"Nes! Turn around! To Port 30!"

  Ciel’s scream was nearly swallowed by the rushing wind, but Denes caught it. He didn't ask why. He knew the place. Port 30—the decrepit cargo dock at the westernmost edge of the harbor—was Elsie’s sanctuary. A secluded corner where she would sit for hours staring out at the ocean whenever she was overwhelmed by university assignments or homesickness.

  If Elsie wasn't at her boarding house and hadn't been swallowed by the gridlock at the station, she would have fled there. To the place where she felt closest to the horizon.

  Denes violently wrenched the scooter's handlebars to the left, breaking away from the totally paralyzed main evacuation route, cutting through an industrial warehouse district riddled with deep potholes.

  They tore ahead, leaving the cacophony of blaring horns and the panicked shrieks of the city's populace fading behind them.

  The closer they drew to Port 30, the more desolate the streets became. The leviathan container trucks that usually choked this artery had vanished. The security checkpoints were hollow shells with boom barriers left permanently raised, abandoned by guards who chose self-preservation over protecting mountains of rusting iron.

  Denes killed the engine right at the dock's entrance gate, letting the scooter coast silently on its remaining momentum before grinding to a complete halt.

  "Insane..." Denes whispered. His voice sounded unnervingly loud in his own ears.

  The vista before them wasn't merely quiet. It was the physical definition of a murdered city.

  Usually, Port 30 was an inferno of noise. The screeching crash of colliding metal, the groaning of colossal cranes, the barks of dockworkers, and the mechanical roar of forklifts served as the eternal backing track here. The stench of diesel and spent motor oil was usually so dense it clung to clothing.

  But this afternoon, Port 30 was a ghost town.

  Hundreds of shipping containers—faded red, bruised blue, sickly green—were stacked sky-high, forging a labyrinth of mute iron walls. They stood rigid, like gargantuan toy blocks abandoned by a bored infant god.

  The container-lifting cranes towered into the bruising gray sky, frozen dead with their steel necks craned downward, looking like the skeletal remains of primeval dinosaurs staring mournfully out to sea. No movement. No exhaust plumes. Massive iron chains hung dead, no longer swaying.

  There was only the sound of the ocean gale.

  Whooooshhh...

  The wind blew fiercely, slithering through the narrow gaps between the containers, generating a low, mournful whistling, as if the iron monoliths themselves were weeping.

  Beneath the concrete pier, the waves slapped against the supporting pylons in a monotonous, apathetic rhythm. Smack... recede... smack... recede...

  Ciel dismounted the scooter, his footfalls echoing tap... tap... tap... across the vast, desolate expanse of asphalt.

  He spotted a yellow hard hat lying discarded in the center of the road, rolling lazily under the wind's breath. Near a weigh station, a plastic coffee cup lay on its side, its half-spilled contents swarmed by ants—a morbid sign that life here had ceased abruptly and violently.

  The silence was suffocating.

  This was the wrong kind of quiet. A silence that screamed that something catastrophic was imminent.

  In the distance, upon the maritime horizon, the naval armada of the United Nations Forces loomed like black silhouettes, offering a mute, looming threat. But here, on these docks, the absolute absence of humanity made that threat feel tenfold more visceral.

  Ciel felt excruciatingly small amidst these dead iron behemoths. He whipped his head left and right, his eyes hunting for a petite figure with long black hair hidden among the concrete and steel.

  "Elsie..." he called out.

  His voice didn't echo. It was instantly devoured by the vastness of the sea and sky.

  "ELSIE!" Ciel roared louder, shattering the sacred silence of the dead port.

  Only the sound of the waves answered.

  The sea breeze at Gant City Port no longer carried the scent of industry. Usually, the air here was thick with the stench of diesel, the steam of bitter coffee from workers' stalls, and the metallic tang of fresh catch just hauled from the holds.

  But right now, Elsie could only inhale the sharp sting of salt and the cold decay of seawater rotting against the concrete pylons. The brine clung to her lips, leaving a coarse, bitter residue every time she attempted to draw breath.

  She stood at the very edge of the pier, its sheer vastness feeling oppressive. Gone was the mechanical roar of crane engines, gone were the shouted orders of the boatswains. There was only a sprawling expanse of barren concrete stretching out like a gray graveyard.

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  In her hand, a mobile phone with a cracked corner emitted a pale blue light that contrasted sharply against Gant's bruised sky. Elsie stared at the face on that screen—the face that was the singular anchor holding her heart in place right now.

  Her brother stood rigidly at attention, a stark contrast to the profound vulnerability Elsie felt. John was clad in full combat fatigues, a steel helm reflecting a pallid, dead light. Elsie could clearly read the name engraved upon the breastplate adorning her brother's chest:

  John Foster.

  The metal plate gleamed, immaculate and unyielding, shielding the heart of the man who had been her protector since childhood.

  John offered a smile. It wasn't the blood-hungry grin of a seasoned killer, but a soft, tender smile he deliberately reserved solely for his only little sister. Behind John, Elsie could faintly make out the massive, imposing structure of Fort Rivermarsh, the heavily fortified northeastern bastion under the absolute command of the black muscle himself, His Grace Alionso Montezar.

  "Elsie, return home," John’s voice crackled hoarsely through the phone's tiny speaker, slightly distorted by the howling gales battering the southern coast. "The air is freezing... and you are all alone out there."

