Ciel’s hands trembled violently—not from the sterile chill of the air conditioning, but from a sudden, explosive surge of adrenaline the moment his eyes snagged on the faint letterhead at the top of the parchment.

  The paper was brittle, reduced to cottony fuzz from the torment of a washing machine, its ink bleeding into abstract purple stains. Yet, the bold typography—though faded—remained starkly legible to Ciel’s eyes, trained to hunt for minute details on fog-choked morning streets.

  He held his breath. His heart hammered wildly, battering against his ribs in a panicked rhythm, desperate to tear free from his chest. His blood ran hot, boiling up to flush his face and ears.

  Beneath the dim amber glow of his bedroom lamp, Ciel devoured the text line by line, his eyes wide with mounting dread.

  CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT - LEVEL 1

  DARK STAR PROTOCOL 121

  — The Burner Agency —

  Foreword:

  As elucidated in previously identically titled protocols, specifically protocols 110 through 117. It is estimated that precisely on schedule, Shade Walkers will breach like a gale of dark wind from Mirror Canyon.

  Countermeasures:

  1. Ignis Magna Beacon Protocol (Note: Purging Fire)

  2. Thousand Constellation Chessboard Array Protocol (Note: Sky Barrier Activation / Containment and Annihilation Net)

  3. The Hunt Protocol (Note: Terrestrial Cleansing of Residual Entities)

  Ciel felt the marrow drain from his knees. He slumped, sinking onto the hard edge of his father’s mattress. The paper nearly tore in his white-knuckled grip.

  "Protocol... Ignis Magna Beacon..." he hissed, his own voice sounding alien to his ears.

  His brilliant mind instantly forged the connections with lightning speed.

  Ignis Magna. Great Fire. It was a weapon. Or at the very least, a "beacon" to conceal something, or to incinerate it.

  Then his gaze shifted to the second bullet point.

  Thousand Constellation Chessboard Array Protocol.

  "Constellation... Array..."

  Ciel’s breath hitched. The web.

  The threads of silver light he had seen pulsing in the sky. The geometric pattern linking one detonation to another. It wasn't a hallucination. It was written right here! The Chessboard Array. A defense system—a colossal "game board" stretched across the heavens to repel an enemy.

  And the enemy...

  Ciel re-read the word.

  Shade Walkers.

  Shadow Roamers.

  "...breach like a gale of dark wind from Mirror Canyon..."

  A bone-deep chill crawled from the tips of Ciel’s toes up to the nape of his neck.

  So, all this time, while he, Elsie, Denes, and millions of other Carta citizens laughed joyously at the "fireworks," up there... behind that beautiful curtain of light... his father's forces, the Burner Agency, were fighting a desperate, bloody war to hold back an invasion of creatures called Shade Walkers.

  This city was not celebrating. This city was serving as the final bastion of defense.

  And "The Hunt Protocol"...

  Ciel swallowed a bitter lump in his throat. If the Ignis Magna and the Array were in the sky, then the Hunt must be taking place on the ground.

  Which meant Shade Walkers might have slipped through the celestial net. They might already be here. Among humanity. Inside the city.

  The parchment in his hands was no longer laundry trash. It was a death sentence for his sanity. He was right. He wasn't insane.

  But this truth was infinitely more harrowing than any madness.

  Ciel’s sweating hands made the flimsy paper cling to his thumb. With the precision of a neurosurgeon, he peeled the damp first page from the second, which had adhered to its back from dried detergent residue.

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  A soft crackle echoed as the paper fibers tore apart.

  The second page lay open.

  The ink on this page was vastly more faded, yet a crimson stamp bearing the words "NOBLE MANDATE" was still faintly visible in the upper right corner. Ciel narrowed his eyes, bringing the paper closer to the bedside lamp, forcing his eyes to decipher the half-obliterated string of letters.

  "...an absolute obligation for titleholders... ranging from Duke, Earl, to Baron... to exterminate the residual Shade Walkers that make landfall upon Carta..."

  Ciel choked.

  So, the feudal social structure in this country—the aristocrats he often saw in lifestyle magazines with their high tea parties and racehorses—wasn't merely historical pageantry? They weren't just wealthy socialites lucky enough to be born into the right bloodlines?

  They were... cleansing units.

  They were the frontline warriors tasked with slaughtering the "filth" that slipped through the celestial net.

  Ciel’s eyes continued to scour the text downward.

  "...in response to the Call of Heshawara."

  The word felt alien on Ciel’s tongue, yet it carried a heavy, ancient gravity when spoken in his mind. Heshawara. The martial oath of the Kingdom of Carta.

  Then, his eyes snagged on a technical paragraph below. Regarding the methods of execution.

  "...Visible solely through the Three Ash Lines from the Kala-Ra Tushka offering..."

  "...Utilizing projectiles or blades forged from Cold Karpharah Metal."

