Blood dripped from the ceiling.

The girl let out a bone-chilling scream as she scaled the smooth, flat wall with her bare hands. Her eyes rolled back, their whites contrasting with the macabre transformation unfolding in her mouth. A sickening blackness seemed to take root on her gums, turning the once-pinkish flesh into a grotesque, curdled mass resembling something dredged from a gutter. Blood oozed and trickled from between her teeth as her lips and the skin around her mouth cracked, tore, and bled. Her jaw unhinged beyond human capacity, and an engorged tongue flickered and snapped out like a coiled viper.

Amid her torment, she screamed in ancient, incomprehensible tongues, hurling curses and maniacal laughter into the room.

The ground itself seemed to shudder, causing nearby tables and chairs to dance and vibrate in place. In the room, her classmates, both boys and girls, froze in fear – paralyzed by their own minds. The others who had been present had fled long ago, vanishing into the hallway as they cried out for help, but none came to their rescue. The air grew frigid, and a sinister presence permeated the atmosphere, carried on a chilling wind laden with the stench of evil.

The girl roared and dragged her fingers across the wall, until her nails cracked and broke, and her scratching left behind a trail of blood.

The priest before her held up a wooden cross with one hand and a rosary in the other. A copy of the bible dangled from his belt, held in place by a chain that was bound to the spine of the holy book. “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you! Begone from this child, devil! Begone and return to the realm of fire from whence you came! The power of Christ, our lord and savior, compels you!”

With a single, bloody hand raised, she snapped her fingers. The once-dancing and vibrating tables and chairs splintered and cracked, their wooden and metal components peeling away with agonizing groans and screams. Among her classmates, panic ensued—some fell unconscious, others remained frozen, and a fortunate few managed to muster enough courage to force their bodies into motion, fleeing the horrifying scene.

“The power of Christ compels you!” shouted the priest, pulling a bottle of holy water from his coat pocket and sprinkling it over her. To his dismay, the holy water had no effect. She continued to laugh maniacally, scaling the walls and ceiling, her bleeding fingers leaving a trail of blood behind. A profuse amount of crimson streamed from her broken and shattered fingernails, or what remained of them. And her laughter was dreadful, the words she spoke akin to the sound of ice cracking and rusted steel groaning at the depths of one's mind. Only the priest remained unaffected. Those who were still conscious resorted to covering their ears, attempting to drown out the dreadful noise with their own screams. “The power of Christ compels you!”

Blood oozed from the walls, streaming from the corners and pooling on the floor, filling the room with the noxious stench of rot and decay.

It wasn’t working.

The priest's resolve wavered, his once-steady grip on the wooden crucifix weakening under the weight of his exhaustion. His arm and shoulders trembled from the effort of carrying it.

A sinister chuckle escaped the possessed girl's lips, her voice resembling the grating, discordant sound of bending and breaking rusted metal—an unbearable cacophony.

"That's not going to work, Father," a calm and cold voice echoed from behind the priest. Startled, he turned to find a boy, likely no older than seventeen, dressed in a plain white shirt, jeans, and brown leather shoes. The boy's face held a distant familiarity, though the priest couldn't quite place where he had seen it before. The boy yawned as he approached, drawing the priest's attention to a peculiar symbol on the boy’s neck. The priest observed in astonishment as the boy stopped beside him, regarding the possessed girl with an almost indifferent curiosity, akin to someone studying a blank wall.

"You're attempting to exorcise a demon, but that's not a demon inside her. Haven't you noticed that the holy water hasn't affected it in the slightest?" the boy remarked, his voice cold and detached.

The priest glanced down at the nearly empty bottle of blessed water, his disbelief mirrored in his gaping expression. The boy's observation struck a painful chord of realization. The holy water had been ineffective; it had done nothing. His heart sank; and the weight of the truth settled upon him. The girl remained possessed, laughing mockingly in the face of his futile efforts. Stammering, the priest managed to choke out, “W-who a-are you?”

“I’m just someone who wants to help,” the boy replied, his smile strangely calm as he advanced toward the girl, still clinging to the wall. There was an unsettling aura around him; the air seemed to distort in his presence. A palpable sense of danger emanated from him, sending chills up the priest’s spine, even more so than the possessed girl did. Every instinct within the priest screamed that this boy was dangerous – mortally.

“You should take a seat, Father. Let me take care of this,” the boy suggested, his voice oddly soothing despite the circumstances.

The boy assumed a fighting stance, reminiscent of a boxers’, as the space and air around his fists shimmered like water. The possessed girl's manic laughter abruptly ceased; and the amusement in her eyes dissipated like smoke in the wind, replaced by a palpable fear, something the priest couldn't help but notice. She spoke once more, her words in an ancient and archaic tongue - Aramaic, the language spoken by the Lord Himself, the priest realized. "Thread Sorcerer...."

