~In the village of Havar, five miles east of Gallios-Five~

  {Are you sure you don't want to move back home? How many Protectorate ships need to deploy to that area before you change your mind?}

  "Hang on, one sec." Jackie put the phone on the table in front of him. The snow pants he just bought to replace his old ones had proven ten times more annoying to put on. It took him several minutes to get them pulled up and properly fastened, but his old ones were gone now, so he didn't have much of a choice.

  When he was finally fully geared and ready to leave, he picked the phone back up and chuckled, "Mother, dropships are large, loud, and annoying. That's the only reason you even know the Protectorate was out here at all. Come on now. You and I both know that your city has a far higher crime rate. That new neighbor of yours was found dead a few months back too! I don't know if you need a reminder, but nobody has been killed in my village, or even the outpost itself in a long time."

  {Then why does the Protectorate keep going there? I can't find any news about it in the Archives either...}

  "I really don't know why, but there hasn't been anything out of the ordinary happening here, and it's been like that for all of the twenty-two years I've lived here. So don't worry, okay?"

  Jackie chose not to mention the alarm system that had suddenly sounded out a few hours prior. He still didn't know why it had happened, and anyone he called in the outpost was just as confused as he was.

  {I know that, but---}

  His mother's voice was suddenly cut off and replaced with a low static hum.

  "Mother? Can you hear me? Hello?"

  He waited a bit, but he could only hear static on the other end, and when he hung up to test the network connection, he continued to only hear static through the earpiece.

  Are the phones really down? That's never happened before...

  While the alarm by itself had only slightly unnerved him, the phones going down a few hours later had made the situation far more worrying as a whole.

  Jackie looked at the timer next to his fryer and sighed. The storage tanks needed to be checked; he couldn't put it off any longer. His siphoner was still running, and he didn't have much faith in the super-old fail safe he had attached to it.

  He then pulled the hood tight over his head and locked in the face mask. The news and archives had said that it was going to be warm for several more days, but starting around an hour prior it had suddenly chilled and began to snow again.

  The front door made a loud creaking noise as he pulled it open. Jackie immediately sighed when he saw the large blizzard waiting outside for him. All he could see in the village was around a dozen home lights, the incredibly bright purple light above the Protectorate substation across the street from his home (that nobody ever used), and the line of street lights leading away from the village.

  He really did not want to leave the village at the moment, but there were several different ways his siphon system could break if he just left it be without draining the tanks, and he couldn't risk that.

  As he closed the door behind him he could hear someone laughing at him through an amplifier. He knew exactly who it was too. One of his neighbors, 'Wilson', an all around asshole that nobody wanted anything to do with.

  Just screw off already, will you... I'd buy a brand new self-regulator system if I could.

  Most of the people in the village made their living draining pure unrefined Moonblood out of the vein behind the village. There was very little worry of anyone stealing the tanks since the unrefined version of Moonblood was barely worth enough to survive in a remote village like his. As such, no security was needed. It was a horrible silver lining to have, but a silver lining all the same.

  Around halfway to the cave housing the vein, he could feel the hairs on his arms stand up. It wasn't a reaction to electricity, but more so a fear of something nearby. Jackie stopped and looked all around him, but past the street lights, he literally couldn't see anything.

  .....

  He started walking again, but he just couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching him. His legs had even begun to wobble a little by the time he was nearing the cave.

  The second he reached the cavern door, he whipped it open and slammed it shut behind him. It had no lock on it, which was only making his anxiety worse.

  Come on, Jackie, you didn't see anything out there. Stop freaking out over nothing and do your job.

  He ran over to his siphoner near the back of the cave and confirmed that his fail safe had indeed shut the pump off, which meant the tanks were full, but despite what he had told himself moments ago, Jackie really didn't have it in him to pump the tanks into drums at the moment. It would take him hours to fill the drums up and get them on the trolley that led to the warehouse, and all he could think about was going home and holing up in his basement until the blizzard was over.

  After removing the power source to the siphoner, he walked back to the cave's front door and forced himself to immediately pull it open. He knew if he didn't leave right away, he'd just end up cowardly staring at the door for an hour.

  Jackie walked back out into the blizzard, which didn't look any worse than when he had entered, but everything around him just felt off now. It went far past a simple feeling of inexplicable fear. It was beginning to feel like he wasn't even in the same village he had lived in for over two decades.

