December 2nd, 2032 — 1:00 P.M.
"So," Jasmine said at last, her voice cutting gently through the quiet hum of the television, "what exactly is your duty supposed to be?"
She sat beside Alma on the couch, angled slightly toward him, her attention fully on his face rather than the flickering screen ahead of them. On his other side sat Max, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, watching his father with the same quiet curiosity.
Alma hesitated, rolling the question around in his mind as though it might change shape if he examined it long enough. "I don't really know, myself," he admitted. "The only thing I was told on the way to the Monarch Approval Building was that I'd essentially be… the guardian of guardians."
That phrase alone was enough to make Jasmine lift an eyebrow.
"Huh?" she said. "What does that even mean?"
Alma let out a small breath and raised his shoulders in a restrained shrug. "Your guess is as good as mine. If I had to speculate, I'd say it means keeping an eye on the other Monarchs—making sure none of them abuse their authority—and acting as a kind of final resource. Someone the government can point to when Beasts of Ruin need to be dealt with and no one else is enough."
Jasmine nodded slowly, absorbing that, her expression tightening just a fraction as the implications settled in.
"I've got a feeling they're going to work you to the bone," Max said.
Alma smiled faintly, though there was little humor in it. "Yeah. That was my first conclusion too." He reached forward and wrapped his fingers around his coffee mug, letting the warmth seep into his palms. "They're probably giving me time to adjust—time to come to terms with what the role actually means. Or," he added after a pause, "they're drowning in Beast of Ruin sightings and trying to decide which one's bad enough to justify sending me."
"Yeah," Jasmine murmured, already half-distracted as she flicked through television channels with the remote. "Possibly."
The room settled again into a comfortable quiet—until Max spoke up.
"Hey, Dad," he said, glancing sideways, "did you ever turn off the encrypted setting on your phone?"
Alma turned to him slowly, his movements stiffening as though his body had momentarily forgotten how to react. The color drained from his face.
"Excuse me?" he asked, his voice tight.
Max broke into a grin. "Relax. Here—let me see it."
After a moment's hesitation, Alma handed over the phone. Max's fingers moved with easy familiarity as he toggled settings on and off, then passed it back.
"I can't believe I missed that," Alma said, genuinely impressed.
"Yeah," Max replied, pride unmistakable in his voice. "Even if you give someone access through a link, they still won't be able to control your phone. Not the service provider. Not anyone. As long as this stays enabled, everything you do is invisible."
"And that includes the government, I assume," Alma said lightly.
As if on cue, his phone vibrated.
He glanced down at the screen. An unknown number. The message was brief, direct, and unmistakable.
Return to the White House.
"Woah," Max said, having already leaned over to read it. "I still can't believe you actually get messages like that. That's insane."
He hesitated, then added more quietly, "You know… it's my dream to develop technology for the government. That'd be it for me. The peak of everything I've worked toward."
Alma smiled as he rose to his feet, resting a hand on Max's head and ruffling his hair. "I know you'll get there one day," he said gently. "Just don't let your ambitions blind you to what's already right in front of you."
Max nodded.
Alma slipped on his leather jacket and reached for the keys resting in a shallow bowl by the door. "I'll be back soon," he said. "Hopefully by lunchtime, if the Lord is willing."
"If you're not back by three," Jasmine said as she stood, "I'll fix something for me and Max."
Alma leaned in, pressing a kiss to each of their foreheads. "Love you."
"Love you too!" they replied together.
And with that, Alma stepped out of the apartment.
---
He stood atop the apartment complex, the city sprawling beneath him in a patchwork of rooftops and streets, his thoughts drifting back to Ardath's words—that flight was a passive ability, something that simply came with being a Dragon Monarch.
Closing his eyes, Alma focused, imagining the weight and span of wings unfurling behind him, scales catching the light as he willed himself upward.
Nothing happened.
"Fly," he said aloud.
The air remained stubbornly indifferent.
He tried again, louder this time, even flapping his arms in an instinctive, almost childish motion—only to stop abruptly when he realized how foolish he must look. Letting out a quiet hum, he tried to reason it out. It wasn't supposed to be difficult. If anything, it should have already been there.
