The morning light cut through the curtains like a blade, slicing across my face before I even had a chance to open my eyes. I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting the silence settle around me before the world had a chance to pull me back in. My body told me everything I needed to know about yesterday. Every muscle ached with a deep, bone-level soreness that no amount of sleep could fully wash away. I sat up slowly, joints popping one after the other, each one a quiet reminder that this body had been pushed past its limits and dragged back just in time. I rolled my neck, listening to the soft crack of tension releasing, and finally swung my legs off the edge of the bed. Whatever today had in store, I was not going to face it lying down.
The guild was already alive with noise by the time I made it downstairs. Footsteps echoed through the halls, low conversations bounced off stone walls, and somewhere in the back the distant clatter of equipment being sorted rang out in a steady rhythm. Normal sounds. Familiar sounds. The kind that told you everything was still running the way it should. But the moment I approached the front entrance, something felt off. I slowed my pace and peered through the frosted glass of the main doors and sure enough, a wall of people had gathered just beyond the threshold. Camera crews. Reporters. Microphones pointed like weapons at anyone who dared step outside. I exhaled through my nose and turned to the nearest guild member passing by, a younger guy still lacing up his gear.
"What's all that about?" I asked, nodding toward the entrance.
He glanced over his shoulder and grimaced. "Yesterday's incident, sir. Word spread fast. They've been out there since early morning."
I figured as much. The public had eyes everywhere now, and a fight the size of what happened yesterday was not the kind of thing that stayed quiet for long. I stood at the glass for a moment longer, watching the reporters jostle for position, microphones raised, cameras rolling. They were hungry for something. A statement, a face, anything they could turn into a headline. I was not in the mood, but I understood the necessity. The guild's reputation was built on more than just results. It was built on trust, and trust required visibility.
I pushed through the front doors and was immediately swallowed by the noise. Voices overlapped, questions fired from every direction before I had even fully stepped outside. I kept my expression steady and raised one hand to quiet them down. It took a moment, but the crowd settled just enough.
Keeping my composure, I leaned into the nearest mic. "Yesterday was just another day to prove the strength of this guild, its reliability, and the trust we are slowly building with the people we protect. We will always show up. That is not going to change." A beat of silence followed, and then the questions erupted again all at once. The moment the reporters turned on each other with competing follow-ups, I slipped back through the doors without another word.
Back in my office, a few senior members joined me around the table. The room was quiet compared to the chaos outside, and for a moment nobody spoke. Then we got to work. We talked through the guild's next steps and the conversation kept circling back to the same problem. We were reactive. We showed up after things had already gone wrong. That needed to change. We settled on one clear priority: a patrol system. Regular routes, visible presence, faster response times. If we were out in the streets consistently, we would reach disasters before they had a chance to spiral out of control. It was not a perfect solution, but it was a start, and right now a start was exactly what we needed.
We called a full meeting with the rest of the members, laid out the plan, and divided everyone into patrol groups based on skill sets and coverage zones. There was some pushback, a few questions, a little grumbling from the ones who preferred waiting on assignments rather than walking beats. But by the end of it, everyone was on board. By the time it wrapped up, my head was full. Too many names, too many routes, too many variables. I needed air. I stepped outside and let my feet carry me wherever they wanted.
Walking down the street, I paid no attention to anything except what was right in front of me. Trees shifting in the wind. Sun rays glistening over the surface of the water nearby, breaking into a hundred tiny flashes of light. The city moved around me the way it always did, indifferent and constant. I found a bench nearby and sat down, leaning back and taking a slow breath through my nose. It was a rare moment of quiet. The kind that felt almost too good to be real. It did not last. My phone buzzed in my pocket and before I even read the message, I already knew what it was going to say. Return to the guild immediately. A new portal had opened.
I was on my feet before I finished reading.
The guild looked calm from the outside, but the moment I stepped through the doors, my team rushed me straight to the meeting room. On the screen was the largest portal I had ever seen. It pulsed with a deep, unnatural light, its edges jagged and unstable, like something on the other side was pressing hard against the boundary trying to force its way through. I studied it for a long moment, eyes moving across the feed, reading the size, the position, the surrounding area. Then I turned to the group. Whatever was on the other side of that thing, we had not faced it before. I could feel it. Something about the way that portal moved was different. Heavier. I called the team together and we headed out without wasting another second, hoping we were not already too late.
The drive over was silent. Nobody spoke. We all understood what a portal that size could mean, and none of us wanted to say it out loud. Reaching it in time was the only thought on my mind. These people out there had no way to defend themselves against what could come through something like that, and we were the only ones standing between them and whatever was on the other side. When we finally arrived, the area had already been evacuated. Only a handful of monsters had made it through so far, scattered and disoriented. We were not too late. Not yet.
We moved in fast and clean. No wasted motion, no hesitation. The first wave of monsters barely had time to register our presence before we were already cutting through them. My blade found the first one before it could turn around, opening it from shoulder to hip in a single motion. Blood hit the pavement. Around me, my team moved like they had trained for exactly this, because they had. Strike, pivot, finish. Strike, pivot, finish. Bodies dropped one after another, blood and guts hitting the ground, severed limbs scattered across the road, until nothing was left standing but us. We stood in the silence for a moment, catching our breath, scanning the area.
Then the portal shifted.