  Elsie felt the biting wind slice across her cheekbones, leaving her skin feeling numb and raw. She did not answer immediately. As someone raised on the scent of the sea, she knew the cold today was not merely a matter of temperature, but an omen that a cataclysmic storm was about to plunge like a dagger into their sovereignty.

  She slowly rotated her body, panning her phone's camera across the Gant docks.

  "Look, Brother..." Elsie whispered.

  The screen now captured a harrowing desolation. The lens swept over rows of piers typically choked with foreign freighters and trawlers. Now, the space was utterly barren.

  As far as the eye could track, there was only dark, churning seawater, rolling aggressively, bearing nothing but plastic debris and splintered driftwood. There wasn't a single human soul besides herself. Gant City had vomited its entire populace inland, leaving this port to become a rotting carcass of history.

  "It's quiet, Brother. Everyone is cowering in their homes. I am the only one left smelling this sea," Elsie continued, her voice trembling on the razor's edge between rising pride and the cold terror creeping into her chest.

  Silence reigned for a moment.

  The only sound was an uncanny symphony of water. Elsie heard the true waves crashing before her—the heavy, rhythmic smash... hiss... of the tide battering the Gant piers.

  Simultaneously, bleeding from her phone's speaker, she heard the waves from the other side of the video call—the violent currents of the Great Seine River, smashing against the stone ramparts of Fort Rivermarsh with a distant, bone-rattling BOOM...

  Two massive bodies of water belonging to the same kingdom, both now preparing to serve as basins for blood.

  Elsie returned her gaze to her brother's face. She desperately wanted to reach out and touch that steel helm, to feel the freezing texture of the metal, just to assure herself that John wasn't merely a digital phantom. She felt her eyes burning hot, but she forced a brave smile for the man standing on the very frontlines of the apocalypse.

  "Be careful at Fort Rivermarsh, Brother," Elsie whispered. "I will be waiting for you at home, with the warmest ginger tea."

  John nodded, his sharp, intelligent eyes dimming for a fraction of a second, harboring thousands of unspoken messages he could not bring himself to voice before the gates of war. The video link held steady, tethering two souls between two crashing tides that were beginning to sound remarkably like the weeping of the Motherland.

  "Elsie, listen to me... go home. The air is growing thinner, biting deeper. You cannot be out there alone," John’s voice returned, this time carrying a much more palpable tremor. That profound anxiety bled through the wireless signal, feeling like short-wave vibrations stabbing directly into Elsie’s ears.

  Elsie remained rooted at the edge of the jagged concrete pier. She could feel the glacial sea wind seeping into her pores, flash-freezing every bead of cold sweat trickling down the nape of her neck. Her sinuses were overwhelmed by the sharp tang of salt and the rotting stench of the dead sea, an aroma that usually offered solace, but now reeked of impending death biding its time.

  "No, Brother," Elsie whispered. Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion, yet as unyielding as the black coral reefs of Dum-Shadd.

  She stared dead ahead at the bruised, gray horizon, where the churning sea bled into the sullen sky.

  "I will not return home. I am waiting for them. I am waiting for that enemy armada to breach the horizon."

  She drew a long, ragged breath, feeling the biting cold air lacerate her throat.

  "I will stand right here, Brother. I will catch their first bullet with my own flesh. If they intend to defile Carta soil through the Gant Docks, they will have to march over my corpse to do it."

  Silence.

  The quiet abruptly became crushing, as if the entire world had just stopped drawing breath. There was only the sound of the waves brutalizing the dock's foundation—smash... hiss...—and the faint hiss of static from her phone.

  Elsie bowed her head toward the screen. Her vision suddenly blurred. The face of John Foster on her display dissolved into a chaotic smear of pixels, refracted by the thick sheen of tears pooling in her eyes. Elsie tried to blink them away, but the tears spilled over, tracing warm paths down her ice-cold cheeks, leaving an agonizingly hot trail in their wake.

  On the other end of the feed, John still stood tall. Yet, the martial stoicism of his uniform could not mask the utter devastation warping his face. John’s eyes were brimming with tears, glistening beneath the dim, sullen lighting of the fortress. His lips were clamped tight, trembling violently as he fought a losing battle against the sob threatening to detonate from his chest.

  John’s shoulders heaved in a frantic rhythm. The image on the screen shook violently, for the hand gripping the camera was now trembling totally out of control.

  "Elsie..." John finally broke the silence, his voice fractured and thick with gravel. He looked upon his sister with eyes overflowing with agonizing grief and an absolutely staggering reverence.

  "You are right... you are absolutely right. My little sister... you are the second sword of the Heshawara Banner."

  John drew a shuddering breath, a desperate pull of air that sounded exactly like a stifled sob.

  "I... I am so incredibly proud of you. You are no longer my spoiled little sister. You are a bastion of Carta."

  In that very second, their final defenses crumbled. The sound of John weeping broke free—a harrowing, guttural wail that flooded from Elsie’s phone speaker, merging flawlessly with Elsie’s own uncontrollable sobbing.

  Upon that desolate port, there were only the two of them, mourning their shared fate through a tiny pane of glass, severed by thousands of kilometers yet irrevocably bound by a terrifying blood oath.

  The winter gale howled with escalating fury, tearing at strands of Elsie’s hair and sending bone-deep shivers that made her teeth clatter. The cold intensified, as if nature itself were weaving a shroud for the impending slaughter.

  Elsie gripped her phone with crushing force, feeling the freezing porcelain and glass bite into her palm.

  Ciel, standing silently behind Elsie, let his own tears fall. He felt a profoundly suffocating, agonizing tightness crush his chest.