Noel stood on the overwatch platform, letting the bone-chilling mountain wind slap his face.
Below him, the twenty-seven pillars of the Ignis Magna Beacon burned. The heat was unnatural. Noel could feel the thermal waves licking his skin, a painful contrast to the night's cold. The scent of the air at the lip of Mirror Canyon was bizarre; a mix of sulfur from the crater, ozone from accumulated static electricity, and the aroma of ancient wood resin burning in the beacon hearths.
However, what tortured his senses most was not the smell or the temperature, but the sound.
From the bottom of the pitch-black abyss below, the monotonous note of the Piper continued to flow. The melody wasn't merely heard in Noel’s ears; the sound crawled into his eustachian tubes, vibrated in his jawbone, and felt like a cold worm writhing at the base of his skull. It was a sickening polyphonic orchestra, shattered echoes reflected by the millions of natural mirrors of the canyon walls.
Noel glanced around. The soldiers on the concrete perimeter stood rigid. Their faces blank, their eyes glassy. They had gone numb, hypnotized by this white noise of death.
Noel’s gaze shifted to the center of the formation.
There, in his wheelchair, sat the Old Ancestor Sanjaya. The great-grandfather looked frail, as if a strong wind could snap his bones. However, Noel knew that was merely a physical vessel. The Ancestor’s milky white eyes stared straight into the abyss, yet Noel knew the old man’s inner vision was dissecting every frequency propagating upward.
A solid black iron staff with deep threading lay across his lap—the object absorbed surrounding light, as heavy as sin, and as old as their family's history.
And behind the Ancestor...
Noel swallowed saliva that tasted bitter. He saw his uncles, aunts, and cousins standing in a semicircle formation. The illusion of the honorable noble family they usually played at family dinners had crumbled to dust.
He saw Aunt Sanjaya gripping a Naginata, her knuckles turning white. He saw Uncle Sanjaya with a spiked war mace. The metal of those heirloom weapons gleamed bloodthirsty, reflecting the beacon fire. The scent of clove oil and old iron wafted from their ranks, drowning out the modern smell of the soldiers' rifles.
Suddenly, the pattern broke.
To Noel’s sensitive ears, the change sounded like an explosion.
Tweet... tweet... TWEEEEET!
The melody down there changed drastically. The tempo spiked madly. Noel felt his heart race along, forced to match rhythm with that panicked note. The sound became dissonant, sharp, as if a very shrill flute was blown by a madman right next to his ear.
"CODE RED!"
The alarm roar sliced the night. Strobe lights spun, bathing Noel’s face in pulsating blood red.
WEEE-OOO-WEEE-OOO!
Chaos exploded. Noel took a step back as the soldiers around him ran in panic. The smell of cold sweat and fear from human anxiety pheromones instantly filled the air, mixing with the smell of burning rubber from boot soles rubbing against stone and concrete floors.
"WHAT IS THAT?! ALL POSTS, REPORT TO CENTER!" Command shouts sounded broken and hoarse on the speakers.
Noel looked at the radar screen on the nearest console. Clean. Green. Empty.
"Nothing on radar, Sir! Only the sound! The sound is everywhere!" screamed the operator near Noel.
The flute sound now mutated into a physical attack.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!
"Ergh!" Noel covered his ears, but it was useless. The ultrasonic shriek pierced his hands, stabbing directly into his eardrums. It felt like ice needles thrust into his brain. Intense nausea hit his stomach, vertigo making him stagger. The fluid in his inner ear churned violently.
Then... Cut.
Everything fell silent.
Noel gasped for breath, trying to balance his body. This silence was heavier than lead. It felt like air pressure suddenly dropping drastically before a massive storm.
He looked around. The world froze. A soldier on the helipad stopped with one foot in the air. The commander's mouth on the intercom gaped wide soundlessly. Time seemed to stop out of fear.
Only one person moved.
Noel saw the Old Ancestor raise his black staff. The movement was slow yet full of power.
CLANG!
The tip of the iron staff struck the stone floor.
The sound was pure. Metal meeting destiny. Its resonance swept the entire platform, vibrating Noel’s chest, forcing him to refocus.
"Now is the time." The Old Ancestor’s raspy voice sounded like an absolute verdict.
That CLANG! sound was a switch. Noel saw his family jerk awake. Their stances lowered. Grips on weapons tightened. Creak. The sound of hidden armor hinges clashing.
And then, the floor beneath Noel’s feet trembled.
Not an earthquake. It was a growl from the belly of the earth.
GROOOAAAN...
Noel’s eyes widened looking at the bottom of Mirror Canyon.
