The first tremor hit Twilight Manor at mid-morning.
Finn felt it through the floor of his office, a deep vibration that ran through the foundations and up through the stone walls. His thumb flared with pain simultaneously. A sharp, insistent pulse that he hadn't felt at that intensity since the expedition.
He was on his feet before the second tremor hit.
Through his office window, he could see dust rising from the Southern District, then the Eastern, then the Northwestern. Multiple points throughout Orario all at once.
"GARETH!" He shouted, already moving toward the door.
The dwarf appeared in the hallway, his axe already in hand. Riveria was a step behind him, her staff gripped tight and her jade eyes sharp. The two of them had felt it as well.
"Multiple breaches across the city." Finn said, taking command without breaking stride. "Same creatures as Monster Feria, I suspect. Get every combat-ready member armed and into the courtyard. We're deploying to the Northwestern residential district first, that's the closest concentration of civilians."
"On it." Gareth turned and bellowed down the hallway with a voice of a Level 6 adventurer that could shake walls. "ALL COMBAT MEMBERS! ARMS AND COURTYARD! NOW!"
Doors slammed open throughout the Manor. Tiona appeared from the training yard in seconds, barefoot and carrying a borrowed greatsword since Urga was still being repaired. Tione was right behind her, dual kukri blades already drawn.
"What's happening?!" Tiona shouted.
"Vine monsters." Finn said. "Multiple emergence points. The city is under attack."
Tiona's expression shifted from confusion to focus in less than a heartbeat. Whatever complaints she'd had about missing out on Aiz's mission fizzled out.
"How many?"
"I've counted at least a dozen columns of dust from the window. There could be more."
"Where's Yuji?" Tione asked, scanning the courtyard.
"He went out earlier." Loki appeared from the central tower's entrance, her vermillion eyes open and alert as she looked at each of her Familia members. Whatever laziness she normally projected had vanished entirely. "Said he was taking a walk."
"Typical." Bete would have said, had he been present. But Bete was beneath Floor 18 with Aiz and Lefiya, which meant the surface defense fell to whoever was left.
Finn turned to Riveria. "Can you get a count from the tower bridge?"
"Already going." Riveria was moving before he finished the sentence, her robes trailing as she ascended the stairs to the connecting bridge between the Manor's towers. From that vantage point, she would have a partial view of the city's skyline, even if it might be limited.
Finn organized the remaining combat members in the courtyard. Most of the lower-ranked members were Level 2 and 3 adventurers, strong enough for the middle floors of the Dungeon but untested against the violas' reinforced hides. He arranged them into four-person squads with clear instructions. Priority was civilian evacuation, not direct engagement. If they encountered a viola, they were to delay and contain, not try to kill it.
Riveria's voice carried down from the bridge above. "I count over forty emergence points from what I can see. Multiple districts affected. The Colosseum area is the worst, Ganesha Familia is already engaged."
"Forty?" Gareth's jaw tightened. "The twins had trouble with just one during Monster Feria..."
"They didn't have their weapons, Gareth." Finn said, his thumb throbbing steadily. "This isn't random. This is—"
He never finished the sentence.
It hit them all at once.
A wave of something rolled across the city from the direction of Babel, and every person in the courtyard felt it simultaneously. It wasn't physical, magical, or anything that their training or experience had prepared them for.
It was emotion.
Raw, concentrated, undiluted negative emotion, washing over them like a tide of ice water. Fear, grief, anger, hatred, envy, all of it compressed into a single pulse that radiated outward from the centre of the city.
Tiona's knees buckled. She caught herself on the courtyard wall, her face draining of colour as her hands shook. Beside her, Tione staggered back a step, her kukri blades lowering as her arms went weak.
The lower-ranked members reacted worse. Several dropped to their knees. One young human woman pressed her hands over her ears as though trying to block out a sound, even though there was no sound to block. A pallum supporter sat down hard on the cobblestone, his eyes wide and unfocused.
Gareth planted his axe into the ground and gripped the handle with both hands, his teeth bared. The dwarf's face was grey, his eyes narrowed against something none of them could see. "What in the Dungeon's depths is that?" He growled through clenched teeth.
Riveria, on the bridge above, had gone completely still. Her staff was braced against the railing, both hands locked around it. Her emerald eyes were wide and her composure fractured for the first time in years. As a high elf with an innate sensitivity to magical energy, she felt it more acutely than anyone else present.
It was wrong. Fundamentally, viscerally wrong.
Every instinct she'd cultivated over decades of studying the arcane was screaming at her that whatever she was feeling was the antithesis of everything she understood about the world's energy. It wasn't Mind. It wasn't Spirit. It wasn't any form of magic or curse she had ever encountered in her extensive career.
It felt like grief given weight. Like anger manifested. Like the accumulated suffering of an entire civilization, compressed and weaponised.
And it was coming from the top of Babel.
Finn alone remained standing without visible difficulty. Not because the effect didn't touch him, it did, it hit him as hard as anyone, but because Finn Deimne had spent twenty years training himself to function through pain, fear and doubt. His thumb was a constant reminder that danger was a state of being, not an obstacle.
