Elena stopped beside the walkway and crouched to retie the loose lace on one of her rubber shoes.
Taylor waited with her hands resting on her hips, letting her gaze wander across Havenwall.
People moved carrying lumber, hauling water, or tending the community gardens. Children laughed somewhere nearby while the rhythmic sound of hammers echoed through the retirement community.
"You know..." Taylor said. "We should join that training camp the guys are planning."
Elena tightened the knot and stood, dusting the dirt from her pants. "Hmm..." she nodded. "Good point. I've always wanted to learn how to properly hold a gun."
Taylor smiled faintly. "Lucas taught me." She reached into her belt and pulled out a compact handgun, carefully holding it by the grip before slipping it back inside.
Elena let out a quiet sigh. "Two years in this shithole..." she muttered. "And I've never actually learned how to defend myself." She shook her head. "Kind of reckless, now that I think about it."
Taylor gave a soft scoff. "Well... yeah, kind of." She shrugged.
"But you have to admit, we spent almost a year inside VIRA Complex. Those walls were practically a fortress." She smiled to herself. "I never really felt like we needed to learn."
They resumed walking. "And then..." Taylor continued. "...Yve came."
Elena chuckled. "Then the sirens."
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Finally, Taylor broke the silence. "Come on. Let's go find Lucas." She smiled. "I'll ask him to sign us up."
Elena looked at her. "You're actually serious about this?"
"Yeah." Taylor shrugged. "Why not?"
Elena scratched the back of her neck as they walked. "Nothing..." she said. "I don't know."
She laughed softly.
"I guess when you've spent so long relying on other people to protect you..." She gestured vaguely toward the sky. "And then you've got sirens, flying horses, and all these mythological creatures watching your back..."
She smiled sheepishly. "...you kind of start believing you're safe."
Taylor's expression became thoughtful. "I don't know about you..." she said quietly. "But I'm not depending on that forever." Her thoughts drifted to Tyler. "I want to know how to properly fight." She looked ahead. "I want to be able to protect my son."
Elena nodded slowly. "...I get that." A long breath escaped her. "Yeah." She smiled. "Yeah... let's do it." Another beat. "We're signing up."
Almost immediately, she shivered dramatically.
"Although..." she groaned. "Just thinking about the training already makes me feel sick."
"Come on." Taylor laughed. "How bad could it be?"
Just then, Taylor caught sight of Lucas stepping out of their house. "Luke!"
Lucas turned at the sound of her voice. The moment he saw Taylor, a smile spread across his face. He walked over, meeting the two women halfway. "Hey." His eyes instinctively searched around them. "Where's Tyler?"
"With Lily," Elena answered. "They're with Caelum."
Lucas blinked. "...Caelum?"
Taylor laughed. "Ysa's flying pet horse."
Recognition dawned on his face. "Oh..." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Right. Sorry, I forgot." A hint of concern crossed his expression. "Is it safe to leave them there by themselves?"
Taylor nodded confidently. "Yeah. Ysa told me those creatures are especially gentle around children and infants." She smiled as a memory surfaced. "Sheila even laid her baby on Caelum's wing once." She couldn't help but giggle. "He didn't move an inch. Just stayed there frozen the whole time."
Lucas chuckled. "...Alright." His shoulders relaxed, then he stepped closer, resting a reassuring hand on Taylor's shoulder. "So... what's up?"
Taylor glanced at Elena before smiling. "We want to sign up for that training camp you guys are putting together."
Lucas looked pleasantly surprised. "Oh...really?"
Taylor nodded. "Yeah." She looked toward the busy streets of Havenwall. "I figured... a day might come when I'll need it."
"Same here," Elena added.
Lucas smiled. "I'd be glad to have both of you." His smile faded into a thoughtful expression. "I'm still trying to figure out how to organize the whole thing."
Elena tilted her head. "Wouldn't Dylan handle it? I mean…he was a soldier."