  While trying to force as many thoughts of his warm home to the forefront of his mind, he continued walking home along the line of street lights until one of them suddenly turned off. It was four lights ahead of him, so around sixty meters away.

  He stopped in his tracks, staring at the dead light which swiftly turned on and off again. During the split second it was on, Jackie saw a tall, dark-gray figure standing underneath the light. That by itself was already horrifying enough, but what really sent Jackie over the edge was that he had heard tales of the creature for his entire life, but everyone grew up knowing it was nothing more than a scary story to keep kids from venturing too far away from their homes.

  A Werewolf...?! That was a Werewolf, right?!

  The light flickered rapidly. While it flicked, Jackie swore he could still see the creature, but when the light fully turned back on, there was no longer anything underneath it.

  Even though the creature had been in the path ahead of him, Jackie wasn't thinking about anything except getting home. All he knew was that staying outside meant he was going to die, so his legs went into overdrive, running forward as fast as they could take him.

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  When he reached the light in question, it turned off again, and he immediately felt many different intense auras wash over him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered being told when he moved into the village that the street lights were imbued in a way to protect any Humanoids within their radius.

  His mind went completely blank in that moment. He just ran and ran, thinking about nothing but getting home.

  The next couple of minutes were a blur, and when he was finally able to calm down and take note of his surroundings, Jackie realized he was sitting down inside his house, leaning against his front door.

  I'm alive...?

  No matter how he looked at it, he should've been dead back there, which in some small way made him wonder if he had just imagined it all, but he knew that was just wishful thinking.

  Jackie stood up and tried the phone one last time. After confirming it was still dead, he ran into his bedroom and pulled open an entrance on the floor that led to the secret room his Father had made for him back when we first moved in. He kept it clean and well stocked, but he never thought he'd ever actually want to use the place.

  He crawled down onto the ladder, and when his whole body was inside the shaft, he pulled off the glove on his right hand and pushed his thumb into the soul-reader placed on the wood behind the ladder. Immediately, the entrance closed itself and sealed shut.

  The descent only took a few seconds to finish. It was about twenty meters underground. It housed one bed, an area off to the side to store food, water, etc., and it had a desk on it with a very tiny TV that he hadn't tested in years.

  Jackie moved to the desk and turned the TV on. It came to life, but all of the channels produced nothing but static.

  I really am cut off completely... Are the neighbors the same? I would think so, but Wilson the asshole has night vision equipment, and he's almost always keeping an eye on the outside, which is why he saw me within seconds of leaving my home earlier. If something really was out there, he would've turned on that annoying alarm of his already.

  Scratch

  Scratch

  Scratch

  Jackie turned the TV off and looked at the small ornamental crystal in the corner of the room. It was attached to a tetra crystal piece inserted into the wall on the main floor, so that it could relay audio to him.

  The sound of something scratching at his front door was already enough to put him back into a state of petrified fear, but he practically jumped when the sound of his door being broken exploded around him. He ran over to the ordained crystal and grabbed it, turning the dial on the side way down.

  And that's when he heard the other sound he had been expecting. Wilson's alarm. However, it only lasted for about five seconds before it ramped down to nothing in much the same way any audio system would if it had been broken.

  Two sets of feet stomping around echoed from above. One pair was already heavy enough, but the other pair sounded like they belonged to someone who weighed eight hundred pounds.

  Dishes, glasses, furniture. All of it was breaking as the large creature stomped through the house. But what worried him the most was the sniffing. The dog-like sniffing he could just barely make out through all of the crashing. It started out loud, suggesting it was close to the tetra crystal placed near the front door, but then it faded a bit as it made its way through the house.

  A few seconds later, he heard something scratching at the hidden entrance he had just descended, and that's when the crashing in the kitchen stopped. Whatever was doing that had heard the Werewolf trying to enter something and was coming to help it.

  At that, Jackie knew there was only one way out. There were two entrances into the hidden room, but he hadn't tested the other one a single time since it had been created. It already seemed ridiculous enough that he had a secret cellar; why would he ever need an even harder-to-find second entrance? That's what he had thought anyway, and normally he would've been right.

  But where would I even go?! There has to be more of these things since Wilson was hit too, so where would even be safe at this point?!

  The train was always there during the night, and he knew how to run it by himself, but it was a mile southwest of his home, so there was no way he'd ever make it. Only if a miracle descended and he somehow was able to run there while not being detected by anything outside, but that wasn't going to happen.