"Here to send you back to heaven, angelic freak," the boy retorted in the same ancient tongue, leaving the priest to wonder how he had come to learn such an old language.

The girl lurched forward, but the boy moved with astonishing speed, his fist striking her square in the face. The possessed girl was propelled backward, crashing through the blackboard and into the adjoining room, breaking through a wall of wood, concrete, and bricks that all measured half a meter thick. A cloud of dust and debris billowed forth, and the pervasive aura of fear dissipated. The students, who had been trapped in the room, seized the opportunity to flee, screaming in their haste. As they fled, the blood that had oozed from the walls seemed to vanish, as if it had never been there in the first place.

The boy stepped forward, his eyes ablaze with baleful blue flames, a grin playing on his lips. The air around him shimmered, akin to a raging, colorless fire. He briefly glanced over his shoulder before addressing the priest. "Father, please vacate the premises. Things are about to get ugly."

He shouldn’t have done it.

Abandoning the girl was a decision heavy with guilt and desperation. But he was at his wit’s end. This situation was beyond him. The holy water and divine incantations had proven utterly ineffective. With each passing moment, the girl seemed to hurt herself more. And the boy was right; the girl did not display the qualities that was typical of demons. Father Manuel Caballero wasn’t sure why he got up and ran, but he was—at the very least—certain it was the best thing to do.

----------------------------------------

Oh, the priest actually ran away.

Huh.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Well, that made things convenient, he supposed.

“A school girl – really?” Gabriel spoke out loud as he stepped through the giant hole in the wall and into the vacant classroom on the other side. A cloud of dust and debris fluttered around him. The possessed girl, Ana Marie, if he recalled correctly, staggered to her feet.

Her broken bones snapped back into place, and her torn muscles miraculously mended. The smell of Thread Energy filled the air—the angelic variant of it, at least, which smelled like candles and self-righteousness. “Is this what the fallen get up to these days? Because, this is an entirely new level of low I didn’t think you’d be capable of.”

“Shut your mouth, Thread Sorcerer!” The possessed girl raised a hand, and the air crackled with Angelic Thread Energy, enough to send a deadly discharge surging toward the poor girl's brain. Unfortunately for Gabriel, his mission was not to vanquish the Fallen Angel but to save the girl, which rendered his task significantly more challenging and infinitely more complex. Yet, he supposed that was the very essence of a test. His duty now was to prevent the lethal discharge.

“Sorry about this,” Gabriel murmured, addressing the small part of the girl's consciousness that could still perceive the events around her. “This is going to hurt.”

Thread Energy roared to life around him. He didn’t possess a large reservoir of it, according to his mentor, but his Thread Energy was far denser than normal, flowing like thick tar rather than water. This density meant he didn’t require as much of it as others did, especially for mere augmentation. However, he couldn’t afford to be wasteful; due to its higher density, his Thread Energy also replenished slower than average, posing quite a challenge. The solution, though straightforward, was demanding: he needed to finish his fights quickly. Unfortunately, Gabriel didn’t have his trusty gun with him at the moment, but in his hands, any projectile became deadly.

Smiling, Gabriel reached into his pocket and grabbed a single coin – twenty pesos, the heaviest of the bunch.

With only a schoolgirl as its vessel, the movements of the Fallen Angel were sluggish and erratic, akin to an epileptic attempting to force coordinated actions. Ana Marie lacked the spiritual and physical strength to properly house a being of such magnitude. Fortunately for Gabriel, this meant he had the upper hand in terms of speed. Just as the Fallen Angel prepared to discharge its Thread Energy in a blast that would have undoubtedly fried its host, Gabriel sprang into action.

“Motion,” he muttered, his right hand flicking out, releasing the coin he had been holding.

The coin streaked through the air, defying the laws of inertia and momentum, maintaining its initial velocity with the aid of Thread Energy.

Enhanced by this energy, its velocity reached a staggering two thousand kilometers per hour—almost the velocity of a bullet. The coin momentarily warped as it sliced through the air before cleaving through the possessed girl’s outstretched hand.

In that split second, it disrupted the flow of Thread Energy, halting the discharge in its tracks.

The fallen screamed—not in pain, but in sheer frustration. The abrupt loss of power left it momentarily stunned. Before it could muster another attack, Gabriel surged forward once more, landing a punch directly into the possessed girl’s abdomen. Upon contact, he injected a sliver of his own Thread Energy into her, disrupting the flow of the Fallen Angel’s energy and causing the possessed host to freeze and convulse. Bloodshot eyes snapped towards him. It had enough strength to move its host’s lips. “You damn... insect!”