"I thought about that," Lucas admitted. "But then there are the sirens." He sighed. "They've spent a good chunk of their lives training for combat. Compared to us... they're in a completely different league."
Taylor folded her arms. "So you're planning to train these fragile human bodies using siren methods?" She raised an eyebrow. "Do you even think we'd survive that?"
Lucas let out a small laugh. "I honestly don't know." He scratched the back of his neck. "I've got a lot to figure out." He paused. "I'm even thinking about signing Tyler up."
Taylor stared at him. "...What?"
Lucas clarified. "Not now. But soon."
"No." Her answer came immediately.
Lucas blinked. "He needs to learn how to protect himself."
Taylor shook her head. "Our son isn't even a teenager yet." Her voice hardened. "He's not holding a gun."
"Honey..." Lucas held her gaze. "That rule doesn't apply in today's world anymore." He swallowed. "He needs to learn how to be responsible around weapons."
Taylor's jaw tightened. "No." She took a step closer. "That's my boy." Her voice trembled—not with fear, but conviction. "I'll learn how to fight for him."
Lucas met her gaze. "I still think he should learn, Tay." His voice remained calm. "As his father... I honestly believe that's what's best for him."
Taylor shook her head. "No." She folded her arms tightly across her chest. "I'm his mother, and I don't." Her eyes searched his. "Do you realize what happens the moment you teach him how to shoot a gun?"
Lucas frowned.
Taylor continued. "His childhood ends."
He blinked. "How? He'll still be a kid." He gestured helplessly. "He'll just be a kid who knows how to defend himself."
Taylor let out an exasperated groan. "Ugh..." She rolled her eyes. "You're impossible." The words came out more out of frustration than genuine anger. "He doesn't need to learn how to fight."
She pointed at Lucas. "We're his parents. We're supposed to protect him." She placed a hand against her chest. "I'll train. I'll work harder. I'll become strong enough to protect him myself."
For a long moment, Lucas said nothing. He simply nodded, understanding where she was coming from even if he disagreed. He drew a slow breath, about to answer—
A piercing shriek ripped through the air. It sounded like the whistle of a boiling kettle—
Only impossibly louder.
The sound echoed across the entirety of Havenwall.
A violent gust of wind swept through the streets. Dust, leaves, and loose tarps were hurled into the air.
People instinctively shielded their faces as the sudden blast whipped through the streets.
Then—
The sunlight vanished. A massive shadow swallowed Havenwall.
Lucas instinctively looked up. "...What the hell?"
Taylor and Elena followed his gaze.
Above them, something enormous drifted silently across the sky.
Horror spread across their faces, one after another. And just like falling dominoes. Chaos erupted.
Screams echoed throughout Havenwall.
Residents abandoned whatever they had been doing. Parents snatched up their children and ran for the nearest houses. Doors slammed shut one after another while others dove behind parked vehicles or whatever cover they could find.
"What is that?!"
"Oh my God!"
"Run!"
Panic swept through Havenwall.
Lucas didn't hesitate. The shock disappeared from his face, replaced by the calm focus of a leader. He turned to Taylor and Elena. "Get the kids," he ordered. "Then head straight to Jenkins."
Taylor's heart pounded so violently she could feel it in her throat. Even as fear threatened to paralyze her, she forced herself to nod. "...Okay."
She and Elena immediately broke into a sprint.
Lucas reached for the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.
He pressed the transmit button. "All security personnel," he said, his voice firm despite the chaos surrounding him. "Grab your weapons. We've got incoming. I repeat, we've got incoming. Over."
Almost instantly, acknowledgments crackled back through the speaker.
Lucas clipped the radio back onto his belt before unslinging the rifle from his shoulder. With practiced hands, he raised the weapon and aimed it toward the heavens.
Above Havenwall, an immense obsidian-black silhouette hovered in absolute silence.
Its colossal body blotted out the morning sun, casting the entire retirement community beneath its shadow.
Meanwhile, inside Havenwall's medical building, Darnell stood alone in what had once been the physical therapy gym.
