The Great War

Part One

December 2094. Siren Island.

Two days later.

The first day of training at the peak of one of the island's mountains was the most embarrassing.

Joining the conflict didn't mean she could skip the two weeks of training.

She would be part of the first experimental mixed squads—humans, feys, aeons, with or without magic, with or without extrasensory abilities—but fighting together to stop the enemy. If those units proved effective on the battlefield, the truth would be revealed in just a few months so they could be deployed to the front lines.

A plan originally scheduled to be unveiled in the next ten years now had to be rushed due to the threat.

Lizbeth exhaled and adjusted her stance, feeling the snow crunch beneath her boots. The exoskeleton felt a little strange, honestly. She almost felt it would be hard to move with it. In front of her, a group of feys and humans in experimental armor watched her with a mix of expectation and distrust.

To them, she was a veteran, a living legend, in other words, something that belonged to a museum. Although, of course, no one was going to say that to her's face. After all, many did not even know her real age, only that she looked too good to be a war veteran.

To her... well, it had been years since she'd been in a real conflict. She knew how to fight, of course. Combat was as natural to her as breathing. But knocking out drunks in back-alley bars, shaking off scum chasing her, was one thing, facing the Fractus—aberrations from another dimension that could tear her head off before she blinked—was something entirely different. They had to use new military gear, and she was having trouble getting used to it.

"Alright, alright... basics first," Lizbeth said, rolling her shoulders with a confident smile that barely hid the faint embarrassment underneath. Her training had never included a module on "how not to feel like a grandma in the middle of an experimental squad again." She stepped forward and took a fighting stance.

In front of her stood a bipedal training droid, its weapons fully deployed. The thing was a good three meters tall and quite bulky, but it moved with surprising agility.

Lizbeth barely had time to react before the droid lunged forward, its heavy frame propelled by smooth, precise motions. She dodged to the side, feeling the rush of air as its arm swung past. With a swift motion, she drew her energy whip, the plasma igniting with a sharp hiss.

The whip cracked through the air, striking the droid's knee joint and causing it to stagger. Sparks flew from exposed wiring as the machine quickly recalibrated—its red optical sensors locking onto her with renewed focus. Her muscles tensed, ready for the next strike.

"Hit me with everything you've got."

She hadn't finished speaking when a bolt of energy whizzed inches from her face. Acting on pure instinct, Lizbeth rolled to the side and rose with an almost natural grace... until she slipped on the snow and landed hard on her back with a dull thud. There was an awkward silence before someone coughed to suppress laughter.

Still on the ground, Lizbeth raised her hand and gave a thumbs up. "Warming up."

Someone muttered, "We're screwed."

Well, what are you waiting for... am I over 150 years old? she thought as she stood up and looked at the droid that had stopped to watch.

When she were deployed against those things, there would be no waiting on the other side. It was better to start taking this seriously.

Still, it didn't take long for the laughter to die down.

Within days, Lizbeth went from "rusty veteran" to the personal nightmare of everyone in the unit. Her body remembered fast: every strike, every dodge, every tactic she'd learned in decades of battle and street fight. By the third day, she was taking down her comrades during training with insulting ease. By the fifth, no one dared underestimate her.

"Weren't they saying I was old?" she asked with a sly smile after disarming a fey nearly two meters taller than her and pressing a knee into his back. Her "victim" groaned something unintelligible from the ground. Around them, the rest of the squad watched with faces of absolute terror, as if they'd just seen a predator remember it's at the top of the food chain.

The training squad captain, a human with knuckle scars and a perpetually disgruntled expression, crossed his arms and snorted, looking at Rein. "I guess we're not that screwed after all." Rein smiled. But Lizbeth caught the flicker of respect in his eyes.

Yes, she was ready for war.

Again.

But with her battle instincts awakened once more, memories from the past also came flooding back stronger than ever. Those memories had never truly left her, but seeing the training and deployment of those coming and going from the battlefield in rotations made her recall her time on Runen Island and the missions she'd carried out with Shin and all her brothers and sisters in arms—and later friends.

