Well that's just gratuitous, I thought to myself as I realized a new incursion was spreading out over the campus. Looking at Katherine again, I realized she was staring at me. So you might know that I'm not quite what I seem—but if that's the case, are you willing to call me out on it?

Feigning terror like all the other students I could see nearby, I whipped my head around like I was looking for any indication of the direction of the nearest bunker. Actually, I realized I didn't know where it was. I just knew that there was supposed to be one near the student union.

Well at least I don't have to pretend!

"There's a bunker nearby, right?" I asked, injecting an edge of desperation into my voice. "Where—"

"Inside the union building," Katherine said firmly, cutting me off. "Come with me."

The way she grabbed my hand and pulled me back in the direction of the student union was totally unlike her limp lettuce grip back when I was the one pulling her off to a cafe and my own penthouse. She really has gotten so much more confident and assertive.

I wasn't sure how much of that was due to gaining the powers of a true Star Guardian and how much was the result of various new fun and thrilling traumatic experiences. Also, wait—I don't know she's a Guardian. She's just a regular person as far as I'm concerned.

I was pretty sure she hadn't told me she was a student Guardian yet. Funny how she's not telling me now, either. What's up with that? It was a little bit suspicious, but I wasn't going to continue leaping to additional conclusions.

It didn't take us long to reach the building, although it would have been faster if I put my real strength into it. As it were, I was limiting my movements to an incredibly pathetic jog that matched my chosen body type for my current form.

Finally, after rushing through the glass doors and descending to the basement, Katherine all but shoved me into the bunker antechamber. "Wait!" I protested as she immediately turned to leave, "what are you doing?"

"I'm a Guardian," she said.

And that was it. By the time I'd considered how to respond, she was already out of sight, recklessly charging up the stairs and back out of the union. Shrugging, I turned an eye to my surroundings.

While an incursion bunker could really be anything, there were certain legal codes as well as standard design practices, and a proper bunker in the middle of a university campus in the middle of a large west coast American city was almost surely going to be fairly good.

One important aspect of the standard implementation was to have a staged entrance, kind of like a spaceship airlock. This meant that the people inside the bunker could let additional people inside without risking an Anathema getting inside as well.

Basically, if a bunker was already closed, you would run into the open middle area, at which point you could close the outer gate and then signal to whoever might be inside to open up the inner gate.

There were various clever design details for how to guarantee certain things, like how one gate always had to be open and one closed, and how to still keep the basic functions operational in the event of a total loss of power, including the internal generators.

I didn't really care about all of that, though. What I cared about was that Katherine had left me behind—and that staying in a crowded bunker with a bunch of scared college students for at least several hours would be an utterly miserable experience.

Once I was sure that Katherine was well and truly gone—even going so far as to flick out my tongue and taste the air with my inhuman senses—I made my way back up the stairs and began searching for a good place to swap forms.

The power in the building was so active, which meant all the cameras definitely were too. Fortunately, now that I'd reached Tier 4, I could pretty easily do something about that.

If I focused on it, I could feel out the location of nearby metal, as well as the various forces and energies running through it. That mostly amounted to getting a rough idea of the temperature of metal, but also extended to things like electricity and vibration. The former was what was most relevant to me right now.

Just as I was about to exit the building, I pulled on one of those esoteric threads connecting me to the major power line running just below my feet. A violet arc snapped into existence between my foot and the power lines.

From there, things went a bit wild.

My ability to manipulate metal at a distance this way was still quite limited, and mostly amounted to either pulling it towards me or flinging it away—or if the object was big and heavy enough, pulling and pushing me.

That being said, upon reaching Tier 4, my domain had also grown to encompass some aspects of magnetism and electricity—specifically where they interacted directly with metal. Combined with the inherent nature of a power circuit, the end result was that I could suddenly exert a massive amount of additional influence that extended well beyond the usual range of any of my abilities.

I was pretty sure I could take down a fairly large area of the local grid like this if I wanted to—and that was exactly what I wanted to do, so I did.

It wasn't very dramatic. There were no sudden explosions or showers of sparks. The lights just went off and the constant hum of fans, pumps, and other machinery that I hadn't realized I was even hearing went off.

It wasn't even like I'd permanently ruined it. I doubted it would be much harder for the utility company to eventually fix than the result of a particularly windy storm.

It did mean, however, that all those people crammed into that bunker would be spending the next several hours in near total darkness, as well as having lost all network connection. A real shame. Sucks to be them.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

But now, I could duck into an empty conference room and shift into my old appearance without worrying about being recorded. Unfortunately, I would lose my current outfit, since I had no reasonable way to store or carry it, and I didn't want to leave it behind as evidence.

So, after completely stripping down, I just ate it. That's one nice part of being an Anathema, I mused, it's so easy to destroy physical evidence.

Then I shifted from the curvy, dark haired Vonnie into what was perhaps my truest form—thin, blonde haired Alex, only now, this form was locked into exhibiting a monstrous, metallic lower face and jaws and equally intimidating metal claws.

An ordinary incursion should be a pretty decent opportunity to both hone my abilities and satiate my hunger—and now that Alex, alias Valkyrie, was a wanted criminal anyway—well, I would dare say it was showtime.

Matthias "Crimson Tempest" Asano

"Well isn't this nostalgic," Matthias muttered as he poked his head out of the second floor window of the university Guardian center building. As a full time member of the Association of Active Guardians, or AAG, assigned as the mentor to student Guardians at the university, it was largely his responsibility to direct the response to an incursion taking place directly on campus.