Silence filled the spacious room.
Exercise machines stood neatly arranged along one wall. Treatment tables occupied the center, while storage cabinets lined the far end of the gym.
Darnell remained perfectly still. Beneath the skin at the back of his neck, the Artificer's Mark pulsed with a faint cyan glow. His pupils narrowed into thin, predatory slits.
The room before him began to change.
Not physically—
Only within his mind.
The exercise equipment dissolved into empty space. Treatment tables vanished, walls shifted, new partitions materialized, a long forge assembled itself against the eastern wall.
Crystal storage racks emerged beside it, each compartment meticulously sized for different grades of Volite.
Workbench after workbench unfolded into existence. Tool cabinets, energy pulsers, assembly stations, precision lathes, material shelves, testing benches.
Every object appeared exactly where it needed to be.
Invisible measurements stretched across the room like glowing blueprints. Distances, angles, weight distribution, workflow efficiency, structural load, ventilation, lighting—his mind processed thousands of variables simultaneously.
One thought flowed effortlessly into the next.
Forge here. Crystal refinement there. Assembly near the windows. Storage away from heat sources. Separate fabrication from testing. Optimize workflow. Minimize travel distance. Increase production efficiency.
The calculations never stopped. They simply... happened.
The Artificer's mind wasn't merely imagining a workshop; it was engineering one.
His neural circuits raced with impossible clarity, visualizing every beam, every bolt, every joint before a single tool had been lifted.
Then his thoughts expanded even further.
A more efficient water filtration system, improved irrigation for Havenwall's farms. And portable generators. Medical equipment. Replacement parts. Defensive fortifications.
Dozens of inventions branched through his consciousness, each spawning new designs before the previous one had even finished.
To an ordinary human, the flood of ideas would have been overwhelming.
To an Artificer...
It was simply how they thought.
Darnell's eyes remained fixed on the room before him, the faint cyan glow reflected faintly within his narrowed pupils.
The workshop already existed.
Reality simply hadn't caught up yet.
Just as his concentration deepened, heavy footsteps echoed through the hallway. They sounded distant. Muted.
Like voices heard beneath the surface of the sea.
His mind ignored them.
Then—
"Boss! Boss!"
Reality snapped back into place.
The cyan glow beneath the skin on the back of his neck faded almost instantly as Darnell flinched, his pupils returning to normal. "Heavens..." he muttered, placing a hand over his chest. "Don't do that."
A resident stood in the doorway, bent over with his hands on his knees, struggling to catch his breath. "W-What?"
Darnell frowned.
The resident looked up in confusion. "What?"
Darnell exhaled. "Never interrupt a siren while we're using our gifts." His tone was unusually serious. "You could get yourself killed."
The resident blinked, too out of breath to ask what he meant. Instead, he shook his head frantically and raised a trembling finger toward the large glass windows overlooking Havenwall. "L-Look..."
Darnell's brow furrowed. He slowly turned.
Outside...
People were running, screaming, and the streets had dissolved into chaos. And above Havenwall—
An immense obsidian-black object hovered silently over the streets, blotting out the morning sun.
Darnell's eyes widened. "...What in the..."
Before the resident could even catch his breath, Darnell was already moving.
He burst through the gym doors, sprinted into the hallway, and took the stairs two at a time, heading straight for the roof.
Darnell burst through the rooftop access door, reaching the rooftop in no time.
The cold wind slammed into him.
Without slowing, he sprinted across the concrete rooftop until he reached the edge overlooking Havenwall.
"HEY!" He threw both arms into the air. "HEY!" His voice echoed as he waved frantically at the colossal object above. "HEY! DOWN HERE!"
Below, panic consumed the streets.
Dozens of rifles remained trained on the immense black silhouette hanging motionless over Havenwall.
Then...
The craft slowly rotated, its forward section turning toward the medical building.
Lucas saw the movement. His pulse spiked. "It's targeting the medical building..." He raised his rifle. "All security teams."
A brief pause.
"...FIRE!"
