The first few seconds Sua spent back on Earth were overwhelming.

Despite the cloudy sky, everything was too bright. The faint breeze made goosebumps break out all over her skin. Sirens ripped through screams, sound pounding in on her from every direction.

It stank like death, the smell of blood and rot so strong it nearly made her sick.

Using a hand to shade her face from the light, she squinted around, trying to concentrate through the bombardment of sensations after spending so long in the absence of everything.

She was back in Guryong Village, although it was hard to believe as much given how thoroughly things had changed. 

The sloping shacks and makeshift tents that made up the slum she once called home seemed to have doubled in number, leaving barely enough space to walk between houses, around tents, and between abandoned food stalls.

Stepping silently, Sua inched between the row of shacks that once surrounded her pitiful cardboard shack and toward one of the main roads of the shanty town, her shimmying quickly picking up pace as she realized the screams were rapidly being silenced from up ahead.

Rounding a corner, she came to an abrupt halt as she took in the sight of pure carnage: the road was split and cracked, slabs of dirt and rock jutting up from the ground or crashed through tattered homes; sparks flew from broken street lamps and power lines; corpses littered the street, bones cracked in wrong angles and entire limbs missing from others

Lumbering through the mayhem were creatures three meters tall, skin ashen gray with tusks jutting out from pig-like snouts. Red paint spiraled across bald heads, their groins covered with fraying cloth, and spiked clubs as long as Sua was tall were swinging easily from their hands.

It was a sight she was familiar with through the visions of the shadows' stories. Creatures she had watched in battle dozens of times from the safety of the Abyss.

To think that she would see ogres roaming the streets of Korea…

A soft groan caught her attention and Sua glanced down, eyes falling on a man still alive, the lower half of his body pinned under a shack’s debris. 

Keeping one eye on the warband of ogres, Sua knelt down, carefully shifting rocks and wood aside until she could pull the man out and tug him onto her back without so much as a huff of effort. 

As nice as it would be to take the moment to revel in the proof of her newfound strength, Sua simply did not have time to waste on marveling.

“Is there an evacuation point?” Having spent so much time in silence, her voice naturally came out as a whisper, Sua tilting her head to glance at the man on her back. 

“Across the highway, at the international school.”

Sua backed away from the ogres, fading into the darkness without a whisper of noise to attract attention. It was fortunate that she spent the early years of her life scurrying around the slum, despite the time away, she made her way to the outskirts without any trouble.

Instincts hammered into her after nearly getting plowed over by the car made her body want to hesitate when she reached the edge of the village. But, she wasn’t a little girl anymore.

It felt like moving through an active warzone, the sound of sirens coming from much further down the road as an automated message announced the shutdown of the street with orders for civilians to shelter in place.

Relying on the whispered instructions from her passenger, Sua raced past the highway that had once served as a barrier between her world and the rest of society, eyes widening as she took in the utter emptiness of the neighborhood around the school.

Cars and bikes had been abandoned in the middle of the streets, windows closed without a single light inside any of the buildings around. The school must have seen better days itself, most of the bottom windows boarded up and the lights turned off in the few windows still visible. A massive wall of barbed wire surrounded the grounds, tethered to trees and into sewage lines.

With safety in sight, and the ogres still several minutes behind them, Sua ran around the fence at a slower jog before coming to a stop at the only opening. A burly man in his thirties with a military haircut and a jagged scar running down his face appraised them both carefully.

Ignoring the oddness of his armor—that looked more akin to what she would saw from the feudal societies in the shadows' stories rather than modern-day Korea—and the shield strapped to his back, Sua said, “This man needs help.”

“They’ll have a stretcher once you get inside.” There was not so much as a flicker of surprise at the sight of a young woman carrying a full-grown man on her back with ease, the man simply pointed his thumb over his shoulder at a door. “Are you part of the rescue team?”

Shoving her ill-timed questions about what had happened to make such a sight normal in Seoul, she shook her head. “We ran away from a band of ogres. I’ll be back when I get him inside."

The man nodded, turning his attention back out toward the city without pause.

Jogging to the door, Sua noted the presence of nurses inside with a polite nod, “I found him under pieces of a shack, but he hasn’t been bleeding too horribly.”

Just like the guard at the gate, the nurses didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at the scene, easing the injured man onto a stretcher without delay and rushing him further into the school.

Sua made her way back to the entrance in mere seconds. “How far away is the rescue team?”

“Fifteen minutes. How far away are the ogres?”

The unfortunate thing about ogres was their tendency to gravitate towards larger groups of targets.

Despite only seeing the nurses inside the building, Sua had heard grouped tears and whispers from further inside. Compared to scattered sets of eyes she had felt from the neighborhood buildings, the school was active enough to bring the ogres straight to their location.

Their only saving grace was the fact that ogres were more inclined to lumber than race toward their prey. That would give them,“Ten minutes, if we’re lucky.”

It earned a sigh from the guard as he stared out toward the street for a moment before resigning himself with a small shake of his head. He glanced back down at Sua, dipping his head in a polite greeting. “My name’s Gwok Daewon. There are extra weapons inside the building if you need some, and if you have more experience with ogres than my four years, you are welcome to take command.”

