartment remained. My vision was hazy. My eyelids felt oddly sticky. But my limbs were still nimble, and my sword remained sharp. The refined silvernit sword hummed as it cut through my enemies, while my World threatened to tear through my very being.
Aureus yelped, trying to reach our bond, but I saw red—literally.
The last beast collapsed to the ground, missing its head, just as my ether reserves bottomed out. My body screamed in exhaustion as my strength waned, but I only realized the toll it had taken once the adrenaline wore off.
“A-Adam?” Mom shrieked, half-sobbing. She took a step closer to me, but her legs gave out and she slumped to the floor.
She stared at me with wide eyes, trembling as her gaze flicked momentarily to something behind me.
A growl made me spin around—another grotesque beast. It didn’t survive long enough to barge into the apartment. A lightning bolt yanked it through the floor. One moment it stood in the doorframe, the next, Daniel was smiling at us.
“Looks like you found your parents in time,” he said cheerfully, while the big head of his Thunderhorn Bull peeked into the apartment over his shoulder. Coco bleated happily, prompting one more of Mom’s stifled screams.
“I guess it was a good thing you started bringing your sword everywhere.” Daniel chuckled, his eyes lingering on the refined silvernit sword. Blood dripped from the blade, tainting the floor—not that it stood out among the carcasses sprawled across the kitchen.
I could only agree. It had felt strange to take the weapon everywhere, and I often debated leaving it at home until I could afford a small storage unit for necessities—and the sword. But the Zerogs had insisted I carry it regardless of the looks I’d get.
‘To be ready for any kind of predicament at all times.’ They’d said, and clearly, they’d been right.
Daniel’s smile faltered slightly as he gave me a once-over. “You… are bleeding.”
His confusion confused me. I checked myself for wounds but couldn’t find any, though my hazy vision made it hard to tell.
“Your eyes are bleeding,” my father said. He was the first to move, picking up the male gibbon and inspecting him before storing him in his World.
Mom scrambled to her feet, her legs still quivering like jelly, but she managed to store her Soulkin shortly after.
I rubbed my eyes at Dad’s comment—and felt it: blood. Some of it was thick and sticky, while other droplets ran freely down my cheeks.
My eyes were burning. They had been burning since I’d charged the beasts in our apartment, but the pain hadn’t been so clear before. Rubbing only made it worse. I squirmed and tried to circulate ether through my eyes, following the pain relief method Peter Zerog had shown me over the past few weeks—but my core was still dry.
Worse, my World felt off, like I’d lost full control of it. The bond with Aureus was… fragile. It felt like even a simple message, a brief surge of emotion, might break the bond. For a moment, I couldn’t sense Aureus at all. He seemed exhausted, or at least that’s how it appeared, and he looked at me like he usually did when we communicated. Then he vanished into my World without a word.
“We need to move,” Daniel said as the Thunderhorn Bull charged down the other end of the hallway. The sounds of battle echoed after it, followed by Coco’s triumphant bleat. The situation was clear.
Mom was frantic, but Dad kept everything under control. He took her hand and led her behind him.
“I’ll take care of her.” Dad patted my back. He paused beside me for a moment, his lips parting, but no words came. Then he strode up to Daniel.
“Where are we going without our things?!” Mom half-muttered, half-shouted. “We need to get our clothes, toothbrushes, —...”
I tried to tune her out and focused on wiping away the last bits of sticky blood from my eyes. They burned as if they’d been dipped in magma—but I could still use them. I wasn’t blind yet. It was just hard to keep them open.
Following Daniel and my parents, I rushed back into the hallway. Mom was still talking about salvaging things from the apartment, but Dad was already pulling her toward the stairwell. Daniel ducked into a neighboring apartment and returned with a bloodied sword. Fresh splatters of blood stained his clothes, but he didn’t seem fazed. He followed Coco into the stairwell. My parents followed slowly, their fear and trembling more painful to witness than the burning in my eyes. I followed them.
A beast from above must have heard us. It rushed down the stairwell and leapt at me. With no ether, I had to rely on my weakened body to dodge the spider-like creature’s attacks. I couldn’t identify it exactly, but it didn’t matter long. My blade carved through its torso, eliminating the threat.
Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Mom gasped and paled—even Dad looked shaken—but he kept moving, pulling her toward the ground floor.
“Daniel!” I called out. “What’s the plan? Are we going to reunite with Bert, or are we heading straight to the estate?”
Daniel slowed and glanced back at me. “If Teach and Evalynn are still there, we’ll go with them. If not, we won’t head to the estate yet. A family friend’s house is closer. We’ll go there and—...”
He fell silent, his eyes catching a familiar azure-blue flash.
“Never mind, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” he said.
I saw him looking at the projection on his bracelet, a small smile tugging at his lips.
Our situation was far from ideal. If anything, it looked like the Bastion had already been claimed by beasts.
When we reached the lobby on the first floor, the chaos was overwhelming. Beasts of all kinds—mostly Wilds commonly found in the Windbloom Forest and the Oridon Mountains—filled the streets. Most rushed into buildings; others fought in the open.
