My initial intention was to go assist Richard and Hans while letting Staircase and Smartypants trail along with me. That turned out to be unnecessary, because the two bosses had already evacuated. They left when the shots were fired, the big Anathema guy informed me.

That was convenient, because it gave me more flexibility in how to deal with the developing situation. Mostly, that meant shepherding my two tagalongs out of the incursion as fast as I could. As a mid-tier Anathema, remaining near the breach would only worsen the incursion.

As it was right now, I suspected that Surfer Dude alone could handle it. That might not have been the case under normal circumstances, but with him standing right next to it—well, I wasn't as confident in assessing the tier of an incursion as I was with Guardians and Anathema, but it didn't feel any stronger than the Tier 1 breach I'd originally faced.

So, with the understanding that I would be more harm than help, and that the annoying Tier 3 vigilante would likely handle it, I nodded at the other guy—whose name and type I still hadn't learned—and we headed for the emergency exit.

It was around that point where the rather ordinary breach went completely crazy.

There was an audible crackling, tearing sound, and a flash of violet-white momentarily baked everything with a light brighter than the midday sun. Twisting fractal cracks raced through reality, carving past us at the speed of—well, at the speed that cracks in reality traveled.

What the fuck?! I tackled Smartypants to the ground just in time to prevent a luminous, pulsating, and bladed tentacle from decapitating him as an absolutely monstrous Tier 4 Grabber fought its way through the nearest part of the breach.

All around us, mid and high Tier Anathema ripped their way into the world, and within the next second, multiple auras pressed down on us. What the fuck?

Aaron Grady

After arriving in LA that morning, Aaron spent most of the day touring the city. It wasn't his first time in California, but he'd only ever visited the San Francisco area and Carmel—and LA was a rather different experience.

But as the day wore on, he found himself lingering at a cafe, bouncing between catching up on his reading list and continuing to dig up information on Valkyrie. By the time the sun was going down, he was willing to test one of his developing hypotheses—that she was involved with one of the larger esoteric trafficking syndicates in the country, the Violet Bouquet.

Unlike his certainty that the recent megatitan and Valkyrie were the same person, Aaron was far from convinced of the nature of her involvement in the local crime scene.

But it could hardly hurt to look into it, and so the Tier 8 Anathema began a serial tour of all the known or suspected Bouquet fronts, meeting areas, and other such locations.

He wouldn't be surprised if someone would catch on eventually, but it shouldn't be a problem. What were they going to do? His power was that of a Tier 7 Guardian. Jumping to picking a fight with him would be a foolish move, even despite the possibility that they had a few members of similar power.

As the evening wore on, his path led him towards a warehouse club called the Trash Pit. Aaron wasn't a fan of those kinds of places, and he would have much preferred a visit to Club Purple, which from what he saw online looked like a nicer establishment.

Regardless, by the time the building was in sight, it was well within the range of his aura, and therefore sufficient for Aaron to ascertain that there was no one of substantial power present.

There were, however, three Anathema of middling power, four ordinary Guardians, several people with esoteric augmentations, and a single, Tier 1 true Star Guardian.

That's odd. The first and last in particular were intriguing in their own right, and put together—Aaron decided to investigate. It was the first thing of real note he had encountered since arriving, and even if it turned out to bear no relation to Valkyrie, learning more could be worthwhile on its own.

Withdrawing his aura, Aaron began to approach the club, only for a large crowd to begin streaming out of the building. Grimacing, he looked around for any other establishment where he could poke around for a few minutes to wait out the crowd.

He'd never been a fan of crowds—part of why he was reluctant to enter the club in the first place. Spotting what was perhaps the most conveniently placed cafe he'd ever had the fortune to spot, an equal distance down the street in the other direction, Aaron hustled over to the other side of the street and began walking towards the corroded, half-unlit sign.

It was only a block away, so it wasn't very long before he was pulling open the grim glass door and—Aaron paused, his body freezing with the door only partway open. He frowned. A breach?

Releasing the door and stepping back into the middle of the sidewalk, Aaron turned to face the direction of the club while letting his aura roll back out over the surrounding blocks. That wasn't a crowd that was leaving after an event, he realized. They were fleeing something.

The incursion itself was only Tier 1, but depending on how fast it widened, he could soon fall within the edge of the incursion, and that would be very bad. If that happened, the esoteric weight of his own presence would instantly rip the breach multiple tiers higher.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Aaron knew he needed to leave before that happened—but he hesitated. He didn't want to lose track of the interesting presences still inside, and unrelatedly—but equally important—the cafe turned out to be an Italian cafe, and that meant they might have a pistachio gelato…

A second later, the late evening dimmed into a moonless midnight, accompanied by a soft and eerie violet glow. Not even a full second after that, the faint glow ignited into an amethyst blaze.

Fuck! Aaron wanted to smack himself. Springing into motion, the Tier 8 Anathema flung himself away into the night with enough force that the sidewalk where he had just stood cratered inward. Even despite the sudden surge in the severity of the incursion, his speed was great enough to send him flying clear of the boundary and back into healthy, unbroken reality.