One night, alone in the barracks after training all afternoon, Lizbeth looked at her hands clad in tactical gloves. They didn't tremble. Never did. But still something inside her did. Not the fear of death—she knew that too well—but the silent doubt that crept through the folds of her uniform: What if this is the last time? What if it's the last time I see the girls? What if I don't come back?

Although she had decided that she would take part in the battle, the main reason that ultimately drove her was Rein and Noki, though Mimi and the others mattered too. The thought of something happening to them terrified her. Over the years, she had learned to live with the constant anxiety of the two girls always going from one adventure to another like Indiana Jones, rescuing archaeological pieces here and there, but now it was different.

A long time ago, she had wanted to go to war. Now she didn't want to, but everything had changed quickly.

The wind outside howled, scraping against the cliffs on that side of the island, and with it, Lizbeth seemed to remember battles no one mentioned anymore. And in the midst of that frozen lament came back—like a shadow beyond the fire—the smell of those old winters past.

The black smoke of bombings, trains loaded with living bodies already knowing they were dead. The gaze of a child hiding among the rubble of a cathedral, the blood on his fingers when she reached out her hand. So much time had passed... yet her mind unearthed those moments as if they were yesterday now. Her own rescue, the training, the successful missions and failures.

Remembering it so vividly made her wonder how she had survived so long and for so much time.

And now she would have to do it again.

It's not the first time I've wielded a weapon for others, she thought, clenching her fist. And it won't be the last. She'd saved soldiers, civilians, creatures the world still refused to accept. And she'd failed too. She couldn't count all the names, but the faces were still there, just behind her closed eyes.

She knew her body had responded to the training by instinct. But it wasn't just the body. It was the past dragging behind her like an invisible cloak: every mission, promise, death. The war hadn't ended in the twentieth century. It had only changed its mask in the twenty-first.

War, she thought, demands more than courage. It demands adaptation. It wasn't enough to carry old scars, the new ones demanded their own language. And this new conflict wasn't fought with bolt-action rifles or bayonets at dawn. It was pretty much an amalgam of energy, technology, and surgical precision. If she wanted to survive—and more so, if she wanted to protect others—she had to understand the new battlefield. From scratch.

That's why during training she had to get used to experimental weapons designed for the battlefield.

She'd already seen that on the news. After the first days of the invasion, everyone had tried by all means to discover the enemy's weak spot. For now, some small fractus had been destroyed with conventional ammunition. But that didn't work for the bigger ones. Not to mention the ones that stood meters tall. It was through some coincidences and experiments that they determined electricity seemed the best method to annihilate the fractus.

Lizbeth had to get used to new electric arc rifles, railguns, and others like the Lightning-Bolt prototypes. Prototypes that should have been tested months and years before being deployed , that would now change as well.

Beyond that, she was ready. It was time to deploy once again.

***

January 2095

Lizbeth had joined Nevermore.

Her relationship with them was more contractual, closer to that of a mercenary. Many feys had chosen that path to avoid being fully enlisted in the army. The contract granted her freedom to move as she pleased, but it also bound her to accept missions whenever the situation required it.

Rein protested a little, but Leon told her it was for the best. Lizbeth had too many enemies scattered around the world, and Nevermore, along with its agents, would soon be under the scrutiny of many governments. It was safer for her to keep a low profile; being a fey with her kind of ability was already more than enough to draw attention.

For her part, she agreed—it was the most reasonable choice. She didn't want to command anyone anymore. Being part of the global army was already more than she had ever wanted.

A global army could not be created and leave each country without national forces, so all private military organisations would now operate under the United Nations for the creation of the Joint Forces. Mercenaries, reservists, retirees, volunteers. Everything that could be gathered would be part of that army, which would be deployed throughout the world. And the feys would also be part of it in experimental teams until the secret was revealed.

The formation of the Joint Forces wasn't born out of unity—it was born out of fear. Governments that could barely agree on trade without throwing each others throat now shared satellites, weapons, and soldiers under the same flag: the United Nations, suddenly reborn as the world's last chain of command. Borders dissolved faster than old grudges, factories turned overnight into weapons foundries, and generals took orders from AIs that didn't even need sleep. It was impressive, in a terrifying sort of way.

