Chapter 190: The Weight of War
She stepped back from the display, her hands falling to her sides.
"Captains," Raven said, her voice hollow beneath the crow mask, "this is what we are fighting against."
The captains were completely frozen.
The details were so absurd, so grotesque, so beyond the scope of anything they had ever imagined, that their minds struggled to accept what their eyes had seen.
A system.
A factory.
A machine that had been grinding up human souls and children’s bodies for two thousand years, right beneath the surface of a world that thought itself civilized.
And no one had known.
No one had suspected. T
he demons had corrupted everything, governments, economies, the very fabric of human society, and humanity had been too busy fighting itself to notice.
Captain Lily spoke first, her voice trembling.
She was sixteen, younger than the others, younger than her rank suggested. A prodigy who had risen through the ranks on raw talent and desperate need. But the images on the screen, the AI-generated drawings, the photographs of jars and blood pools and children who looked like ghosts, had cracked something inside her. Her pale face was wet with tears she had not realized she was crying.
"Chief," she said, her voice small, fragile,
"this is inhuman. We have to save those children." Her hands were shaking. Her shoulders were shaking.
Everything about her was shaking, because she was not an adult, not really, she was a girl who had been forced to grow up too fast, and now she was seeing something that no amount of growing up could prepare her for.
Captain Erika turned to Lily, and her eyes were wet too, but not with fear.
Her past trauma had surfaced, bubbling up from the dark place where she had buried it.
Her little sister’s face flashed through her mind, the way she had looked before the demons took her, the way she had looked after, the way Erika had held her body and screamed until her throat bled.
"No," Erika said, her voice hard, sharp, cutting through Lily’s fear like a blade.
"We have to end all the suffering. Forever." Her eyes blazed with the fire of revenge, the fire that had burned in her chest for years, that had driven her to become a captain, to hunt demons, to kill anything that stood between her and the creatures that had taken everything.
Chief Sara raised her hand, and the captains fell silent.
"Yes," she said, her voice calm and steady, though her hands trembled beneath the table where no one could see.
"I am aware of the horror. And Raven has already shared all the documents with other world agencies, the Americans, the Chinese, the Russians, the Japanese, everyone who needs to know."
She paused, her violet eyes sweeping across the captains, measuring them, weighing them.
"So that we can finally end this war."
She let the word hang in the air.
*War.*
Not skirmishes.
Not raids.
Not the endless cycle of attack and retreat that had defined the Agency’s existence for generations.
War.
Total, absolute, world-changing war.
The captains were furious.
Not at Sara, not at the Agency, but at the demons, at the system, at the centuries of horror that had been hidden from them.
They wanted to end the suffering.
They wanted to burn the demonic kingdom to the ground.
They wanted to take every child that was still alive and wrap them in blankets and tell them that the nightmare was over.
But first, they had to survive.
"The reason I showed you this today," Sara continued, her voice dropping, becoming more serious, "is because from now on, the world is going to change."
The captains exchanged glances. Confusion flickered across their faces, mingled with fear.
"What does that mean, Chief?" Elga asked.
Captain Fiona leaned forward, her voice quiet. "The world is going to change?"
Sara nodded slowly.
"Yes," she said. "Once the world agencies decide on a course of action, once we have coordinated our efforts, aligned our strategies, and agreed on a unified response." She paused, letting the tension build, letting the captains lean forward in their seats.
"And once we find the demon king’s hidden base, the castle that no satellite can see and no agent can reach."
She paused again.
"Then it will be all-out war."
The room felt silent.
Not the heavy silence of before, but a different kind of silence, the silence of soldiers standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down at a darkness so deep that they could not see the bottom.
Either they would win and save humanity, or they would lose and forfeit their right to live free. There was no middle ground.
No compromise.
No retreat.
Sara’s voice was cold and absolute when she spoke again.
"From now on, I want you to recruit more members. Train them harder. Prepare them for what is coming."
She looked at the empty chairs around the table, chairs that had once been occupied by captains who had died in the Japan ritual, who had given their lives to stop a nightmare that was nothing compared to what was coming.
"We cannot afford to lose anyone else in this upcoming war."
The captains nodded.
They understood.
They had all lost people, friends, family, comrades.
They would not let those sacrifices be in vain.
---
Sara turned to Raven.