Such an event wasn't unheard of in the university's history, and objectively speaking, it was more likely for a new incursion to happen soon after a previous one than at any other time.

Still, Matthias couldn't help but shake his head at the unfortunate coincidence.

Leaping straight out of the window, the Tier 4 Guardian didn't waste time unleashing his aura to blanket the surrounding area. As a Tier 4 Guardian—the effective equivalent of a Tier 5 Anathema—he had reached the first tier at which a proper aura developed.

The aura was what truly distinguished Tier 4, 5, and 6 Guardians from Tier 1, 2, and 3, and it represented the single largest power gap until the chasm between Tier 6 and 7, which almost no one ever crossed.

Within a fully formed aura, a Guardian's abilities commanded qualitatively—as well as quantitatively—greater power and control. The difference was so huge that it was never recommended for a Tier 3 Guardian to ever engage a Tier 5 Anathema—the equivalent of a Tier 4—unless there was literally no choice.

In Matthias's case, one of the simplest and most obvious effects became apparent the moment he detected an uncommonly powerful Tier 2 skinner entering his aura.

Skinners were one of the most common Anathema types, present in almost any incursion. With an appearance like a hairless big cat or scaleless lizard, taut skin stretched over a too-bony body, and massive, blade-like claws, the monsters were nonetheless a dire threat to any ordinary human.

While they were mostly associated with lower tiers—mainly just Tier 1—skinners could become a poor match for Matthias when their own tier matched or exceeded his own. This was due to their complete lack of blood, which was the concept around which all of his abilities revolved.

But a mere Tier 2 was nothing, as despite having no blood to seize control of, skinners were one of the weakest types at any given tier. A mere concentration of will was all it took for Matthias's aura to utterly shred the monster.

It didn't even take a full second for the monster to be reduced to fleshy ribbons.

Back when he was Tier 3, Matthias would have had to make direct physical contact to get the same result. With his Tier 4 aura, however, he could do it with a mere thought from over two dozen feet away.

Unfortunately, the same lack of blood meant that there was little to be gained from killing it besides taking down an Anathema in the first place. So, Matthias moved on, using his aura to seek out anything he could, until he had accumulated his namesake whirlwind of alien blood.

From there, the Tier 4 Guardian took a more directed, forward thinking approach. Not sensing any human beings in range, he took off in the direction of the nearest bunker.

Bunkers were always a good first place to stop in any incursion. While most Anathema that would appear in a low tier incursion wouldn't do much to threaten those already inside, Anathema would nonetheless accumulate around them like sharks around a caged diver.

Similarly, people who weren't already inside would be rushing over, making the general location a true hotspot for both Anathema and people in need of protection. For those reasons, Guardians were instructed to seek out bunkers if there wasn't anything else nearby that seemed like it should warrant their attention, like a titan or other people.

And finally, the resulting convergence of multiple separate Guardians or Guardian teams would ultimately provide a great chance to meet up and strategize.

The nearest true bunker was underneath the student union building, so that was where Matthias headed. Along the way, he took down anything that passed through his aura. Most of the Anathema were only Tier 1—even weaker than the first skinner—so he didn't have to slow down.

There were a couple Tier 3s that required more attention. The first was a massive, truck sized grabber. Another extremely common Anathema type, grabbers were essentially little more than writhing masses of formless black tentacles.

This Tier 3 variant, however, possessed additional esoteric abilities that could have presented a serious challenge to a Tier 1 or 2 team. Matthias discovered this when the Tier 3 Anathema struck at him from many different angles while still thirty feet away, as if it had stuck them through a dozen different miniature portals.

This was not a problem for Matthias, as his own abilities worked best for cutting a destructive path through anything that got close. The grasping, disembodied tentacles were torn apart by shards of crystallized blood the moment they appeared.

By the time the grabber realized what a poor match its own ability was for Matthias, the Guardian had closed the distance. Seconds after that, he emerged through the other side of the dead monster, having torn a gaping hole straight through the central mass.

Dark, yellow-black ichor ripped free of what remained of the grabber, fueling the growing tempest of Matthias's power.

Finally, Matthias reached the union square, putting the building and the bunker below in reach of his aura. There were a lot of people down there and only a few in the surrounding buildings—but that wasn't what caught the majority of his attention. At the very edge of his senses, he could feel the signature of a powerful Tier 4.

Shit.

While a Tier 4 Anathema wouldn't have an aura, it was still a serious threat. An Anathema that powerful could definitely force itself into a typical bunker, given enough time—and while this particular monster was only at the bottom of Tier 4 in terms of advancement, it nonetheless felt like a strong one.

Not all Anathema were created equal, after all.

With that kind of strength, Matthias worried that the bunker's defenses might not even pose a true obstacle. Shit.

Making matters worse, an Anathema like that could potentially massacre an unsuspecting team or typical Civil Guard detachment. As the official mentor for all of the Guardians at the university itself, Matthias was confident that only one of their teams would even have a chance at escaping alive, let alone winning.

Bursting into action, Matthias put everything he had into chasing after the Tier 4, which oddly enough seemed to be itself moving in the opposite direction from all the delicious humans trapped in the bunker. He found that odd—surely the Anathema should have detected their presence—but he didn't have time to dwell on it.

A powerful, low Tier 4 was something he needed to handle with utmost haste. And while it wouldn't have an aura of its own, Matthias knew to be careful. Anathema, once they'd grown past the lowest tiers, could be full of surprises.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.