The footage sputtered out in a burst of static.

No one spoke.

Only the soft hum of the command centre filled the silence, broken by the occasional crackle from an overhead light struggling to stay on. Cold, digital light bathed their faces in pallid shades of blue and white, casting long shadows against the reinforced walls.

Derek didn't blink. He tapped the console again. The image jumped back a few seconds, just before the feed had been lost. With two fingers, he expanded the frame—once, twice, three times—until the pixels broke down into smears of colour and noise. But there it was.

Blurred. Grainy. Almost missed it in the chaos.

A shape.

No—a claw.

Long. Black. Curved like a scythe, obsidian-smooth and gleaming as if polished by something unholy. It had struck faster than the drone's sensors could react. It hadn't just hit the drone—it had anticipated it. Executed.

Derek leaned in, jaw tightening. "That," he said, pointing with a sharp motion, "is not a B-rank beast."

Andrew narrowed his eyes. "A-rank, maybe?"

"No." Derek's voice was low, almost distant. "The drone was flying at over six hundred miles per hour. That thing saw it. Reacted. Destroyed it mid-air."

He turned from the screen and met their eyes, one by one.

"We're looking at an S-Rank. At least."

A heavy silence fell like lead.

General Miles let out a curse under his breath, pushing his hat back. "If that thing reaches the heart of the city—"

"It won't," Derek cut in.

All eyes turned to him.

"Yvalna and I will intercept."

At his side, Yvalna blinked once. Her face betrayed nothing, but her eyes flicked briefly to the frozen claw on screen before she gave a slight nod.

The others also turned their attention to the otherworldly beauty beside Derek; they had felt she possessed a strong aura, but they did not think she was that strong.

"An S-rank beast, with Phantom Cloud, we can suppress it long enough to learn its nature. Maybe even kill it." Derek thought.

" The S-rank might be dangerous, but the beast horde is more dangerous. The two of us will not survive under the attack of that many beasts, we will be outnumbered, and regular soldiers joining will prove no use "

"Andrew"

Andrew, still hunched over the console, suddenly tapped the interface. A new screen blinked into place: a tactical grid of the city, dotted in blue. Civilian and soldier biometrics, live feeds, identification tags.

"These are everyone we've observed who shows signs of mana mutation," he said. "Enhanced reflexes, denser muscle mass, abnormal pulse regulation. Their bodies are changing—but they haven't awakened yet. They're pre-phase."

He zoomed in on a quadrant. The icons pulsed softly.

Derek's brow furrowed. "How many?"

"Over twelve hundred. Maybe more by now."

"And you want to awaken them?" a female colonel asked, folding her arms.

Andrew nodded. "With the right catalyst, yes."

"Mana stones," Derek said slowly, connecting the thought. His eyes narrowed as his mind raced ahead. "We've been harvesting them from the fallen. Different elements, different resonance frequencies..."

Andrew's eyes gleamed. "We match the right stone to the right candidate. Push them through. We don't just have survivors anymore. We have a militia."

There was silence again. But this one was different.

Hope—dangerous, raw—sparked at the edge of the room.

Mayor Harkland, seated in the corner with a deep scowl, rubbed the sides of his head as if warding off a migraine. "You're proposing we create a population of superpowered civilians overnight. In the middle of a siege. While you go off chasing a skyscraper-sized deathclaw through a burning city."

Derek cracked his knuckles slowly, the sound cutting through the hum of servers and tension like distant thunder.

"Welcome," he said, "to the apocalypse."

The mayor let out a long, slow breath and muttered something too quiet to catch.

The room began to stir—hands moving to comms, soldiers relaying orders, analysts pulling files on stone resonance, awakening rates, priority sectors. Technicians rushed toward the storage vaults to inventory the mana stone stockpiles. The atmosphere turned kinetic.

A war machine turning.

Yvalna stepped closer to Derek, her tone quieter now. "Do you really think this will work?"

Derek's eyes stayed fixed on the screen, on the frozen claw, still gleaming with otherworldly menace. The enemy marched closer with every second, their formations horrifyingly clean.

"I don't believe," he murmured. "I run the numbers. And this is the best statistical chance we have left."

She looked at him for a beat longer, then let a small smile pull at the corner of her lips. "Good. I was getting bored."

Derek smirked faintly, then reached to shut down the console. "Then suit up."

He tapped the city map again. The advancing wave of red icons pushed forward with a grim, algorithmic steadiness.

"We move at dawn. I'll buy the city one more day."

The overhead light finally gave out with a sharp snap, plunging the command centre into a flicker of auxiliary reds and backup whites. Still, no one moved. They didn't need perfect lighting to understand what they were facing.

A storm was coming.

Derek pulled on his gloves with mechanical precision, each motion sharp, deliberate. The silence fractured again—this time by the rising drone of activity beyond the room. Boots stomping. Crates are being moved. Field engineers barking orders. The city's last heartbeat is accelerating.

"We've got about twenty hours," Andrew said, stepping beside him. "Judging by the horde's trajectory, if they maintain their current speed, they'll breach the outer perimeter by then."

"And if I can delay them at the choke point?" Derek asked without looking.

Andrew didn't miss a beat. "You might buy us another twenty. Forty total, at best."

Derek nodded. "That's enough."

"For what?" Evelyn asked, walking back into the room with a new tablet in hand. "You're talking about delaying a horde, not stopping it. And even if we awaken those twelve hundred, most won't be ready in forty hours. Many won't even survive the surge."

"We're not aiming for perfection," Derek replied. "We're aiming for resistance. Disruption. If even two hundred make it through the awakening stable and battle-ready, it changes the calculus."

"And if none of them do?" General Miles asked, voice hard.

"Then we make sure they die buying time," Derek sighed.

Maya glanced sideways at him and said in a low voice. "Th...that's cold"

'That's math. " Though he did not like the idea himself, this was the only way out; they could only pray and hope that the figures were better than their expectations.

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