The world was burning.
More specifically, the Beol mountain range was being methodically unmade.
For the residents of Edas, a village carved into the bones of an ancient elven settlement, it was a waking nightmare.
Just hours before, the day had dawned with its usual rhythm.
The air was cool and crisp, carrying the scent of pine and dew-damp earth.
Hunters had already slipped into the shadowed woods; farmers were tending to their hardy, terraced crops.
A familiar tension had hummed beneath the surface….a concerning absence of travelers, golden pillars of light and the smoke choked skies of the south, from Orario.
The village's lifeblood as a trading stop was clotting.
Old Man Jam, the village chief, had finally sent a rider to investigate at first light.
None of that mattered now.
The earthquake came first, a violent shudder that cracked hearthstones and sent timber frames groaning.
Then, a sound like the sky tearing in two.
People stumbled into the streets, their eyes drawn to the far northern horizon where two impossible shapes circled and clashed.
They were leviathans of scale and wrath, one a brilliant, blinding silver, the other a void-black serpent wreathed in necrotic energy.
Bahamut and Falazure.
The shockwave of their collision moments later was a physical wall of air that shattered windows and knocked people off their feet.
But the true horror was the exodus their presence triggered.
The mountain's heart, seized by a primordial fear, vomited its contents.
Every monster, from the smallest kobold to the ancient things that slept deep in the stone, fled in a blind, panicked stampede.
Edas had been safe for generations, protected by a relic: the obsidian scales of the Black Dragon, gifted by forgotten heroes.
Its aura had been a barrier.
But now, with two equally terrifying presences scouring the land, the monsters' terror overrode their instinctive aversion.
They ran anywhere, and some, in their mindless flight, ran straight into Edas.
Now, as the sun bled away behind a curtain of smoke and ash, the village was a charnel house.
..........
The air reeked of iron, bile, and smoke.
Kaelen, a retired adventurer whose Level 2 status had faded with his youth but not his muscle memory, braced his spear against a fresh charge.
A giant boar, its eyes rolling white with madness, tusks gleaming red with the blood of his neighbor, thundered toward the shattered gate.
"Hold the line! For your children!" he roared, his voice raw.
A young woman, Eyra, stood beside him, her hands trembling as she nocked an arrow.
She wasn't a fighter; she mended cloths.
She let the arrow fly.
It thudded into the boar's shoulder, enraging it further.
It slammed into the barricade of overturned carts and splintered furniture, and the entire structure groaned.
Kaelen drove his spear deep into its neck.
Hot, coppery blood geysered over him, blinding him momentarily.
With a final squeal of agony, the beast collapsed.
Before they could catch their breath, a guttural chittering arose.
Three goblins scrambled over the boar's corpse, claws and teeth bared.
One leapt, sinking its filthy teeth into Kaelen's forearm.
He screamed, more in fury than pain, and smashed its head against a post with a wet, crunching finality.
Eyra impaled another on a farming pitchfork, retching as she had to put her foot on its chest to pull the tines free.
The third was clubbed down by a farmer wielding a splintered chair leg.
The brief respite was filled with the sounds of dying: the screams from the village square, the bestial roars, the desperate cries for help.
Kaelen spat blood, his body screaming in protest.
"They just keep coming…" he muttered, his defiance beginning to curdle into despair.
.........…
The Village Square.
This was the heart of the nightmare.
The carnage was centered on three young Bloodsaurus's.
Larger than oxen, with hide like cracked, iron-red leather and teeth like shards of broken pottery, they rampaged without strategy, driven only by a blinding, primal fear.
One had already cornered a group of families sheltering in the longhouse.
It lowered its immense head and charged, reducing the heavy oak door to a spray of splinters. The agonizing screams from inside were instantly cut short, replaced by a horrific, wet rending sound and the sickening crunch of bones being ground to marrow.
Old Man Caam watched from the cover of a smoke-filled smithy, his heart a cold, seizing stone in his chest.
He saw Elara, the village weaver, try to lead her two small children through a narrow alley, only for a giant, tusked boar…..to burst unexpectedly from a side path.
It didn't even register them.
It simply trampled them underfoot.
The only sound was a series of sickening pops and a single, short-lived cry that dissolved into silence.
Caam clamped a hand over his mouth, vile bile rising in his throat.
His village, his friends, were being erased from existence.
"To me! Form a wedge!" a voice bellowed, strong despite the terror.
It was Bren, the blacksmith, his great hammer held high, leading a handful of other able-bodied men and women armed with scythes, axes, and blazing torches.
They charged one of the Bloodsaurus's, successfully drawing its attention away from the smithy. Bren swung his hammer with all his might into the beast's foreleg.
The bone snapped with a sound like a frost-cracked tree trunk splitting under an axe.
The creature roared in a mixture of pain and blind rage, whipping its heavy, armored tail around. It caught two villagers, sending them flying through the smoke-filled air to land in broken, unmoving heaps.
They were buying time with their lives, and the currency was running out fast.
It was into this hell-scape that the Bahamut Familia arrived.
They moved not as individuals but as a single, perfectly lethal organism.
Their armor was scarred by a hundred fights, their faces grimed with soot and sweat, their eyes fixed not on the monsters below but on the smoky northern sky, where their goddess fought a battle that shook the mountains.
The stench of fresh death and the screams of the suffering had pulled them to this place.
Draco, the captain, did not hesitate.
His order was a single, sharp syllable.
"Engage."
The familia fell upon the remaining monsters with the power of a force of nature.
Eleni, her long sword a blur of silver, became a whirlwind amidst the packs of scrabbling goblins, leaving dismembered limbs and steaming entrails in her wake.
