Chapter 19: Guardian Zephorion

Quil never stood a chance.

It came like a shadow given form, descending in near silence from the thick redwood canopy above. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of damp earth and something older, something unnatural. The moon, once a silent guardian in the night sky, vanished behind roiling clouds as if recoiling from the presence of the thing that willed itself into existence. It was not merely a predator—it was something woven into the very fabric of the wild, a force of nature itself.

Its bioluminescent blue-green eyes narrowed into slits, dimming as it locked onto its target. The frailest one. The easiest to break. A whisper of wind brushed the treetops as its elongated limbs extended, talons outstretched, craving the sensation of flesh giving way beneath its grasp. A deep, shuddering thrill coursed through the beast—this was not just a kill. This was retribution.

The attack was instant, a blur of motion too fast for the human eye to follow. A rush of wind, the snap of branches—then impact. The creature struck from the void, slamming into Magi-tec officer Quil with the force of a falling star. Its long, knife-like claws tore through the fabric of her uniform, sinking deep into her upper back. She gasped, barely able to cry out before she was ripped from her footing and hurled face-first into the unyielding earth. The impact sent up a shroud of dust and leaves, masking the horror unfolding beneath.

No one had time to react.

The Eradication Squad hesitated for a fraction of a second, fingers barely brushing the triggers of their magi-tec rifles, but the creature and Quil were already gone. One moment she was there. The next, nothing but swirling debris and a hollow absence where she had stood.

Then, from above—a scream.

Quil's body plummeted from the towering redwoods, a lifeless marionette tossed from unseen hands. Two of the grunts lunged forward, arms outstretched to catch her, but before they could—

A sound. A sickly pop, subtle, almost unnoticeable.

The deception was complete.

Joseph saw it before the others. A ripple in the air, the faintest distortion—then the nightmare stepped forward from the void. It did not simply move; it bent reality around itself, emerging from the blackened weave of space as if stepping through a threshold unseen by mortal eyes.

The tail struck before the squad could react.

A segmented, scorpion-like appendage lashed out, piercing through the throat of the nearest soldier with surgical precision. His eyes bulged, hands scrambling to staunch the flood of crimson spilling from his severed windpipe. A second later, the creature’s tail-tip pulsed with energy—dark, shimmering, almost liquid in form—before unleashing a concentrated beam of obsidian-blue light. The second grunt never had the chance to scream. His face was there—then gone, replaced by a smoking void where his skull should have been.

Both bodies collapsed. One twitching, grasping at life with slipping fingers. The other still.

Then, with a sickening crack, Quil’s broken body slammed into the ground for the second time. Blood pooled around her motionless form, soaking into the thirsty earth, her bluish-green skin slick with crimson. The air was thick with the scent of burnt flesh and fresh death.

She was gone.

Three lives. Taken in mere seconds.

Joseph’s heart pounded in his chest as he finally got a clear look at the thing responsible. And in that moment, he knew—he knew—that whatever he was staring at would follow him into his dreams for the rest of his life.

If he lived long enough to have them.

The air pulsed with an eerie glow, thick with floating dust and leaves that drifted lazily through the bioluminescent mist. Towering redwoods stretched into the abyss above, their trunks gnarled with age, their canopies so dense they blocked out the alien sky. The silence was suffocating, the kind of silence that came not from emptiness but from the presence of something vast.

The creature before him was unlike anything born of this world or any other. It moved with the predatory grace of a panther, its obsidian chitinous plates shifting in the dim glow like liquid shadow. Its sleek, owl-like face turned with unsettling precision, enormous hypnotic eyes glimmering with an intelligence far beyond mortal comprehension. A long, bioluminescent tendril jutted from its forehead, pulsating in time with some unseen rhythm, casting flickering halos of ghostly light across the twisted roots and damp earth below.

It was beautiful. And it was terrifying.

