After returning the terminal to the captain, Karim walked back to his post. In the distance, the faintly golden Holy Light Bastion glimmered with an eerie radiance beneath the setting sun.
He stared at that light without moving.
European Theater, Berlin ruins, an underground tunnel.
Forty-five-year-old Hans was a lone-wolf bounty hunter. He had never joined the Demon Hunter Guild because he hated rules, hated being controlled, and hated those people in matching uniforms shouting matching slogans.
But he killed demons too.
Over the past twenty-five years, he had killed more demons than most registered demon hunters.
He did not use the Guild's standard equipment. Instead, he used things he had picked up on the black market: old Russian incantation daggers, Turkish magnetic-field disruption grenades, and a modified sniper rifle capable of firing silver bullets.
His "work" covered a wide range: demons, vampires, werewolves, dark wizards—he would kill anything, as long as the price was right.
On the day the angels fell, he was handling a job in an abandoned factory in eastern Berlin.
The target was a low-ranking demon, with a bounty of thirty thousand euros.
Then the entire factory ceiling collapsed.
An out-of-control passenger plane crashed into a nearby office building. The shockwave from the impact brought down half the street. By the time Hans crawled out of the rubble, the demon had already fled, and he could not be bothered to chase it.
Over the following month, he witnessed true chaos.
Some of the angels that descended from the sky were slaughtering people, some had gone mad, and some were hiding.
The demons took advantage of the chaos and occupied ten cities. The Demon Hunter Guild was run ragged, rushing everywhere to put out fires. More than a hundred million humans had died—a number too vast for