Then he remembered the Liminal Bonds.
He searched inward, probing not his body but his presence, his being, trying to sense that strange energy he'd been told now belonged to him. Minutes passed. Still nothing.
His phone vibrated, another message from the White House. "Come now."
Alma stepped toward the ledge and looked down, grateful—almost absurdly—that he wasn't afraid of heights. He backed away at first, doubt creeping in. If this worked, it wouldn't be because he forced it.
He returned to the edge.
Without another thought, he stepped forward.
He didn't fall. He didn't rise.
He simply remained there, suspended in open air, level with the rooftop. Then, realization kicked in.
Alma looked down, his legs kicking uselessly at empty air in a reflexive, almost childish attempt to stop himself from falling. The irony wasn't lost on him. He had survived a plunge from space to Earth without so much as a fracture—this height posed no danger to him at all. Still, the thought of slamming into the ground like this made his stomach twist. Not from fear, but from embarrassment.
He thrust his arms forward, mimicking the posture of an old, iconic superhero, willing himself to surge ahead. Nothing happened. He tried again, then gave up and flapped his arms like a bird, immediately regretting it as the air answered him with nothing but silence. He clenched his jaw, focused his mind, commanded himself to move forward.
Still nothing.
With a quiet, frustrated breath, Alma stopped trying.
He let his arms fall to his sides and allowed the tension to drain from his body. He emptied his thoughts one by one, loosening his grip on control, on intention, on effort itself. Ardath's words surfaced in his mind—not as instructions, but as a presence. Passive. Natural.
And then he moved.
At first it was barely noticeable, a gentle pull rather than motion. Then, without warning, the world snapped sideways. The air screamed past him as the ground blurred into streaks of color. In the span of a heartbeat, he was no longer hovering—he was flying, rocketing forward, tearing past the White House and vanishing beyond Washington in a breath.
Olney came and went in an instant. Panic flared.
Alma tried to stop, reaching instinctively for control again. Nothing happened. He tried to empty his mind once more, but now the fear clung stubbornly, every second stretching as the landscape beneath him transformed into rolling hills and fractured plateaus. Seconds flew by and still he didn't slow.
"I'm not going to stop," the thought struck him with chilling clarity.
Then—suddenly—he did.
Momentum bled away all at once, leaving him suspended above the earth just beyond Elmira, New York, having torn through Pennsylvania like a living missile. He floated there, motionless, chest rising and falling as his heart thundered against his ribs. Below him, the land lay calm and indifferent, unaware of how close he had come to losing himself entirely.
Only then did he understand.
Flight wasn't about relaxation. It wasn't about instinct, or effort, or even emptiness of thought.
It was trust.
Not in himself—but in Ardath.
That trust was what had allowed him to float in the first place. That same trust, once shaken, was what had nearly sent him hurtling endlessly forward. Slowly, carefully, Alma let that understanding settle. He turned himself around in the air, testing the sensation with quiet reverence.
Then, with renewed certainty, he leaned forward—and shattered the sound barrier.
A grin spread across his face.
Laughing aloud, Alma moved, gliding above the streets and weaving between buildings, dipping into alleyways and skimming past walls with deliberate recklessness of the towns he passed, the thrill of it all sending a rush through his chest.
Then he angled upward.
The city fell away beneath him as he climbed, the sound barrier shattering in a thunderous crack. Wind tore past him, the cold biting sharply against his skin, yet none of it mattered. In two seconds, he passed from the clouds into the thermosphere, the sky darkening, the world below shrinking into abstraction.
Up here, he felt oddly calm.
After a moment, memory caught up with him. The messages. The urgency.
He descended just as quickly, streaking back toward Washington, slowing only as the White House came into view. He landed near the gates, surrendering his sheathed, rust-stained machete to the Secret Service before being searched and allowed inside.
Minutes later, he sat across from the President in a chair that felt conspicuously small.
