It was deep into the night when Graves finally drew close to his home. He couldn't wait to administer the supplements to his mother.
After leaving the testing center, he had quickly run a few odd jobs to scrape together some extra NHF coins. He spent the afternoon carrying heavy loads for the elderly and disabled. Today had actually yielded a solid profit, and he was walking home with four fresh NHF coins in his pocket. The reason for the good payout was simple: most of the outskirt kids who usually posed tough competition for manual labor were still stuck at the testing center. The sudden scarcity of "work donkeys" allowed him to command a higher price.
By this time, his home was in sight. He had completely stopped passing through the dark alleyways since the four-man gang had ambushed him. He couldn't risk getting cornered again.
When he walked inside, his mother was sitting up, reading a book with most of its pages torn out. Graves had always wondered how she could possibly understand what she was reading when half the story was missing. Although he had never stepped foot inside a classroom himself, he was smart enough to know that a book with missing pages usually didn't make sense. But his mother didn't seem to care. She was deeply concentrated, and it was only when Graves made a sound that she raised her head, a warm smile welcoming him home.
"My boy, how are you doing? You came home late today and had me worried," she said softly. Before closing the book, she carefully folded the corner of a page to mark her spot.
"I... uh, went to get the supplements for you," Graves replied, half-smiling, a quiet sense of pride swelling in his chest. "I went to the testing center for the compatibility exam, and then I did a little extra labor to earn some coins."
"Did you make it?" She asked, Graves could only stare..
His mother nodded gently. "Come here. Come and sit beside me."
Graves stepped forward and sank onto the floor beside her, resting his head against her shoulder. In that brief, fleeting moment, it felt as if all his problems completely evaporated. Her scent filled his nose. To a normal person, it might have smelled of the foul outskirts, but to Graves, it was simply the scent of his mother.
"You don't deserve to struggle this hard, my little boy," she murmured into his hair. "This world is so cruel."
Graves sighed. "Stop worrying about me, mom. Your son is a man now. I'll take care of you and provide for us."
"I know, I know," she whispered, a bittersweet note in her voice. "But you're still my baby boy."
Graves smiled tightly in the dark. The world he was born into was uncaring, but to someone raised entirely in hardship, starting minimal labor at the age of four felt normal. To the wealthy people living inside the Great Wall, it would probably be viewed as horrific child abuse—not that those citizens actually cared about the outskirt rats anyway.
Graves pulled out the medicines and administered them to his mother. She swallowed the bitter pill and gulped down a massive quarter of the liquid supplement. Because the medicine was set to expire in two days, they had decided it was better to aggressively dose it, completely ignoring the risk of an overdose.
"If the polluted air can't kill me, medicine inside a bottle won't," his mother would usually joke whenever she took an unhealthy amount of expired drugs.
"Did you cough more today?" Graves asked, his brow furrowing with concern.
"No, not much," she replied with a smile, though her teeth were temporarily stained by the deep purple color of the liquid medicine. "My man of a son is taking good care of me."
A short while later, his mother drifted off, heavily sedated by the side effects of the supplements. Graves sat in the twilight, caught between sleeping and staying awake.
Then, a thunderous BOOM resounded from outside.
Graves bolted upright. His mother mumbled incoherently in her sleep but didn't wake. Standing completely still, Graves tentatively listened, straining his ears through the dark.
BOOM!
This time, the explosion was instantly followed by blood-curdling shouts, frantic screams, and the sudden, violent eruption of gunfire. Muzzle flashes illuminated the cracks in their makeshift walls. Heart pounding against his ribs, Graves steadily moved toward the door.
"Where are you going, Graves?" his mother asked, her voice heavy and slurred from the medicine.
"I just want to check what the noise is about," Graves responded, his hand gripping the doorframe.
"Don't go... don't leave me," she pleaded, her eyes fluttering as she desperately tried to fight off the heavy sedation, slowly drifting back under.
Graves stared at her face for a split second, agonizing over the choice, before finally sneaking out into the night.
"Crap!"
The street outside was absolute carnage. Gunfire erupted from every single direction as panicked soldiers moved through the smoke, firing blindly. People ran in terror, stumbling over each other. Blood and severed body parts already littered the dirt ground. An outsider might have thought the military was executing a mass slaughter of the citizens, but as Graves looked closer, the blood in his veins turned to ice.
The devils had attacked.
Gigantic, monstrous figures ranging from seven to eleven feet tall were tearing through the streets. They moved with such terrifying, supernatural speed that the soldiers' crosshairs couldn't keep up. One massive beast slammed its fists into a heavy armored personnel vehicle, flipping the massive APV, upside down as if it were a plastic toy.
The devils lunged into the fleeing crowds, shredding human flesh apart like paper. Children wailed as their parents were devoured right before their eyes; parents screamed in agony, trying to drag back children who had already been torn to pieces.
Graves's legs buckled beneath him. As a resident of the outskirts, this wasn't his first time witnessing the horrific sight of a devil eating a human—but a coordinated invasion of this scale? It was unheard of.
The military was being systematically overpowered. They hadn't planned for a siege. The only personnel currently fighting for their skins were the meager guards who had accompanied the doctors for the compatibility tests earlier that day. They were drastically outnumbered, and the roaring horde of devils seemed to number in the hundreds.
Suddenly, a deafening crash shook the earth directly behind him.
No. Not just behind him.
The sound had come from his home.
A devil had just smashed directly through the roof of his shelter, obliterating the structure where his heavily sedated mother was sleeping. A sharp, terrifying scream cut through the debris.
"Mom! No, no, no!"