Its forelimbs, jointed like a mantis’s, twitched in slow, deliberate anticipation, each movement a whisper of something razor-sharp waiting to be unleashed. Hind legs, thick with amphibian musculature, coiled as though storing untold power, ready to spring with the force of a living storm. A long, segmented tail, jagged and alien, arched over its back, the crystalline barb at its tip glowing with a quiet, ominous energy.

Then, the wings unfurled.

For a moment, the air itself recoiled.

Glistening, insectoid wings extended from its back, shimmering with arcane runes that shifted and pulsed as though alive. They beat once—just once—but the force sent a wave of dust and luminous visible mana cascading through the clearing. The trees groaned, their ancient limbs swaying under an invisible pressure, the very atmosphere thickening with unseen power.

The redwoods seemed to bow before it.

This was no mere predator. No mindless beast stalking prey.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

This was a force. A guardian. A legend whispered among those foolish enough to wander too deep into the Veil.

And it had found its prey wanting.

With a billowing screech, the creature unleashed a pulse of psychic energy, a rippling force that warped the very fabric of the air. The ambient mana twisted at its command, bending, writhing like a living thing, saturating the battlefield in an unseen, inescapable fog of influence.

The soldiers—hardened veterans forged in the fires of war—clutched their ears as an invisible shockwave rolled over them. There was no immediate impact, no explosion, no flash of light. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the attack had done nothing at all.

Then Joseph saw them.

Eyes. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Peering from the darkness between the redwoods, blinking down from the canopy above, lurking within the swirling dust and shadows. Shapes moved, too many to count—some shifting, slithering, others looming impossibly tall. Wings beat against the night air. Clawed fingers curled around the trunks of ancient trees.

An army. A legion of nightmares.

His breath hitched, but his mind snapped to the truth before panic could consume him. Illusions.

“GUARDIAN TYPE!” he bellowed, his voice cutting through the growing hysteria, but it was already too late.

The squad broke.

Gunfire erupted in frantic bursts, magi-tec rounds cutting through the air, streaking with elemental force as they struck phantom enemies. Soldiers screamed as they turned on one another, shooting at shadows that were never there, slashing at creatures that only existed in the twisted veil of their minds.

Joseph’s pulse thundered in his skull as he forced himself to focus. He reached inward, drawing on his own mana reserves, willing them to surge through his body, to purge the hallucination’s grip. But the moment he tried—he felt it.

Something was wrong.

The mana wouldn’t bend. It refused to obey. It was tainted, infused with the creature’s will.

His stomach clenched as true fear took hold.

Then, from the edge of his vision, movement. The real one.

The creature descended, its unnatural form lowering itself to the ground with slow, deliberate ease, as if savoring the chaos it had unleashed. It was watching them tear themselves apart. Enjoying it.

Joseph raised his rifle, locking onto the one thing he knew was real. He pulled the trigger, the magic-infused round streaking through the dark—

Ping!

The bullet struck but did nothing. The shot ricocheted off its chitinous exoskeleton like a mere pebble skipping off stone.

Then it turned.

Joseph felt it before he even saw it—something cold, ancient, pressing against his very essence.

And when its luminous, bioluminescent eyes fixed upon him, his soul froze.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.

This wasn’t just a guardian.

It was something far worse.

Something that should not exist.

Joseph stood frozen, watching the horror unfold around him. His squad—once disciplined warriors—had become puppets to a nightmare they could not escape. They tore at one another, their screams of terror drowned beneath the relentless gunfire echoing through the blood-drenched clearing. Shadows twisted and warped in the flickering muzzle flashes, their movements erratic, each soldier trapped within a cruel, false reality woven by the creature’s psychic influence.

The thing toyed with them.

It moved through the battlefield like a specter, slipping in and out of existence with those sickening, popping distortions of space. Each time it reappeared, another soldier fell, their death more gruesome than the last. Clawed limbs, slick with viscous fluids, carved brilliant arcs of crimson through the night, illuminated in fractured flashes of rifle fire. It was playing with them. Savoring the moment.

