Angels don’t blow trumpets. They break the ceiling.

  There was no warning. The tempered, armored glass of the Botanical Garden’s dome, thirty meters above us, exploded inward. Thousands of shards rained down like razor hail.

  In the center of the glass rain, descending in a beam of golden light that vaporized the fog, was Miguel Polardo.

  He landed on the greenhouse floor. The impact created a crater, pulverizing the carnivorous plants around it. The shockwave threw us against the lab’s control panels.

  I stood up, spitting blood. My ears were ringing.

  I looked at him.

  Miguel didn’t have feathered wings. His wings were projections of Solid Light, blades of pure energy extending from emitters on the back of his silver armor. He wore a closed, smooth, faceless helm, with only a glowing cross where his eyes should be.

  In his right hand, he held the Blade of the Horizon. A longsword with no physical edge; it was made of superheated plasma contained by a magnetic field.

  "Arthur Veras," his voice didn't come from the helm. It came from everywhere at once, projected directly into our skulls by forced telepathy. "Sovereignty has declared you a Cancer. I am the Chemotherapy."

  "How poetic," I grumbled, checking if my bones were still in place. "You Paladins always had a flair for drama."

  Miguel raised the sword. Its heat made the giant ferns wither instantly.

  "Step away from the tank. That abomination will be purged. And so will you."

  Luna raised her baton, trembling. Valéria cocked the flamethrower, though she knew it was useless. Gristle roared but instinctively backed away from the Holy Aura (S-Rank) emanating from him.

  "You don't understand, Miguel," I said, walking slowly to the side, placing myself between him and Specimen Zero's tank. "What’s inside that glass isn't a demon. It’s a natural predator of mana. If you use that energy sword near it..."

  "Silence, heretic." Miguel flexed his knees. "Light does not fear darkness."

  He vanished.

  It was too fast for the human eye. But the Parasite saw it.

  [ALERT: HYPERSONIC DISPLACEMENT.]

  Arthur (the Parasite) moved my body on its own. I threw myself to the left.

  Where my head had been a millisecond before, the Blade of the Horizon passed, slicing the air. The vacuum left by the strike created a sonic thunderclap: BOOM!

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The console table behind me was sliced in half, the metal edges glowing molten orange.

  "Slow." Miguel rotated his wrist for a second strike. This time, he aimed for my legs.

  "Luna! Sonic Flashbang!" I shouted.

  Luna slammed the baton into the ground. A pulse of white sound exploded.

  It didn't hurt Miguel, but it destabilized his wing flight sensors for a second. He hesitated.

  It was the time I needed.

  Not to attack him. I'm not an idiot. I can't kill an Archangel with a scalpel.

  But I can change the battlefield environment.

  I spun on my heel and threw my heaviest scalpel.

  Not at Miguel.

  At the tank.

  The Mithril scalpel, reinforced with the full strength of my suit, hit the glass of the containment cylinder.

  There was a sickening CRACK.

  A spiderweb fracture formed on the glass.

  "What have you done?" Miguel stopped, his sword humming.

  "I opened the cage door." I smiled, blood on my teeth. "You said Light doesn't fear darkness? Let's test that hypothesis."

  The glass gave way.

  The blue liquid leaked out, flooding the floor.

  And Specimen Zero was released.

  There was no roar. The Ether Devourer didn't make noise. It subtracted noise.

  The mass of starry darkness floated out of the broken tank. It expanded like ink in water.

  Miguel, arrogant, attacked the creature.

  "DIE!" He brought the plasma sword down in a perfect arc.

  The blade hit the black mass.

  And vanished.

  There was no cut. The sword's energy was simply... drunk.

  The darkness swallowed the plasma. And grew.

  "What?!" Miguel stepped back, looking at his sword, now extinguished.

  Specimen Zero sensed the massive energy source that was the Archangel. The black mass shifted shape, creating vacuum tentacles that whipped toward Miguel.

  "RUN!" I screamed to my team.

  We bolted for the greenhouse exit while the two titans collided.

  Behind us, chaos was absolute. Miguel reactivated his light wings and began bombarding the creature with holy lances. Every lance that hit the darkness vanished, but the overload was making the creature "belch" waves of gravitational distortion.

  The ground shook. Plants were ripped up by the roots and sucked into the combat.

  "The van! Where's the van?!" Valéria shouted, kicking open the garden door.

  Werewolf Beto's Opala was outside, engine roaring. Beto had his head out the window, howling in fear.

  "Get in! The smell of that thing is making my fur fall out!"

  We threw ourselves into the car.

  "FLOOR IT, BETO!" I ordered.

  The car peeled out, skidding on the gravel, and shot through the Botanical Garden exit.

  I looked through the rear window.

  The greenhouse's glass dome glowed intensely—a blinding golden light—and then imploded. A sphere of darkness swallowed the entire structure, eating glass, metal, and light.

  Then, the sphere collapsed in on itself and vanished with a POP that made our ears bleed.

  "Did he die?" asked Luna, huddled in the seat.

  I looked at the data on my watch.

  [SPECIMEN ZERO ENERGY SIGNATURE: DISSIPATED (OVERLOAD).]

  [ARCHANGEL SIGNATURE: ACTIVE. DAMAGED, BUT ACTIVE.]

  "No," I replied, tasting bile. "The beast ate so much energy it popped. But Miguel survived. He'll crawl out of the rubble in a few minutes. And he's going to be very, very angry."

  Beto drove like a maniac through the streets of Curitiba, heading for the southern exit of the city.

  The Necropolis was on high alert. Fog sirens were blaring.

  "Where are we going?" asked Gristle, wiping soot from her face.

  I pulled the drive with my father's data from my pocket. It was warm to the touch.

  "North. To the heart of the beast." I looked at the holographic map of Brasília projected on the dashboard.

  Sovereignty had just shown us their power. A single man nearly killed us. And they had an army of them in the Capital.

  But now we had something they didn't expect.

  We knew their origin. And we knew they bled.

  "The next step, my friends... is radical surgery."

  The Parasite inside me settled down. It was tired, wounded, but evolving. With every battle, it learned.

  And so did I.

  The road ahead was long. But for the first time, we weren't running blind.

  We were going to war.