Chapter 28 — When the Sky Screams

The meeting ends with the clatter of chairs and the rustle of maps being folded. Orders are given; routes are confirmed. Tomorrow they sail for Hawaiʻi aboard the USS Saratoga Mark II. The carrier is a fortress reborn—rail cannons glinting, batteries humming like restless beasts. For a moment the world feels astonishingly small: a deck, an engine room, the horizon.

Kohaku records his thought into the dry light of morning, voice flat and tightly held like a promise folded into steel.

“Tomorrow will be a day I never forget. This is what needs to be done. I promised I would bring peace back—no matter the cost.”

Around him, the base rises to war. VTOLs roar, rotors cut the air, alarms weave through the compound in urgent silver threads. Men and women shoulder packs, slide helmets down, kiss the photos in their jackets. The last quiet has broken; a new noise has taken its place—the single steady drum of a world returning to fight.

Vivian is back.

She arrives like a challenge—hair like fallen frost, one blade strapped crimson to her back, eyes folding over the scene with an expression both hungry and amused. When Kohaku sees her, she stares as though studying a specimen and then smiles with the arrogance of someone who cuts and has never been cut in return.

“So this is the one who killed the Black Dragon—and butchered men in Kyoto,” she says. “Fascinating.”

Her voice is a cold coin tossed into a river; it makes ripples on the surface of him but does not disturb the depth beneath. Kohaku does not answer. He never explains where words will only mar what the blade must do.

Ely—Eva—moves among them with the steady certainty of a commander who turns fear into order. Agnes runs diagnostics, eyes flickering, calculations pouring through her like light. Rika is not allowed to board; her grandfather’s orders hold her back. The look she gives Kohaku as the VTOL lifts—equal parts stubborn and sorrowful—catches in his throat like a word unsaid.

Above the blue, the fleet becomes a ribbon of metal and shadow. Saratoga rides below them like an island of iron. VTOLs peel off in formation, jets streak overhead and drop their loads—precision incendiary charges designed to sterilize the nests of Soul Beasts before the ground troops hit the streets.

Over the squad channel Aaron Mustang’s voice cuts in—aged, steady, tinny through radio compression, a voice that has led men before when the horizon burned.

“I know you’re tired. We all are. Look outside—this is more than a sunrise. In one hour we force a new dawn. Yesterday proved they can be struck. That was vital. But the core still breathes. Under that city, the rot still festers.”

“You are the spear. Each VTOL, every helicopter—this is the blade. We fly above history to plunge into it. They expect rest; they expect us to slow. We will show them wrong. Every meter you take, every bullet you send, is for the silence we promised—our children waiting below. This is not a mission; this is the execution of a vow. Leave nothing behind. Give everything.”

Pilots call their runs into the static: “Bombs away! Bombs away!” Ordinance tears at the ocean and the skyline. Columns of vapor bloom where the sea is struck; nests of beasts below the surface sizzle and burst. The air tastes of cordite and salt.

Onboard, soldiers press family photos to their chests, inscribe names on smokes and small packets of soil—rituals for the living and the dead. There is fear, yes, but threaded through it is a brittle, burning will. They will go because there is no other language left to speak.

Honolulu receives them in smoke and fire. Jets scream and tear at the dark nests above the city; surface-to-air flak blossoms like black flowers. Tanks rumble ashore, APCs disgorge men into streets ringed with ruins. The invasion plan—clear the outer nests, push to the neural core under the city, sever Ryugaa’s resonance—meets the truth: the beasts flood like a tide, resilient and ravenous.

Kohaku moves with the cold efficiency of someone who has practiced death until it leaves no trace. Vivian is a red storm at his flank; Agnes keeps them breathing, rerouting power, patching armor with movements too quick for cheering. Eva’s orders slice the chaos into lanes of survival. Yet every step forward costs a ledger of lives.

The roar comes then, low and planetary—a sound that shakes the teeth in the skull. It is not a beast’s cry but a command. Under the ocean’s boiling skin something answers, and across the globe that bone-deep sound calls the dead and the sleeping.

No one is ready for the flood that follows. Cities that had begun to heal crack open; the earth coughs up old terrors. From Tokyo to Moscow, from Beijing to Santiago, the bells of war ring again. Men clutch their photos tighter. Women close their eyes and pray in tongues older than the ruins.

At the front, a pilot’s voice reaches Kohaku over the channel. The simple line drops like a stone into the mechanics of the day.

“For the ones who can’t fight. For tomorrow.”

Kohaku tastes a thin kind of iron consolation. He will carry that stone. He will press forward until the blade cracks or the world breathes in a different rhythm. Honolulu is only the beginning. The roar from the deep will demand everything the world has left.

They do not know yet the name that will be written in the shadow above them—Ryugaa, Angra—the world-eater risen from the marrow of old sins. For now, they answer only with motion and iron and the heat of living hearts pressed against a sky that has begun to scream.

Someone shouts—equal parts prayer and command—“LIBERATION!”

The cry rolls through the canyon of shattered buildings and is swallowed by smoke, but it keeps moving. They descend into the city and into the war that waits there. Tomorrow, Kohaku thinks, will be the day he burns into memory. He promised to bring peace. He promised to be the iron that holds the last thin line.

The world leans forward with him.