The corridor stretched ahead, endless and gray, lit by strips of cold fluorescent light that hummed faintly overhead.

Fiona’s boots clicked against the polished concrete, a steady rhythm that matched the pounding of her heart. Erika walked to her left, sharp and silent, her silver braid swaying with each step. Elga lumbered on her right, his massive frame casting a shadow that swallowed the floor. Lily brought up the rear, pale and quiet, her white uniform almost glowing in the dim light.

Their units followed at a distance, boots scuffing, equipment jostling, the low murmur of soldiers who knew better than to speak loudly in these halls.

Fiona could not shake the unease.

It had settled into her chest somewhere between the apartment and the garage, somewhere between Erza’s cold declaration and the sight of seventy combat vehicles lined up like sleeping beasts. The timing was wrong. The demons had been quiet for months, years, even, content to scheme from the shadows while lesser demons did their bidding. And now, on the same night that a silver-haired monster declared war, they decided to move?

Coincidence?

The word tasted like ash.

The other captains did not know about Erza. They had no idea that a being of unfathomable power was sitting in a small apartment across the city, holding a mortal man in her arms, unaware that the demonic world was stirring because of her. The weight of that secret pressed against Fiona’s ribs, demanding release.

Not yet, she told herself. First, I need to understand what is truly happening. Then I will tell the Chief about Erza.

She tightened her grip on her weapon and walked faster.

---

The High Order Meeting Room was not used lightly.

It was designed for one purpose: to coordinate large-scale strikes against demonic threats. The kind of threats that involved entire towns, entire cities, massacres, sacrifices, rituals designed to harvest sin on a scale that made individual deaths feel like drops in an ocean. The last time it had been opened, Fiona had been young. A lieutenant. Barely old enough to carry the weight of the rank, let alone the weight of what she witnessed.

That had been ten years ago. The Japan Incident. A ritual to awaken a nightmare creature, stopped at the last possible moment by a coalition of agencies and a lot of good people who had not all made it home.

Fiona had stood in this room with her captain, watching the screens, feeling the world tilt beneath her feet. She had promised herself she would never forget the way it felt, the cold sweat, the dry mouth, the certainty that they were all going to die.

She had not forgotten.

And now, after ten years, she was returning.

---

The door loomed at the end of the corridor, enormous, forged from reinforced steel, its surface marked with the emblem of the Agency: a dragon rising from flames, wings spread wide, beak open in a silent scream. It was a door that spoke of secrets. Of worlds hidden behind worlds. Of the darkness that lurked just beneath the surface of ordinary life.

The captains stopped before it.

A red scanner light flickered to life, sweeping across each of them in turn. Fiona felt the beam pass over her face, her eyes, the identification chip embedded in her uniform collar. The AI voice, Monday, cold and feminine, stripped of anything resembling warmth, spoke.

"Captain Erika. White Wolf Division. Recognition confirmed."

"Captain Elga. Golden Fang Legion. Recognition confirmed."

"Captain Lily. Saint Lily Covenant. Recognition confirmed."

"Captain Fiona. Phoenix Wing. Recognition confirmed."

A pause. The scanner light dimmed.

"Captains have entered successfully. Welcome to the High Order Meeting Room."

The door opened with a soft hiss, not a dramatic groan, not a thunderous clang, but the quiet, deliberate sound of a mechanism designed to move without announcing itself. It slid apart, revealing the chamber beyond.

Fiona’s breath caught.

The room was enormous, larger than she remembered, larger than it had any right to be. It was circular, built at the very heart of the headquarters, surrounded on all sides by layers of reinforced concrete and advanced security measures. The walls were lined with screens, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, each one displaying satellite imagery, tactical maps, real-time video feeds from agents scattered across the country.

The light from the screens bathed the room in a cold, blue glow, illuminating the faces of the analysts and strategists who sat at the edges of the chamber, their fingers flying across keyboards, their voices low and urgent.

At the center of the room was a table.

It was made of dark wood, the finest oak, polished to a mirror shine, its surface marked with the scars of decades of use. Documents were spread across it: reports, photographs, satellite images, each one stamped with the red seal of classified intelligence. A small lamp at the center cast a pool of warm light, a fragile island in the sea of cold blue.

Six chairs surrounded the table. Only four would be occupied tonight.

Fiona stepped inside.

The air was thick, not with humidity, but with tension. The kind of tension that preceded a storm, that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, that whispered *something terrible is coming* in a voice she could not ignore.