To the soldiers' eyes, it might just be ordinary darkness. But to Noel’s eyes, which inherited Sanjaya blood, he saw it.
WHOOOOOOOOOOSSSSHHH!
They came out.
Millions of black shadows—like smoke eels made of liquid Vantablack—shot vertically from the depths. The smell was putrid, like rotting meat mixed with burning metal. They writhed slickly, disgustingly, piercing the night sky at supersonic speed.
They swallowed starlight. Noel looked up, feeling nauseous seeing the sky above him polluted by these living black stains. The pillar of darkness tried to choke the clouds.
The fire responded.
The twenty-seven Ignis Magna Beacons exploded with a roar of FWOOOOOOSSSSHHH!
The heat now stung Noel’s face until it hurt. He squinted as the fire pillars changed form. They were no longer static fire; they became whips. Living tentacles of solar plasma.
BOOM! CRASH!
Noel saw the fire whips slam into the shadow pillar.
Sonic booms shook his teeth. Blinding orange light clashed with pitch darkness.
BLAST!
Every fire strike vaporized thousands of those screaming shadows. Noel could hear their screams—not a physical sound, but a psychic shriek piercing his mind as the shadow creatures burned into nothingness.
Three fire whips from the south twisted themselves into a giant spear, ZWOOOOSH, plunging into the heart of the darkness pillar.
Amidst this visual apocalypse, Noel turned his head sideways.
He saw Sergeant James Reed, a young soldier commanding the overwatch platform guards. James stood frozen, mouth gaping, gas mask askew.
Noel realized something horrifying. James didn't see the shadows.
The soldier screamed hysterically,
"What are they attacking?! There is nothing there! Radar is empty!"
Noel felt a vast distance between himself and the soldier.
James saw fire whipping empty air and exploding.
Noel saw fire whipping real monsters.
Noel looked back at the sky which was now a battlefield of gods. Debris of light fell like a meteor shower. His face was illuminated by flickering orange and black. The vibration of BOOM! CRASH! hammered his chest relentlessly.
Although fear crushed his knees, Noel couldn't look away. There was terrifying beauty there. Grandeur surpassing human logic.
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"Beautiful..." Noel heard Sergeant James' whisper beside him, a voice broken by tears and awe.
"This is... a beautiful apocalypse."
Noel could only nod slowly, hands gripping the guardrail until his knuckles whitened, eyes recording every second of a war ordinary humans shouldn't see.
Noel’s ears rang, not just from shattered air pressure, but from that sound.
He heard a visceral collective scream. It was the sound of thick ink liquid being slashed, whipped, and torn forcibly by holy tongues of fire. It sounded like millions of wet meat pieces thrown onto a giant frying pan simultaneously—hissing, blistering, and screaming in a frequency that made Noel’s teeth ache.
Noel’s eyes were glued upward. His neck stiff, looking up at the increasingly mad choreography of war.
He saw several tongues of fire from the Ignis Magna Beacon no longer attacking individually. They moved as if possessing a single consciousness. Three, four, five giant fire whips writhed closer, then united. They intertwined, twisting into each other forming a thick and solid web of plasma net.
The fire net shot forward, then constricted the surging darkness.
Like a giant boa constrictor made of sun, the fire braid coiled around the dense wave of darkness, gripping it, then crushing it with absolute thermal pressure.
And then... contact happened.
BOOM! CRASH!
The explosion was deafening. The shockwave hit Noel’s chest, forcing him back a step and holding onto the platform's iron railing.
The sky above Mirror Canyon turned into a glowing slaughterhouse.
The booming sound of the explosion mixed with the harrowing mass shriek from within the darkness pillar. It was an unbearable symphony of destruction. The shadows struggled, trying to break free from the fire coils, only to be instantly scorched into etheric ash.
Noel squinted, but couldn't look away.
He felt the skin of his face washed by rapidly alternating colorful glows. The orange of blazing fire, purple from colliding plasma, and pitch black from the remnants of shattered shadows. The light danced on his retinas, reflecting in the cold sweat soaking his temples.
Energy debris fell from the sky.
Above this Valley of Death, the war between ancient occultism and eternal darkness exploded in the sky. To Noel’s naked eyes, now wet with tears from the glare, the sight possessed a paradoxical beauty.
They exploded, glowed, and fell exactly like fireworks.
A magnificent, horrifying, and awe-inspiring celebration of death all at once.
The explosions in the sky of the Valley of Death were not merely a battle; they had now become an intoxicating feast of light.
Noel looked up, his stinging eyes forced to witness the doomsday carnival unfolding above his head. The twenty-seven pillars of Ignis Magna beacon fire no longer looked like static fire poles. To Noel’s eyes, they had metamorphosed into twenty-seven giant plasma dragons. Their orange fire tongues writhed wildly, slashing, biting, and constricting the darkness with savage grace.