Clair's spear punctured the skull of a charging great boar with a single, brutal, and efficient thrust.
Nikolaos and Michalis moved in tandem, halting another monstrous charge and turning the creature into a sloppy, unrecognizable mush of hide and bone with their synchronized attacks. Dimitra's arrows found eyes and throats with unerring accuracy, each strike followed instantly by a gurgling, dying cry.
Vasileios massive shield battered monsters aside, creating necessary space, while his sister, Vasiliki, released a wave of chilling cold that froze a pack of goblins mid-lunge, leaving behind nothing but horrifying ice sculptures.
The surviving villagers could only watch, stunned into silence, as these demigods in mortal form swept their home clean.
Within seconds, the village square was quiet, save for the moans of the wounded and the dying crackle of burning debris.
The last Bloodsaurus fell to Draco's claw, its head pulled from its body with a messy, arterial spill.
Panting slightly, Draco wiped the slick gore from his hand onto his cloak.
It was clear he hadn't recovered from his previous battles…..with Mors, in particular...yet here he was, pushing himself without proper rest.
"Status?" he grated.
"Clear, Captain," Michalis replied, sheathing his twin daggers with a dry, metallic click.
The relief in the village was a palpable shift in the air, a collective, ragged exhalation of a people who had just stared into the gaping abyss.
Old Man Caam emerged from the smithy, his expression a mask of gratitude and overwhelming despair.
He stumbled toward Draco, grabbing the captain's cloak in trembling hands.
"Thank you," he choked out, tears finally breaking through his hard exterior.
"Thank you. But you… you must help us. You can't leave."
Draco's face tightened with weary impatience.
"We have other duties. We cannot stay."
"You don't understand!" Caam pleaded, his voice breaking entirely.
"The monsters are coming in waves! Sporadic, driven only by the battle moving through the mountains! You leave, and the next wave will find us utterly defenseless! We have nothing left!"
He fell heavily to his knees in the blood-soaked dirt.
"I beg you. My friend was a rider we sent to Orario a first light. I do not know if he lives. Do not let his journey and our sacrifices be in vain. Stay until the dawn, I, no we implore you."
The Bahamut Familia exchanged conflicted glances.
Their hearts were pulled north, toward their battling deity.
But their eyes were fixed here, on the blood-soaked soil, on the weeping, orphaned children, on the broken bodies of the weaver and her kids in the alley where the boar had passed.
The dilemma was a physical weight on Draco's shoulders.
He opened his mouth, prepared to give the order to split their forces...a compromise that felt like a painful failure on both accounts.
However, a new voice, clear and strong, cut through the tension.
"It seems we arrived too late to join the main feast."
Alise from the Astraea Familia strode into the square, her team fanning out behind her, instantly assessing the scene.
Relief flooded Draco, sharp and immediate.
"Alise! By the gods, your timing is divine."
"But why are you here?" Draco asked.
"Well, did you truly think us pretty and perfect girls wouldn't help our friends in their time of need?" Alise countered, a flicker of her usual confident smile touching her lips.
"I guess that was a silly question," Draco conceded.
"But how did you find us? I know you were still clearing up the city when we left?"
"Our arrival at this village was not coincidental," Alise began dramatically, puffing out her chest. "Ahem, and it's thanks to my sixth, utterly reliable sense, naturally."
"It was by coincidence," Lyra interjected dryly from behind her captain.
"We actually saw the thick black smoke rising from the mountains and came directly here, avoiding the main road."
"Oh, that makes considerably more sense," Michalis murmured, nodding his head.
"Lyra!" Alise growled, pouting at the disruption.
"Anyway, back to business," Draco interjected, shifting the focus.
"This village has been under siege from the mountain's exodus. We must go after our goddess. Can you girls secure this place and protect the survivors?"
Alise offered a brilliant, reassuring smile that instantly eased the tension in the square.
"Of course, Draco. That's exactly why we chased after you. To help. Go. We'll hold this village safe. You have my…."
Her next few words were utterly obliterated.
A pillar of gold light suddenly erupted from the far southern horizon, from the distant direction of Orario itself.
It shot into the heavens, a beacon of impossible brilliance that tore through the smoky twilight and the gathering night.
It was beautiful, serene, and utterly, fundamentally horrifying.
Every mortal and god knew its meaning without needing a word spoken.
A god had been killed on the mortal plane and was being sent back to Heaven.
The Astraea Familia stared, frozen solid.
Then, Alise fell.
It wasn't a stumble; it was the collapse of a marionette whose strings had been ruthlessly severed.
Her knees hit the bloody ground hard, her eyes wide, unseeing, fixed on that fading golden light. A small, broken sound escaped her lips.
It wasn't a scream; it was the terrible, raw sound of a soul being violently severed from its very foundation.
A simultaneous, agonized gasp ripped from every member of her familia.
They clutched at their chests or hammered their hands against their heads, stumbling as if struck by an invisible, massive hammer.
The light in their eyes… the divine spark of their Falna… flickered, guttered, and vanished completely.
Draco's blood ran cold.
His gaze snapped from the rapidly fading pillar of light to Alise's crumpled form, and then to her familia members…..Lyra, Iska, and the others...collapsing one by one as their divine blessings were irrevocably severed.
Their power, their skills, their very connection to the one who gave them strength and purpose… gone.
It didn't take a genius to understand the truth.
The Astraea Familia hadn't just arrived to help their friends.
They had arrived only to lose their goddess.
The nightmare for the village was not over.
It had simply found new, shattered hosts to inhabit.
As the last of the golden light faded, leaving behind only the hellish glow of the distant burning mountains, the survivors were left in a silence more terrible than any monster's roar.