"Thank you for everything," she said. "I want you to keep tracking the high demons and the upper blood demons and monitor their movements. Report any changes. We need to be ready when the time comes."
Raven bowed her head, her crow mask gleaming in the dim light.
"Yes, Chief," she said. "For humanity, we will do anything."
She stepped backward into the shadows, and the shadows swallowed her.
One moment she was there, solid, real, present, and the next she was gone, vanished into the darkness as if she had never existed.
The captains stared at the spot where she had stood, their minds still struggling to process everything they had seen and heard.
The other captains rose from their seats.
They did not speak.
There was nothing left to say.
The briefing had ended, and now the weight of what they had learned settled onto their shoulders like a yoke.
Elga clenched her fists so tightly that her knuckles turned white. In her mind, she imagined her fingers wrapped around the throat of Upper Blood Demon Number Three, the monster who had destroyed her life, reduced her to nothing more than a breeding tool, and brought her into existence for his own twisted entertainment.
Her jaw tightened.
Hatred burned within her chest like an uncontrollable flame.
Her eyes blazed with fury as the memories she had spent years trying to bury clawed their way back to the surface.
Erika walked past him, her face set in stone, her mind already racing through strategies for hunting Upper Blood Demon Number Four, the one who had sexually assaulted her little sister, who had tortured her, who had killed her slowly, who had made Erika watch.
She would find him.
She would kill him.
And she would make sure he suffered.
Lily followed behind them, her steps unsteady, her face pale as a sheet.
The reality was too much.
The images. The reports. The horrifying knowledge that children were being fed to demons at this very moment while she sat safely inside a meeting room, listening to words on paper.
Her stomach twisted.
Tonight, she knew she would not sleep.
The nightmares would come.
But they were nothing compared to the truth she had just learned.
Five years ago, dozens of children had vanished from her orphanage without a trace. No bodies were ever found. No clues were ever discovered. She had spent years blaming herself, wondering if there had been something she could have done to save them.
Now she finally knew what had happened.
The children had never run away.
They had never been kidnapped by ordinary criminals.
They had been taken by demons.
Fed to monsters.
Lily’s hands trembled as grief and rage mixed together inside her chest.
For five years she had searched for answers.
Now that she had them, only one thought remained.
She would kill them.
Every last one of them.
They filed out of the room, one by one, until only Fiona remained.
She did not move from her seat.
Her hands rested on the table, palms down, fingers spread.
Her eyes were fixed on the blank screens, on the place where the images had been, on the horror that still lingered in her mind like smoke after a fire.
She had questions.
She had secrets.
She had a weapon that the Agency did not know about, an ally that no one had even imagined.
Chief Sara turned to her, one eyebrow raised.
"Captain Fiona," she said. "You have something to tell me."
Fiona looked up.
The room was empty now, just the two of them, the polished table, the blank screens, and the weight of everything that was coming.
She took a breath.
She steadied her hands.
And she began to speak.
Fiona’s voice was low, serious, each word measured as if she were confessing a crime rather than reporting intelligence.
"Chief, remember the port incident a few days ago?"
Chief Sara turned from the blank screens, her violet eyes narrowing.
The way Fiona spoke, the hesitation, the weight behind her words, the way she would not meet Sara’s gaze, felt less like a debriefing and more like a confession.
Sara had heard this tone before, from agents who had made mistakes, from soldiers who had broken under pressure, from people about to admit something that could destroy their careers.
"Yes," Sara said carefully. "And?"
Fiona swallowed.
"Like I said before, when the time came, I would tell you everything. That time is now."
Sara folded her arms, her violet hair catching the dim light.
"I remember. You told me your team had killed the threat. You filed a report. I let it go because I did not have enough evidence to prove otherwise, and because."
Her jaw tightened.
"Because I trusted you, since you must have had a reason to hide."
Fiona flinched.
The word trusted hung in the air like an accusation.
"Yes, Chief," she said. "We are grateful for that. But now the time has come to tell you the truth." She took a breath, steadying herself. "We did not kill that threat. She did not die from her own attack. Your suspicion was correct, the report I filed was false."
Sara was silent for a long moment.
She had known.
She had suspected it from the beginning, from the inconsistent witness statements, from the satellite data, from the cold aura that had rippled across the city.
The power she had sensed that night was not something that could be killed by mortal weapons or demonic magic. It was something else.
Something older.
Something that should not exist in this world.
