Six months had sharpened us into something quieter and harder.
We'd trained until calluses mapped my palms and my legs remembered the right stance without my brain. Serin pushed me every day—eight hours, six days a week—until breath and motion braided into the same thing. I could hold a small water sphere between my palms now. My footwork had gone from clumsy to economical. My sword cuts were cleaner. I could aim an arrow and land it where I meant. I was not a master. I was a tool that, when set right, worked.
Still, none of that erased the parts of me that stayed small: the flicker of fear when I thought of Mira, the quick breath when I pictured Eron's face, the way my chest tightened imagining any of them taken from me. Training taught me to move, not to stop the heart's sudden, human jumps.
School that day felt like theater. We were in the middle of exams—muffled sighs, pencils scratching—when the sound started: shouts first, muffled and wrong, then the long animal cry of people who see something impossible. The invaders didn't tiptoe. They came like a line of accusation.
Twenty of them—thin and tall, bodies of cracked black stone, a white core like a gem embedded at the center of each forehead—crossed the schoolyard. Two of them, larger and broader and wrapped in a darker sheen, took positions near the outer gate. Another pair—bigger again, the ones that felt more like generals than soldiers—waited a step behind, axes and double-bladed weapons humming with an edge of cold mana I could feel from the classroom.
They moved too slow to be cowardly and too precise to be careless. It was as if the city had been a stage and someone had finally cried "Now." Within minutes they were on the roof. The students—twenty class representatives with the most prominent auras the invaders could sense—were pulled up by force. No one volunteered. The demons didn't ask. They dragged them, ragged and wide-eyed, to the edge.
The captives were a cross-section of our year: ten came from well-off families, ten from poorer homes; ten were girls, ten boys. Some of them trembled with the raw panic of being used as shields; others seemed to shrink inward, trying to fold themselves away. The invaders arranged them in a ring, faces pale against the bright day.
A taller demon—bigger than the rest, an obvious leader—stepped forward. He wore no mouth, yet a sound came from him: a low, sibilant voice that scraped along bone. He lifted a long, iron-grey sword and spoke, words that the reporters later tried—and failed—to render as anything human.
"People of this place," the voice said, and the students felt it down to their teeth. "Our king sends a message. Surrender your resources. Offer them to us, or we take them by force. Your leaders will learn. Your children will show you what happens if you resist."
Someone screamed. A boy in the front row tried to be a hero; he grabbed a chair and leapt forward. The demon's hand moved with impossible speed. The chair shattered against his chest like paper. The boy's face went slack. He staggered, choked, and then vomited a dark, glittering liquid—his eyes rolling white for a breath before he fell, convulsing, and then strangely still. They did not kill him, not at first. They wanted proof, control, a theater of fear.
I felt my limbs tighten. I caught Serin through telepathy, because she always moved like that—inside my head before she did with hands. *Stay calm. Do nothing. Don't make them show what happens when people fight back.* Her voice was a cool ribbon across my mind. Calm, precise. The kind of voice that had made me practice the same thrust three hundred times.
From across the street, the army arrived in a rush of diesel and metal. Men and women in fatigues moved like a different species—ordered and sudden. They opened fire. Rifles cracked. Bullets hit stone and chattered off. It was grotesque: the rounds sunk like drops into thick mud. Men in uniform opened grenade tubes, flung them, and the air flooded with smoke. The demons did not stumble.
Then a tank rolled into place, its barrel trained and decisive. Hope tightened in my chest when the big gun fired: the shell hit the leader clean on the shoulder. For a breath the creature shuddered; the black skin cracked and a flare of white-hot light burst from its core. The impact blew out windows and sent dust raining down. The leader staggered—but then slashed.
The tank's hull split like paper. The blast threw men like ragdolls. The explosion ate the air and the next two behind it caught fire before anyone could think. Soldiers screamed. People ducked. Three vehicles lost crews in a single heartbeat; those men did not survive.
It was not clean. It was not some cinematic victory. The demon's counterstrike carved the battlefield into horror: bodies, screams, smoke, the smell of metal and burning leather. The others around him advanced, not to finish the tank, but to show the price of striking back. They wanted to teach us that our defenses could be broken—and they had illustrations.
Amid the chaos something stranger happened to one of the captives. He began to tremble, then shout in a language that sounded almost like prayers, claws raking at his skull. The white core at his forehead burned bright, and for a moment—only a moment—light flared between his teeth. Then he fell backward, eyes rolled, unconscious. He wasn't dead, but he was changed: the invaders had used him the way one uses a signal flare—proof that they could touch our people in ways the army could not deny.
The students' screams shifted—first a ragged fear, then a slow, stunned silence. The auditorium of the school had become a theater for a new kind of war: one with rules we did not know and a scale we had not prepared for.
I should have gone. I had trained for this. My hands knew the knife. My feet remembered the angles. But something inside me froze—less a failure of skill and more a tug of heart. I imagined Mira's laugh, Eron's careless grin; I pictured any of them falling under that strange bright core. I hesitated. That hesitation felt like a physical force, heavy as lead.
Serin's hand found my shoulder for one second—solid, grounding. *You trained for this so you would not hesitate,* she said, not aloud but like a cold wind. She did not push me with guilt. She only made the fact of training a weapon in my hands.
We did not charge alone. We did not storm into madness. The invaders finished their performance and opened a thin, trembling seam in the air—dark and oily—then walked through one by one. The sky swallowed them. The reporters screamed into cameras. The army regrouped, tending to the wounded. A hush fell that was not peace: it was the silence of people who had seen the unthinkable and now knew it could come close.
In the days that followed the government tried to control the story—remove footage, order radio silence, classify reports—but cameras and phones had done their work. Footage leaked. Translations spun like wildfire. Forums argued over frames, images, and the meaning of the white cores. Small towns looted armories; big cities moved to protect harbors. The ember we had seen was no longer a single spark. It was a line kindling under dry brush.
We had a choice: hide and hope, or train and move. The council made their move quietly: reinforce the frontlines where they could and prepare citizens to shelter. Tanks and anti-material teams were shifted to obvious places. The budget and resources were whisper-allocated to anything that might buy time.
That night, when I lay on my bed and watched the ceiling, the image of the tank tearing open stayed with me: not because it had won or lost, but because I had seen what happened when humans hit monsters with everything they had. It cut bodies. It broke things. It cost lives. That was a truth that had weight: our defense would be bought in loss.
I clenched my fists and felt the calluses there like small medals. Training was necessary. Training would be the difference between chaos and survival. Outside, the city murmured and shifted. Inside me, the ember smoldered into something like resolve.
They had declared war without asking. We were left to answer.