  Karpharah.

  Ciel repeated the word. Cold Karpharah Metal.

  His memory vaulted back to the living room. To the empty artillery shell casing his father used as a flower vase. Ciel had touched it once while dusting. The metal was bizarre. Always freezing to the touch, icy even in the midst of a sweltering summer. His father had called it a "training souvenir."

  "Liar..." Ciel hissed. "That’s Karpharah. That’s shadow-killer ammunition."

  His breathing accelerated. He couldn't take much more, but he had to know the end of it.

  With hands trembling violently, he turned to the final page. The third page.

  This sheet was different. No lengthy narrative text. This was a technical data sheet. A specification.

  At the apex, written in firm, clinical capital letters:

  ASSET DEVELOPMENT REPORT

  TEST SPECIMEN: ASSAULT WEAPON C-001

  OBJECTIVE: TOTAL TERMINATION OF SHADE WALKERS

  "Specimen?" Ciel muttered. "Assault weapon?"

  He visualized schematics of an advanced rifle or a laser cannon. However, as his eyes dragged down to the physical description of the specimen, the blood throughout his entire body seemingly ceased to flow.

  The text was severely blurred in the center, marred by the deepest fold of the pocket. But several keywords remained legible, surfacing amidst the purple ink stains.

  ...Non-material subject...

  ...Advanced metallurgical engineering...

  ...Integration of shadow with liquid Karpharah elements...

  Ciel felt violently nauseated.

  C-001.

  That wasn't a designation for a standard firearm. That was a designation for a non-living entity.

  Someone—or something—was being engineered, or modified, to become a living weapon designed to butcher those monsters. Ciel dropped the paper as if the parchment had just stung him. The brittle sheets fluttered down to the wooden floorboards.

  He scrambled backward until his spine collided with his mother's wardrobe. His breaths came in frantic, ragged pulls.

  Out there, monsters known as Shade Walkers were raining from the heavens.

  And somewhere within the kingdom's military laboratories, a new weapon designated C-001 was being cultivated.

  Ciel Evans’ mundane universe—university lectures, paper routes, video games—had just utterly collapsed, usurped by a horrific reality festering within the pocket of his own father's coat.

  Ciel slumped.

  His legs, which moments ago had supported his athletic frame, now turned to jelly. He slid down the length of the teakwood doors until he hit the cold bedroom floor.

  His body began to tremble.

  Initially just his hands, then spreading to his shoulders, until his entire frame shook violently. His teeth ground together, producing a harsh chattering that sounded deafening within the room's silence.

  Clack-clack-clack-clack.

  He shivered, as if the room's temperature had just plummeted to absolute zero, even though the thermostat read a comfortable twenty-four degrees Celsius.

  This wasn't physical cold. This was the ice of pure terror.

  The intel he had just digested wasn't a mere state secret regarding corruption or political scandal. That would have been rational. That would have been human.

  But this...

  Shade Walkers. Heshawara. Cold Karpharah Metal. Modified Weapon C-001.

  This was science fiction violently bludgeoned into reality, bearing the official stamp of the military.

  Ciel hugged his knees to his chest, struggling to quell his uncontrollable shaking. His eyes were pinned to the tattered sheets of paper lying on the wooden floor, mere centimeters from his toes. The paper looked innocuous, mere laundry lint, but to Ciel, the object now radiated a lethal, radioactive aura.

  "Insane..." he whispered, his voice cracking and trembling. "Father... what exactly are you doing?"

  He pictured his father, Hannes Evans—the man who always demanded he cut his hair neatly and eat with a straight back. The man he assumed was merely a uniformed "office worker" at the Ministry of Defense.

  In truth, that man was a cog in a colossal machine waging war against monsters from another dimension. That man knew of—or perhaps even sanctioned—Project C-001.

  The thought echoed in Ciel’s skull, making him want to vomit.

  Ciel felt agonizingly small. He was just a paperboy who liked playing football video games. He was just a freshman university student stressing over calculus assignments. His brain’s capacity was not architected to process cosmic horror of this magnitude.

  The world he knew—a world where the greatest dilemmas were being late for a lecture or running out of allowance—had just been obliterated into dust.

  He stared at his own hands, still quivering violently. He felt contaminated just by harboring this knowledge. He felt... hunted.

  If his father knew he had read this...

  If they knew he had read this...

  Ciel pressed a hand against his constricting chest. His heart raced painfully, as if trying to tear through his ribs and flee for its life. He wanted to scream, wanted to sprint to Elsie’s house, wanted to call Denes.

  But he couldn't.

  He realized, in this very second, he was utterly alone inside the belly of the beast. And he had just struck a match inside a powder keg.

  The sheer terror paralyzed him, forcing him to remain huddled on the floor, shivering violently beneath the shadows of his father's stiff uniforms hanging like executioners above his head.