But even he felt his heart rate spike as the pressure built.
"Everyone hold!" He commanded, his voice cutting through the courtyard. "It's not an attack! It's not targeting us! Hold your positions!"
He didn't know how he knew that. But the energy, whatever it was, wasn't directed at them. It was radiating outward from a single point, expanding across the entire city, and the violas were bearing the brunt of it far more than any person.
Then Loki spoke.
"...It's him."
Every head turned toward the Goddess.
Loki was standing at the edge of the courtyard, her vermillion eyes fully open, fixed on the distant silhouette of Babel tower. Her expression held none of her usual playfulness, none of the mischief and trickery that made Loki, Loki. In its place was something the Familia had rarely, if ever, seen.
Awe.
"Loki?" Finn called.
"It's cursed energy." She said quietly, and the two words carried a weight that made even Gareth look at her sharply. She was facing away from them, so they didn't notice the intense glow of iridescent light appearing in her eyes. "This is what I felt when I touched his Falna. But concentrated… Unleashed."
"What are you—" Tione started.
The energy vanished.
One moment it was there, pressing down on them like a physical force, and the next it was gone completely, as if it had never existed. The absence was so abrupt that several of the lower-ranked members gasped, their bodies suddenly light as the oppressive weight lifted.
And with it, the sounds of combat across the city stopped.
Every crash, every roar, every wet tearing of vine appendages ceased simultaneously, replaced by a silence that was almost louder than the chaos had been.
Riveria was the first to understand. From her position on the bridge, she had a clear view of the Northwestern District. Where, moments ago, two violas had been rampaging through a residential street, there was now nothing.
Just bodies. Bisected cleanly, dissolving into black mist.
"They're dead." Riveria said, her voice carrying down to the courtyard with a steadiness that cost her visible effort. "The vine creatures. All of them. They've been cut apart."
"All of them?" Gareth repeated. "How many?"
"All of them." Riveria said again, leaning forward over the railing and scanning the skyline. Every column of dust was settling and every point of emergence was going quiet. Across the entie city, in every district, the violas were falling apart in identical fashion, bisected through their centres with eerie precision.
The courtyard fell silent.
"...Simultaneously." Finn said, not in the form of a question.
"Simultaneously." Riveria confirmed his words.
Tiona looked down at her shaking hands, then up at the skyline where the dust was clearing. "What just happened?"
Nobody answered.
Finn's mind was racing. Clean, simultaneous cuts across dozens of targets spread across the entire city. The same technique applied uniformly, with no variation in angle or depth. Whatever did this had mapped every viola's position, calculated the optimal strike for each one, and executed all of them in a single moment.
He thought about what Loki had told him that morning. An energy that was the inverse of every positive force in the world. Fundamentally opposed to spirit energy.
He thought about the violas, how they had reacted to Yuji when he tried to sense whatever it was that controlled them from down below..
"Loki." Finn said carefully. "When you said 'it's him.' You meant—"
"I said what I said, kiddo." Loki interrupted, her eyes still fixed on Babel. Her voice was quiet, but there was something trembling beneath it. It wasn't laced with fear but the residual impact of having felt, for the second time in her existence, an energy that belonged to no category she'd ever known. "And that's all I'm gonna say right now."
The silence stretched.
Gareth was the one to break it, because Gareth was always the one to break difficult silences.
"Right. Whatever just happened, there are still people injured across the city. Collapsed buildings, fires, casualties." He pulled his axe from the ground and shouldered it. "We can figure out the how and the why later. Right now, we've got a job to do."
Finn nodded, the tactical mind reasserting itself. "Agreed. All squads, deploy as planned. Priority is search and rescue in the Northwestern and Southern Districts. Riveria, coordinate with the Guild relief teams. Gareth, take Tiona and the first squad to the Colosseum area, Ganesha Familia will need support processing the aftermath."
"On it." Gareth was moving before the sentence ended.
Tiona followed, but she paused at the gate and looked back at the Manor. Her expression was complicated, a mixture of gratitude, confusion, and something that looked almost like being starstruck.
"Tiona, let's go!" Gareth called.
She shook herself and ran after him.
Tione lingered a moment longer, her eyes meeting Finn's. He gave her a small nod that said 'later', and she departed without a word.
Within minutes, the courtyard was empty except for Finn and Loki.
"He's going to come back." Finn said. "And when he does, everyone is going to have questions."
"Let them ask." Loki said. "He'll answer what he wants to answer, same as always."
"The Guild will want answers too. The other Familias. Someone eliminated every threat in the city from a single point in less than a second. That doesn't go unnoticed."
"I know."
"Freya saw it too. From the top of Babel, she would have had a front-row seat."
Loki's expression finally shifted, her eyes narrowing. "Yeah. She would have."
The two of them stood in the empty courtyard, the sounds of the city's recovery echoing past them. Distant shouts, running footsteps, the creak of damaged buildings and the clanging of Guild emergency bells.
Finn looked at his thumb. It had stopped aching.
To him, that wasn't reassuring. It usually meant the immediate danger had passed, but there could be underlying threats remaining out of sight.