The light inside it changed, deepening from a dull purple to something closer to black. The edges of the portal stretched outward, the frame widening with a low groan that vibrated through the ground beneath our feet. Something was coming through. Something big. The first claw appeared before anything else, white and curved and enormous, gripping the edge of the portal like a hand gripping a doorframe. Then the arm followed. Then the body. A creature unlike anything I had catalogued stepped through, its frame filling the entire width of the portal as it emerged. It stood upright, easily four meters tall, its skin a pale, almost luminous white, smooth in a way that looked wrong, like something that had never been exposed to sunlight. Its eyes were narrow and dark, set deep in a face that had no real expression. Just hunger. Before I could process it, another stepped through behind it. Then another. Then three more. A whole group of them, pouring out of the portal in silence. I had never seen anything like it. Not even close.
"Hold formation," I said quietly. Nobody moved.
The creatures were tall and white, their claws long enough to split a person clean in two with a single swipe. We watched them spread out slowly, testing the space around them, learning the ground. They were not mindless. That was the part that made the air in my chest go tight. These things were thinking. Sizing us up the same way we were sizing them. I exhaled and made the call.
We did not rush. Every move was calculated, every strike placed with intent. We split into pairs and doubled up on each creature, one person drawing its attention while the other attacked from the blind side. The key was the joints. The arms went first, one clean strike to the shoulder to kill the reach, then another to the elbow to drop the claws. Once the arms were gone, the legs. A sweep at the knee, a follow-up to the ankle, and the creature went down hard. Then the finish. One clean cut across the neck, deep and decisive. Blood soaked the pavement beneath our boots. Heads rolled. The sound of each body hitting the ground was almost satisfying. One by one, they fell, until the last one dropped and the street went quiet again.
We stood there breathing hard, blades dripping, waiting.
We knew it was not over. It never ended with the smaller ones. Every portal of this size had a boss creature, something that waited until the others had softened the targets before making its move. We spread out and held our positions, eyes fixed on the portal. The wait was short. The ground began to shake first, a low rumble that moved up through my boots and into my legs. Then the portal expanded again, wider this time, the light inside it almost completely dark now. A hand came through. Not a claw. A hand. Massive, with fingers thick as steel beams, pressing flat against the ground and dragging the rest of the body forward. It pulled itself out slowly, deliberately, like it had all the time in the world. Like it already knew we were there and did not care.
The moment it fully stepped out, the portal sealed shut behind it with a sound like a thunderclap. The silence that followed was heavy. We stood there and took in what we were looking at. It towered above us, easily twice the height of the creatures we had just finished, its shoulders blocking out the streetlights behind it. Its skin was the same pale white as the others but thicker, layered like plating, each section overlapping the next. Its arms hung low, nearly reaching the ground. Its face was featureless except for two points of dim red light where its eyes should have been. It did not move at first. It just looked at us.
Then it exhaled, a long, slow breath that fogged in the night air, and the red in its eyes brightened.
We did not hesitate. The team shifted formation instantly, moving into the pattern we had drilled for exactly this kind of situation. Two members flanked left, two flanked right, drawing the creature's attention in opposite directions. I positioned myself directly in front of it, holding its gaze, giving it something to focus on. The moment it committed to a swing in my direction, the flankers hit the back of its knees simultaneously. The creature staggered, not falling, but losing its balance just enough. That was the window. My team locked their hands together and launched me upward with everything they had. I rose fast, blade drawn back, the creature's head level with me for just a fraction of a second. I drove the strike down with full force, feeling the impact travel all the way up my arms as the blade connected with the side of its skull.
The creature let out a sound that shook the windows of every building on the street. It swung wildly, and I dropped back to the ground, rolling clear of the arc. It was hurt. But it was not done.
We regrouped without panic. This was always part of the plan. We had one move left and we were going to make it count. The team gathered close, and I felt the energy build between us, the shared magic we had trained to channel together drawing up from somewhere deep and pooling into a single point. The air around us crackled. The creature turned toward us, red eyes blazing, and took one thundering step forward. We released everything at once. A beam of pure light erupted from the center of our formation and tore straight into the monster's chest. The force of it stopped the creature mid-step. Dust and debris exploded off the ground in every direction, a wall of white consuming everything in front of us. The shockwave hit us like a wave, and we braced against it, holding the formation, holding the blast, until there was nothing left to give.
Then silence.
The dust hung in the air for a long moment, thick and still. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. We just stood there, weapons raised, waiting to see what was left when it cleared. Slowly, the cloud began to thin. Shapes emerged. The outline of buildings. The broken pavement. And then the creature, still standing, but barely. A wound had opened across its entire torso, deep and wide, black blood pouring from it in heavy streams. Its legs trembled. The red in its eyes flickered once, twice, and then went dark. It swayed forward and hit the ground with an impact that shook the street beneath our feet, sending a final cloud of dust rolling outward in all directions.
It was over.
Nobody cheered. We were too tired for that. We stood in the wreckage, catching our breath, letting the reality of it settle. We had taken down something none of us had ever seen before, and we had done it without losing a single person. I looked at my team, each of them battered and exhausted, and felt something close to pride settle in my chest. We handed the cleanup over to the militants already moving in on the perimeter and turned to leave. The walk back felt longer than it should have. My legs were heavy, my arms were sore, and my head was finally, mercifully, empty. We had earned the rest that was waiting for us. Every single one of us.
Authors Note -
Thanks to everyone reading this book I'm very sorry for the slow release of chapters..
more soon!