And then there was Japan. Japan had done none of these things. Rather than take drastic and sweeping measures, the government instead decided to reluctantly place troops at possible invasion points and wait for the storm—a typical Japanese response. Well, when the storm came, it came hard, and magically induced floods reduced the nation to rubble.
The government had stubbornly refused to bring all their weight to bear for fear of the economic repercussions. Shanti had heard someone on the news call the disaster in Japan “mutually agreed destruction,” attributing it to the timidity and persistent unwillingness to rock the boat that was inherent in their culture.
Shanti, though, simply felt bad for the people. The female idol group she loved was on her mind, true, but so was everyone else. The loss of life terrified her on a human level.
“Wait,” she said suddenly.
“What is it?” her friend asked.
“Shoot, I just remembered! I completely forgot I’m going to Al’iksir!”
“That was today?!”
“Yeah, gotta run!” Shanti started to trot off. “See you tomorrow!”
“Get going! You gotta tell us all about it if you meet any elves!” the other girl called after her.
Shanti hurried away, her friends shouting goodbyes at her back.
Despite it all, classes in Jakarta were still in session. A bit farther north, though, like in Vietnam or Thailand, all schools and businesses were suspended, and all available hands were preparing to meet the otherworldly threat. Of course, that didn’t mean that Indonesia was flying by the seat of its pants...right?
“I mean, my teacher did tell me this whole invitation thing is part of a nationwide initiative,” Shanti muttered uncertainly.
She was currently sitting at a table, killing time at an eatery on the wharf by sipping on some fruit juice. They wouldn’t be at the harbor for a little while yet.
About a month ago, physicals had been conducted at her school. They’d been checking people’s “aptitude” for something, and according to her teacher, Shanti had scored incredibly high. When she found out that she had been invited to the floating city of Al’iksir, she was over the moon.
Everyone knew about the rumored city of elves—a state-of-the-art, high-tech society built on the water right by the equator; an absolute dreamland of beautiful, smart, and eloquent elvish sages. And she, Shanti Maretta Putri, was actually getting to go there.
“I can’t believe they’re sending a whole ship out to meet me,” she murmured. Shanti grinned. “Makes me feel pretty important.” And then she frowned. “But I’m still nervous.”
The breeze felt nice against her skin as Shanti struggled to settle on an expression. The restaurant she was loitering at had no walls and was completely open-air, only sheltered by a few dozen columns holding up a roof. So when a mysterious jade aurora appeared in Jakarta’s sultry sky, she noticed it quickly.
A mystical curtain suddenly dyed the scenery outside an ominous green.
Shanti’s jaw dropped. “Didn’t...Taeyang talk about this?”
An aurora meant something.
They were coming.
But who was “they”? Shanti couldn’t remember.
And then, for the first time, she saw it. The source of humanity’s fear. The bringers of terror the likes of which no one on Earth had ever seen. Just off the coast of Jakarta Bay, floating in the sky, Shanti saw a mass of rock with a stone, temple-like edifice towering on top of it.
“An aurora means...” Shanti’s lips trembled. “A portal-keep...”
Suddenly, something started to fall from the cloudless sky. Squalls weren’t so strange for the tropics, of course, but the things clattering hard against the harbor’s concrete weren’t water droplets.
“S-Skulls?!” Shanti cried.
She flinched back. They were skulls. Human skulls. Thousands of them were falling to the ground all around the wharf. Shanti quickly realized that, if she had been outside, she could have been badly hurt. And then she realized that other less fortunate people already were. She had to help them.
Shanti’s heart pounded restlessly while she waited for the rain to stop. When it did, she started to run.
But before she had even made it outside, she stopped. Something strange was happening to the skulls littered across the ground. First, they began to sprout spines. From there grew rib cages, shooting out from newly formed sternums, and then limbs burgeoned, assembling themselves like amoebae undergoing mitosis. Every single skull Shanti could see was manifesting into a full human skeleton.
When the monsters began to stumble forward, Shanti noticed that they weren’t unarmed. In their fleshless hands they held old and rusted swords, axes, spears, and shields of various shapes and sizes.
A girl screamed. It wasn’t Shanti, though. Someone else at the same eatery was staring outside in shock. Another onlooker, a young boy, finally looked up from his phone to mutter fearfully, “Skeletons... Anomalies...”
Shanti immediately took action. “Everyone!” she called out. “We have to get away from the ocean! Safety is our first priority! Let’s find shelter, hide, and wait for help!”
The skulls had stopped falling, at a glance. So Shanti rounded up the seven people who were nearby, directed them outside, and followed last, staying behind to lend her shoulder to an old woman struggling with a bad leg. As she scanned the area for somewhere safe, a harsh shriek echoed across the wharf. The skeletons had gotten to someone.
Praying that they could avoid a similar fate, Shanti and the others scurried carefully through alleys and shadows, until one man suddenly lost his nerve. Before Shanti could stop him, he bolted away from the rest of the group, desperate to escape the danger.
When he turned a corner, she heard him shout, “No!” before his voice became a guttural howl. A skeleton rounded that same corner with a wet, bloodied sword, and its eyes were on Shanti’s group next.
“Ya Allah...” Shanti prayed quietly.
In response, a woman’s sharp voice came from the sky. “Civilians should find shelter at once!” it said. It was unconcerned and rather high-pitched, yet distinctly thorny. “Your presence will only hinder my ability to do my job and eliminate the Anomalies! Failure to comply will be taken as forfeiture of my aid!”
The voice came from a blue suit of armor fringed with silver, and much like Taeyang’s Mark IV, it conveyed a solemn kind of majesty. They were actually very alike in that sense.
The girl inside the metal plating delivered an impossibly nimble spin kick through the air so fast that Shanti could have sworn her leg had vanished entirely. When she saw it reappear a blink later, the skeleton’s sword was gone, and its entire upper body had been smashed to splinters.
“That’s an order from Devicer Five,” she commanded in perfect English. “Now go!”
Shanti was mesmerized by the blue suit of armor that must have been the Asura Frame Mark V. Her eyes fell to the warrior’s legs. There, a red cloth was wrapped around both of her knees all the way down to her feet.