Overhead, a few winged beasts—vulture-like creatures—circled and picked at corpses. They dragged the dead into the sky, likely to feast on them atop nearby rooftops.
If my mother’s face could have been whiter, she would have paled even further at the sight unfolding before her. At least she wasn’t screaming. Daniel moved like an assassin. The lightning element was flashy, yet Daniel was quick and silent as he reached the beasts lingering in the lobby. He decapitated them within a handful of heartbeats and stepped out through a set of broken windows. Coco followed Daniel, not nearly as silent. The Thunderhorn Bull leaped through the broken window, and Daniel, Coco, and I followed.
“What are you talking—” Daniel spun around and silenced me with a gesture. Once satisfied with my silence, he turned back to the street and pointed down the street, toward the inner sectors.
I followed his gaze, only to see dozens of beasts half the size of the Mistral descending from the sky. At this point, the second Mistral had joined its partner, and they did not sound particularly pleased. I was not the best at analyzing a beast’s body language, but even I could tell the Mistrals were royally pissed. One shrieked and swung its mighty wings, and that was all it took to create a typhoon that tore through the inner sectors. My eyes were still hurting, my vision not yet perfectly clear, but I was damn sure I saw parts of several sky-rising buildings within the typhoon.
Initially, I’d been confident in the dome’s protection. The dome shouldn’t have failed so easily. Then again, Bastions were rarely attacked by Guardian beasts. There was no Forbidden Zone near our Bastion, and it was not worth the risk. I had learned enough about beasts to know that Guardians were intelligent. Some said their intelligence was as great as human adults, whereas a few researchers claimed that Guardian beasts were more intellectual than most Blessed.
And that was also why Guardian beasts should know better than to attack the Bastions. Attacking the Bastions protected by the Rulers was a certain death sentence. Even less intelligent creatures were aware of that. Only desperate times and unforeseen circumstances resulted in attacks like this, and that was exactly what was happening. The Mistrals had gone on a rampage, and they forced their will upon the beasts residing in the Zones they had crossed to reach the Bastion.
There was no reasoning with the frenzied beasts attacking the Bastion, especially not with the Mistrals. Their plumage was beautiful, glistening like polished emeralds, but the Mistrals were as beautiful as they were dangerous. A flap of their wings was enough to tear through several buildings, and it did look like they had just gotten started.
How can anyone survive this? That… My hair stood on end, and I shuddered involuntarily as the sense of certain death enveloped me.
Will I ever be strong enough to face such monstrosities? I would be dead—there was no doubting it.
I couldn’t move at the display of power even as a few Wilds attacked me. Coco stepped between me and the Wilds and charged them with a discharge of lightning currents, and the other beasts knew better than to attack. The occasional avian dove from the sky in an attempt to tear them apart, but Daniel and Coco released deadly projectiles of condensed electricity with perfect precision.
Loud movements and sounds reached my ears. They perked up, and I tore my gaze away from the Mistrals and the destruction they caused to focus on the noises. There were shouts, laced with confidence rather than despairing screams. The best, however, were the beasts. They were on the receiving side this time—their despairing shrieks and yelps rang blissfully in my ears.
“Was about time they made their move.” Daniel grunted, but the displeasure in his voice never reached his smile. “The army is coming.”
Just as the words escaped Daniel’s lips, I caught a glimpse of plated armor, sapphire-blue and shimmering. Members of the Bluesky Battalion—some wielding weapons forged from the same material as their armor, others unleashing their Soulkins’ traits. Regardless of what they wielded to best the beasts in the ninth district, they wreaked havoc.
A fireball whistled through the air and tore through the head of an Awakened avian. Chains of condensed shadows poured from shades, shackling half a dozen beasts before they could flee. Arrows whirled through the air at a blinding speed, piercing the vital spots of several beasts in a few heartbeats.
The strongest beasts in the street were quickly dispatched, and it didn’t take long before the first avian beasts emerged around the armored Blessed. They burst out from the rows of the Bluesky Battalion and shot into the air to face the avian beasts hiding on the sky-rising buildings head-on. The Bluesky Battalion split into groups of two and rushed into the buildings, following the commands of a middle-aged woman. The right side of her face was covered in a jagged scar, the eye unmoving, yet she could still see the beast to her right.
I could only barely sense a trace of ether whipping through the air before the beast collapsed, and it never got up to move again. Nobody paid attention to the beast either as the Bluesky Battalion stepped forward, tearing through the beasts that had dared to hurt innocent souls.
But no matter how shocking the scenery in the ninth sector was, the terror unfolding in the background captivated me.
How could I not be bewitched when a third figure—one much grander than the Mistrals—joined them?
“Is that…” I muttered, barely recognizing my quaking voice.
“That’s Dirk. Weird name for a wyvern, I know.” Daniel chuckled. “It looks like my uncle is back.”
His smile faltered all of a sudden, and a curse escaped his lips. “I hope he forgot my sister on the way.”