Despite her family name being a common one, Sua couldn't shake a sense of uneasiness surrounding Jae-sung's disappearance from the shadows. Barring him vanishing into some odd dimension where shadow didn't exist, it seemed most likely that someone was hiding him.

And if they were hiding Jae-sung from the shadows, it wouldn't be difficult for them to track down his younger sister if her name started floating around.

Dipping her head in return of the greeting, Sua replied, “Sua." Ignoring the mild confusion on the other man's face at her curt introduction, she continued, "I’ve never fought ogres before, but I have my own weapons.”

“As long as you can take one or two down, that’ll help us hold out for reinforcements.”  

Looking out in the direction she came, Sua paused to listen as the shadows whispered from each corner. What she had initially thought was just sensitivity to the world after spending so long in the Abyss was clearly more than that.

Much like her strength, speed, and stamina, her senses seemed much stronger than was normal for a human of any age. Despite the distance and the buildings between them, Sua could sense the ogre band, moving quicker now that they had cleared the edge of the shanty town.

They felt strong... but not overwhelmingly so.

Tugging her attention back to her immediate surroundings, she looked at Daewon, “Is it just the two of us?”

“So far, yes. The closest gate is about twenty minutes off and the closest guild left for a training camp two days ago. If we’re lucky, a few more hunters might be in the area and coming to support, but we’re primarily dependent on the Hunter’s Association’s rapid response team right now.”

“I see.” Half of the words leaving his mouth had no real meaning for her, but this was not the time or place to demand explanations when the bottom line was obvious: the two of them had to hold out for at least five minutes. “What sort of fighter are you?”

“A tank.”

Sua blinked at him and his decidedly human-shaped appearance. Given the absurdity of what was going on, she could only fervently hope that human beings had not developed the ability to turn into vehicles in the last twelve years. “… what?”

Daewon gave her a curious look-over, amending his statement immediately, “A defensive fighter. I draw the attention of the enemies so others can attack.”

Making note of the term in case it came up later, Sua nodded, “Then you can keep defending the school, I’ll distract the ogres until help gets here.”

“The reports indicated there are ten of them moving as a group, that’s too much for one person to handle.”

She shrugged, “I’m not going to fight them head-on. Four or five of them will probably keep coming for the school, so stay on your guard.”

“But-”

Decidedly more interested in testing out her training than having a debate with a stranger, Sua pulled up the hood of her cloak and took off.

Taking a steadying breath to concentrate, she leapt at a cluster of shadows beside an abandoned car, melting into them as one of their own. Only a split-second later, she slipped back out of the shadows on top of a residential building, peering down at the highway as the band of ogres finished crossing it.

She was stronger than a normal human, that much she was positive of, but Sua wondered where she stacked up against creatures whose entire society was built around combat and war.

Even from a distance, she knew their hides would be near impossible to pierce if her blades were not of the best quality shadows could steal, imbued with enough of the Abyss’ energy to cut through a dragon’s hide.

“Wanna give me some help, guys?” Sua mumbled, her consciousness reaching out to the shadows around the ogres.

It was slow at first—Sua adjusting to the slight resistance that came with no longer being in the Abyss—the shadows growing longer as the warband lumbered through the metal railings on either side of the streets. They spread with each step the beasts took, swallowing abandoned bikes and climbing up lightposts to snuff them out.

As the shadows raced up the sides of trees and buildings, the ogres’ movements began to slow: the growing darkness coupled with their species’ poor eyesight making it nearly impossible for the ogres to see where they were going, much less each other.

Despite the steadiness of her hands and the cool calculation her brain tumbled through, Sua's heart pounded with adrenaline as she leapt from the rooftop, her landing cushioned by the shadows that reached up from the ground to break her fall, catching her like a droplet hitting the ocean and letting Sua land on the ground directly in front of one of the ogres.

Dagger hilts dropped out from the darkness inside her cloak and into her palms as she launched herself at the creature, jabbing the blades into the center of its gut and ripping them sideways in opposite directions with the ease of slicing through butter, tearing its stomach open in a vicious slash.

The roar that accompanied the spurt of green blood shot straight down her spine, but Sua didn’t stop moving, falling backward into the shadows before her location could be exposed.

It felt like what she always imagined a trampoline would as the shadows caught her fall, tossing her back up into the world so that she was hurtling at the second ogre, burying her blades into its eyes and toppling down to the ground on top of its corpse.

Her shadow crawled up her body, swallowing her rapidly as the ogres grunted at each other in their own language.

Sua stayed hidden in the shallow between the physical world and the Abyss, watching the band reorganize into pairs, moving with their shoulders pressed against their partner's before continuing across the highway.

She stepped out of the darkness at the back of the group, slashing the tendons of one ogre’s leg before pivoting, throwing a knife straight through the eye of its partner when it turned to investigate the first ogre’s sudden drop to the ground.

A sharp tingle of warning ran down her spine and Sua glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a greatsword hurtling her way. She skipped backward just fast enough to avoid getting clipped by the blade, blinking at the sight of another human decapitating the now crippled ogre. The fighter looked to be about her age, perhaps a year or two older, decked out in armor similar to Daewon.

“Seoyeon-ssi, now!” The man shouted, grabbing Sua’s arm and tugging her behind him.

She let him pull her out of sheer curiosity, eyebrow inching even higher when fireballs began to crash down from the sky, killing the remaining ogres in one fell swoop.