He walked into his office holding a folder thick with reports, only to find the man from the other night—sitting in his leather chair, feet propped up on the mahogany desk. He glanced back at the busy hallway, where coworkers hurried past with coffee cups and binders, then clicked the door shut. The lock sounded louder than usual in the sudden silence, a sharp snick that cut through the hum of the building’s vents.

  "What are you doing here?" he asked, setting his jaw.

  The man smiled, a slow, predatory expression that made his eyes look like dark pits. "I told you last time—I want to know what you’ve learned." He spun the chair like a kid on a carnival ride, laughing softly as it creaked. "I like this chair. Sturdy. Can I have it?"

  He slammed the folder on the desk, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the small space. He stood over the man, looming, fists clenched at his sides. The stranger raised his hands in a mock defensive gesture, grinning. "Easy, easy—I came because I want to tell you something important. About your daddy."

  The man stood up and walked straight to the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of the office, looking out at the sprawling grid of people, cars, and concrete stretching to the horizon. "So, how much do you love this?" He paused, casting a look of pure, curdled disgust at the life moving below—tiny figures hurrying across crosswalks, buses belching exhaust, windows reflecting the blue sky. "You know... humans."

  He gave the man a sharp, warning look. "Don’t."

  The man laughed, a dry, papery sound like leaves crunching underfoot. "I know, I know—they’re sacred. You’ve been fed that line since you could walk." He sat back down, picked up a heavy fountain pen from the desk, and toyed with it as if it were a strange artifact he’d dug up from ruins. "So," the man sighed, twirling the pen between his fingers, "what did you find out about yourself? Has your daddy told you everything? About what you are?"

  "Shut the fuck up," he snapped, reaching for the pen—but the man pulled it away, his movements too quick.

  The man laughed again, clearly savoring the reaction. "Looks like he still doesn’t. Or he’s too scared to tell you." He stood up again, his movements too fluid, too effortless—as if gravity barely touched him.

  Suddenly, a blast shattered the glass wall. It didn’t just crack or break; it detonated, sending shards flying across the office like shrapnel. He stepped back, shielding his eyes from the diamond-sharp fragments that embedded themselves in the wall behind him. Then, every window in the building began to blow outward in a rhythmic chain reaction—as if the structure were being hit by a localized atomic pulse that traveled floor by floor.

  The Man slowly got up from the debris, dusting off his green velvet coat as if he were merely clearing away crumbs. Then his eyes fixed on the shimmering air behind him, where light was beginning to bend and warp like heat off asphalt. "Looks like this kid's father is pissed after all."

  "Hello, brothers," the man said as two towering figures appeared amidst the chaos, their forms solidifying from pure light.

  They didn’t walk in through the door; they were simply there. One of the angels—Uriel, his wings of silver blades catching the light—stepped forward, his voice a low-frequency hum that made the floorboards vibrate and the remaining glass on the desk rattle. "Azazel. Leave. Now."

  But Azazel just smirked, tilting his head. "I’m just getting started. We were having a conversation."

  As he spoke, Uriel moved faster than sight. A flash of golden light, and heavy thuds hit the floor. Azazel looked down, then casually picked up his own severed arm from the carpet, the sleeves of his expensive coat soaked in dark, preternatural blood that smoked where it touched the fabric. "Look what you did to my arms, Uriel. This is the best suit I've had so far—these cost me a fortune." Azazel complained, holding the limbs to his chest like a morbid trophy.

  He intervened before Uriel could strike again, his voice tight with a mixture of terror and disbelief. "You call that a suit?"

  The second angel—Zadkiel, his form wreathed in white static—turned a gaze on him that felt like a physical weight pressing down on his shoulders. "Shut up," the angel commanded, his voice sharp as broken glass. He felt a sudden surge of heat—an anger that wasn’t entirely his own, burning up from his veins—and was about to retort when Azazel spoke up.

  "Zadkiel, Zadkiel... you’re scaring the kid." Azazel grinned, even as blood seeped from his shoulder stumps.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Uriel stepped forward, the air around him glowing with a faint, deadly gold that made the temperature spike. "Don't you dare touch that child, Azazel. He is under the Taxiarch’s jurisdiction."

  Azazel stepped back, still clutching his severed limbs. "I won’t. Promise." He raised his bloody hands in a mock gesture of surrender, then vanished—his form dissolving into black static that fizzled out of existence.

  The silence after Azazel vanished was pressurized, thick enough to taste like metal. Uriel and Zadkiel stood amidst the floating glass shards, their gaze a final, agonizing Audit that seemed to see through his skin, his bones, straight to the code in his blood. Then, the world glitched—reality stuttering for a split second like a bad video feed.

  A hand of solidified shadow reached through the air, cold as ice and strong as steel, snatching him by the throat. Before the Archangels could fully materialize their defense, Abaddon—a jagged, high-tier nightmare with too many mouths and claws like obsidian—dragged him backward through the shattered glass wall and into the bright blue sky.

