They met the GEA on the old logging road at 11:47 p.m., exactly where the monastery's property line ended and the national forest began.
Seventy-two souls in four columns, walking in perfect silence except for the soft click of rosary beads and the crunch of boots on fresh snow.
Every forehead glowed.
Every neck wore a brown scapular.
Every right hand held either a rosary or a crucifix.
They looked like a candlelight procession that had lost its way from 1950 and wandered straight into Armageddon.
The GEA had come prepared.
Forty-three vehicles: armored Humvees, two drone-launch trucks, one mobile Mark-injection unit the size of a semi, and a single matte-black command SUV flying the new world flag (gold circle on deep blue).
They stopped a hundred yards away, floodlights snapping on like a second sunrise.
A voice boomed through loudspeakers:
"UNAUTHORIZED RELIGIOUS ASSEMBLY.
DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY OR FACE LETHAL FORCE.
YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS."
Dom Pius raised one hand.
The Rosary Army halted as one.
Sofia stepped out in front, barefoot again, olive-wood rosary wrapped twice around her right hand like a weapon.
She did not shout. She simply began:
"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…"
Seventy-two voices answered "Amen" so loudly the snow shook from the pine branches.
Then they started the Joyful Mysteries together, loud, unhurried, unafraid.
The commander in the SUV—Colonel Victor Lang, the same man who had given the order to shoot Sarah Kline—slammed his fist on the dashboard.
"Launch the swarm. Now."
Twenty-four combat drones rose from the trucks like hornets, red targeting lasers painting every glowing forehead.
Sofia reached the first Hail Mary.
The drones locked on.
Father Elijah's voice joined hers, then Diego's, then the children's high and clear.
By the third Hail Mary, the sky above the Rosary Army filled with soft white feathers—guardian angels, visible for the first time since the vanishings, wings spanning ten feet, swords of pure light.
The drones opened fire.
Not one bullet left a barrel.
Every trigger froze. Every targeting laser flickered and died.
The drones themselves hung motionless in mid-air, caught in an invisible net.
Sofia announced the first mystery:
"The Annunciation—when Mary said yes to God."
A pulse of golden light rolled outward from the front row.
The twenty-four drones dropped out of the sky like stones, smashing into the snow in perfect silence, rotors dead.
Colonel Lang screamed into his radio: "Manual override! Shoot them manually!"
The Mark-injection unit rolled forward, hydraulic doors opening. Inside: six technicians in hazmat suits, holding what looked like cattle prods tipped with glowing needles.
Sorrowful Mysteries began.
The technicians stepped out—and froze.
Their Marks began to boil.
One by one they tore off their gloves, staring in horror as the black tattoos peeled away from their skin like burning leeches.
The first technician—a woman barely older than Sofia—fell to her knees in the snow and began the Our Father in a voice that hadn't prayed since childhood.
The other five followed.
Glorious Mysteries.
Now the floodlights on every vehicle exploded in showers of sparks.
The command SUV's engine died.
Colonel Lang kicked his door open and walked forward alone, sidearm raised, face twisted with rage and something that looked very much like fear.
He stopped ten feet from Sofia.
"Witch," he spat. "You're using forbidden tech. Surrender or I execute you on global feed."
Sofia met his eyes.
She was crying, but her voice never wavered.
"We are not the ones who marked souls, Colonel.
You are."
She lifted the olive-wood rosary.
Luminous Mysteries.
The fifth Luminous Mystery: the Institution of the Eucharist.
The Host appeared again—this time twenty feet in the air above the entire Rosary Army, larger than a harvest moon, spinning slowly, edges on fire with gold.
Every sealed soul in the columns felt strength pour into their knees.
Every former enforcer who had joined them in the last three days felt the last chains of the Mark snap.
Colonel Lang raised his pistol.
He never got the shot off.
The Host lowered until it hovered directly between his eyes and Sofia's heart.
Lang's hand opened. The pistol fell into the snow.
He dropped to his knees, mouth working soundlessly.
Behind him, every remaining GEA soldier—forty-three vehicles' worth—stepped out unarmed, hands raised, some weeping, some laughing, some simply staring at the Host like men who had forgotten the sun existed.
The mobile Mark unit's doors slammed shut by themselves and locked from the inside.
The technicians inside began singing the Salve Regina through the armor plating.
Sofia finished the final Hail Holy Queen.
The Host rose slowly, blessed the four directions, then dissolved into pure light that rained down like warm snow.
When the last flake touched the ground, the entire GEA convoy was on its knees in the middle of the road.
Colonel Lang looked up at Sofia with eyes suddenly ancient.
"I executed a woman three nights ago for refusing the Mark," he whispered. "She forgave me before she died."
Sofia knelt in front of him, placed her hand on his head, and made the Sign of the Cross on his forehead with her thumb.
Where she touched, a faint luminous seal appeared—smaller than the others, scarred, but undeniably there.
"Then live for her now," Sofia said.
She stood and faced the Army.
"Brothers and sisters," she called, "we have prisoners of war who just surrendered to Heaven itself.
What does the Immaculate Heart command?"
Seventy-two voices answered as one:
"MERCY."
They spent the rest of the night baptizing, clothing, and enrolling in the brown scapular every soldier who asked.
By dawn, the Rosary Army had grown from seventy-two to two hundred and nineteen.
The disabled convoy was pushed into the ditch and blessed.
And on the monastery flagpole, for the first time, a new banner flew beneath the American and Vatican flags:
A blue field, golden M crowned with twelve stars, and beneath it the words Captain Sarah Kline had died praying:
O MY JESUS, FORGIVE US OUR SINS
Far away, in a darkened room in Rome, Prince Alessandro watched the satellite feed of two hundred soldiers kneeling in the snow and shattered an entire mirror with his fist.
The cut on his hand did not bleed.
Instead, something black and many-legged crawled out of the wound and hissed at the screen.
To be continued…