It began with the black crack in the sky, raining shadows.
From the gaping wound in the heavens—still leaking whispers of otherworldly energy—came dark silhouettes, plummeting like cursed meteors.
They descended with shrieking velocity, trails of black flame and ash chasing behind them. The plaza was momentarily bathed in speeding shadows as the first of the figures struck, crashing through one of the tallest spires near the Liberation grounds.
The tower, once a proud structure of pale stone and architecture, was pierced into like it was shot by bullets, raining debris across rooftops and nearby streets.
Other figures fell farther, striking distant neighborhoods with bone-crunching force. Distant screams echoed as fire rose into the morning sky. But most of them—too many of them—landed directly in the plaza.
BOOM.CRACK.BOOM.
The ground quaked. Pavement split. Statues crumbled.
And then came the silence.
Choking dust billowed into the air, masking the shapes of what had landed, only their towering, twitching silhouettes visible like nightmares emerging from a fog.
Hearts across the plaza stopped in synchronicity, the air thick with dread. Then, as the debris settled and the visibility returned, the horror stepped into clarity.
They were smaller than the first Conflict—by more than half, though that did not diminish the fear they brought.
Each of them bore the same terrible wrongness, grotesque contradictions of nature and form. Smooth, jet-black carapaces that ended in edges too clean for any living thing.
Bodies that bent at unnatural angles and eyes that shimmered with oily colors no human tongue could name. Their presence was oppressive, like the air itself recoiled from them.
And then a scream.
A man—young, no more than twenty—had frozen in place, mouth agape at the abominations. His scream was all it took.
One of the fiends turned.
Its motion was fluid yet jerky, like it was moving through a different set of physical laws. It closed the distance in less than a breathe, a clawed limb cleaving straight through the man's chest. Flesh tore like parchment, his scream never finishing as his body was ripped in two, one half flung into the crowd.
That was the matchstick to the flame that was born.
Chaos erupted.
People began to run—screaming, trampling, shoving. The plaza became a panicked sea of flailing limbs and raw terror. Families were torn apart in moments.
One mother, seeing a fiend closing in, screamed and threw her infant toward her husband on the other side of a crumbling statue.
He caught the child—barely—as the mother was pounced upon. Her screams turned into wet gurgles. Blood painted the cobblestone.
An old man tripped on a crack in the ground and tried to crawl away as one fiend skittered towards him. It paused, as if amused, and then dragged him screaming into the air before letting him drop like meat.
A group of guards, barely trained, rallied near a broken fountain and tried to defend the civilians. Their weapons clanged uselessly off the creatures' bodies before being ripped from their hands—and then they too were gone, shredded into ribbons.
And above it all, high in the VIP booth, the regal woman stood frozen.
Her eyes trembled. Her body screamed at her to act, but for a moment—even with all her power—she had faltered.
She'd seen a Conflict before. In the cracks called Fractures, though those were basically the runts of the Conflicts.
Conflicts with such ferocity though?
She had not seen them in a long time.
In a time that was supposed to be sealed and forgotten. But now… this was the current reality.
They were invading. Not leaking through some Fracture at the edge of the realms.
They had opened a hole in the sky above a Liberation Ceremony.
Her pale, bony fists clenched.
"Enough."
With a whisper of a breath, she leapt.
She didn't fall. Her body hung in the air, suspended by a current unseen, her silken robes flaring around her like banners.
And as she raised one hand into the air, the very fabric of the world seemed to shift.
A glowing symbol appeared before her—a Rune. But it wasn't written or conjured. It simply was. A luminous glyph, pulsing with power.
A building block of the world.
She extended her palm, and with a soundless command, the Rune expanded.
It shot upwards like a second sun, its light colliding with the fracture in the sky. It didn't seal it. It restrained it, binding the edges of the crack in a lattice of brilliant sapphire energy.
The sky shivered against it.
Then the Rune pulsed once more.
Its power rippled across the entire plaza like an invisible wave, expanding outward and sealing the air into a dome of radiant force. The moment it locked in place, a thunderous hum resounded.
The Conflicts were trapped inside—with the people.
She knew what she had done. Her face was grim, her eyes resolute.
She was too old.
Too far from the height of her prime.
She couldn't stop them all directly, not without risking the enitre city.
This was the only choice. Seal the chaos.
Contain it in a small space.
Even if it meant condemning the innocent within.
