The Incident, as it was originally known as, started on an unassuming grey morning in the middle of May. I had met Beatrix on the way to school, which seemed to be the norm now, and the two of us had been making small talk as we walked the familiar route.

  “Weirdly cold for May,” Beatrix said, looking up at the thick grey clouds drifting over us. Drones puttered about in the skyline, small squads heading in seemingly random directions.

  “Mm,” I replied.

  “Is that... what do they call it... global warming? I thought, you know, Vetruvian Man was fixing all that shit. Purging excess carbon from the atmosphere, refreezing gciers, shit like that.”

  “Mm.”

  The sudden elbow to my ribs made me wince, and I snapped my gre toward her. “Rude to ignore people when they talk to you, dude,” she said.

  “... Sorry,” I said, puffing my cheeks out. “Just... thinking about stuff, I guess.”

  “You’re still worried about getting into the big fancy social club?” she asked, raising one brow at me.

  “Uh, I guess that’s part of it, at least.” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose and slowly massaging at it. “I think I care about my foster family.”

  She looked at me like I was a crazy person, and I suppose I couldn’t bme her for that. “Oh... no? Should we call the cops?”

  We rounded a corner, continuing on our usual route. “Being honest? I... never thought I would. In the past, foster parent were just... pces where I lived for a brief period. I had no faith in the people who took me in, they never gave me any reason to. I’d sort of thought I’d never have any type of family I’d care about. But... my current family are actually good. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  Was I really spilling my guts to Bea? I really did need to get my head checked.

  Beatrix considered this, slowly rubbing at her chin. “Well, uh, why is it a bad thing? Like yeah maybe you didn’t expect it, but you should be happy about it anyway.”

  I frowned, turning my gaze skyward as I tried to put my feelings into words. But every time I tried to articute it, I felt like an idiot. How did I say ‘I’m afraid I’m betraying my dad by being happy with a new family’ without sounding stupid or crazy?

  I opened my mouth to say... something, but the particur thought was wiped out in an instant by what happened in the very next instant.

  There was a cp of thunder so deafening that it seemed to make the ground shudder, joined by the sound of hundreds of windows shattering in an instant. The quakes hit half a heartbeat ter, rocking the street beneath my feet and nearly bowling over several other people on the street nearby.

  Waves of purple light sliced through the sky, like some great slew of knife wounds in the heavens themselves, darkness spilling out to bcken the clouds. It happened so fast that I could only blink skyward in bewilderment, trying and failing to grasp what I was seeing.

  Somewhere, blocks away from where we stood, came another roar of thunder. Arc of stark sapphire lightning nced through the air, striking distant buildings and burrowing clear through great swathes of bricks.

  “Shit!” Beatrix said, swiftly helping me to my feet. “What the hell is that?!”

  I watched as the drones in the sky twisted about, instantly making for the source of... whatever was causing such a commotion. Other people around us turned and ran, quick to put themselves as far away from all this as they could. Rather than doing the smart thing and running, I grabbed Beatrix and pulled her into a nearby alley.

  “We won’t know if we don’t get a better look. Come on.” With all the panic on the street, nobody was inclined to spare us so much as a fleeting gnce. I pulled my yo-yo from my jacket pocket and flicked it upward. Jets of air rocketed it upward, clearing over ten floors in only a few seconds, tching onto the top of the fire escape. I reeled myself up, and Beatrix swiftly cmbered up after me, like a speedy monkey.

  From our higher vantage point I could see across several blocks, toward what must have been the eye of the storm. Toward the busy intersection of Silver Avenue, where many cars had either been scattered like bowling pins or melted into molten sg, stood a churning maelstrom of red and purple light.

  I squinted, barely able to see a silhouette shaped in the heart of the alien energies. Vaguely humanoid, but with angur and crystalline facets covering its arms and torso. It was like some poorly rendered polygonal model from an old video game.

  The rift of energy surrounding the creature faded away, and it raised its arms to reveal six diamond-like fingers on each hand. But even with the pulsating rift gone, after if had scored a two-meter deep hemisphere into the ground, the darkness pulsing in the sky had not faded.

  “Is that... an alien? Or something?” Beatrix murmured.

  “It’s... something,” I replied, staining my vision. I fished my phone from my pocket and peered through the camera, magnifying it as best I could. Which wasn’t a whole lot...

  About ten drones had formed into a ring above the strange being and were barking orders at it, too far away for me to hear anything being said. An order to stand down and surrender, such was their nature.

  The creature’s head was a featureless crimson tetrahedron, no face or eyes to speak of, but it seemed to turn and focus on the drones. It flicked a hand toward them, the air rippled, and a wave of force punched clean through one drone and sent a cloud of metal shards erupting from its obliterated chassis. The rest of the drones opened fire, wasting no time on rubber bullets.

  From where we stood I could hear the chorus of whirring of their rotary guns, each of them unleashing a hail of high caliber gunfire. The angur being recoiled, sparks fshing up wherever the bullet struck. But, otherwise, it seemed unharmed. The shots that missed carved deep gouges into the asphalt and sidewalk, shredding them like swiss cheese.

  The drones had been designed to be able to harm Apexes with decent invulnerability gradients. I’d seen videos of their main guns shredding tanks. But the strange being, after getting its footing, remained unharmed under the consistent fire.

  What happened next happened so fast that I struggled to perceive it. The creature jumped high, cleaving two drones in twain with its bare hands. It spun around, hovering in the air. The front-facing facet of its head glowed crimson, summoning forth a focused beam of ruby light, slicing through several of the drones and colpsing the front of a nearby building in a spray of sparks and dust.

  “Whatever that thing is, I don’t want nothing to do with it,” Beatrix said, stumbling away.

  Frowning, I tuned and tossed my gym bag aside. My vilin gear was in there, concealed in bck pstic. “Gimme some privacy, I need to get changed.”

  Beatrix stared sckjawed at me. “You wanna fight that thing?!”

  “Fuck no. But if that thing comes near us, I have a tiny chance of surviving if I have my armour on.” I turned, gncing her way. “Send word to the other Devils. There’s strength in numbers, and I don’t think any of us want to be alone while that thing is rampaging around!”