The President finished writing, set his pen down, and slid an earpiece and a watch across the desk. "The earpiece connects you directly to a Beast of Ruin Extractor operative," he said. "The watch will display mission data—locations, targets, and threat levels."
Alma accepted them, fitting the earpiece into his left ear and fastening the watch to his left wrist.
"When do I begin?" he asked.
"Whenever there's a call," the President replied. "So far, no EF 5 sightings."
"EF 5?" Alma asked, confused by the strictly tornado damage scale.
"A classification system," the President replied. "It's similar to tornadoes, because that's what these things basically are in terms of destruction. From Ef 0 to EF 5."
Alma nodded slowly. "And if a Monarch weaker than you is sent after one of those..." He started.
"They die." The President finished.
Both men sat quiet.
The President smiled thinly. "But, hey! With you here, even Ef 5 threats will be no problem!" He started, then his tone got suddenly serious. "Just remember—no matter how powerful you are, they can still kill you."
"I understand," Alma said with a nod.
They shook hands, nodding at each other. Moments later, Alma was at the gate once more, reclaiming his machete, then left the White House. He rose into the air above the city, nearly falling three times, then practiced flying around, almost falling again five more times, waiting for a call that would begin his first government mission.
A faint, persistent noise hissed in Alma's earpiece, threading through the quiet like an irritation he couldn't quite ignore. He lifted a hand and tapped the control. There was a beat of silence—only static—before a woman's voice cut through, calm and professional.
"Mr. Alastor?"
The voice replayed in his head, reminding him starkly of the Founder. He shook his head, burying that memory.
"Hello," Alma began, then paused. He cleared his throat, subtly deepening his voice as he straightened his posture and puffed out his chest just a little. "Greetings, madame."
"There's been an EF 4 Beast of Ruin sighting on Solomons Island Road, Annapolis. It's currently moving onto MD Route four-fifty."
"Roger," Alma replied. He pulled up the map on his phone, locked into finding the location. Once found, he tapped the directions button, then followed his marker, launching himself into the air, angling his flight toward the coast.
He arrived within the minute, moving at a speed he considered comfortable—fast enough to matter, slow enough to remain in control.
And then he saw it.
The Beast of Ruin towered above the landscape, grotesque and unmistakable. It was colossal—exactly five hundred feet tall—its entire body unnaturally thin, stretched taut over a dark gray frame like skin pulled too tightly over bone. Its arms were impossibly long, dragging against the ground even as it stood upright, fingers gouging into asphalt and soil alike. Where its face should have been, there was nothing—only the exposed interior of its skull, hollow and obscene. Its ribcage pressed visibly against its skin, though at its center yawned a massive cavity, a jagged hole spanning at least one hundred and fifty feet across.
Every eight seconds, without fail, the creature released a low, agonized groan—an echoing sound that rolled across Annapolis and beyond, reverberating through buildings, water, and bone.
Alma felt his stomach tighten.
Horror flickered openly across his face as he activated Black Eyes, his pupils widening as his vision shifted beyond the physical. Souls came into focus—too many of them. He counted instinctively.
One hundred thousand.
Each one suspended within the creature, spaced unnaturally, trapped in a state that defied both life and rest.
"This isn't an EF 4..." Alma muttered under his breath.
The realization hit him like a weight. This was an EF 5—the worst of them.
For the first time since arriving, he whispered a brief thanks to God that it had been him who was sent, and not someone else. He descended until he hovered level with the beast's knee, steadying himself in the air as he raised both hands and aimed them toward the massive form.
"The False Storm: Gale," he said.
The air responded.
Fabricated wind surged upward from beneath the creature, roaring like an artificial tempest. Slowly—agonizingly—the Beast of Ruin was lifted from the ground, its long limbs flailing uselessly as gravity lost its hold.
Alma shot skyward, spiraling around the creature five times in rapid succession before pulling back and stopping high above it. He extended one hand, fingers rigid.
"Spear."
The attack tore forward in a flash, piercing clean through the Beast of Ruin. The creature collapsed in on itself, its groan cut short as its form disintegrated, releasing the trapped souls in a silent, unseen exodus.