But Joseph noticed something else.

It was ignoring him.

Deep in his gut, he knew why. The creature saw him as the leader, the one meant to endure the slow, torturous unraveling of his squad. It wanted him to suffer. To watch. To break.

His fingers curled into fists.

No more.

With renewed resolve, he reached behind him, fingers closing around the cold steel of a magi-tec cylinder strapped to his back. The weight of it was absolute. A weapon so potent, so abhorrent, that even the Kul only deployed it in the most dire of circumstances.

The Devourer Plague.

Joseph’s grip tightened as he snapped the safety latch open. His breath was steady, his heart a war drum pounding in his chest. The decision was made.

The creature loomed over a fallen soldier, lifting the unfortunate man by his shattered torso. Its jagged mouth split wide, releasing a bubbling stream of dark, putrid ichor that hissed against the soldier’s armor, burning through the plating, then the flesh beneath. The man’s screams twisted into something inhuman as the liquid ate away at him—his voice cut short as the last of him disintegrated into ruin.

Joseph took his chance.

“DIE, YOU MONSTER!”

With all his might, he hurled the activated canister at the beast.

The creature twisted its head toward him, its luminous eyes narrowing in cruel amusement—until it noticed the strange, swirling darkness spilling from the device.

For the first time, it hesitated.

It felt something. Something it had not felt in a long, long time.

Fear.

It flitted from reality, attempting to escape, but it was too late. The unseen force spread outward in tendrils of consuming blackness. The moment it reappeared, its right arm was already rotting.

A screech of agony tore through the clearing.

Its flesh disintegrated, peeling away in ragged chunks, as the black substance crawled hungrily across its chitinous hide. Desperation overtook it. It flitted in and out of space, attempting to shake the plague off, but every time it reemerged, more of its body was lost to the ravenous corruption.

In a maddened frenzy, it struck itself against trees, tearing through its own illusions, its panicked thrashing spreading the plague like wildfire. The infection leaped from its decaying form onto anything it touched—bodies, trees, even the earth itself. The once-lush clearing became a blackened graveyard of rot and ruin, whole sections of the landscape simply vanishing as the plague devoured them, leaving behind yawning scars of emptiness.

Then, in one final act of hatred, it turned its ravaged eyes upon Joseph.

With a hellish screech, it lunged.

Joseph barely had time to react. It was a blur of darkness, its gaze burning into his very soul, its ruined body moving with monstrous speed, ready to take him with it into death.

At the last second, Joseph threw up his mana shield.

The impact was catastrophic.

The sheer force sent him hurtling backward into the underbrush, his body crashing through tangled roots and branches. Stars burst behind his eyes as pain flared through his limbs. His vision darkened, his breath ragged.

Through the haze, he could barely make out the creature’s final moments.

It thrashed wildly, its screeches turning to distorted, warbled gasps. The plague devoured it entirely, its body breaking apart into blackened fragments that crumbled into nothingness. A final pulse of mana erupted outward as its existence was erased.

Then—silence.

Joseph lay still, his head spinning. Slowly, painfully, he forced his eyes open.

And what he saw made his stomach turn.

The battlefield was a ruin of death and devastation. His squad—what remained of it—was either dead or dying. Three of his men were still writhing, their bodies consumed by the very plague he had unleashed. Even the redwoods—some of the most ancient living things in existence—had been reduced to skeletal husks, great sections of the forest eaten away by the relentless hunger of the Devourer.

Joseph felt bile rise in his throat as he activated the kill switch. The plague stopped, but the damage was done.

A heavy, suffocating quiet settled over the clearing.

The forest itself seemed to mourn. No birds. No rustling leaves. No sound except the broken moans of the barely living and the slow, steady beat of his own heart.

He pushed himself up, legs shaking, breath uneven.

He was alive.