That was the first observation and it was blunt enough to occupy Damien's full attention for a moment before he could process the specifics of it. Wrong in the way that things that were out of category appeared wrong. It was not obviously wrong, not in the dramatic sense of something clearly impossible. More like a detail that didn't resolve correctly when you looked at it.
It was demon-shaped.
It moved like a demon.
Its combat was the combat of a demon. The aggressive forward weight, the specific brutality of a species that did not operate on subtlety.
But his senses were not reading it clearly.
He had keen enough awareness to identify most threats at this range with confidence. The demon presence, the essence character, the grade, all of it registered on the specific frequency he had been calibrated to read through months of sustained experience with the actual thing.
This one did not read clearly.