And yet the damage had been done. His hesitation had cost him, and now, the only thing he could do to not make things worse was to put even more distance between himself and the blossoming incursion.

Alexis "Valkyrie" Huntingfield

We need to run.

I was under no illusion that my own strength would be enough to make it safe for me to remain within the breach itself now that the incursion had spontaneously skyrocketed in severity.

I might be a decently powerful Anathema for my tier, but there was a qualitative barrier to punching up while I was a Tier 3, in Guardian terms.

I wouldn't have a proper aura until the next tier, meaning that any more powerful Anathema could attempt to directly contest any of my reality-altering abilities and stop them from taking effect, and until I had an aura of my own, there was no way for me to press back.

The only thing you could do against it was to put even more force into your own power and hope that the higher tier opponent was still fundamentally weaker—and even then, you weren't overpowering them on equal terms. You were just exerting a lot more effort for a lot less effect, and only getting that much because their aura wasn't quite strong enough to completely suppress you.

Meanwhile, the effect on their abilities would be minimal, so it was still a pure, completely lopsided disadvantage. Once I neared the limit of my current tier, that was a kind of fight that I knew I would push myself to take.

But right now? When I was only partway into Tier 3 at best? Against not just one, but many higher tier opponents? I didn't think there would be any way I could win.

So I decided to cheat.

Katherine was still nearby, and while she might be even weaker than I was, I hoped that her bullshit power would help us survive against the growing onslaught. Even if it didn't end up being able to partially jump tiers and push back against a true aura, I recalled the ease with which she navigated through swarming Anathema in previous incursions, as well as her ability to project an icky, Anathema-go-away bubble.

She and Maria were still down on the ground floor, as was Surfer Dude. I'd lost track of Luna—knowing how she operated, she was probably yanking shadows around on the ceiling or some shit.

There wasn't much time or space to plan, though, and I had already been backed into a corner by the unusually colorful and bladed waist-thick tentacles of an enormous, Tier 4 grabber. Both Staircase and Smartypants cowered silently behind me—I appreciated the silent part a great deal, actually.

Ugh, fucking thick bastard. Even with my huge strength and a sword that could change its momentum, cutting all the way through the huge tentacles was a chore. Still, my sword ended up being my best weapon, and after one too many severed, multi-ton tentacle tips thudded to the ground, the offending Anathema retreated away from us.

Fucking hell. And that one didn't even have an aura.

Capitalizing on the brief moment of respite, I took the opportunity to cast aside my sword, freeing my hands to remove my jacket, which I promptly threw behind me. I shuffled out of my dress shoes at the same time, and then—after briefly pausing to bat a shrieking Volter out of the air with the flat of my blade, I stripped out of my pants too.

"Hold these for me, would you?" I asked while shoving my cane and shoes into Staircase's chest and throwing my pants at Smartypants to go along with the jacket. "I'll get you all the way out of the incursion and not just to a bunker if you manage to keep those safe."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two men share a confused look, but then I was back to pointing my sharp metal stick real threateningly at anything that dared approach. Regardless, I meant what I said. It would be super annoying if my suit got ruined, which was why I had waited until now to begin manifesting my full armor.

I didn't care as much about the shirt, tie, or belt, as those were much easier to replace. The suit and the shoes had been custom fitted, though.

As the seconds passed, it became apparent that there was one saving grace of my precarious situation. Most of the Anathema weren't interested in me, only in the ordinary humans still cowering even further in the corner behind me.

That meant that as long as I put up enough fight to be genuinely annoying, anything that approached would decide to stop bothering and go run off in search of better prey.

The downside was that I was still stuck in a literal corner.

I was so focused and so on edge that I came frighteningly close to straight up decapitating Luna when she dropped down in front of me. In fact, if it wasn't for the sword's ability to turn intangible, she would already be dead. As it were, I realized she wasn't a random Anathema dropping down to attack me just in time to cause the blade to phase harmlessly through her neck.

She was now as surprised as I had been, and for a moment, she just stood there, utterly still. Then she yanked the shadow out from behind me and chucked it at another Volter that tried to dive at us, splatting against the bird-like Anathema's ceramic wings and sending it tumbling out of the air to shatter against the balcony railing.

Not bad.

"Not bad," a rumbling voice complimented from the side. Slightly startled, I glanced over to see the popcorn bucket guy approaching us. He'd removed his shirt, revealing a huge and heavily muscled chest.

The same grabber that had originally harassed me was now fully out of the breach and vacuuming up everything on the ground floor, and the tip of a tentacle whipped up to strike at the big, shirtless cultist.

Instead of dodging, as I would have, he simply leaned away and slapped it with his forearm. While the blow didn't rip through the tentacle, it did succeed in knocking it away, and the grabber pulled it back down and out of sight.

It looked like it must have hurt him too, though, because he rubbed at his forearm with his other hand as he finished approaching us. "Hey there," he greeted, "figured you could use another hand."

He slapped a hand almost as big as Han's against the concrete wall. "Now let's get out of here."

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