No one saw them coming.

They struck hard and fast, ten rifts opening over the Kentucky farm. A large, menacing ship was birthed from the largest portal, armed with heavy guns that fired off twenty rounds per second.

The other portals released Jawal. 

Synthesis had been stationed near his home and mobilized whoever he could to respond to the attack. 

He arrived first out of the interceptors.  

He fought tooth and nail, but a massive slab of concrete from a blown building crushed him. The light of his suit flickered before it went out.

On the other side of the farm, Tabitha struggled to protect her daughter, Rebecca, trading blows with the beast at the same time as she tried to get her daughter out of harm's way.

She could run, but the firing turrets from the colossal battleship made it impossible to escape. Her daughter wasn’t indestructible like her.

Tabitha had fought her way to her house in hopes of refuge, but the enemy ship had sent rounds through it, piercing the lab underneath. A ricocheted bullet struck her, and Tabitha found herself lying on a cold floor, blood pooling around her. Her head ached.

Through her lashes, she saw Rebecca lying beside her. Breathing.

Blue from the lab spilled around her.

We must have fallen through the floor.

In a desperate act, she grabbed one of the pills.

Any…anything to save my daughter. She thought incoherently.

Her husband hadn’t even entertained the idea of testing Blue on her, worried her already amplified cells would rupture with the steroid. Blue had only been approved for non-immune individuals. Tests had shown that Immune abilities were amplified for a short time, but the immediate sickness afterward was fatal.

She pushed the pill past her lips right as she felt her consciousness slipping.

Tabitha had no idea what it would do to her. 

In an instant, gravity disappeared. 

Debris lifted, glass shards rose like a deconstructed chandelier, and the pills danced in the air. Tabitha’s eyes shot open. 

Her daughter Rebecca floated beside her, and she too felt her body suspended in mid-air amongst weightless debris. Tabitha was still bleeding out, and a moment of coherence reminded her that the enemy ship was still above her, turrets trained on them. 

Her daughter.

Her home. 

She got angry. 

With a shout, she aimed her anger at the ship. 

The hull of it shook, and was torn off by some unseen and unforgiving force. 

Tabitha’s anger was momentarily overruled by shock.

On cue, bodies, machinery, and weaponry spilled out the hull and descended to the surface of the now destroyed farm.

The image of her family’s ruined legacy put Tabitha back into her blind rage. She shoved herself off the floor.

She wasn’t going to let the monsters hide in the fields now full of debris. 

She tore the place apart, wreckage defying gravity as she passed them, and came face-to-face with the enemy. A robed red figure with yellow eyes and a flat ridge where a nose was supposed to be, stumbled from a broken solar panel. He turned hateful, glaring yellow eyes at her. She matched his glare.

An alien.

Their staredown was interrupted by a flood of energy beams. Interceptor beams.

The cavalry is here. Tabitha thought with relief.

Daybreak, NovaStar, Vermillion Destroyer, Bluestar, and Cloud descended from the skies.

Kiera realized that the fight her team was forced to engage in reminded her of the war stories her parents had told her. This wasn’t the wild attack of the Jawal beasts, but a coordinated push, even with their main ship down. 

It took hours of fighting Jawal and the mysterious red-skinned creatures before the enemy did a full retreat through the portals. It took even less time for the battle to be on the news. Clips of the enemy stragglers being rescued by the humanoids were a metaphorical kick to the public’s stomach. Kiera’s hunch was right.

The world now knew who their enemy truly was, and what their enemy looked like.

The Jawal weren’t the monsters, they were the minions.