  "THE LINE IS BREACHED!" Uriel’s voice was a thunderous overwrite that shook the skyscrapers below.

  High above the financial district, Uriel transformed into a Meteor of Living Frequency—his form compressing into a streak of pure light. He folded the space between the skyscrapers, closing the distance in an instant. Every beat of his six wings sent a "Surgical White" pulse through the sky, turning the falling glass and fluttering office papers into golden dust before they could touch the screaming commuters flooding into the street below.

  Abaddon hissed—a sound like a thousand layers of orchestral static—and swung the Witness like a Human Shield, holding him in front of its body as Uriel closed in. Uriel’s wings flared wide, a violent, high-pitched vibration that turned the surrounding air into liquid glass. He was forced to Pulse-Brake, his metallic feathers screaming as they scraped against the air, fighting to "clip" Abaddon’s coordinates without deleting 'him' that's caught in the crossfire.

  Below them, the city was already lost. Demons began to pour from every crack and crevice—subway tunnels, building vents, even the seams between sidewalk slabs—emerging into the daylight for the first time. Zadkiel impacted the center of the intersection like a kinetic shell, hitting the asphalt with enough force to send shockwaves through the ground. To the humans, it felt like a cataclysmic 7.8 magnitude earthquake—cars bouncing, streetlights toppling, the ground heaving under their feet. The asphalt didn’t just crack; it detonated into ten-foot obsidian shards that sprayed outward like bullets. A gas main beneath the street exploded, a pillar of fire roaring sixty feet high, only to be snuffed out instantly by the vacuum of Zadkiel’s presence.

  The steel girders of the subway entrance buckled and twisted, the metal turning into a "liquid song" of shimmering silver as the structure imploded inward. The Crawler Demons erupted from the fissures—jagged, static-fleshed horrors that smelled of wet ash and burnt wiring. One lunged for a woman pinned under the wreckage of a taxi, its claws extended to "unzip" the human code straight out of her chest, leaving nothing but grey dust behind.

  Zadkiel moved in Temporal Glitches—here one moment, ten feet away the next, his form leaving trails of white light in the air. He simply was wherever the demons appeared. His spear didn’t just stab; it executed a deletion. With every thrust, a crawler locked up, then turned into a cloud of grey silt that was swept away by the wind.

  Up in the air, he felt the "Heaven’s blood" in his veins reach a boiling point—hot enough to make his skin glow with a faint gold light. He reached into the shimmering air beside him, and the Gold Knife materialized in his hand—a jagged shard of Solidified Sunlight that hummed with the same frequency as Uriel’s wings.

  He didn’t stab blindly. He carved. He drove the blade into Abaddon’s shadow-neck, where the creature’s form was thinnest, most unstable. Where the gold metal touched the shadow, the Fallen’s form didn’t burn—it vaporized into white static that crackled and faded. Abaddon shrieked, a sound that made the windows of nearby buildings shatter, his grip on the boy’s throat shattering into dry ash that scattered in the wind.

  He fell.

  Uriel caught him in a column of white light that wrapped around his body like silk, lowering him gently into the center of the intersection. The world didn’t "Snap Back" to the silent office, or to the city he’d known an hour ago. It stayed broken.

  The street was a graveyard of twisted metal and black smoke. People were screaming, crawling out of the glass-strewn lobbies of the skyscrapers, their clothes torn, faces pale with shock. The woman from the subway was weeping, staring at the pile of grey silt where the demon had been, her mind struggling to categorize the horror as "seismic debris," as something her brain could understand.

  "Help me! Somebody help!" a man yelled from under a collapsed awning, his leg trapped under a chunk of concrete.

  Eric was there, his suit torn at the shoulder, his forehead bleeding from a falling light fixture. He was frantically trying to pull a trapped coworker from the ruins of the office building’s lobby, his hands raw and scraped. He looked up at him, his eyes wide with the primal terror of a man who just saw the world end.

  "You're okay!" Eric gasped, letting go of the concrete slab to grab his shoulder. "I thought... the whole twentieth floor just exploded. We have to move! The buildings aren't stable—they’re shifting again!"

  Around them, the sirens of the city began to wail—a desperate, human sound that couldn’t touch the celestial frequency of the Angels who were already ascending into the white sky above, their forms fading into light as they left the debris to clean up its own mess.

  He looked at his hand. The Gold Knife was gone, but a faint, glowing gold scar ran across his lifeline, pulsing with every beat of his heart. Under his fingernails, a trace of preternatural black blood was already beginning to crumble, turning into grey silt that he brushed off onto his pants.

  "Yeah," he whispered, looking at the ruin of the city that the Heavens had just "maintained"—at the people crying, bleeding, trying to help each other despite the impossible horror they’d just seen. "Let's go, Eric. We have to help them."