The Calm

Still energized thanks to the excitement of the whole journey, John managed to come back home rather quickly. He then showered and ate some dinner before going to sleep. He had warned his friends that he was too tired to meet up right away which disappointed Tom greatly. But John promised he would be there the next day to tell them everything.

After a good night's sleep, it was time for John to start his Sunday. Tutoring ending right before noon and one of his last shifts as a bartender in the evening were on the menu. But between those two, he would be eating lunch with his friends all the while telling them about his adventures of the previous day. Once the tutoring was over, John rushed to Tom's place. As he turned the corner to enter his friend's house's street, John came across a rather odd pair of people. They looked almost too well dressed to be in such a place and were discussing amongst themselves very stealthily. The fact John had no memory of ever seeing those two faces before, and the small notepad they had on hand just did not sit right with him. However, even if those two were likely undercover government officials, there wasn't much he could do. Not to mention they might have been here for reasons wholly unrelated to himself which lead him to decide to ignore those two strangers for now. Upon entering his friend's house, John was warmly greeted by his entire group of friends as well as Tom's parents. They had bought pizzas for everyone and he did not have to wait for long before they all started eating, chatting away happily all together. Once lunch was over, it was time for John to tell everyone all that happened during his excursion the previous day. The appearance of the Ursa was the highlight of the story for sure.

It was past 2 pm already and the mood was still very happy. To the utmost surprise of everybody, sirens started ringing extremely loudly in the entire city. Many were puzzled, these were the emergency sirens after all. Most people's first instinct was to turn on their phone or television to see if there were any news about it.

"Attention please! This is not a test. Any non-military personnel under the Fourth Sky should evacuate into the Third Sky as soon as humanly possible. Anyone under the First, Second or Third Sky should stay put and get ready to enter the closest bunker."

All the channels on the TV were currently broadcasting this message on loop. It was the first time anyone in the city had ever witnessed such events happen. Meanwhile, those looking at the network on their phones were able to learn that the city was under attack. A large mob of monsters had appeared outside the city limits and had started attacking the Fifth Sky. The city's military institutions had gone on high alert during the night due to the conspicuous loss of communication with most of the teams on missions in the wilderness at the time. Finally, once the presence of a large pack of monsters had been confirmed, the alert had been rung at around noon but solely for the entire military zone in the Fifth Sky. What then awaited the military officials two hours later shocked them to their very core. What should have been a simple group of thirty to fifty monsters that would have been rather quickly dealt with by the city's defences, turned out to be a real army. None dared state the obvious yet they all knew instantly, thousands were attacking and they were not sure the city of WuTian would stand for long.

When the announcement was first made, the public's reaction was very much scepticism over what looked more like a prank than anything else. However, it only took a few minutes for people to scavenge enough information over the network to get a wave of mass hysteria sparked. Meanwhile in Tom's house, the mood had turned from surprised to serious extremely quickly. The six youth instantly gathered around the table to set up how they would respond to such an extreme incident. Due to the risks involved with their practice of magic, the group had frequently talked about what to do if they ever were discovered. Though this was an entirely different situation, their preparations meant they knew how to set up emergency plans. The first thing they did was to share whatever information they had gathered in these few minutes and it made something very clear to all of them: this was bad.

Within the group, John, George and Judy had all been taking exams to enter different military organisations lately. As such, they all had studied more than your average person about monsters, including raids that happened at most every decade. And thus, just like the military did, they instantly realized this attack was much more serious than normal. The most dangerous part of a regular raid was actually before it really started. Usually, a few teams suddenly went missing due to being killed by the monster's raiding party, before the beasts would decide to try and assault the city. Those attackers would slowly get killed over the next few hours as they were trying to break the Fifth Sky and their numbers would hardly ever reach fifty monsters in total. The only casualties on the human side would be the dozen or so of people that got caught unaware before the raid got spotted. But the images floating around on the network clearly showed monster numbers in the thousands. With those numbers, even one of the almighty Skies might not last much longer than a couple of minutes. With those numbers, it was not a few human lives that were endangered but basically every single life in this city.

It was time for action for our six young adults. But what action? Fight? Flee? Hide?