Lizbeth had to admit, she'd never thought much of the UN before. In her experience, they were about as useful as a fart in the wind whenever real blood started spilling. But maybe this time would be different. Maybe this time, fear would make humanity efficient. The world had finally realized that survival wasn't a diplomatic debate—it was logistics, batteries, and who could pull the trigger first when the shadows came crawling out of the thin veil of the new reality.

Lizbeth first orders sent her to the United Kingdom, a territory she knew well, where the battle lines weren't defined merely by geography, but by what could be done in the shadows of a global conflict.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

In Ireland, the stage was set for confrontation, and Lizbeth—just another piece on that strategic chessboard—joined a mixed platoon of feys and humans under the command of an artificial intelligence that seemed to understand war in a cold, calculating, and pragmatic way. Her task was simple, though deadly: exterminate the fractus threat in that region.

A portal had opened for a couple of days deep within the forested highlands. Civilians had been evacuated, but there were still casualties—people who vanished before the military could fully respond. The armed forces and the local authorities were overwhelmed, stretched thin between evacuation duties and the refugee camps forming along the outskirts of Dublin. Through that portal—a sphere roughly ten meters wide—had emerged what was estimated to be several hundred fractus of the same species, though of different sizes: from small ones barely a meter tall to towering forms over four meters high. Reports suggested similar rifts had appeared across Europe, but the Wicklow breach was the first to last long enough for something to cross over in that part of Ireland.

The first fractus she encountered belonged to the Whistling type, a species known as empusa. Their elongated bodies, reminiscent of giant mantises, moved with a dangerous grace. The truth was that, apart from the heads being different, the rest of the body really did resemble mantises a little. The threat didn't lie solely in their physical prowess, but in their ability to adapt and blend into their environment.

They were invisible, perfectly camouflaged among the trees, often mimicking the sounds they heard—especially the final words of their victims. They reverberated these sounds through external vocal structures, similar to vocal cords, to lure others into ambushes.

The situation was suffocating. At the slightest misstep from a fey or human in the platoon, the forest's silence shattered with distorted echoes of those imitative screams, unleashing chaos.

The Wicklow Forest was a cursed battlefield.

From afar, it looked untouched: damp hills, fog drifting between the pines, the breath of an ancient land that had survived too many invasions through the centuries. But within, the earth boiled beneath the snow, and the grass trembled with dry whispers. The sensors picked up impossible fluctuations, and the ground shuddered with the electric hum of weapons. The branches swayed without wind, as if something invisible brushed past them.

Lizbeth advanced in silence, her rifle resting on her shoulder, finger grazing the trigger of the arc discharger. The faint whine of the weapon was her only comfort—a high, contained lament that reminded her she still belonged to this side of reality. The air smelled of ozone, burnt sap, and fear. It didn't matter how many veterans stood in that squad—none had ever faced an enemy like this, born from something so near and yet so alien.

"Contact at two o'clock," someone said through the radio. The voice dissolved into static. Then—nothing. Only the hiss of stretched syllables.

That sound.

The same one that fractus type tried to imitate perfectly, but never quite could.

A human whistle—casual, like someone waiting for a train or chasing away boredom. But here, among the trees, it was the sound of the hunt.

The empusa moved like refracted light: they didn't run—they folded through space. Their bodies, covered in organic crystal that mimicked the tall trees, flexed between the trunks with a speed the human mind could barely register. Every movement left a trail of distortion in the air, like a liquid mirage. Conventional firearms were useless; bullets pierced only the image, never the real body, which slipped milliseconds out of phase.

The squad responded with electric discharges. Blue columns rose among the trees—arcs of lightning snapping through the winter air. The first bursts destabilized the empusa's camouflage for a second—just enough to see them in all their grotesque elegance. Powerful hind legs, a narrow abdomen, a fine triangular head with three vibrating lights on each side that might've been eyes but weren't. Those slits shimmered as they moved, emitting flashes like fractured signals. They were machines of biological imitation. Voice, echo, appearance—everything was an evolutionary trick.

Lizbeth aimed toward the sound of a whisper—her own name—and pulled the trigger. She recognized that voice as one belonging to a soldier they had lost the day before. The last thing that poor guy had said had been her name, to warn her.

