Chapter 2: The Five Battle Angels
Eighty years ago, life on Earth mirrored the everyday rhythm most would recognize.
Cities pulsed with activity, traffic jams snarled the streets, kids darted through playgrounds chasing soccer balls, and office workers trudged through their routines, clutching steaming mugs and muttering about deadlines.
Markets buzzed with vendors haggling over prices, while families bickered over grocery lists or whose turn it was to cook.
It was a world of mundane chaos, predictable, flawed, and alive. The sun traced its arc across the sky, seasons shifted, and time marched forward as it always had.
...That is until one day it didn’t.
One particuar ordinary afternoon, the ground suddenly shuddered, not with the familiar jolt of an earthquake, but with a deep, resonant hum that prickled the skin.
People paused, glancing around, puzzled, until the sky split apart.
Fissures ripped through the atmosphere, jagged and glowing with a sickly, iridescent light.
Portals, they’d later be called, tears in reality itself.
They erupted everywhere: above skyscrapers, over rural fields, across oceans. And from those gaping rifts, horrors unlike anything humanity had ever faced poured forth.
Creatures emerged, each a nightmare given form of various types.
Some were hulking brutes with reptilian scales and claws like scythes, slashing through crowds and leaving trails of gore in their wake.
f.re(e) w.e(b)nov el.c.om