CRACK!
Lucas's rifle thundered first.
A heartbeat later, the air erupted.
Gunfire echoed throughout Havenwall as dozens of rifles, pistols, and shotguns unleashed everything they had.
Round after round streaked toward the enormous obsidian craft. It was like trying to stop a tank...
With sticks and stones.
Lucas worked the action on his rifle and fired again while the others continued pouring rounds into the sky.
Then—
Every bullet stopped.
Hundreds of rounds hung motionless in the air. None of them touched the craft. They floated only inches from its obsidian hull, frozen as though time itself had stopped.
A translucent barrier shimmered into view for the briefest instant, revealing the invisible shield surrounding the colossal vessel.
Silence fell.
The gunfire ceased.
No one spoke. Not one even breathed.
"...What?" Lucas whispered.
A deep pulse rippled across the object.
Thin blue veins illuminated beneath its obsidian armor, coursing across the hull in perfect rhythm before converging around the invisible barrier.
The suspended bullets quivered.
Then—
They slowly rotated.
Every projectile now pointed back toward Havenwall.
Lucas's eyes widened. "EVERYBODY GET DOWN!"
A split second later, the barrier released them.
The bullets screamed back toward the ground.
CRACK!
CRACK!
CRACK!
The streets erupted into chaos.
Concrete burst apart. Windows exploded into showers of glass. Bullets tore through parked vehicles, rooftops, fences, and walls, ricocheting in every direction.
Most of the security team threw themselves behind cars and concrete barriers.
One guard didn't.
He was still staring down the sights of his rifle when a returning round slammed into the bridge of his nose.
The back of his skull burst apart in a violent spray of blood and bone. His body went limp before the rifle slipped from his hands, clattering against the pavement as he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
Another man cried out as a bullet ripped through his sides.
Lucas dove behind a parked truck. A searing pain exploded through his left shoulder. "AAAGH!"
The impact spun him sideways before he crashed hard against the pavement. Blood immediately soaked through his sleeve. Ignoring the pain, he looked up and spotted a wounded resident lying helplessly in the open.
"Move!"
He crawled through the hail of returning rounds, seized the man's vest, and dragged him behind the truck just as another volley struck the pavement where they had been moments before.
"NO!" Darnell's voice cracked across the rooftop. He watched in horror as the storm of bullets rained back upon Havenwall.
Blood stained the streets as the residents got hit, some dropping dead, others crawling, ducking for cover.
Darnell's breath caught in his throat, a strangled gasp lost in the storm. He slammed his hands flat against the ledge, his knuckles white. 'STOP!' he roared, the sound tearing from his chest. "NINE! ABORT! DISENGAGE THE DEFENSE PROTOCOL!"
~~~
Inside the ARC, Yve quietly wandered into her father's private quarters. The room remained untouched, exactly as he had left it. She sat on the edge of the bed and opened the bedside drawer. Inside rested a smooth stone frame, its polished surface carved with a family portrait.
Her father.
Her mother.
Ysa.
Yve.
The four of them...
Before everything had fallen apart.
A faint smile tugged at her lips as she brushed a thin layer of dust from the frame with her thumb. For a brief moment, she simply stared at it.
A soft chime echoed throughout the craft before the AI's calm voice filled the room. "Destination reached. Autonomous Navigation Intelligence entering Station Keeping Mode."
The overhead lights flickered faintly. Yve carefully returned the frame to the drawer and closed it before stepping into the corridor. The door slid shut behind her with a pneumatic hiss.
She had barely taken a few steps when the AI spoke again.
"Incoming hostile projectiles detected."
Yve stopped dead in her tracks. "...What?"
"Adaptive Defense Protocol activated."
Her heart dropped. "No..." She broke into a sprint. "Nine!" she shouted as she raced down the corridor. "Abort Adaptive Defense Protocol!"
"Countermeasure Sequence committed. Abort unavailable."
Yve's eyes widened. "NO!"
The intercom crackled to life.
