"This again..."
Rael watched TV as the portal finished stabilizing.
Not snapping into place like before—sagging into reality instead, its red edges uneven, trembling. The air around it distorted faintly, as if the world itself was bracing it.
The shape inside the portal was already visible.
Not rushing, not dropping, not spilling out in a wave but Descending.
Slow, deliberate, heavy—like gravity belongs to it more than the world below . The portal stretched around the mass as it emerged, its edges darkening, veins of black crawling along the red door.
Someone behind Rael inhaled sharply.
The reporter's voice faltered.
"…visual confirmation from Sunview sector—wait—no, that's not—"
Then the alarms triggered.
Not gradually.
Not in layers.
All at once.
The city-wide siren tore through Sunview, vibrating the glass hard enough that Rael felt it in his teeth, distant booms signaled military mobilization as defensive grids came online.
This wasn't a drill.
This was full activation.
The common room erupted.
Chairs scraped violently. Someone knocked over a table. Children jolted awake mid-motion, panic overtaking before understanding could catch up. Caretakers came to their senses, shouting orders, voices sharp and practiced, drilled into them through months of preparedness training.
"Shelters! Everyone up—now! Move!"
Rael was already on his feet.
Ren's hand clamped onto his right sleeve without asking, his left hand extending towards Miko. Someone bumped into his shoulder. Another child stumbled and nearly fell before being dragged upright again.
No one questioned it.
Everyone knew what the alarms meant.
The TV didn't shut off.
The screen switched automatically to emergency broadcast mode, the image shrinking briefly before expanding again—now overlaid with warning text, evacuation codes, and a pulsing red banner at the bottom of the screen.
SUNVIEW SECTOR: IMMEDIATE SHELTER PROTOCOL
They spilled into the street.
Military vehicles tore through intersections without slowing, their mounted weapons tracking upward toward the industrial zone. Loudspeakers bark evacuation routes in clipped, emotionless loops.
"Proceed to the nearest public shelter. Do not return to residential zones."
Rael got pulled into motion by the flow of bodies.
Hands gripped sleeves. Children stumbled.
Caretakers shouted names over the sirens. No one asked questions—they already knew the answers.
The shelter entrance was open.
Reinforced concrete, military markings etched into the walls. Soldiers waved civilians through, weapons lowered but ready, eyes flicking skyward between commands.
"Move! Inside, now!"
The doors didn't closed immediately.
They waited until the last stragglers were inside.
Then the steel seals shut with a sound that felt final.
The underground chamber hummed as power rerouted. Emergency lights stabilized. Air filtration systems kick in with a low, constant drone.
Breathing became loud.
Too loud.
The shelter was packed.
Not panicked yet—but tense in that fragile way that comes right before it. Families clustered together. Orphanage kids sitting shoulder to shoulder on reinforced benches. Lian, Nyla, Maven, Kira , all caretakers kept moving, counting heads again and again.
Rael was sitting near the back.
His hands steady. His chest wasn't.
Then the TV screen activated as the wall-mounted display flickers to life, synchronized to the battlefield. The feeds showing battlefield live. Drone footage. Fixed military cameras. Long-range optics that struggled to stay steady.
Sunview's feed dominated the screen.
Gasps rippled through the shelter as the monster came on screen.
The creature wasn't tall enough to scrape the clouds.
It didn't need to be.
Its body looked like a dense mass of swollen, dark structures clustered together—layered, uneven, heavy. Thick limbs unfolding outward as it stabilized itself, each one long enough to span a street. The ground touched by those limbs fractured instantly.
Buildings nearby tilted—not from impact, but from pressure of its limbs alone.
The creature's surface looked wrong.
Layered. Bulbous. Threaded with faintly glowing lines that pulsed when it moved, dim and erratic, like veins carrying something unstable.
A low, subsonic vibration hummed through the shelter walls.
Someone whispered a prayer.
Artillery fire began almost immediately.
Shells streaked in from beyond the frame, slamming into the creature's mass in rapid succession. Explosions bloomed across its surface, fire and debris erupting outward.
For a heartbeat, hope sparked.
The blasts tore chunks loose. Pieces of the creature were thrown skyward, trailing dark fluid before crashing back down.
Then the smoke cleared.
The thing kept moving.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Just forward.
Another volley came.
Missiles detonated against its limbs, shredding them apart—
—and Rael's stomach twisted as he watched the damage crawl back together. The severed structure folded inward, knitting itself into new shapes that dragged against the ground.
The camera zoomed in.
