The forest outside Velvetia's walls was the kind of quiet that only existed after midnight — the deep, thick silence of a city that had finally stopped moving, where even the guard rotations had settled into their rhythms and the men on the wall were fighting sleep more than anything else.
Then a portal opened between the trees.
It didn't announce itself. There was no sound, no light — just a tear in the air, edges rippling like disturbed water, and then two figures stepping through it onto the forest floor. The shorter of the two was dressed in dark travelling clothes, his face obscured, his posture carrying the particular ease of someone who had never once in his life been in a hurry. Beside him, the second figure was dressed in Egyptian attire — radiating a glow of a god.
Horus stood twelve feet tall and radiated light the way a furnace radiates heat — not blinding, not aggressive, but constant, like a star that had decided to take a walk. His eyes were the flat, depthless gold of something that had existed long before the concept of mercy was invented. In Egyptian myth, he was the god of light and sky. In the post-Flux world, he was a legendary class myth — the kind of creature that didn't attack cities. The kind that ended them.
The mystery man looked up at the walls of Velvetia, his hands clasped behind his back. The city glowed faintly against the night sky, lanterns lit along the battlements, torches at the gate posts. A kingdom that was asleep and unaware.
He smiled.
"Well then," he said, quiet and almost fond. "Let's get this started."
He raised one hand. In the forest behind them, a dozen portals bloomed open — then two dozen, then more, overlapping and spreading between the trees like wounds in the air. And through them, flooding out onto the dark grass in a tide of snarling shapes and bared teeth, came the lower myths.
Hundreds of them. Moving fast, hungry for calamity.
They hit the base of Velvetia's walls like a wave.
✦ ✦ ✦
The alarm horn was the ugliest sound in the city.
It was designed to be. Three short blasts followed by one long, low wail — the kind of sound that reached through walls and sleep and dragged people upright whether they wanted to be or not. Levi had heard it in drills. He'd never heard it at two in the morning, with the windows rattling and the city outside suddenly, terribly awake.
Jane was already dressed.
He found her in the hallway buckling her second dagger sheath, moving with the focused efficiency of someone who had done this more times than they could count. She looked up when she saw him — just for a second, something passing across her face that wasn't quite worry and wasn't quite relief — and then she was moving again.
"You know the drill," she said. "Take the car. Nearest Gate Portal Centre. Wait for the all-clear signal." She paused at the door, hand on the frame. "If it goes code red — Olympia portal. Don't wait. Don't look for me. Just go."
"Mom—"
"Levi."
He stopped.
She crossed back and put a hand on the side of his face, briefly, and looked at him the way she sometimes looked at him when she thought he wasn't paying attention — like she was memorising something. Then she let go.
"I'll see you when it's done," she said, and walked out the door.
Levi stood in the hallway for exactly three seconds. Then he went to wake Jasmine.
✦ ✦ ✦
At the eastern wall, SS-class MK arrived to find that some soldiers are already engaged — crossbows trained on the shapes below, shouting coordinates at each other over the noise of impact as the myths hammered against the stone.
"Report," he said.
"S, A, and B class so far, sir." The lookout soldier didn't take his eyes off the wall. "Nothing above S."
Exhaled. No SS. No legendary class. This was manageable — loud, messy, but manageable. "Are Jane or Quinton on the way?"
"Both confirmed, sir. ETA a few minutes."
He looked out over the wall at the mass of myths below, calculating. Numbers were high but the class ceiling was low. His team could hold this.
"Don't jinx it, sir," the lookout said quietly.
The SS-class MK snorted. "I wasn't going to—"
The light came first.
A beam of pure white radiance, wide as a house and moving faster than sound, erupted from somewhere in the dark of the forest and crossed the distance to the wall in less than a heartbeat. Everyone there had exactly enough time to register that it existed before it hit.
The eastern wall didn't crumble. It didn't collapse. It ceased.
Stone, mortar, soldiers, battlements — vaporized in an instant, leaving a gap in the city's perimeter fifty metres wide, edges glowing red-white with residual heat. The ground shook. Buildings near the wall shuddered. In the sudden absence of the barrier, the remaining myths flooded through the gap like water through a broken dam.
From the forest, unmoving, Horus watched the light fade from his outstretched palm.
Beside him, the mystery man watched the breach with quiet satisfaction. With the wall gone, the ward that had prevented him from opening portals inside the city dissolved — a boundary protection built into Velvetia's defences for exactly this scenario, and now useless. He raised his hand again.
Portals opened across the city. Hundreds of them.
The screaming started almost immediately.
✦ ✦ ✦
They were three blocks from the nearest Gate Portal Centre when the portal opened directly in front of the car.
Jasmine saw it first. She had time to say "Levi—" before the Evogre came through — a dense, boulder-shouldered thing standing eight feet tall, grey-skinned and blank-eyed — and brought down it's gaint axe on the car's hood with the indifferent force of something that had never needed to be careful about anything.
The car split down the middle like wet paper.
Levi came back to himself against a wall, ears ringing, tasting copper. The car — or what was left of it — had been driven sideways into the front of a building, and the street around them was lit orange by the fires already spreading from the northern quarter. He blinked. Shook his head. Found his hands. Found his feet.
Jasmine was unconscious in the wreckage beside him, her arm bent at an angle that made his stomach turn. Alive — he could see her chest moving — but out cold.
He looked for his grandmother.
She was standing ten feet away, completely still. A Kitsune — low class, fox-faced, barely waist height — had appeared from somewhere in the chaos and was pressed against her leg, one paw touching her ankle. The stone had already reached her knees. It moved slowly, almost gently, travelling up her body with the patient certainty of something that couldn't be argued with.
"Grandma—"
She looked at him. Her eyes were still clear, still her. She raised one hand — not in panic, not reaching for him, just a small, steady gesture. Like she was telling him it was alright.
Then the stone reached her face, and she was gone.
Levi didn't move for a long moment. The city was burning around him and the myths were everywhere and Jasmine needed him and he stood completely still and let the fact of it travel through him like a current — cold and complete and impossible to outrun.
Then somewhere nearby something exploded, close enough to feel, and his body made the decision his brain hadn't yet.
He picked up Jasmine, and he ran.