"Duncan to Yve! Ysa! Command deck! Now! I'm locked out of the flight controls!"
Another door slid open ahead of her just as Ysa emerged from the opposite corridor.
The sisters locked eyes for only a split second before breaking into a sprint, racing side by side toward the command deck.
"Threat neutralization complete."
Yve dropped into the pilot's seat and gripped the primary command controls. "Nine," she said, her voice taut with urgency. "Disable Autonomous Navigation Intelligence. Transfer manual control to me."
"Autonomous Navigation Intelligence disabled," the AI replied calmly. "Manual command transfer complete."
The dormant control console came alive. Holographic displays blossomed into existence around Yve as the command interfaces illuminated one after another, responding to her touch.
Beside her, Ysa hurried to the operations console and activated the tactical display. A panoramic aerial feed unfolded before them.
Both sisters froze.
The streets below had descended into chaos. Residents sprinted in every direction while others lay bloodied across the pavement. Some desperately dragged the wounded toward cover as shattered vehicles burned and smoke curled into the sky.
Yve felt her stomach knot. "...Heavens."
Yve's hands flew across the holographic controls.
"Forward command hatch," she ordered. "Deploy pilot access."
"Confirmed. Deploying pilot access."
A section of the ARC's forward underside split open with a low mechanical hum. From within, a narrow staircase unfolded, each step extending outward in rapid succession as the entire assembly lowered toward the rooftop of Havenwall's medical building.
Ysa didn't wait.
The moment the staircase came within reach, she sprinted down it. Before the final sections had even finished extending, she pushed off the last step.
For a human, the jump would have shattered both legs.
For a siren...
She landed in a crouch atop the rooftop with practiced ease before immediately springing back to her feet "Darnell!"
He hurried toward her, relief washing over his face. "You girls activated the ARC?"
Ysa gave a quick nod. "We'll talk later." She was already running toward the rooftop door. "I've got injured idiots to heal." She disappeared down the stairwell.
Above them, the pilot staircase began retracting into the ARC.
Darnell took three running steps before leaping upward, catching one of the retracting steps. He pulled himself aboard and hurried through the forward hatch just before it sealed shut behind him.
The command deck was a blur of illuminated holographic displays.
Yve sat at the flight controls, making minute adjustments as the ARC settled into a perfectly stable hover above the medical building. "Darnell," she acknowledged without looking away.
He stopped beside her. "You girls activated the ARC?"
"Yes."
His expression hardened. "Did you obtain authorization from the Galactic Council?"
Silence.
Neither Yve nor Duncan answered.
"...You didn't?" Darnell frowned, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Duncan rubbed the back of his neck. "I couldn't exactly stop them."
Darnell looked at him. "You know the restrictions."
"I do."
"Then why?"
Duncan sighed. "Because waiting months to years for a permit isn't exactly an option while we're trying to find solutions to time-constrained problems..."
Darnell opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again. "...Why the ARC?" he asked instead. "We had other kinds of transport vehicles."
"We considered them," Duncan replied. "None made sense." He gestured toward the cargo manifests displayed on one of the consoles. "We weren't just transporting ourselves."
"Tidecrafts. Pegacampi. Medical supplies. Volite reserves. Energy Pulsers. Personal belongings requested by the other sirens." He exhaled. "The ARC was the only vessel capable of carrying everything in a single trip."
Silence.
Then Duncan continued. "Not to mention the other crafts have been sitting idle for centuries." Duncan shook his head. "Some, for millennia. I wasn't willing to gamble everyone's lives on systems that hadn't been powered in millennia."
Darnell remained quiet. "...So you chose the one ship the Council prohibited."
"It was the safest ship we had," Duncan answered.
Yve finally spoke, her eyes still fixed on the controls as she made another small correction to the ARC's position. "The Council probably already knows."
The words hung heavily in the command deck.
"The moment we powered up the ARC, every long-range monitoring array in the galaxy would have detected it." She released a slow breath. "So whatever happens after today...we'll deal with it."