Between the dance of those fire dragons, twenty-seven modern iron towers joined the scream. The megawatt-powered photon spotlights they emitted sliced the smoke like white lightsabers, creating a blinding theater stage in the dead of night.
And when ancient fire and modern light slammed into the ink blobs of darkness surging from the abyss...
BLAST! BOOM!
Noel held his breath. It truly looked like fireworks.
The blobs of darkness exploded to pieces in the sky, scattering black and purple shards that glowed before vanishing into ash. The sky above the canyon was now colorful—orange, white, black, purple—an abstract painting moving fast and lethal. Very festive. Very noisy. Very beautiful.
Noel lowered his gaze slightly, shifting from the sky to the land.
What he saw down there gave him goosebumps.
He saw a sea of humanity paralyzed by awe. Tens of thousands of soldiers in the valley had forgotten their military discipline. No one ducked for cover. No one checked their weapons.
They all—tens of thousands of those combat helmets—looked up in unison at the sky. Their faces bathed in rapidly blinking colorful light. Their mouths gaped wide, jaws dropping unconsciously, their eyes not blinking at all. They were like little children seeing new year's fireworks for the first time, spellbound by the destruction happening up there.
The light of the explosions was so intense that Noel could see the visual impact on the surrounding environment.
The Iron Mountains surrounding the valley were now naked.
Usually, those mountains were only threatening black silhouettes. But now, the beacon light and ink explosions stripped every detail of their surface naked. Noel could see every rough striation on the cliff walls, every sharp edge of wetly gleaming granite rocks, and the pointed peaks of mountains piercing the sky.
The stone shadows moved wildly along with the explosions above, as if the mountains themselves were alive and breathing.
BOOM!
The explosion echo bounced off those rocky walls, creating a long rumble. To Noel, it didn't sound like a normal echo. It sounded as if this giant natural fortress was cheering, encouraging the war of light raging at its peak.
Noel narrowed his eyes, enduring the sting from wind and light. His heart sank.
He saw it. Amidst the blind whipping of the Ignis Magna dragon fire, several shadow blobs managed to maneuver. They writhed slickly, utilizing narrow gaps between fire tongue slashes, surging stronger, and escaping that hell crater.
Noel’s hands clenched at his sides, nails digging into his palms until it hurt. He stared in horror as the blobs flew free over the peaks of the Iron Mountains.
However, amidst his fury, Noel’s ears caught Aunt Sanjaya’s voice behind him. The woman’s voice was calm, cold, and full of terrifying mockery.
"Escaped? Hah. Even ghosts shouldn't dream of running from Carta’s sky."
Noel turned confusedly, but his attention was quickly diverted.
Noel tilted his face back up to the sky dome, and this time, his breath truly caught in his throat.
What he saw were no longer just remnants of enemy explosions. His naked eyes caught a cosmic anomaly making his common sense scream.
Those stars...
They were no longer just points of silver needles sitting politely at light-years distance.
They burned brighter. Their light intensity spiked drastically, changing from dim blinks to a stable glow hurting the retinas. Their colors became distinct—hot sapphire blue, angry garnet red, and blinding pure white.
And what made Noel’s knees tremble violently was his depth perception.
They were enlarging.
Visually, the light spheres in those constellations appeared to swell in the sky. Their light halos expanded, eating the surrounding night darkness.
The optical illusion was so real and horrifying. As if a distance of millions of light-years had just been forcibly pulled to zero. As if they were falling.
They were approaching earth.
Noel felt the air growing heavier, as if gravity reversed. The sky felt pressing down on him. He felt the roof of the world was collapsing. Strange atmospheric pressure hit his chest, making him breathless.
He felt dwarfed, like an ant staring at a giant glowing sole slowly descending to step on the earth.
Noel looked up, neck stiff, eyes squinting against the piercing mountain wind.
The sky above him was being rewritten.
Among the stars that had enlarged and approached earlier, Noel saw something that made his breath catch. Faint silver lines appeared—thin as silk threads yet glowing—beginning to draw themselves from one star to another. The light points connected, forming ancient geometric patterns: Constellations.
But it wasn't finished. After the constellations formed, much thicker and brighter faint lines appeared, shooting across the void of space, connecting one constellation to another. The chaotic night sky was now bound in a giant cosmic spider web glowing silver.
Below that web, Noel saw the blobs of "black ink" that had surged from the canyon earlier. They shot away, flying wildly in all directions, away from Mirror Canyon. They got further, smaller, until finally vanishing completely from Noel’s naked eye sight, swallowed by the dark of night.
