The monitoring room smelled of cold coffee and ozone. Screens blinked, feeds rolled in neat columns — dorm courtyards, testing fields, the line of tents — and Arthur sat like a conductor with his hands folded, silver eye reflecting the slow drum of the camera lights. Beside him, the teachers were still half in routine: Eleanor's posture precise and impatient; Adalia's cigarette burn slow and deliberate between two fingers; the wall of consoles hummed with a kind of obedient calm.
Then the feeds hiccupped.
At first it was a single mosaic tile, a screen that jittered. Someone at the main console muttered a diagnosis and reached to reset the line. The chatter was light and practical: "Solar uplink fluctuation… satellite jitter… check redundancy." Arthur did not like the cadence of the sound. He toggled one feed after another — south campus, the riverboard tents, the athletic field. The image on the southern tent clogged into static, like a page gone to snow. The sound dropped out. A white hiss crawled across the glass and filled the room like cold fog.
"Connection error," the tech said, fingers flying. "I can't— it's not a line fault. There's—there's interference."
Adalia blew smoke into the interference as if it could stem the static. "Of course," she said, flat. "Of course it would choose today."
Eleanor's jaw tightened. "Is it local? Jamming device?"
"Traces," the technician answered. "Wave signature is… not terrestrial."
Arthur's calm broke then into that animal alertness that favours decisions over curiosity. He rose, the chair squeaking. "Get the backup. Hardline alley. If we lose the watchrooms, we go to manual. Ring the bells. Get all patrols up."
The technicians moved like a machine except one hinge had been removed: the main feed died completely. The monitors froze. For a teeth-long second that silence was total — then far off, a different sound threaded through the air, low and mechanical, and the whole academy felt it: a shudder that was not wind.
Outside, the island wore its usual morning: breezes skimmed the coconut palms, foam lipped at the black sand; the lab tents settled into the day's rhythm. Students moved—clusters of heads bent over tasks, laughter and the odd bicker of young voices. Nobody noticed the sea until a shadow in the water broke the horizon.
They came in silence at first. The ship that had been waiting on the far line of the bay skimmed like a black tooth. There was no horn. No flags. Ten cloaked figures descended by the patience of a craft that had learned to unmake itself from the noise of the world: a whisper of wind, a hollow in the soundscape where the sea should be. They landed like predators — low, precise, and exactly where the marshes met the dunes.
They did not run; they unfurled. From beneath their cloaks they drew sigils, rings of motion etched in the air. Each raised a palm and the sky answered.
The academy's south shore split like a seam. The first gate ripped open over the sand: a black wound of air, a cut between the world and something starved. From it poured forms that made the breath freeze. They were not animals in any clean taxonomy. Wings sprouted in living folds like molten leather; limbs arranged themselves in angles that bred dizziness; the sound they made was not vocal so much as the clatter of something vast remembering its teeth. Their eyes glowed in colours that did not follow daylight — coals, green sparks, an oily purple — and their movement was a language of appetite.
The Ten dispersed like command points. Port, starboard, north ridge, the tents — their boots barely kissed the sand before they began to open more of those impossible doors. The air between gates thrummed; small things seeped out first: the size of dogs, but sharper; then others, spidery and lithe; then broader, winged beasts that passed like falling roofs. Where a portal held, the world behind it looked like a thin place: sky reversed, a smear of unlight and screaming geometry. The island's pleasant orders cracked like a thrown plate.
The first cries set the morning to a new rhythm. Out at the training field, senior students blinked. A girl who'd been testing a leg sweep froze as something dropped from the air above and struck the ground only three paces away. Students scattered, turning corners that led only to more shapes: a creature like a shadow leaned and sniffed the air, then turned its head and cocked it as if considering whether the thing that screamed was ripe.