The creature's surface rippled where the blasts struck. Dark fluid seeped outward, pooling briefly before being pulled back in, as if the wounds being swallowed rather than healed.
"It's not stopping," someone said, voice thin.
More guns fired.
The creature lifted one limb.
It brought it down.
The impact didn't explode.
It compressed.
A cluster of local houses collapsed inward, folding like wet paper. The shockwave rattled the shelter . Lights flickered overhead. Dust drifted down from the ceiling seams.
Rael's ears rang.
A child screamed.
The feeds split, to multiple screens—other cities now, other portals.
Everywhere, the same scene.
Similar behemoth at every portal.
No swarm.
No flood.
Just a single, massive presence pressing into the world at every breach point.
"This isn't a wave," an analyst said on one of the side feeds, voice strained . "This is—this is something else."
The feed cut back as fighter jets screamed into frame over Sunview, releasing payloads in tight formation. The explosions were precise, controlled.
They don't work.
The creature's advance slowed, but only slightly.
It adjustsed, limbs shifting, mass redistributing as if learning in real time.
The shelter went quiet.
Not silent—people were still breathing, still whispering, still crying—but the noise faded into the background as a heavier truth settled in.
This might actually be their end.
Rael felt a tug at his sleeve diverting his attention to Miko, who looked pale.
"Brother, will we have to leave the orphanage, like the others we saw on the TV?." asked miko, her voice desperately looking for hope.
For a moment, Rael mind halted, although the situation wasn't the same but he remembered the same voice that screemed who knows how many times. It was his own voice when he screemed at himself to tell his family that he didn't want to go engineering, it was the voice that screemed that he should quit while he had time to do something else, a voice that searched for a desperate hope, that someone would make a choice for him as he himself couldn't.
Another explosion echoed bringing him back to the present, he looked down at Miko , her eyes, and for the first time in a long while his eyes now showed firmness, the same frimness that he had when he wasn't worn out by life, when he with all his heart wanted to do something for his family.
"Don't worry, i am here" Rael said hugging her against his chest, cradling her head at back as he turned to the feed again.
The angle was wrong—too close, too low. A handheld camera, shaking violently. A cameraman breathing hard, voice barely audible over the roar.
"…I'm still here—don't cut the feed—"
The creature filled the frame now.
Up close, its surface wasn't smooth, dim at first, then brighter with each hit.
Artillery fire paused.
For several seconds, nothing came again.
The creature advanced another step.
Then something else entered the frame.
A projectile arced in—smaller than a missile, slower than artillery, pulsing red. It didn't explode on impact.
It embedded itself in the creature.
For a fraction of a second, nothing happened.
Then the air warped.
Not heat distortion.
Something heavier.
The embedded object collapsed inward, light bending toward it as if space itself was being pulled tight,the creature convulsed.
A section of its mass caved in violently—not blasted apart but crushed, collapsing inward as if its internal structure had failed.
A shockwave rippled outward.
The screen jerked backward, voice came laughing , breathless and hysterical.
"It worked—it actually worked—"
The camera turned
The creature was damaged now—visibly. One limb dragging itself half-formed along the ground. The pulsing lines across its body flicker erratically, brightness surging and fading without rhythm, even though it didn't die, there was no usual signs of it's recovery.
Then came another projectile , then another.
With each detonation, unrecoverable wounds increased on the creature, with every impact, the creature's movements grew more erratic. Its advance stalled.
Until finally it collapsed, imploding on itself
, slamming into ground, dense chaos energy leaking from its body covering the area , covering the camera and the screen.
Cheers erupted in the shelter—raw, disbelieving, desperate. People laughed and cried at the same time. Some collapsed to their knees. Some clung to each other, relief flooding through them.
The screen was now battlefield enveloped in red, the soldiers screaming, not of desperation but release.
Neutralization of the behemoth was confirmed.
For the first time since the alarms began, no one was screaming orders.
The shelter felt… lighter.
Rael didn't cheer.
He didn't cry either.
He just breathed.
Slowly.
Miko was still clinging to him, her face buried against his chest, small fingers twisted into his shirt like she was afraid the moment would slip away if she let go. He rested his chin lightly against her hair, eyes still on the screen.
Around them, the noise softened.
Voices dropped.
Relief settled in uneven waves, fragile but real.
Then—
Light bloomed.
Not harsh.
Not blinding.
A soft, colorless glow appeared in the air before them, wherever eyes were lifted,
across shelters and battlefields alike.
And the world went still once more.