BANG.
This time the impact was stronger than before.
Metal screamed, not metaphorically. The reinforced gate actually screamed as it deformed, buckling inward like aluminum foil crushed in a giant's fist. A crater bloomed across the thick steel surface, edges warped and twisted into impossible geometries. Fractures spiderwebbed outward from the impact point.
The guards who had been dozing at their posts, lulled by weeks of relative safety, by the false comfort of walls and weapons were jerked awake with panic.
One of them— a young man, barely older than Ishiki scrambled up the watchtower ladder to get a better view. He reached the top and looked over the wall.
As he saw beyond the walls, his face transformed into something ghastly. All color drained. Eyes went wide enough to show white all around the iris. Mouth opened but for a heartbeat no sound emerged.
Then he shouted.
"XENONS! SIX OF THEM!"
Ishiki's blood turned to ice.
Six? wasn't that an abnormally high number for mindless beasts to be moving around with each other.
Before the guard could say anything else, even before he could ring the alarm bell or raise his weapon to do anything that might have saved him.
Something rose over the wall.
A hand.
But calling it a hand was obscene understatement. Like calling a hurricane a breeze. Like calling an execution a disagreement.
The thing was enormous—easily twice the size of any Xenon limb Ishiki had seen. Fingers thick as tree trunks extended from a palm wide enough to cradle a grown man. The skin was mottled gray-green, diseased-looking and covered in growths that looked like tumors? scales? or maybe calcified flesh? Ishiki had no idea of categorizing something like that.
It grabbed the guard.
Just... reached over the fifteen-foot wall and plucked him from the watchtower like a child picking up a toy. The young man's scream cut through the night.
Then the maw appeared.
It rose above the wall like a nightmare clawing its way out of hell's throat. A mouth—if that word could possibly apply to what Ishiki was witnessing. It opened wide enough to swallow a person whole. Rows of teeth, jagged and irregular like broken glass arranged in concentric circles. A throat that led down into darkness absolute.
The hand brought the screaming guard to that maw.
And the jaws closed.
The screams of the young man were cut off mid-note. Punctuated by smaller sounds of bones breaking, meat tearing, something liquid hitting stone—that painted a picture no sane mind wanted to complete.
Just like that the young man's youth, hope and his desire to live were all stripped away in an instant.
Silence fell like shroud over the whole camp.
Then chaos erupted.
Alarm bells rang from every corner. Lights blazed to life. People poured from tents and the buildings, some armed, most just terrified and running around to get to better security. Children crying and their relatives trying to act tough but feeling useless against the fear of death.
The organized structure of the camp dissolved within mere seconds.
On the roof, Ishiki and Kenji stood frozen, weapons still raised, minds struggling to process what they'd just witnessed.
"That..." Kenji's voice came out strangled, barely above a whisper. "That wasn't a normal Xenon."
"No." Ishiki's grip on Black Tether tightened until his knuckles went white. "It wasn't."
'Goddamnit! What is happening, now of all times.'
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Three more impacts hammered the gate in rapid succession. Three more craters bloomed across its surface like malignant flowers. Metal groaned under assault from things that looked like horrors too large, strong and too fucking wrong, to be the shambling corpses they had fought before.
"We need to go." Kenji was already moving toward the stairs. "Now."
'Screw this, I am not even fully healed yet. Do I need to fight to protect them?' He gritted his teeth, and ran behind Kenji.
He wanted to argue there but decided against it. Because the alternative to fighting would be, looking at people die, children being devoured and this place turning into a graveyard.
As the two of them were moving down, the building shook—or maybe that was just Ishiki's perception, but something was wrong here.
They burst out of the dormitory building into absolute chaos.
The organized settlement of survivors now looked like an anthill someone had kicked. People running desperately towards the school building with terror and the desperate hope that running there might somehow be safer than standing still.
"ALL THE CIVILIANS, PLEASE DO NOT PANIC AND GATHER AROUND THE BUILDING." The princess's voice cut through the panicked stamped as she walked out from the school building.
As Ishiki watched, pixels materialized around her body—glowing fragments of light coalescing into physical form and then turned into the same armor she had worn on the day she returned from the trial, but it was completely whole now and gleamed under the moonlight.
But there was no weapon in her hand.
Ishiki looked around and spotted kaori who stood just some distance away from him, her face was twisted in a dark and bitter expression. The Pixels turned into her armor around her body and her sword materialized in her hand.
Kenji and Ishiki ran to her. "What... what exactly is happening?" Kenji gasped, taking deep breathes.
Behind them, Akari reached, her face pale, eyes wet and her expression hovering on the edge of breakdown. She must have seen the maw and the thing that ate the innocent guard boy.
Kaori looked at them and then, bizarrely sat down on a supply crate and bit at her nails like a nervous student before an exam. "I... I can't fight. As you know my powers become ten times lower during night. I am just a bit above a normal human right now. Maybe slightly stronger and faster. But against those things?" She laughed darkly. "I'd die in seconds."
Her eyes found Ishiki, desperate and calculating in equal measure. "Is your arm fixed now? Can you fight?"
Ishiki looked at her with narrowed eyes, what if he were to say that it hasn't. Would he be prohibited from fighting? Would he not have to fight then?
'It doesn't matter now. I will have to fight regardless.'
"Yes, I can use it alright now."
She nodded and then said with a dark tone. "Help that bastard Shen fend them off." She grabbed their wrist, squeezed hard enough to hurt. "Don't die. I don't want my team to be in shambles even before the Scenario."
They both looked at her and nodded, there was no time to argue.
Through the chaos of fleeing civilians, dodging people who'd frozen in terror, leaping over abandoned supplies and overturned crates. They ran to the front.
The sounds of destruction grew louder with each step—metal shrieking, wood splintering, something massive hitting the gate again and again.
Then the gates gave way and the horrors became visible.
Those massive hands—Ishiki could see them clearly now, three of them, each belonging to something that rose behind the destroyed gate like mountains of malformed flesh.
His mind struggled to categorize what he was seeing.
They were Xenons, technically speaking. They had the same basic structure—humanoid, sort of. The same mottled gray-green skin. The same wrong anatomy of human origin twisted into something monstrous.
But these weren't the shambling corpses he'd fought in either the mall or his trial.
These were something else.
One of them stood twelve feet tall at minimum. Muscles bulged beneath skin like tumors, asymmetrical and grotesque. Extra limbs sprouted from backs and sides, arms that ended in claws, external outgrowths that might be organs exposed to air.
One of them had three heads. Another had no head at all, just a torso that split open vertically to reveal that massive maw Ishiki had seen from the roof. A third walked on two arms, its legs fused together into a tail that dragged behind it like a massive club.
Ishiki paled. 'What in the hell are these?'
"Oh fuck," Kenji whispered beside him and then went ahead and emptied his stomach. They were ugly beyond reason.
"HOLD THE LINE!"
Shen's voice came. The handsome bastard was already standing besides the princess, sword drawn and positioning combat-ready Players in a defensive formation. The tall man stood beside him like a wall of muscles.
Maybe two dozen armed Players in total. Against six of these... things.
The math wasn't good.
The lead creature—the one with three heads, each looking in a different direction with eyes that glowed faint red, opened all three mouths simultaneously and roared.
The sound was so ugly and strong that, Ishiki felt it in his chest, his teeth, his bones.
Then the six creatures charged.