Wednesday, September 10, 2025. 12:35 PM JST.
It was lunchtime in Tokyo. In the sheltered, fortified "Green Zones," office workers were buying ramen from street vendors, their conversation a low, anxious hum beneath the city's veneer of normalcy. The air was still. The sirens were silent. The city, and the world, was holding its breath.
At 12:36 PM, the sky began to bleed.
It started directly over the needle-like spire of the Tokyo Skytree, just as Sakura had foretold. It was not a cloud or a storm. It was a wrongness. The light did not dim; it bent, taking on a sickly, bruised-purple hue. The constant, ambient hum of the city ceased, swallowed by an unnatural vacuum of sound. A wave of psychic pressure, a feeling of cosmic vertigo, washed over the city, causing millions of people to stumble and clutch their heads.
Then, the sky tore.
A black, silent wound opened in the heavens. It was not a hole in the sky; it was a hole of the sky, a rip in the very fabric of reality that drank the light and cast no shadow.
From this bleeding rift, they came. Not flying, but pouring, extruding into reality like a swarm of obsidian insects birthing from a cosmic wound. The Star Vulture fleet had arrived. Their ships were all predatory angles and insectoid grace, their movements silent, their presence an utter violation of every known law of physics.
For a single, stunned second, the world was silent.
Then, the planet roared back.
From every fortified rooftop in Tokyo, from the naval blockade in the bay, from the orbital defense platforms in low orbit, a thousand steel throats screamed defiance. The first global defense volley was a thing of terrible, desperate beauty. Lances of pure particle energy, waves of plasma, and swarms of kinetic-kill missiles converged on the invading fleet, a wall of fire and steel representing the absolute pinnacle of humanity's combined military might. It was a blow that should have sterilized the sky.
It did nothing.
As the volley approached, the very space around the Vulture ships seemed to warp and shimmer. The particle beams, traveling at near light-speed, did not impact; they bent, sliding off the ships' hulls like water off polished stone, their immense energy harmlessly discharged into the upper atmosphere. The missiles, guided by the most advanced AI on Earth, suddenly lost their tracking, tumbling uselessly into the void. It was not a shield; it was a casual, contemptuous dismissal. A Spatial Polarization defense.
Then came the horror.
The plasma bolts, the slower, hotter energy weapons, did not slide away. As they neared the Vulture fleet, dark, shimmering tendrils of energy reached out from the alien ships and simply... ate them. The roaring fire of humanity's defiance was siphoned, consumed, drawn into the Vulture fleet, causing the faint, dark glow of their engines to burn a fraction brighter. They were not just immune to Earth's best weapons; they were feeding on them.
The human fleet in Tokyo Bay, expecting to see their enemies obliterated, saw their own energy weapons turned into a banquet. The EAC flagship, the Dragon's Breath, fired its main cannon, a brilliant spear of golden energy. A Vulture cruiser met it with a siphon beam, and in the next instant, a bolt of identical golden energy, twisted and corrupted, shot back, gutting the human vessel from stem to stern.
The first casualties of the war were men killed by their own redirected fury.
The defensive line shattered. The orbital platforms were silenced. The world watched in stunned, silent horror as the full, terrible, and absolute scale of the technological gap was revealed. This was not a battle. This was not a war.
It was a harvest. And it had just begun.