Chief Sara stood at the head of the table.

She was watching the screens, not the main display, but a series of smaller feeds showing news footage from across the country.

Fiona saw burning buildings, their flames reflected in the lenses of distant cameras. Saw crowds screaming, running, trampling each other in their desperation to escape. Saw the aftermath of attacks that had happened too quickly, too simultaneously, to be random.

Sara’s violet hair was immaculate, her uniform pressed and spotless. But Fiona saw the tension in her shoulders, the tightness in her jaw.

This was different from the Japan Incident. Worse, somehow. The enemy was not a single target to be struck, but something larger, something more diffuse. Something that was already moving.

Fiona slowly took her seat, the cold wooden chair creaking softly beneath her weight. The smooth surface pressed against her palms as her fingers rested on the table, but her attention remained fixed on the documents spread before her.

Reports. Casualty estimates. Demonic activity charts. All written in a language she understood perfectly well, yet for some reason, tonight, she found herself wishing she could not read any of it.

Around the table, the other captains settled into uneasy silence.

Erika sat to Fiona’s left, posture straight and rigid as always, silver eyes narrowed toward the glowing screens at the front of the room.

Elga occupied the seat to Fiona’s right, her massive frame making the reinforced chair beneath her look painfully inadequate. Even sitting still, she radiated violence, fingers tapping slowly against the table like a predator waiting for permission to hunt.

Across from them sat Lily.

Quiet.

Still.

Too still.

Her pale hands remained folded neatly atop the table while the blue light from the monitors reflected faintly in her eyes. She looked less like a captain and more like a ghost trapped in human skin.

No one spoke.

The only sound inside the room came from the soft humming of machinery and the occasional flicker of the giant screens mounted across the walls.

Then Sara finally turned toward them.

The moment Fiona saw her eyes clearly, her breath caught slightly.

Red.

The exact same shade as a vampire’s, indicating she was serious enough to let others see her true form. The realization struck Fiona so suddenly that it almost made her miss Sara’s expression entirely.

Cold.

Sharp.

Calculating.

Those crimson eyes slowly swept across every captain seated at the table, silently measuring them, judging them, as if determining whether they were truly prepared for whatever was about to come next.

Sara did not smile. She did not greet them. There were no comforting words. Only silence.

Then she gave a single sharp nod before gesturing toward the main display behind her.

"The demons," Sara said calmly, "have finally made their move."

The room erupted.

"Move? What kind of move?"

"Why all of a sudden? They’ve been quiet for months."

"Is this a new ritual plan? Like Japan? Something worse?"

"Is this why the High Order meeting room opened?"

The questions flew like shrapnel, sharp and chaotic, bouncing off the walls and the screens and the cold, polished surface of the table.

Fiona sat frozen, her hands flat against the wood.

Sara’s aura leaked.

There was no flash of light.

No crack of thunder.

No visible sign at all.

But the temperature in the room plummeted, and the air grew thick and heavy, pressing against lungs and eardrums with the weight of an approaching storm.

The voices stopped, not faded, not quieted, but stopped, as if someone had pressed a mute button on the world.

The silence was unbearable. It was the silence of a held breath, of coiled tension, of soldiers standing at the edge of a cliff and waiting for the order to jump.

Sara’s vampire-red eyes swept across the captains, cold and measuring, and no one dared to meet her gaze for more than a second. Her expression was unreadable, not angry, not afraid, not anything that could be named.

It was the expression of someone who had seen too much to be surprised anymore, and that was somehow more terrifying than any display of emotion.

For a long moment, nothing moved.

Then, Elga broke the silence.

She was the oldest of the captains, her scarred face weathered by decades of war, her massive frame hunched forward in her chair like a bear waiting to charge. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and careful, the voice of a woman who had learned that the worst news was usually delivered in the calmest tones.

"Chief," she said, "is it an invasion? A ritual? What makes this serious enough to summon all of us without warning?"

The other captains looked at each other. Fear flickered in their eyes, not the sharp, adrenaline-fueled fear of battle, but the cold, creeping fear of the unknown.

They wanted to ask the same question. They were afraid of the answer.

Sara sighed.

The sound was long and tired, pulled from somewhere deep in her chest, and for a moment she looked less like the chief of the Agency and more like a woman who had been carrying too much for too long. She pressed her fingers against her temples, then lowered her hands and looked at them, really looked at them, as if she was seeing something in their faces that she had not noticed before.

"No," she said. "This time, I believe it is something else."