Alma exhaled and tapped his earpiece.
"Job completed," he said, dropping the affected tone he'd been using.
"Good work. Job reported as completed successfully," the woman replied.
"I have two things to say," Alma continued. "First—what I just killed was not an EF 4. That thing was over four hundred feet tall and had accumulated one hundred thousand souls."
There was a brief pause before he added, "Second—how are you even receiving sightings? I thought no technology could perceive these things."
"Before the Cyclops Monarch died, he developed the blueprints for the S.O.D.—the Supernatural Optic Detector," the woman explained. Paper rustled faintly near her microphone. "It does exactly what the name suggests."
"Then how did this get labeled 5?" Alma asked. "The S.O.D. didn't show the scale?"
"That's the limitation," she said. "The S.O.D. can show us vivid outlines of Beasts of Ruin, but it can't display their height or the number of souls inside them. Think of it like a three-dimensional radar."
"What?" Alma frowned. "Why doesn't it work properly? Didn't the Cyclops build it?"
"That's the issue, sir. He died before completing it. What we have is a half-finished device created by a genius mind. It's taken weeks just to replicate a standard model."
"Understood," Alma said quietly. "My apologies." He genuinely felt for the people struggling to finish another man's impossible work.
"Another report has come in," the woman continued. "An EF 4 sighting in the Susquehanna River, right at the Maryland–Pennsylvania border."
"On it," Alma replied instantly, pulling up the new location and taking off.
Halfway there, her voice returned. "Another sighting—Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania."
"Understood. I'll handle this one quickly, then head there," Alma said as he arrived at the river.
He never deactivated Evil Eyes. Beneath the water's surface, the Beast of Ruin was already visible—a sharp, angular body shaped like a malformed fish, with a face disturbingly similar to a blobfish's slack features. It had hooved legs like a horse and no visible gills.
Alma hovered above the river and extended his hand. Spear shot downward, piercing the creature and ending it instantly.
He keyed in Jim Thorpe's location and flew on.
When he arrived, he hovered above the city—and saw nothing.
His gaze swept across the mountains, then the forests. Nothing. He descended, landing at the beginning of Broadway, and began searching on foot, checking alleys, narrow spaces between buildings, doorways—every place something might hide. Ten minutes passed.
Nothing.
"Ma'am," Alma said, tapping his earpiece, "there's nothing here. I've scanned the area and searched the streets."
"Really?" she replied, genuinely surprised. "That's strange. The presence is registering directly on top of you."
Alma glanced around and noticed a manhole cover. He pried it open with his machete and dropped into the sewer, searching for several minutes before resurfacing.
"Negative again," he said. "Nothing down there."
"That's… odd. For now, there are no new sightings. I'll keep you posted."
Alma cut the connection and stood there for a moment, listening to the quiet.
He began walking, taking in the town's compact structures and quiet charm. The people were beautiful—not in appearance, but in their souls. He could feel it. They smiled at one another, waved across the street, carried a gentleness that made something in him loosen. There were exceptions, of course—but the majority made him smile.
Broadway stretched ahead, its vintage buildings holding a stillness he couldn't quite name. He walked to a café at the corner, then entered.
Warm air greeted him, heavy with the rich scent of coffee. The interior caught him off guard—it didn't feel like a shop so much as someone's home. Cozy. Lived-in.
His eyes lingered on a wall filled with pictures of pop stars, rappers, and bands. He moved to the counter and studied the menu until one item caught his attention.
"Phoenix Latte."
He ordered it, paid, and took the cup once it was ready. Settling into a large black chair, he sank down with a quiet sigh. His eyes drifted shut.
Then, abruptly, they snapped open.
Alma took his time with the latte, savoring the warmth and the faint sweetness as it settled in his chest. When the cup was finally empty, he rose from the chair and disposed of it in the nearby trash. He held brief conversations with the people in the café. They all had different stories, different wisdom, and were all around bright peopple. And for an even briefer moment, he simply stood there, taking in the scene around him. This part of town felt gentle—cozy in a way that dulled the edges of the world. It made him forget, if only temporarily, the weight of its endless struggles and quiet cruelties.