The assaults were fast and precise. These were not blind wildings. They were a hunt. In two minutes the academy's quiet bubble had opened into panic. Shouts ran like thrown pebbles across the campus. A group of first-years, newly blind to tactics and full of bravado, rushed to form a line with wooden poles — but the poles banged uselessly on a cuirass that drank the blow like water. Another youth slashed a rune of warning with hands that glowed; the glyph fizzled out under something that moved like static and heat, and the boy staggered back with his face gone white, his rune dead under a pressure that felt like someone reading him and deciding his heart was unnecessary.
The demons did not speak as humans do, but there was a taunting cadence. A thin one with a voice like bell metal laughed in a series of ratches that sounded like a child cranking a music box — and the sound became a contagion. Laughter rippled from the invaders and turned the campus into an instrument of dread.
Back in the monitoring room, the hardlines came up late, only to reveal fractured feeds of distant violence: a blur of students falling, a teacher calling a ward that flared and died like a candle guttering. Arthur barked orders into the static. "Hold the central hall! Move the evac teams to the infirmary! Watch the eastern approach! Seal the archive!" A dozen hands complied. A dozen others failed.
Magic spiked and clashed. Teachers threw up shields, thick and pearled, that held like shell—until five creatures in a ragged flanking cascade hit them with a pressure that sounded like a boulder rolled down a well. The shield warped and the creatures slipped through the break with the quiet of something that had practiced escape.
Students fought. They screamed as they ran, as they ducked, as they tried to pull classmates out of the path. A girl bolted forward and slammed a saved-for-weeks gauntlet against a winged creature's flank; it shook and landed with a thud that resembled a machine collapsing; she did not wait to see if it rose again. Another teacher — one of the old guard with a chest scar — drew a sword lined in moonlight and cut a path, voice high with ritual as he called names of wards. He stabbed, and sometimes the blade found purchase and drove a beast back into whatever gate had birthed it; sometimes the blow passed through something that should have been fleshed and found a chill and did not fall.
Wards failed. Anchors cracked. The air saturated. Smoke began to curl from the tents where cooking fires had been overturned. The smell came first as ozone, then as something with the brittle taint of sulphur and the wet metallic catch that sits on the tongue after panic. For a moment the island tasted like the underworld: burnt salts, deep smoke, the sharp shiver of iron.
From the field tents came an odd, terrible sound: a student being taken. You could not see the exact mechanism where a person vanished, only that the space where they stood seemed to slither like a pool in late rain; shadow reached, closed, and the silhouette flinched, then the flinch stopped. In the minutes that followed, pockets of students simply ceased to exist in the sight lines of the stunned onlookers. Teachers tried to pull them back, hands clutching empty air.
"Pull them back—pull them—" someone screamed; that voice broke into raw nothing.
The academy's alarms finally answered — thin, invasive bells that sounded like an old ship warning of reefs. They called and called, and big men with ropes and packs tried to shepherd lines of students toward the sturdier buildings. The infirmary door became a choke point. The main hall's wards flashed blue and then faded to a flagging light as if something invisible had gone through them with a grin.
From the dunes the Ten were not merely opening gates; they were directing traffic. One of them — heavy set, hands like anvils — planted a stave into the soil and the sand trembled. From that staved place a dark rope crawled outward and the shore around it buckled inward; students within the circle felt a cold in their teeth and started to collapse, their breaths shallow. Teachers threw themselves into the circle to break it, and some of them came up shaking, but the rope of dark continued, and men were pulled away into the sea of its blackness like a tide inviting driftwood.
Shouts: "North wall! North wall, now!" Eleanor's voice cleaved the chaos. She carved a running shape through the mass, a command forming like a blade: "Teachers form! Form on me! Keep the kids inside the square!" A ring began to gather on the practice field — older students, instructors, even a handful of those with well-tempered wards. They hammered out a door — not perfect, but a frame they could hold to shelter dozens.
Between the shelter and the sea, the beach dissolved into combat. A monster with too many elbows seized a learner and hauled; the student hit the sand and did not rise again. The teachers pushed and screamed; one young instructor — barely twenty-four — threw himself at the thing and slammed his staff into its neck. The beast shrieked. For a hair's breadth, the creature faltered and the student slid free. The instructor bled on the sand. He did not look away when two other creatures lunged for him; his staff rose again like a flag, a last insistence.