"Something else?" Elga’s brow furrowed.

"Yes." Sara’s voice was cold. Calm. The voice of someone who had already accepted a truth that the others were still struggling to grasp. "Something different from anything we have faced before."

The room went silent again, not the heavy silence of aura this time, but the quiet of minds racing, of questions forming and dying on lips, of the dawning realization that they were standing on the edge of something they did not understand.

Sara raised her hand.

Behind her, the shadows moved.

They had always been there, Fiona realized with a chill that crawled up her spine, hiding in the corners of the room, pressed against the walls, invisible to anyone who was not looking for them. The shadows detached from the darkness and stepped forward, and the captains saw them for the first time.

The Shadow Crow Unit.

They wore black uniforms that seemed to drink the light, their edges blurring into the air around them like mirages on a hot road. Their faces were hidden behind crow masks, beaked and angular, with lenses that glowed faintly red in the dim light.

They moved as one, silent and fluid, their footsteps making no sound on the polished floor. They were the secret protectors of Chief Sara, the elite force that worked in shadow, tracked in shadow, killed in shadow.

They hunted contractors before they could sell their souls to demons. They stalked the stalkers. They were the reason that some demons vanished without a trace, their bodies never found, their fates never known.

Once a Shadow Crow decided to stalk you, there was no escape.

No shelter.

No sanctuary.

They watched from rooftops and alleyways and the dark corners of crowded rooms.

They were patient.

They were silent.

They were death wearing feathers.

The other captains shifted in their seats.

If the Shadow Crow were here, if they had been called out of the shadows and into the light, then something was very, very wrong.

The Crow did not stalk upper blood demons or lesser blood demons; those were left to the captains and their units.

The Crow hunted something else. Something worse. Something that the Agency did not speak about in polite company.

Erika’s voice was tight, her silver braid swaying as she turned to face Sara. "Chief, what is the meaning of this? Why is the Shadow Crow unit here?"

Lily spoke for the first time, her soft voice carrying an edge that belied her delicate appearance. "Is something truly wrong enough to summon the elite force, Chief?"

Sara raised her hand again.

The Shadow Crow stopped.

The captain of the unit, a woman whose name was known only as Raven, stepped forward. She was shorter than the others, her crow mask marked with a single silver feather on the forehead, and when she moved, the shadows seemed to move with her, trailing behind her like a cloak made of midnight.

She inclined her head, not a bow, not quite, but an acknowledgment of equals meeting in a time of crisis.

"Greetings, Captains." Her voice was low and smooth, like water flowing over stones, and it carried an authority that had nothing to do with rank and everything to do with the weight of the secrets she carried. "Thank you for answering my summons."

The captains exchanged glances.

"Your summons?" Erika’s eyes narrowed, her sharp gaze flicking from Raven to Sara and back again. "Chief Sara summoned us."

Chief Sara’s expression did not change. "I am admitting," she said, "that I summoned you all at Raven’s request."

Erika turned to Raven, her posture rigid, her hand resting on the weapon at her hip.

"Why use the Chief’s name instead of your own?"

Raven was silent for a moment. The red glow of her mask’s lenses seemed to brighten, then dim, and Fiona could almost imagine the woman behind the mask choosing her next words with the care of a surgeon selecting a scalpel.

"This matter," Raven said, "is so serious that I wanted everyone to be present. If I had summoned you myself, if I had used my own name, some of you might not have come."

The words hung in the air.

The captains looked at each other.

Raven was the one who tracked elite demons. Raven was the one who knew when high demons moved. Raven was the one who had spent years building a network of informants and spies that spanned the continent, who had seen horrors that the captains could only imagine. If she was here, if she had requested this meeting, if she had deemed it serious enough to involve the Shadow Crow, then something had gone terribly wrong.

Fiona’s blood ran cold.

Serious, Raven had said. Not dangerous. Not urgent. Not critical.

Serious.

The worst kind of word. The kind of word that preceded wars. The kind of word that ended careers and lives and nations.

Raven stepped back, melting into the shadows from which she had emerged. The other Shadow Crows followed, their forms dissolving into darkness until nothing remained but faint traces of presence at the edge of perception.

Sara turned back to the table.

"The situation," she said, "has escalated to the worst possible degree."

She gestured toward the screens.

Raven remained where she was, her expression unreadable as she activated the display. The gathered data flickered to life, reports, fragments, and classified records stitched together into a single horrifying truth.

She had collected enough evidence to reveal a discovery no one in the room was prepared to face.