It was beautiful.
A voice crackled to life in his earpiece, cutting cleanly through the calm.
"Mr. Alastor, we've got another sighting. Sending you the coordinates now."
Alma frowned, the interruption pulling him back to the present. Then he remembered the watch the President had given him. He tapped his earpiece and nodded to himself.
"Roger," he said, glancing down at his wrist. The device came alive, displaying the last two locations he'd nearly forgotten about.
A holographic map bloomed above the watch's face, expanding outward before shifting slightly to the left. It zoomed in, locking onto a single red dot.
Mahanoy City.
Alma lifted off the ground and shot toward it without hesitation.
He arrived at the city's center, hovering high above the streets. His eyes swept across rooftops and roads, searching for any sign of distortion or movement—but there was nothing. The town lay quiet beneath him. He raised a hand toward his earpiece, ready to report another false alarm.
Then the air shattered.
A deafening scream tore through the sky, rattling the ground and shaking the buildings below. Alma snapped his head upward just in time to see it.
The Beast of Ruin hurtled toward him.
It was an obscene fusion of forms—a vulture's frame warped with the bloated body of a featherless turkey and the long neck of a goose. Its wings beat violently as it descended. Alma surged higher, forcing distance between them. He waited—counting the seconds, watching the creature commit to its path.
At the last possible moment, he veered aside.
The Beast plunged toward the town, its momentum unstoppable. Before it could impact the ground, Alma thrust out his hand.
"Spear."
The attack tore through the creature in a single, decisive strike. The Beast of Ruin collapsed midair, its body unraveling as it fell, the threat ended before it could touch the earth.
He traveled to every location the woman speaking through the earpiece directed him to, repeating the same grim cycle again and again—arrive, assess, eliminate, depart. By the time it ended, he had done so approximately three hundred and eighty-two times. Each destination brought another Beast of Ruin, and each encounter ended the same way. An hour slipped past almost unnoticed, and when the last body fell, the count had climbed well beyond a thousand.
Only then did Alma pause.
He checked his watch, the time reading 2:33 PM.
Twenty-seven minutes remained before Jasmine and Max would begin preparing food for themselves.
"Well done, sir," the woman's voice said through the earpiece, steady and professional despite the scale of the report. "That accounts for a vast majority of them. The states surrounding Maryland—Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and the entrances to both West Virginia and Virginia—have been fully cleared of any Beast of Ruin activity."
Alma hovered just beneath the cloud line above Princeton, New Jersey, the wind tugging faintly at his coat. A small smile formed on his face. This—this was a job well done. And more than that, it filled him with a quiet, profound happiness to know that millions of people across those states would wake up tomorrow without the fear of these walking disasters looming over them.
"All right," Alma said at last, his voice calm. "Does that conclude my job for today?"
"Yes, sir," she replied. "Given that your assignment was only to secure the immediate area surrounding Washington, I'd say you went well beyond expectations." There was a brief pause before she continued, her tone shifting just slightly. "Tomorrow, we'll begin purging the remaining states. At this rate, we may even move far ahead of the original schedule—now that we have you."
Alma smiled a little wider. "Thank you, ma'am," he said. "I aim to please."
"Hold on," she interrupted suddenly. "We've just detected another Beast of Ruin. Sending you the coordinates now."
Alma glanced down at his watch as the map interface lit up, the pin locking into place almost instantly. The moment he recognized the location, the breath caught in his throat.
Jim Thorpe.
Before another second could pass, Alma launched himself forward, tearing through the air toward the city.
His eyes widened as he drew near.
Jim Thorpe was gone.
What had once been a living city now lay reduced to ash and ruin. The hills and surrounding forests—once lush, green, and full of life—burned with a sickly yellow flame, releasing thick, choking columns of black smoke that clawed their way into the sky. Alma descended slowly, landing in the center of what had once been Broadway Street.
The buildings were destroyed. Nearly two centuries of history erased. Innocent lives—families, children, memories—gone in an instant.