"I knew that long ago. I was not sure who she was or where she was hiding. That is why I did not have a choice but to wait for you to confess." She stepped closer to Fiona, her shadow falling across the table. "Now tell me where she is."
Fiona met her eyes. "Chief," she said,
"she lives in this city. Among us. Living a peaceful life."
Sara’s composure cracked.
"What? Are you insane?"
She had been expecting the creature to be hiding in some remote location, a mountain fortress, an underground bunker, a dimensional rift no human could access.
But the same city? The same streets where civilians went about their daily lives, unaware that a being capable of ending the world was walking among them?
"Now you are telling me that a world-level threat has been living among us this entire time? Do you have any idea what could have happened if she had decided to."
"Yes, Chief," Fiona interrupted, her voice steady despite her trembling hands.
"I am sorry. I did not intend to hide it. But you have to trust me, she is not aligned with the Demon King. I am certain of that."
Sara’s aura leaked.
The temperature in the room dropped.
The lights flickered.
The air grew heavy, pressing against Fiona’s chest, making it hard to breathe.
Sara’s red eyes blazed with something that was not quite anger and not quite fear, something in between, something worse.
"How can you be certain?" Sara demanded.
"Do you know what our systems showed when she released her aura? Do you have any idea what I saw on my screens that night?"
Fiona paused.
She had not thought about that.
She had been at the port, fighting for her life, watching Erza freeze the harbor and shatter the demons and disappear into the night.
She had not seen the readings.
She had not analyzed the data.
She had only felt the cold and the fear and the impossible weight of the dragon queen’s presence.
"I do not know, Chief," Fiona admitted. "I was at the scene."
Sara’s voice dropped, becoming cold and absolute.
"The system marked her as a humanity-level threat."
Fiona froze.
The words echoed in her skull, humanity-level threat.
Not city-level.
Not country-level.
Not even world-level.
Humanity-level.
A threat so great that it could not be measured in terms of geography or politics or military power. A threat to the very existence of the human species.
She had known that Erza was strong.
She had felt the white-haired monster, had seen her freeze the port, had watched her shatter the demons without effort.
But she had not understood the scale.
She had not realized that the Agency’s systems, designed to detect and classify demonic threats, to measure power levels and predict outcomes, had looked at Erza and found no category that fit.
Not because she was weak, but because she was beyond classification.
Humanity-level threat.
Fiona’s mind raced, connecting dots that she had been trying to ignore.
The demons were not acting coincidentally.
They were not moving randomly.
They were not attacking without reason.
They were afraid.
They knew about Yuuta’s wife.
They had sensed her power, had felt her aura, had realized that something was coming for them.
And they were preparing.
Fiona realized, in that terrible moment, that she had made a deal with the worst possible ally.
She had agreed to let Erza help her, had agreed to let the dragon queen destroy the demonic kingdom, without understanding the full implications.
She had been so focused on her revenge, so blinded by her hatred for the demons who had killed her father, that she had not stopped to consider what would happen after.
Erza was not just a weapon.
She was a force of nature.
And forces of nature did not care about collateral damage.
Fiona’s hands trembled beneath the table. Her heart pounded against her ribs. Her throat was dry.
She had thought she was forming an alliance.
She had just signed humanity’s death warrant.
Fiona felt her throat go dry.
Across the table, Sara noticed immediately.
She had spent years leading captains and agents. Reading people had become second nature to her. The moment she saw the fear creeping into Fiona’s face, she began connecting the pieces.
Sara’s eyes narrowed.
"Why are you bringing this up now?" she asked.
The room immediately fell silent again.
Her gaze remained fixed on Fiona.
"You hid this information for weeks. You protected her identity. You defended her actions."
The pressure in Sara’s voice grew heavier.
"So why confess now?"
A terrible possibility crossed her mind.
"Unless..."
Sara’s expression darkened.
"Unless you’ve done something behind my back."
Fiona lowered her head.
The silence that followed was answer enough.
Sara’s eyes widened slightly.
"Fiona."
Her voice became dangerously calm.
"What did you do?"
Fiona slowly clenched her fists.
Then she spoke.
"I made an agreement with her, Chief."
The room froze.
Sara’s face lost all expression.
"...What?"
Fiona forced herself to continue.
"I joined hands with that monster."
Silence consumed the room.
To Be Continued...
