You are Noel Tiberius di Hazaran, and you’re currently wearing the proverbial hat of a leader among the half-blooded, silver-eyed monster slayers you consider your family. With you at the moment is a team of three - Serana, a one-armed and mute warrior whose level of skill and ability were once considered a step above your own, is the first of these. She also happens to be among your closest friends and confidantes. Second you have Alexandra, a talented sensor-specialist from what by your reckoning was the last full class of rookies trained by the Organization that created you. Alexa has looked up to you for years after you led a trio of her fellow rookies on what had been intended as a suicide mission, ensuring their survival even above your own and thereby earning their respect and loyalty. Last there’s Solaris.

Solaris is a bit of an unusual case, a warrior who at one time passed the limits most of your kind set on the use of their own powers. Each warrior has a different limit, and their respective techniques place a different amount of strain on the body as it transforms to serve in combat. This power is called ‘yōki’, and you owe your ability to produce its energy to the flesh and blood of the yōma that was surgically implanted in each of you when you were young girls. But when a warrior like Solaris uses too much of that yōki the transformations become almost impossible to reverse, and a warrior becomes an even worse sort of monster than those which they once fought.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Solaris was the second of what is now several “awakened beings” who have traded feeding off living human flesh for a relatively simple dietary supplement, now grown fairly extensively at a series of farms in your family’s ancestral fortress town of Scaithness.

With these three teammates, you shadow the movements of a defeated attacking force as it withdraws across the northern border of your homeland, Hazaran, which has served as a refuge for warriors like you who value your duty too much to simply die as your former Organization had designed.

[They’re slow,] Serana observes from a distance.

She’s right. “They’re exhausted,” you reply with a slight frown. “They have wounded.”

“They insisted on evacuating them?” Solaris asks curiously.

You nod. “They did. Seems we’ve managed to frighten them into acting irrationally… at this point we can’t say anything to make them trust us.”

“It’s too bad,” Alexa mutters sadly. “Some of them will die because of that.”

After a moment, you reply. “Yes, but more of them will live.”
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