As a girl, Delia DeWitt had watched on television as a man fought monsters. People ran and screamed and died. There were heroes in brightly coloured costumes, but they were performers, there for show. They weren’t there to fight monsters but to be seen fighting monsters. It was the one draped in shadow who moved with passion and ferocity. A dark avenger, giving everything he had.Today, Delia was an essence user with the Global Defence Network. From the day she saw the man with the dark powers, all she had wanted was to be a warrior who fought the monsters. A hero who protected people. He had shown her that it was a dream that could be reached. Now a freshly minted silver-ranker, she had just been appointed the primary defender of Bangor, a small, Welsh cathedral city of twenty-one thousand. Along with a team of bronze-rankers, she was responsible for eliminating any monster threats that appeared in the region.While still nervous at the new responsibility, Delia was excited at the chance to live up to her childhood dream. To be the hero, standing against the tide. In this moment, however, that dream was rapidly becoming a nightmare.The manifestation had appeared on the grounds of the cathedral itself. The massive orb of rainbow light had appeared amongst the trees and torn them apart. The ground was carpeted in leaves, shattered branches and shards of wood, as if the trunks had been hit by a bomb.The grid had done its job, the monitoring station reporting the event to Delia’s team in plenty of time. By the time the monsters spawned from the manifestation, she was ready and waiting while the rest of her team were well into evacuating civilians. The readings from the monitoring station were of a silver-rank manifestation of mild strength. That meant one monster that was powerful for its rank, a small number with more moderate strength, or weaker monsters in a pack or swarm.The monitoring station was wrong. What emerged was a pack (...)