Rena reached the rim of the south camp and saw the gates. She had heard something — a smell that was wrong, a soft drum of dread through the ground that had nothing to do with herd movement. Smoke coiled in the hollows. Flames licked where a tent had toppled. The first figure Rena saw was not a demon; it was a child being lifted on hands that were too many for one body, and then the weight of that child's world blinked out into absence. Rena's soul clenched.
She moved like a blade. Her feet were a rush of silver across sand, her hair streaming, and the heat that gathered around her hands was not the warmth of a hearth but a concentrated, disciplined thing that answered faster than breath. She did not burn people. She made arcs of light that cut through the warped shapes of the invaders; the light cracked like glass and forced them back into edges. A pair of winged creatures tried to flank her and found their passage met by fire that did not sear outward so much as hold a shape in place. Rena punched the air; a wave of silver heat rolled like a tide and pushed a cluster of smaller things back into a re-closing portal.
Her presence changed the calculus where she moved. Some of the demons recoiled as if smelling a kinship they could not stomach; others sharpened on her like predators who hate their own mirror. A creature darted at a student only three paces ahead, and Rena hit it with a hand that turned the air around the thing into a small weather system — the creature coughed, staggered, and then fled into a fissure of wind. She vaulted the sand wall into the circle of shelter and ripped off her scarf to bandage a younger boy's leg with rough efficiency. He was pale, eyes blown wide, but alive.
Still, for every demon she drove back, two more poured forward. You could not be everywhere. A portal opened at the far end of the grounds and a darker creature — broad, with a maw that closed like a lattice — swept through a bank of students; two vanished in a whisper, their screams cut like thread. Rena lunged, hands made shield, and the feeling of absence pressed on her chest like hands reaching for her throat. She felt her dragon-heart meet that pressure; the drumming inside her ribs answered with a raised frequency that steadied her limbs.
Teachers fell. Students acted like small armies; some ran like hunted birds, others turned and fought. A trio of second-years with improvised spears charged into a pack and managed to buy time for a teacher to pull a thin boy from beneath the falling shadow of a wing. A girl—first year—threw herself in front of the bell rope and did not rise.
No matter how many desperate rescues succeeded, the invaders did one perverse thing: they tested the lines. If the guards focused too much on one gate, another gate would swing wide. The Ten were harmonized, moving in a choreography that counterbalanced each hero's best effort. They were not crude plunderers but engineers of ruin: arrange a diversion, open a portal, harvest an anchor.
Adalia, cigarette gone to a stub, shouted orders like she had been shaped for command in a harsher life. She ran like a woman in a storm, hands flinging wards that were jagged and practical. Where her wards landed, the smoke stung but the creatures could not pass: the barrier burned them with sense rather than flame. "East side evac, move! Tug the injured to the stables!" she yelled. Some students obeyed. Some did not. A teacher tackled a small handful and dragged them like a man carrying sacks.
In the distance, the heavy crest of the outer hill exploded into sound as a bombardment of mana hit. It did not stop the spread, but it stole fire from one flank and forced the demons to orient. Arthur, watching frantically in the room, realized the pattern: the Ten used local gates as conduits to gather specimens — not necessarily to kill, although death rode with their wake — but to drag the best and strangest into pockets where their onshore crews could seize them.
The thing you remember from moments of invasion is not a single death but the chorus: the way a child's voice morphs from confusion to pleading, the way old men breathe like broken bellows, the way a teacher's hand never stops moving until it cramps. In the shelter yard the ring held for a time because Eleanor's orders turned every adult into a brick wall. They prayed, they kept numbers, they bore the horror like a crafted thing. The infirmary became a triage station lit by doubled wards, and there stood a line of students without teachers, their faces small and raw, their histories shortened in an instant.
Rena found Shizana beside a collapsed tent. The white wolf-scented presence had moved like a guardian. She saw Shizana's muzzle slick with sand and panic, but the wolf's eyes held a clarity as veteran as a lighthouse. Together they pushed out from shelter into a swath where a group of first-years huddled, two of them clutched to a teacher whose fingers were already numb with cold.