“Wasn’t expecting that, huh?”

Seizing the opportunity, Gabriel lunged forward and delivered an open palm strike to the girl’s forehead, the seat of the soul, injecting an infinitesimally tiny amount of Thread Energy at the moment of contact, forcefully expelling the Fallen Angel’s presence from her body.

In the absence of a stable host, the Fallen Angel could not sustain itself in the material plane for more than a moment. Consequently, when Gabriel blinked, the entity had already vanished, forced back into Cocytus, from where it likely had crawled out through a Realm Tear; Gabriel made a mental note to investigate that further. There had to be a tear close by.

Ana Marie fell to the floor, unconscious and perilously close to death. Her soul, now fragile and deteriorating, cracked and flaked apart like old paint exposed to the elements. Without immediate healing, she would succumb to a true death—her spirit shattered, ceasing to exist entirely. There would be no afterlife, no trace of her existence left. The only remnants of her being would be cast into the void. Gabriel couldn't allow that. Allowing this would mean he’d fail the damn test.

“This better work.”

Bent down beside the girl, Gabriel laid his left hand on her forehead and grasped the stump of her right hand. The air shimmered around him as he called upon the Thread Energies within himself, coaxing them forth and channeling them into the girl before him.

By nature, Thread Energies were destructive, sourced from the chaos between dimensions, the very realm where all supernatural creatures drew their power. Inherently malevolent and chaotic, these energies sought only carnage. However, ancient Sorcerers had devised a method to reverse the polarity of Thread Energy, transforming it from a chaotic sea into a steady and orderly stream. This reorganized energy – now the polar opposite of chaos - could then be harnessed to "heal" physical damage, even restoring lost body parts and organs if the wielder was skilled enough.

Yet, there were individuals who could take it a step further. They could convert this Reordered Thread Energy and inject it into another person, thereby healing them. Gabriel, however, was not one of those people. He struggled even to reverse the polarity of his own Thread Energy to heal a simple cut. There was a trick to it, though, a method his mentor had shown him—more accurately, demonstrated, several times.

“This better work,” Gabriel muttered, his eyes tightly closed in concentration.

Reversing the polarity of Thread Energy was an immensely challenging task, requiring intense focus. The fact that his energies were denser than most only complicated matters further. However, reversing someone else’s energy was comparatively easier, especially if that someone was not a sorcerer.

Every living creature possessed a minuscule amount of Thread Energy in their bodies, usually concentrated at the seat of the soul—the forehead. This amount was typically insufficient to grant them any of the abilities of a sorcerer. However, by flooding their bodies with additional Thread Energy, saturating them, and subsequently reversing the polarity of this energy, a sorcerer could heal others without needing a complete understanding of self-healing techniques.

This was because Thread Energy, lacking a directive or purpose, would instinctively attempt to adapt to its surroundings. If left exposed, it would disperse. But if contained within a human body, it would acclimate. By flooding the formerly possessed girl’s body with Thread Energy, allowing the energy to adapt to her internal environment, and then reversing its polarity within her, a process a thousand times easier than performing it on himself, Gabriel induced a sudden burst of healing. Her hand regrew, including her lost fingernails; the damaged organs, along with the cracks in her soul caused by the Fallen Angel's presence, mended themselves.

It was ironic, honestly, that Gabriel still couldn’t perform the healing on himself, but it was a useful skill.

He took a deep breath and leaned back, settling onto the floor right beside the girl. Inhaling slowly, he sighed. This had been his first proper exorcism. Usually, dispatching the host was enough to banish the entity within. “Well... that was harder than I thought it would be.”

“Good job!” Gabriel nearly jumped out of his skin as Blake Ishimura, his mentor, materialized right beside him, dressed in his trademark black suit and tie. He looked remarkably like a businessman, except for the pair of jet-black aviator glasses that shielded both his eyes.

His mentor grinned, as he always did. “I thought you might slip back into old habits and just kill the poor girl. But you went the extra mile to keep her alive. Good job, Gabriel. You passed the test. But, that’s not really a surprise for anyone, ya know?”

Gabriel nodded and rose to his feet. The girl appeared to be fine now, albeit with a few bruises here and there, things that human doctors could patch up without much trouble. He might have been a tad overzealous in punching her through the wall, though.

"There were too many witnesses when the Fallen came and possessed the girl. What do we do now?" Gabriel inquired.

"Let the Grand Council worry about that," his mentor replied with his ever-present grin. "By tomorrow, no one's going to remember a thing correctly—except maybe the priest, but that's just how it goes."

"Now that you've passed," his mentor continued, "it's time I properly introduce you to your team. Be nice."

“Tsk, no promises.”