She floated above the dome, arms extended, her face a cold mask of wrath.
"They will not leave this place," she whispered. "Even if I must bury this entire plaza in endless rubble."
High above the slaughter, the regal woman hovered with unwavering focus.
Her gaze pierced through the storm of chaos below, locking onto the Conflicts beneath her.
The largest of them—the one that had broken through the sky and crushed the mayor—had not moved since its brutal entrance.
It stood still amidst the gore and dust, a towering monolith of otherworldly malice. Its jagged, chitinous frame shimmered faintly under the broken light of the fractured sky, untouched, unshaken.
But the smaller ones? They were rabid beasts.
Some crawled down buildings like grotesque arachnids, leaving deep gouges in stone and glass as their talons bit into every surface. Others that had been buried in the earth upon impact burst forth from beneath the crowd like abominable geysers of flesh and death.
Still more charged like savage hounds, tearing into any living being they encountered with wet, crunching slashes.
The air was filled with screams, and blood slicked the once-sacred stones of the plaza.
She narrowed her eyes. The larger one would require significant focus and strength on her part, especially due to its nature.
But she would not find any true success unless the lesser ones were first culled.
She raised her hand again, and with it came a new Rune—glowing, ancient, raw with pure foundational energy. With a silent command, the Rune pulsed.
Bolts of majestic blue light shot out like divine spears.
Where they struck, Conflicts died. It didn't matter how twisted their forms or unnatural their hide—each bolt that found its mark vaporized a fiend instantly.
They roared, if what came out of their maws could be consider a roar, their bodies unraveling in brilliant flashes of annihilation.
But they did not wait to die. The moment the first was struck, the rest began to scatter and lurch, moving with unpredictable bursts, dodging, skittering behind broken statues or diving through the crowds as living shields.
The culling had begun.
And below the regal woman, within the glowing prison of the Rune dome, it all still continued—blood, fire, screams, and all.
Victor stood paralyzed in front of his distraught mother, the golden book in his trembling hands.
Blood sprayed just meters from him as their final guard—a seasoned man once clad in shining armor—was ripped into three twitching pieces by a nearby Conflict.
The creature turned to them next.
Victor couldn't breathe. The thing's form was a jagged nightmare: thin like a starving hound, yet lined with dense armor that reflected no light.
Its face was just a maw of unending teeth, nested between eyes that flickered and glitched.
His grip tightened on the Codex.
The power was there, he knew it—but it remained dormant.
Why?
Why wouldn't it answer?
Hadn't he just been Liberated? Hadn't he seen the light? He cursed himself, cursed his uselessness.
Where was his father when they needed him?
"Move!" he begged himself. "Do something! Anything!"
The creature lunged, claws outstretched.
A flash.
A single bolt of energy struck the beast mid-leap, vaporizing it in an instant.
Victor stumbled back, heart slamming against his ribs. He stared in disbelief, then whirled around.
"Mother!" he gasped.
She lay still, her face pale and slack. He dropped to his knees, shaking her gently at first, then harder. "Wake up, please—wake up! I don't know what to do!"
Tears welled in his eyes as she remained unresponsive. Around him, the chaos continued, the battle far from over.
Atop the shattered remains of the Liberation stage, the towering Conflict finally moved.
It shifted, ponderously at first, looking down at the red smear that was once the mayor. It had not moved until now because it had no need to.
It had acted on instinct. It had landed. It had killed. A life was taken. Something within it… stirred.
It did not understand the feeling.
Conflicts were not made to understand.
But now, its instincts were whispering something strange.
It looked around and noticed the deaths of its kin. One by one, they were disappearing in flashes of divine light.
The large entity turned its eyeful maw toward the sky, to the being who dared to defy it.
It did not feel rage. It did not even feel loss.
But it knew she was a problem.
Her presence tugged at its thoughts. She had to be ended.
Yet, as it prepared to lurch toward the sky, something halted it.
A pressure.
A sensation.
It didn't have a word for it, but it felt it—wrongness.
Threat.
Fear.
Conflicts did not feel fear. They did not feel anything. So what was the source of this?
It turned its jagged head to the side, slowly, uneasily.
And there, lying not far from the broken stage, was a boy. Young, unconscious. But in his hand…
A golden book. Glowing now. Glowing brighter. The power within it surged like a heartbeat.
The Conflict tilted its head.
It didn't know why… but it needed to kill that boy now.