The electric arc burst between two oaks and struck something that screamed in a metallic tone, as if the air itself had been cut in half. A translucent, three-meter form fell from a tree and hit the ground in a convulsion of reflected light. Its structure trembled, exoskeleton folding upon itself, and the whistling vibration died with a sharp crack. Its body shattered into fragments, leaving behind a shard that looked like impure quartz—the fractium core.

For a few seconds, no one spoke.

Then another voice: "Behind!"

An empusa, nearly two meters tall, dropped from the canopy like a solid shadow, breaking branches and unleashing a guttural wave of sound. Lizbeth turned in time, fired point-blank, and saw the creature dissolve in a burst of white light.

The forest filled with sparks, with smoke, with a rain of insects that weren't insects.

The aeon in command marked coordinates, but the interference was total. The fractus generated a distortion field that confused radars and communications. So they fought like in the old wars—by sight, by instinct, with their senses sharpened to the edge of pain.

Lizbeth felt the pulse in her throat resonate with the rhythm of the weapons. When she shouted, her voice came out deeper, vibrating with something not entirely human. A sonic burst tore through the echo the Empusa used for camouflage. The creatures froze, disjointed, and the squad opened fire. Crossed arcs illuminated the fog, painting fleeting shadows across the trunks.

For a moment, she thought they might win.

Until the whistling returned—this time multiplied, as if the entire forest were breathing through a hundred invisible mouths.

One of the reservists fell with a clean hole in his chest—no visible shot. Another vanished into the darkness with a scream that came back seconds later, identical, but without origin.

Lizbeth moved with fury—not out of vengeance, but discipline. She shouted orders no one could hear and poured the rifle's full charge into a crack of shadows. When the electric light faded, there was no body—only broken branches and the rancid smell of burnt metal.

The battle lasted twenty-three minutes.

The after-action report would call it "a minor interference."

But for Lizbeth, it was something else: a prelude. A trial by fire in a place where reality had become porous—where sound could kill, and every whistle could be an enemy's call… or the echo of oneself.

When night finally fell, the forest was silent.

A false silence—expectant, like the space between two breaths.

Lizbeth looked up and thought that, for the first time in a long while, the war had found its own voice.

And it sounded exactly like a whistle between the trees.

During those first incursions, Lizbeth realized what was truly at stake. The war against the fractus wasn't merely a battle for survival—it was a confrontation with something utterly alien. What humanity had once considered "the natural world" was unraveling before her eyes.

The fractus weren't just close invaders. They were altering the very fabric of reality.

As she moved through the Irish forests, she felt a heaviness in the air, as if the earth itself trembled beneath her feet, trying to resist the advance of these intruders from another dimension. The trees no longer whispered the way they used to, the leaves moved with an unnatural purpose.

Lizbeth and her squad quickly learned that fighting fractus required more than skill in combat. It demanded adaptation depending the type. The key was not to fall for their sound traps or visual illusions. The fractus, with their ability to distort perception, made every step a gamble very easy to lose for an enemy that technically was not even too much inteligent, but know how to use the surroundings. In that battlefield—where sound and shadow were as lethal as the sharpest blade—Lizbeth stood her ground.

The reason she'd been sent there was primarily because of her voice, and it proved to be a wise choice. Using her voice, she could unleash sonic bursts that disrupted the fractus' mimicry and scrambled their vocal attacks, allowing soldiers with electric arc weapons to finish them off during ambushes.

As the war escalated, something within her ignited—a spark she knew well in her heart. Another reminder of the Second World War.

Though her forces were formidable now, nothing she'd experienced so far compared to what was coming.

Seeing the fractus was like watching an anomaly ripple through the fabric of reality. They appeared as entities emerging from a higher dimension—first as diffuse shadows, then gradually revealing flashes of a defined form. Each appearance was a slow materialization, as if matter itself were reconfiguring before their eyes, forming from nothing.

Their shapes shimmered, unstable, fading and reemerging in a cycle of twitching surfaces—like beings caught in the act of becoming. Their movement wasn't within three-dimensional space. It was through it, as if they were some form of living tesseracts.

But the most disturbing part? What they were seeing was only the shadow of the enemy—not the enemy itself.

