Victoria wrenched upward. She had been having a dream, that much she was sure of, her arms were covered in talon wounds that had already closed and were beginning to fade. They had not been there last night. They were probably self-inflicted. Hopefully.
She rose out of the bed drenched in sweat.
She hated this feeling, it felt like her body was betraying her. It felt weak. She hauled her way into the shower and turned the shower on as cold as it could possibly go. Victoria had never been a fan of the heat, she had preferred night missions or missions in cold environments, hot sticky jungles made her feathers feel awful.
After a thoroughly practiced morning ritual, teeth brushed, generic tasteless cereal prepared, air conditioner cranked and swaddled in a cocoon of blankets Victoria flung herself onto the couch prepared for a long day of consuming 3 separate points of mass-produced, low-quality media through her phone.
She had lain there for an indeterminate amount of time when her phone rang. Beowulf HQ. damn. “This is Victoria, id number 5854” she said pre-emptively in a tone that dripped with disinterest. The young sounding operator slowly read out the task she would be required to do using language that made it very clear to her that the boy was reading from a script.
“look” she drawled, cutting him off mid-sentence “put me onto mitch or something, I don’t have all day”
She did, in fact, have all day. But she wasn’t about to tell the kid that. The phone crackled for a moment before the world’s most painful hold music began to slowly wind itself around the cracks in her patience until the abrupt stop as sergeant Mitchell’s voice came back onto the radio. There was no true ranking in Beowulf, his title was in name alone but he had once been a soldier and Mitchell took pride in that.
“Victoria, I would appreciate it if you followed protocol and waited until the legal preamble had ended before I told you what was happening” sighed Mitchell
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“I don’t have all day Mitchell, is it an emergency?”
“YES” affirmed Mitchell, clearly annoyed by her irreverent tone “you have some prep time but we are pre-warning you, this job is taking place in the dead zone, and it is urgent”
The dead zone.
Of course it was in the dead zone.
When the monsters first came, no one knew of their corrupting influence, if they stayed in an area for a long amount of time it would slowly become infused with some sort of reality warping energy. Giant ecosystems completely hostile to human life would appear as beautiful as they were deadly. So while the monsters near people had been destroyed, many far away from people, for instance in great deserts like the Sahara and Siberia, new biomes completely had appeared. The dead zone was the biggest of all of these locations. In Australia the vast majority of land is uninhabitable by humans. There may be roads through it but no settlements to save. So the monsters were left there. Eventually what was created was an enormous, corrupted area full of different ecosystems and completely ruled by monsters. Most cities had been swallowed up leaving only the very outskirts of Australia inhabited. As far as Beowulf knew, no one could survive inside there without being a hunter, although, the exception worked for them.
“the dead zone is growing at an alarming rate and the final strongholds are coming under fire. The monsters are encroaching on human territory. We have to evacuate the entire country. And we need all hands-on deck”
Victoria stopped to consider this for a minute. This was an operation far beyond anything she had ever been involved in before. Usually she just murdered single monsters, but this didn’t seem like the sort of thing hunters would be required for, usually monsters didn’t leave the dead zone unless under the influence of an alpha or something even bigger.
“Mitchell?”
“Yes Victoria?”
“There wouldn’t be anything *big* that you’re leaving out would there?”
Mitchell said nothing but she could almost feel him wince through the phone
“there’s a Nephilim in the dead zone.”
Victoria paused, aghast at the news
“Are you trying to kill it or are you actually evacuating?”
“We aren’t going to fight it unless absolutely necessary, none of us want to repeat Greenland. You have a day to prepare”
And with that he hung up, leaving Victoria to wallow in dread.
Her phone embedded into the drywall followed by a cascade of insults. Her day was ruined, and they were totally going to make them fight the Nephilim