  Just then, he thought about that large annoying purple light he could see from his bedroom window for the past two decades.

  The Protectorate substation... That's my last hope.

  He knew it had a single Android inside of it, and everyone knew how powerful those things were. It wouldn't defend him unless he was being attacked in its jurisdiction, which was the building itself, so he just needed to make it there.

  Jackie walked over to the area next to the bed and climbed up the ladder that led to his kitchen. The exit was right next to his fireplace, and he could feel the heat radiating off the walls on his right side as he climbed up.

  Please work, please work...

  He pushed his thumb into the soul-reader, and the wall above quickly slid to the left. Jackie could feel his gut sinking as a loud screeching accompanied the door's movement. It was only meant to be used in emergencies, so it wasn't supposed to make any noise, but unfortunately, the second the wall started moving, it made a loud wood-on-wood grating noise.

  Jackie pulled himself up in a hurry and rushed out the front door. The Werewolf from inside his house immediately roared in anger while trying to leap through his bedroom window. Sadly for the creature, it was unaware that the window was reinforced, so only part of the window broke as it jumped into it. Jackie stole a glance backwards to see that the top half of the Werewolf's torso was stuck inside the window. Blood was pouring down the jagged pieces of glass that pierced into the creature's body.

  To his right he could see someone under a distant house's light running without any of their snow equipment on, but the cold was the least of their problems. A large Werewolf leapt from outside the house's lighting, landing directly on top of the person's back, smashing them into the snow. It then pulled the person's upper half up and snapped their oversized jaw down onto them. Its front teeth landed around the person's midsection, and while he only watched it for a second, Jackie could see the creature whipping back and forth as it ripped into his neighbor's body.

  He heard the large creature in his house break through the walls soon after that, but he was transfixed by what he saw on the left. The street lights were all out now, but he could see just fine around the eight-meter-tall Demon as it continued channeling into a vortex behind him. Jackie could only see a giant eye inside the vortex, but far more worrying was the thirty-five-meter-tall monster in the woods behind the Demon. He could just barely see its outline and all of the crows flying around it, but he knew it was looking right at him.

  The monster appeared to be feathered, with large wings, and it was holding a staff in its left hand that was firmly planted into the ground. The monster was probing his soul, and likely the souls of everyone in the village. Jackie felt like throwing up as a disgusting aura wrapped around his soul and began poking into it.

  The entrance to the Protectorate's building opened up as he neared it, and as he ran inside, it immediately sealed shut behind him.

  "Citizen Jackie Helmsworth, you are safe now." The Android behind the desk walked out from behind it and helped Jackie to his feet, "Worry not. I cannot currently connect to the main network, but I have relayed a distress call to the Protectorate currently stationed at Gallios-Five's outpost. They will be here within the hour."

  "Are we really going to be okay in here?!"

  "We will. Only an aged and powerful God would be able to tear these walls down in an hour. They are designed to--"

  The building itself began to crack all over. A cacophonous sound of cracking raised in tempo until eventually Jackie couldn't hear anything except a loud ringing noise.

  He watched as the walls slowly crumbled upwards into the sky, beginning with the roof, and eventually, so much of the upper portion of the building was gone that Jackie could see that the monster in the woods was pointing his staff at a vortex in the sky that was sucking up all of the building's materials into it. He himself however felt no such pull, and neither did the Android who was now rushing outside to crush the invaders.

  Jackie could feel his heart beating out of his chest as the building gradually dwindled to nothing. The next thing he saw was the Demon's horned head, and then several slightly smaller Demons holding large gilded weapons.

  And then finally, the Werewolves.

  To the left, the Android was ripping the head off of a Werewolf while crushing one of the approaching Demon's knees with a swift sideways kick, but Jackie didn't see or hear any of that. Most of the eyes there were on him now, and all he could think about was how much he wished he had listened to his Mother when she first asked him to return home months ago.

  A large clawed hand grabbed him from behind, stabbing him in multiple places around his right shoulder as it slammed him into the ground. He barely had time to scream before the beast and several others began to tear into him.

  The Android attempted to help him, but there was only so much a single Android could do against so many, and the large Demon, a Satyr, stopped channeling into the vortex behind it so it could join the battle.

  The last thing Jackie heard was the sound of thunder smashing into the Android, frying most of its circuitry and disabling its ability to self-repair long enough for the Warrior Demons to smash it into pieces.