All of it, swept away.
And for what?
There was nothing—nothing—that justified this level of destruction. Nothing worth even a single life, let alone the thousands that had been extinguished here.
At the center of Broadway, framed by spreading fires and collapsing structures, stood the culprit. The disaster. The pest.
A Beast of Ruin.
It stood twelve feet tall. Its arms, from palm to shoulder, were split with zipper rails, the metal teeth ending near its shoulders. Stitches ran down its legs, looping up and around its abdomen like crude attempts to hold something together that was never meant to exist. Its face was contorted beyond recognition, smeared and stretched as though it were a stain dragged across glass.
The image of the ruined city burned itself into Alma's mind, overwriting the memory of what Jim Thorpe had once been. His fists clenched, then slowly relaxed. With his head lowered, he began to walk toward the Beast of Ruin.
The creature noticed him.
It turned its grotesque head, then its body, and began to approach—matching Alma's pace step for step.
Black mist seeped from Alma's body, rising around him like smoke from a dying fire. It clung low at first, then thickened, curling upward as he drew closer. His hands moved with deliberate precision—his left rising to rest against his chest, palm facing downward, his right settling just below his abdomen, palm facing up.
Between them, a flowering dogwood bloomed into existence.
Its petals were pristine white, glowing softly as if lit from within.
Alma's hands moved again, slowly closing in around the flower—but just before his fingers could touch it, the bloom vanished, leaving him grasping empty air. The mist around him shifted instantly, its deep black melting into radiant white, soft pink, and warm yellow.
The world responded.
The burning buildings around him repaired themselves in an instant, standing whole as though they had never been touched by fire, then expanding outward beyond their original form. The road beneath his feet rebuilt itself and spread wide. Grass erupted from the ground, growing taller and taller until it nearly swallowed the Beast of Ruin whole.
Then decay began.
The fires vanished at their peak, snuffed out without warning. The restored buildings cracked and crumbled. The road shrank and fractured into useless shards. The grass withered, dying back into bare dirt.
Alma moved.
He seized the Beast of Ruin by the wrist and slammed it face-first into the ground. Gripping its neck, he lifted it effortlessly to eye level.
"The False Touch," he said.
The creature's body began to swell rapidly—growing from twelve feet to hundreds in mere seconds, surpassing seven hundred feet, pushing against the upper limits of an EF5 manifestation. Before it could grow any further, the process reversed violently. Its massive form collapsed inward, shrinking, rotting, twisting into something even more grotesque.
Alma never loosened his grip.
He twisted the creature's skin with crushing force and spoke again, his voice steady, confident, and final.
"Withering Grace." And with those words, the Beast of Ruin dissolved into nothingness.
"Perish." He said, tone devoid of all emotion, nothing was there except for the sheer cold in his voice.
The mist faded away, leaving Alma standing alone amid the remains of Jim Thorpe. He tapped his earpiece, his voice quiet and drained.
"Mission completed, ma'am."
"Excellent work," the woman replied. "That will be all for today. You may return home and do as you please. Just make sure you get some rest—we're starting early tomorrow."
Alma rose into the sky, looking down at what was left of the city. The people, the structures, the history, the legacy—everything had been swept away, discarded as though it never mattered.
Yet to Alma, only the people mattered. He would destroy every structure in the world without hesitation if it meant saving even one life.
He checked his watch, the time now reading 2:47 PM.
Entering the coordinates for his apartment, he broke the sound barrier and arrived moments later. He landed on the fire escape, descended a few steps, and stopped at his window. Opening it, he stepped inside.
Jasmine sat on the couch, watching television. Max was at his desk, absorbed in the design of his weapon.
"I'm home!" Alma called, forcing brightness into his voice.
They both rushed to greet him. Afterward, Alma moved into the kitchen and began preparing a meal, though his mind wandered far from the task. Jim Thorpe replayed again and again behind his eyes.
There was no joy in them—only destruction, endlessly repeated. But beneath it all was a promise. He would end the Beasts of Ruin. He would protect humanity. No matter the cost.