A demon tried to steal around their flank. Shizana snapped a neat sound twice, and something laced with cold bit the invader's shoulder; it howled and retreated. Rena turned that small victory into a rope of silver that hauled the group toward a hallway. The young faces looked at her as if she were a thunderbolt. One whispered, "Thank you," and the word landed like a small, ridiculous gift between the roaring things.
It was not enough. The Ten were relentless. From their places across the shore they threaded the island with more of those black places and the dark creatures kept arriving until the beach became a place of shadows and shrieks. Their laughter — high and wrong — wove across the trees. It sounded like triumph and like a song of harvest. The threatened fields shook; hens in the compound bolted, and the wind picked up the scent of smoke and something more ancient: the smell of brimstone threaded into the salt.
At last, when the sky had taken the look of a bruise, a new sound came: the distant but distinct beat of a bell at the academy's northern tower. Word ran: "Portals collapsing. Concentration on the south gate." The Ten withdrew, or rather, their command pattern changed. The black staves on the sand recoiled like ropes being reeled in; the portals shrank, swallowed their children like the lids of jars. Some of the swarm retreated through the seams; some stayed, writhing and dying where they had been abandoned by the tide of invaders. The noisy, cruel laughter gasped and became a croak.
As quickly as the morning had bent, the tide of terror ebbed. The academy's ring held because the teachers tore their tired bodies into lines of defense; Arthur's voice on the hardline was hoarse from orders and from a dawning calculation: the Ten had not vanished; they had taken what they intended and then left — a precise predation, surgical and cold. They had also left the island shaky and sullen, a coral reef torn open.
The count came in ragged waves. Some students were missing; some had been taken through the cracks and vanished into a geometry too far to reach; some lay pale and scorched and in need of healing; many more trembled from the shock and bore questions that would not yield soon: why, how, and who would claim the lives ripped from the weave of morning.
Rena stood in the center of the shattered camp, sand in her boots, her hands still smouldering with controlled mana. Around her was the odor of sulfur and wet cloth; a young boy hugged a teacher as if she were a mountain. Rena's mind was a ledger: who had been taken, what the Ten had wanted, where the portals had last pulsed. Her breath came slower now; the dragon-heart in her chest still thrummed, a strange metronome that had held her through the screaming.
They had bought time, not victory. Arthur's radio scratch began to map contingency lists: repair the wards; clean up the field; secure the children; search the dark pockets. Eleanor called for volunteers. The sun slid sideways and the academy closed in on its wounds, but in the corners of the campus the dark places had not healed. The island had been marked.
When the last fires at the tents smoldered and the ambulant wards took over, someone found the first scrap of evidence the attackers had left: a piece of cloth. It was not the island's fabric. It had sigils stitched in a lattice that looked a bit like teeth and a bit like doors. Sophia, one of the healers, touched it with a glove and shivered.
"How far?" she asked, voice small.
Arthur looked toward the line of dunes where the sea met the sky and saw the last silhouette of the ship, a black smudge swallowed by the horizon. He answered with the verdict of an officer who must be both blunt and steady: "They came from the sea. They left through the seam. We have taken losses and some of them were taken — taken for a purpose. We will bury the dead, tend the wounded, and we will not forget what was carved out of our morning."
He did not say the other truth that thudded like a second heart in his ribs: an attack like that was a probe. It aimed at an appetite that could be fed again. The Ten did not act at random. They had done something that demanded a reply.
Across the island, in tents and halls and on the black sand, people moved with shock and purpose. Some howled. Some wept. Some swore oaths that tasted like steel and patience. The demons had come and gone; the island remained. But the hush that followed the raids was not peace. It was the prelude to a question: what would come next, and would the academy be ready when it did?
.....
Jin: Thanks for reading. I also didn't use mana now and the attacks are magic because I was focusing on attacking the demons more, and then we'll move on to the rest of the characters.