And yet, even the shadow could be struck and destabilized.

Witnessing it felt like watching a CT scan live, each frame revealing hidden layers of an existence that defied all logic. Every time they appeared, their three-dimensional projection reconfigured, and Lizbeth felt like was witnessing a lifeform that transcended known science.

The experience left her with a blend of awe and dread. Each encounter stirred questions her mind could barely articulate. These weren't beings content with a single form—they unfolded across multiple dimensions, as if each movement were part of some cosmic riddle.

Their presence was subtle and overwhelming at once, challenging the very laws of physics.

In those moments, Lizbeth felt small, insignificant in the face of a universe where everything she thought was real faded under the weight of the unknown.

It was a fleeting feeling—but it was always there. She'd seen too much in her life. But this—this was new for all of them.

As the fractus emerged and dissolved into the air, leaving a trail of uncertainty behind, Lizbeth understood they weren't merely enemies to defeat. They were a new window into the inexplicable—another sign that the barriers between dimensions were falling apart.

She thought of Shin, and his curse. The way the fractus manifested reminded her of how his armor formed around him. Wasn't it a similar process—emerging from within to wrap around his body?

Whatever the case, it was a question without an answer.

Shin wasn't there. But she was.

She might feel small against the enemy—but that didn't mean she couldn't face it.

Lizbeth spent weeks locked in battles across the United Kingdom, each fight was a relentless test of endurance and skill on everyone. Day after day, she faced the fractus without pause. And constant alertness became the norm— like a brutal rhythm of survival that left little room for anything else.

Each skirmish, each ambush in the urban labyrinth burned itself into her memory.

Regarding the platoon she was with, they treated her quite coldly at first, although the situation changed quickly, and she earned their trust and respect soon after. In just a few days, she found herself talking to them as equals. Among the battles, the few feys who had gradually joined were also well received. However, only she and one other fey survived after weeks passed. They also lost a mage and three reservists who had voluntarily joined not long before.

Lost battles, won battles. Dead comrades, and new faces joining the conflict.

And so, finally, the day arrived.

***

The news came like a bomb in the middle of the night. Lizbeth was at a military base in Ireland, finishing a patrol with the new platoon where she was in, when the communicators exploded with urgent transmissions.

At first, everyone thought it was a new fractus offensive, but when her comrades' faces turned pale and some exchanged looks before turning to her, she knew it was something else. Just as the girls had warned her days before, the announcement arrived. Everyone ran to the barracks' dining room.

The day had come.

It was a worldwide TV broadcast.

The base's holo screens showed the face of a high-ranking UN official, a man with a stone-cold expression who, with a mechanical voice, announced that the Secretary of the United Nations General Assembly would speak.

The skinny man looked at the cameras while clear nervousness could be seen on the faces of the representatives in the General Assembly hall. Finally, the man uttered the words.

The truth Lizbeth and her kind had hidden for centuries: feys existed, and not only that. Magic existed too. Not as myths, nor as stories buried in dusty books for children or just fantasy. They were real, had been among humans for generations... and some had fought, killed, and died in wars history never recognized.

Lizbeth nearly dropped her jaw when she saw Leon on that broadcast. Really, him? Whose brilliant idea had it been to have him as a representative? There were other feys she had heard of, and on one side she spotted the alchemist named Fu, whom she had visited long ago.

The silence in the dinning room was sepulchral. Lizbeth felt the eyes of her companions on her—a mixture of shock, fear, and and nervousness of what would happen in next days and weeks. Of course everyone knew what she and the other feys, mages and espers, were and until that moment, no one had cared. She was Liz, the fey siren who fought alongside them, the one who shared cigarettes on guard nights and told stories too old to be made up.

But now, with the truth exposed to the world, she was no longer just their squadmate. She was something more.

The cat finally was out of the bag—and it was fucking live for the rest of mankind.

Lizbeth let out a sigh, lit a cigarette with the calm of someone who had seen enough centuries of shit, and exhaled smoke with a tired smile. A weight had slipped off her shoulders. Whatever happened next, the world already knew.

"Well," she said sarcastically, "I guess we won't have to hide anymore. At least while this war lasts."

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