The true reason behind the summoning.

And with that, the True Horror briefing began.

---

(Yuuta’s Apartment)

The Kounari family sat together at the dining table, quietly eating curry rice. The warm smell of spices filled the apartment, mixing with the soft noise of the television playing in the background. It was one of Erza’s favorite dishes, rich with heat and flavor, something Yuuta had learned to cook perfectly after countless attempts.

Elena happily munched away beside them, kicking her small legs under the chair while praising her father’s cooking every few seconds.

But Erza barely tasted any of it.

She ate slowly, her expression cold and distant, lost deep within her own thoughts. Her mind continued circling around the same problem over and over again.

Money.

Yuuta’s future.

His safety.

Should I kill someone important and force their inheritance toward him? she thought seriously while holding her spoon. Or perhaps threaten the governments of this world until they give him enough wealth to live peacefully forever.

To Erza, both options sounded perfectly reasonable.

But the real problem was Yuuta himself. Anything she did recklessly could place him in danger, and that alone made her hesitate. Her thoughts only became more frustrated from there. Perhaps I should leave one of my Ice Knights hidden nearby to protect him at all times...

But no. That would risk triggering his sealed memories.

Erza quietly exhaled through her nose, irritated by her own helplessness.

Yuuta noticed immediately.

He had been watching her for the past several minutes without realizing it himself. Every tiny expression on her face unconsciously pulled at his attention now. The more he stared, the more obvious it became that something was bothering her deeply.

After hesitating for almost an entire minute, Yuuta finally gathered the courage to speak.

"My Queen..."

Erza’s eyes lifted toward him sharply, pulled from her thoughts so suddenly that her irritation leaked directly into her voice.

"What?"

Yuuta flinched slightly.

"N-Nothing bad," he said quickly before awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck. "I was just asking if you’re okay."

For a moment, Erza simply stared at him.

Then her gaze shifted away again.

"I am fine," she answered quietly. "You do not need to worry about me."

The conversation should have ended there. Normally Yuuta would have nodded and dropped the subject immediately.

But tonight felt different.

Ever since Isvarn left, something heavy had settled inside his chest and refused to disappear. The old dragon’s words continued echoing inside his mind no matter how much he tried to ignore them.

Weak.

Powerless.

Unable to protect anything.

Yuuta tightened his grip around the spoon slightly before speaking again.

"There’s... actually something I wanted to ask you."

That made Erza pause.

This time she looked at him properly. Yuuta’s expression carried an unusual seriousness to it, mixed with nervousness he was clearly trying to hide. Even Elena slowed her eating slightly, sensing the atmosphere changing around the table.

Erza set her spoon down carefully.

"What is it?"

Yuuta hesitated.

Part of him still wondered if asking this was a mistake. But Isvarn’s words had already planted doubt too deeply inside him to ignore anymore.

"Do demons really exist in this world?" he finally asked quietly.

The room suddenly felt much quieter than before.

Yuuta swallowed once before continuing.

"And if they do... have you actually fought them before?"

Erza’s eyes narrowed slightly.

For the first time that evening, genuine surprise appeared across her face.

Yuuta was never supposed to know about that side of the world. As far as she understood, he still believed everything strange surrounding his life was simply coincidence, accidents, or unexplained events. He did not even know that Elena had once been Slipped inside a Lion cage because of demons. He did not know that he himself had nearly died because of them either.

Since Yuuta never asked, Erza never told him.

She believed it was better this way.

Yuuta had never directly encountered demons himself. At least... not knowingly.

So why ask this now?

Did Isvarn say something to him before leaving?

Erza studied him silently for several seconds before responding carefully.

"Why are you suddenly interested in demons?"

Yuuta looked down at the table awkwardly, pretending to focus on his food while choosing his words carefully.

"I don’t know..." he admitted quietly. "Lately it just feels like there’s a lot about this world I don’t understand."

He gave a small nervous laugh.

"And I remember you mentioning demons once before."

Erza remained silent.

The tension at the table slowly thickened. Even Elena had stopped eating entirely now, blinking between the two adults curiously.

Finally, Erza spoke. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"And what if my answer is yes?" she asked softly. "What if demons truly exist?"

Yuuta lifted his head immediately this time.

His hesitation disappeared completely.

"Then I want to learn aura."

The words came out so suddenly that even Yuuta himself looked surprised by how firm his voice sounded.

Erza blinked once.

"...What?"

To be continued...