The sky looked clean again. Empty. But Noel knew that was a lie.
"Lord Noel! Look at this!"
The voice trembled violently. Sergeant James stood beside him, the soldier's entire body shivering as if having a high fever. James’ trembling hand thrust a rugged military tablet in front of Noel’s face.
Noel looked down, staring at the portable screen displaying real-time satellite imagery of the Kingdom of Carta.
On that screen, there was no black ink. Even the most advanced military satellites couldn't capture images of those supernatural entities. The screen only displayed a calm geographical map and drifting clouds.
However, the audio from the tablet told a different story.
Panicked voices from military radio channels sounded broken and hysterical, shouts of field commanders seeing what cameras couldn't.
"Information from mirror canyon platform, perimeter breached! Subjects spreading to civilian sector! No visual display! Repeat, subjects not visible on radar!"
Then, Noel felt the answer. Not from the screen, but from the ground he stepped on.
WOOONG!
A low-frequency vibration traveled up from the platform concrete, pierced his boot soles, and vibrated his shins up to his teeth. The fine hairs on Noel’s nape stood up sharply.
He realized something. The twenty-seven Ignis Magna Beacons in front of him were merely triggers. Detonator fuses.
On the tablet screen, Noel saw the map of the Kingdom of Carta begin speckling red.
Hundreds of other fire points—located in remote temples, atop noble castle towers, and at ancient menhir sites—now responded to the call.
"What is that..." Sergeant James whispered, eyes wide staring at the digital map.
Everything is active, Noel thought.
The Thousand Constellation Chessboard Array Formation has awakened.
Noel looked back at the tablet screen. He knew those shadows were there, shooting over cities and mountains, even though the screen showed it empty. Millions of invisible monsters thought they were safe in the open sky.
Then they hit it.
BOOM! CRASH!
The explosion sound was real to Noel’s ears, echoing from afar. But his eyes were glued to the bizarre phenomenon on the tablet screen.
Over the Crownbelt Capital sector, on a screen that should only display empty air, suddenly a giant thermal explosion appeared.
BLAST!
No missiles. No enemy aircraft. Only empty air between two ancient temples suddenly exploding in a silver fireball.
The invisible ley line had burned something unseen.
"They exploded on their own..." Sergeant James babbled softly, eyes wide with horror looking at the screen.
"Sir, the air exploded..."
Noel gaped. The digital map on the tablet was now filled with the blinking of countless massive explosions. Like an aerial minefield detonating in unison, destroying enemies uncaptured by camera lenses.
BOOM! CRASH!
On the screen, Noel saw a thick cumulus cloud blob over the port. The cloud was calm, then suddenly...
BOOM!
The cloud was torn from inside. Exploded messy by flashes of randomly intertwined golden spider web light. Something hiding inside that cloud had just been annihilated.
They are trapped... Noel thought, his voice trembling between horror and awe.
The web is everywhere.
The night sky of the Kingdom of Carta had turned into a spiritual slaughter zone. Nowhere to run.
Sergeant James swiped the tablet screen with sweat-slicked fingers, showing a feed from a drone camera in the stratosphere, 10,000 meters above the city holding the festival.
On the screen, Noel saw green city celebration fireworks explode beautifully. Bang.
However, right above those green fireworks, in empty void space...
BOOM!
A massive silver explosion occurred out of nowhere. Blinding white light burned the void, creating a shockwave that even shook the drone camera.
Noel saw the insane synchronization. The supernatural explosion burning invisible ink in the upper atmosphere occurred simultaneously with civilian fireworks below.
James swiped the screen again, fingers trembling more violently.
Silent snowy mountains. The screen only displayed peaceful white peaks.
Then... BOOM!
The air above the mountain peak exploded in silver light. No audience except a startled mountain eagle flying across the screen.
Desert full of ancient tombs. Screen displayed darkness.
CRASH!
Suddenly tombstones were illuminated by silent silver light from an explosion in the empty sky. Ghosts killing ghosts.
Open ocean. BOOM!
The dark water surface suddenly reflected a cosmic fireball exploding in the air, even though there wasn't a single ship there.
Noel lowered the tablet slowly. His eyes looked back at the vast sky above his head. The sky looked clean, starry, and peaceful to layman's eyes.
Yet his ears were full of explosion echoes—BOOM... CRASH...—shaking the stone beneath his feet.
In silent rugged lands, where there was no internet signal and human applause, that epic total war raged in visual silence. And Noel, standing rigid at the edge of the abyss, became a silent witness to how his family cleansed the sky of what the world could not see.
