BREW

They finally regrouped.

Merry, still standing atop the vehicle, leapt down and walked over to Commander Ran, blood dripping from her fingertips.

"We bought time," she said, "but barely."

Ran nodded grimly. "Main HQ support is arriving in 30 minutes. If no major nightmare breaches, we can hold."

"But they will," Merry muttered. Her voice was heavy. Cold. "We encountered a Level 2, borderline Level 3, but it wasn't the commanding type. It fought alone. That means it's not the source."

"We're just getting started. The true one's coming."

Ran glanced back at his team preparing for another wave. "Can we hold for thirty minutes?"

"Give me enough time I'll prepare a strong barrier, this commotion would certainly reveal something on public and we don't want that" Ran as ritual type lucid have a way to hide everything to normal people.

Putting barrier in a whole town wasn't easy, he needs Merry to buy as much time as possible.

Merry didn't answer right away. She looked at the sky again. The clouds were starting to twist.

And somewhere beyond the haze...

Something laughed.

T-minus 30 minutes.

The chaos had gone quiet.

Merry stood atop the blood-slick vehicle, eyes scanning the sky. The clouds twisted above like wet cloth being wrung by unseen hands. A low hum vibrated through the air—just below the edge of hearing. She stepped down onto the cracked pavement, boots echoing unnaturally in the silence.

Nothing moved.

The anomalies—gone. No flickers, no shadows, not even static. It was as if they'd never been there. A terrible calm had blanketed the town, like breath held before the scream.

Vanguard squads moved with caution. Eyes wide. Weapons drawn. The bloodied streets of the town looked like still frames frozen between heartbeats.

Then the ground pulsed.

"…Did the street just breathe?" a scout muttered.

Nobody answered.

Something shifted—subtly wrong. One Vanguard agent walked toward the end of a street only to find himself back where he started. He swore, retraced his steps. Same result.

"Map's looping," Ran said, staring at his malfunctioning tablet while completing the ritual. "GPS is cooked. Something's folding the terrain."

Then the comms flared.

Merry commanded orders.

"Merry? You said that already—"

Her blood ran cold. That was her voice—recorded, warped, echoing from five minutes ago.

"Comms are feeding psychic feedback," another agent said. "They're… remembering us."

The air warped. Lampposts leaned toward brick walls. Sidewalks cracked in spiral patterns like muscle tissue beneath skin. Distant buildings swelled, almost pulsing.

The town wasn't dead. It was mutating.

Merry's cursed scissors twitched.

T-minus 25 minutes.

A cracking sound broke the stillness.

Then the first black root erupted through the pavement, as if bursting through a shallow grave.

Twisted. Soot-colored. Breathing.

"We've got growths—unnatural flora. Negative resonance," a mage called out, dropping her scanning crystal as it sparked violently in her hand.

Then came more. Black roots snaked through alleyways, curling over wreckage, coiling like muscle memory. They hummed—a discordant vibration that crashed into electronics and disrupted psychic shields.

"Psychic field's destabilizing!" someone shouted. "Switch to visual confirmation only!"

"Squad Leaders: command via line-of-sight. Radios are compromised," Ran barked.

A nearby corpse twitched. From it bloomed a black flower. Pitch-dark, petals like burned velvet. A syrupy, sickly sweet scent poured out—burnt sugar and old grief.

"Don't breathe it in," Merry warned, stepping between the flower and her unit.

One mage clutched her head. "Something's puppeteering the battlefield... it's layering false auras. It's... not anomaly-born. It's external."

"Then it's feeding on this zone," Merry said, her voice tight.

Around them, the roots spread, reaching higher, wrapping around buildings and stretching toward the bleeding sky.

Commander Ran stood a few meters away, his hands glowing faint blue, weaving sigils in the air. Thin lines of ritual ink hovered above the ground—barrier symbols.

"I've started the cloaking field," he said. "The town's now hidden from the public eye. The barrier also slows territorial expansion."

"Good," Merry replied. "That gives us one less thing to lose."

Above them, thunder cracked—but it wasn't thunder. Something laughed again, this time closer.

And somewhere beneath the roots, the ground pulsed like a heart.