Chapter 1 ONE

The wall exploded before Ken could move.

The blast threw him off his feet and slammed him into the ground hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. Dust and fire everywhere. Screaming from every direction. When he looked up through the smoke, the west wall of Raven Force base was gone. Just a fifteen metre gap where reinforced steel used to be.

And something was walking through it.

Ken grabbed the weapon from the ground next to the Z-Band lieutenant who no longer needed it. His hands were not shaking. He did not understand why they were not shaking.

'Move,' something inside him said. Not fear. Not instinct. A thought that did not feel like his own.

He raised the weapon and fired three shots at the creature's head.

They landed. It turned toward him.

He ran.

He made it around the corner of the supply block before it caught up. The impact hit him from behind like a wall falling on him. He went face first into the ground. The weapon skidded away. The weight on his back was absolute.

This was how it ended. No band. No power. Not even a death worth remembering.

Then something cracked open inside his chest.

Not pain. The opposite. A warmth that started at his sternum and spread to his fingertips in under a second. His vision sharpened. Every sound around him separated into individual layers. The creature's breathing. The creak of metal above him. The distant thunder of something enormous moving through the northern part of the city.

And then a voice spoke inside his head.

Calm. Precise. Patient. Like it had been saving itself for exactly this moment.

"System activated. Adjusting to user. Do not be afraid."

Ken threw the creature off his back.

It hit the supply block wall hard enough to crack reinforced steel. It slid down slowly. It did not get back up.

Ken stood there looking at his hands.

"What is happening to me?"

"That is a long conversation," the voice said. "But right now there are four more coming through the west gap. Shall we continue it later?"

Ken picked up his weapon.

He had spent two years in this base as the unit joke. The soldier with no band, no power, no future. Every morning he ran laps before dawn because nobody had told him to stop. Every night he read tactics manuals nobody assigned him because the only thing worse than being nothing was accepting it.

He was still nothing right now.

But the four creatures coming through the gap did not know that yet.

"Later," he said.

He walked toward them.

"First mission assigned," the voice said. "Survive the next ten minutes."

Ken almost smiled.

'Almost.'

Outside the base the sky was a colour it had never been before. Deep bruised orange that had nothing to do with sunrise. And in the far distance, rising above the city like three new suns that nobody had asked for, something ancient had finally arrived.

Ken ran straight at the gap.