Angel Monarch

'...Agghh, it hurts...' was Sera's first thought waking up.

She was lying on the ground, barely conscious after the explosion.

Her ears were ringing and she couldn't see anything cause of the smoke. Her whole body was alight with pain, that was the only thing keeping her from passing out.

Trying to hold onto consciousness, she began checking herself for any serious injury. Every citizen knew basic first aid in their apocalyptic society exactly because occasions like this.

Sera looked at herself, other than a few scrapes, bruises and a couple of small burn marks she looked fine, even though she didn't feel like that at all.

'What happened?' she asked herself.

She shook her head trying to clear her foggy mind and immediately regretted it.

"Egh..." 'So painful! I probably have a concussion.'

After that disaster she tried to look around her surrounding to make sense of what happened, but alas she couldn't see much from the ground.

She then started rising up, but immediately fell back on the ground and began coughing because of the smoke.

'I... need... to get... out of here...'

She redoubled her effort to move and started to rise up from the ground. On shaky legs she stood and could finally look around and see the destruction surrounding her.

The whole street was in flames, maybe even the whole city. All around her were destroyed buildings, or ones that were about to crumble. And the dead, there were so many of them, just lying on the street, motionless. It was horrible to say the least.

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'What happened? What caused all this destruction?'

As if answering the question, her hearing started to return. At first Sera was startled about all the sudden noise and it disoriented her. But after a couple of seconds she could focus on one specific sound.

Her watch, which every citizen in Newber had was special. It could not just tell the time, it was a communication device that was connected to a network. It could warn the people for incoming attacks on the city. It also had other functions but most of them were kept for the Evolved.

"Alert Citizen! Class 4 Realm Gate Opening in the vicinity! Immediately leave the premises! The closest Evolved have been alerted and are already inbound! Seek shelter!..."

It was repeating this message constantly.

'Fuck, a Class 4 Gate?! This doesn't make any sense! This stupid watch should warn everyone about a Gate Opening hours or even days beforehand.'

She just couldn't wrap her head around it. The alert system was specifically designed so this would never happen.

"...Alert Citizen..." her watch continued.

She looked at it and touched the alert on the holo-screen to turn it off, then checked where the Gate has opened.

It wasn't too close and she had a clear line to get to her house, which had a basement that in theory could withstand an onslaught like this. She could wait there until the Evolved take care of this mess in relative safety.

But she was still blocks away from there. And there were probably monsters in the way.

She as a regular human without an Enchanted weapon or at least a firearm couldn't hope to take on even a Tier 1 Tainted and there's going to be way worse things coming out of that Gate.

Luckily the Academy prepared her somewhat of situations like this, but it was hard to recall anything of that sort with the persistent haze in her mind.

In the end she decided, that the best option is to start moving and adapt to obstacles along the way.

Sera started walking down the street slowly first, nearly falling a couple of times, but a minute or two later she started to jog when she heard some monster arriving to the destroyed street behind her.

While hurrying home she tried to relax her mind by recalling her studies. They seemed to always have a calming effect in stressful situations like this.

'Our society is made up of two levels, on the lower level are the regular humans referred to as Citizens, on the higher are the protectors of humanity the Evolved. The purpose of the Citizen is to work and help their society where they can, the purpose of the Evolved is to fight monsters and defend the Citizens.'

Sera was miserably failing to calm herself because of the monster noises coming from all around her. She started running and redoubled the efforts of soothing her mind.

'The Evolved have 7 rankings the lowest are called without too much creativity the Evolved, rank 2 are the Ascended, 3 are the Transcended and 4 are the Stellar. The other 3 rankings are classified for unknown reasons.'

Just as she was getting some peace of mind, she noticed something moving ahead.

Sera immediately went behind an up turned car and watched through the broken windows the shape move.

It looked like a big, grotesque, hairless dog the size of a small truck. The dog had 2 heads and six legs with 5 talons on each.

Sera typed on her watch and brought up the scanner function.

'Scanning in progress...' It read on the holo-screen.

'Come on! Hurry up you stupid watch!'

'Scanning complete... Classification: Rotten of the 2nd Tier... Name: Feral Hellhound... Suggestion: Avoid at all cost!'

'Well, that's just great.'

As she was thinking of a different route to take, suddenly the Hellhound started sniffing the air, then it looked to the sky and growled once before running away.

'Huh? Why did it run away?'

Then she noticed that everything around her seemed to become quiet and kind of peaceful, if you don't mind the destruction of course.

Sera looked at the sky where the Hellhound was looking and what she saw froze her blood.