"I need to draft a report for the Guild." Finn said. "One that explains what happened without explaining how."
"Good luck with that." Loki said, and for the first time since the attack began, a ghost of her usual grin appeared. "I'll handle the Gods' side. If anyone asks me directly, I'll tell 'em the truth."
"Which is?"
"That I have no idea what happened." Loki shrugged with theatrical innocence. "I was in the Manor the whole time, nowhere near Babel. How would I know?"
Finn stared at her. Then, despite everything, the corner of his mouth twitched.
"You're going to enjoy this, aren't you."
"Kiddo, I haven't had this much fun since Bete arm-wrestled Riveria."
She walked back inside, humming something tuneless to herself, leaving Finn alone in the courtyard.
He stood there for a long moment, looking at the sky.
Then he went inside to write the most carefully worded report of his career.
--------------------
Yuji returned to the Manor an hour later.
He came through the gate at a walking pace, hands in his pockets, his clothes dusty but otherwise unremarkable. The guards at the entrance stared at him but said nothing.
The courtyard was empty. Most of the Familia had deployed to assist with the city's recovery efforts. The sounds of their work echoed faintly from beyond the Manor's walls.
He made it to the hallway leading to his room before a voice stopped him.
"Took you long enough."
Loki was sitting on the windowsill at the end of the hallway, one leg dangling, the other pulled up to her chest. Her vermillion eyes were fixed on him with an expression that mixed exhaustion with curiosity, and a hint of something dangerously close to pride.
"Rough morning?" She asked.
"You could say that."
"Take a walk, you said. Just going out for some air, you said."
"I did take a walk."
"Uh-huh." Loki's eyes narrowed. "And during this walk, did you happen to swing by the top of Babel and do something that made every living person in Orario feel like they were reliving their worst memories for about three seconds?"
Yuji was quiet for a moment.
"The negative emotions." He said. "People felt that?"
"Everyone felt it, Yuji. Every single person in the city. My children were shaking. Riveria, who I've seen face Floor Bosses without flinching, was gripping her staff like it was the only thing keeping her standing and shaking like a leaf." Loki's tone wasn't angry, but she was being careful. "That's what cursed energy feels like from the outside, isn't it."
"Yes." Yuji said, and there was a weight behind the word that Loki hadn't heard from him before. "I didn't think people in this world would be able to sense it. Back where I come from, only sorcerers and people with high spiritual awareness could perceive cursed energy directly. Normal people(monkeys) could to a much lesser extent, but nothing as extreme as what you're describing."
"Wherever you come from, this place ain't similar to it." Loki said quietly. "The people here have Falna, which means they're connected to the divine framework. Even the weakest Level 1 has a heightened sensitivity compared to an ordinary person. And what you just put out..."
She trailed off, shaking her head.
"I didn't have a choice." Yuji said. "Fifty violas across the city. People were dying. I needed range and precision, and that required a higher output."
"I know."
"If I'd held it back further, the technique wouldn't have reached every target simultaneously. The chant I used required a buildup."
"I know, Yuji."
"The negative emotions people felt, the fear and grief and anger, that's not me attacking them. That's what cursed energy is. It's born from those feelings. When I release it at that scale, people nearby experience a reflection of the emotions that fuel it."
"I know." Loki said for the third time. "I'm not angry. I'm not even disappointed, you saved the city."
She hopped down from the windowsill and walked toward him, stopping a pace away.
"But you need to understand something." She said, looking up at him. "The people who felt that today, my children included, they don't know what it was. They don't know it came from you. All they know is that for a few seconds, something made them feel every negative emotion they've ever experienced, all at once. And then every monster in the city died."
She held his gaze.
"That's terrifying, Yuji. Not because of what you did, but because of what people will imagine when they try to explain it to themselves. Fear makes people stupid, and stupid people with weapons are more dangerous than any monster."
Yuji said nothing. He knew she was right.
"For now, nobody's connecting it to you. Finn's writing a report that won't mention cursed energy or anything related to it. I'll handle the Gods. But this is going to draw attention, and the next time someone asks where you were during the attack, you'd better have a boring answer ready."
"I was taking a walk."
Loki stared at him for a long moment.
Then she snorted.
"You're impossible." She said, and walked past him down the hallway. "Get cleaned up. Dinner's in two hours, and you look like you rolled through a construction site."
Before she walked away, she turned over her shoulder and asked.
"Yuji, those emotions... Are they from the cursed energy you have, or-"
"My own emotions fuel it." Yuji answered her simply.
She gave him a look, a soft smile appearing on her face before she turned to walk away.
She disappeared around the corner, leaving Yuji alone in the hallway.
He looked up, closed his eyes, and sighed out.
'This, I didn't miss.'
He pushed off the wall and headed to his room.
Tomorrow, an emergency Denatus was to be called. Every God, Goddess, and Familia captain in Orario was going to be asking the same question.
What happened on top of Babel?
Yuji planned to be reading a book when they asked.
--------------------
Authors Notes:
Yikes, who would've known that letting curse energy flow that freely to a world filled with magic and sensory sensitive people/gods would have such a blowback?