xenophobic Homicide

RISE OF THE CRIMSON DAGGARS

Chris's POV

My ribs scream with every shallow breath as Janaro half-carries me through the choking smoke.

The neural interface in my neck burns hotter, like something ancient is clawing its way awake inside me.

But I push the pain down. I always do.

Because right now, my mind isn’t on the ambush behind us.

It’s flashing back three years.

I remember the exact moment the sky tore open.

It happened without warning.

a jagged wound ripped across the stars like fragile fabric being shredded by invisible claws. Then they poured through. Monstrosities beyond anything we’d ever imagined.

Some the size of elephants, armored in thick, glistening carapaces. Others no bigger than dogs, but fast, skeletal, with bladed limbs that moved like living razors. And some… some who commanded the very air and lightning around them.

Earth’s defenses lasted less than a week.

Cities burned. Governments collapsed. Armies were slaughtered or simply vanished. In days, humanity went from rulers of the planet to prey.

But we didn’t die quietly.

We became something else.

Resistance.

I was just eighteen when it started.

A high school football prodigy who thought his biggest worry was which college would offer the best scholarship.

That boy died the day the sky fell. What rose in his place was The Runner.

Byson… he wasn’t always the leader of the most feared resistance cell on Earth.

Before the invasion, he was just a mechanic, hands covered in grease, fighting rusted engines instead of aliens.

Then the creatures took his wife and daughter. Rage became his religion. Vengeance, his only fuel.

He built the Crimson Daggers from the ashes.

We started with six men in the half-sunken wreckage of an aircraft carrier on Lake Michigan.

From there, we carved our name in blood. After our first major ambush on a Karthari nest in an old power station, we painted our blades crimson with alien ichor.

That color became our symbol. not just violence, but pure, burning defiance.

The Daggers grew fast, but brutally. You didn’t just join. You earned it in fire.

Cowards and traitors never made it past the first mission. Many came. Many died. Some were lost to the alien mind-plague. Others were twisted into puppets by the Shai’thuun.

But the core endured.

And within that core were the eleven of us they started calling the Exceptional Eleven.

We weren’t like any other fighters. We were legends.

There was the silent sniper who never missed they say he dropped a Vraek Overseer from five miles away.

The blade dancer with neurotoxin-laced twin swords who moved like smoke through enemy lines.

The demolition expert who could rig an entire city block to collapse on an alien patrol.

One who fought with nothing but his fists, bones shattered and re-healed a hundred times.

The ex-AI engineer who turned their own technology against them.

a woman who carried a modified mini-chainsaw and once took down a Shai’thuun horror single-handedly.

there was Jamaro. Byson’s younger brother. his eyes always carrying the storm of the family he couldn’t save.

And me.

The youngest. Just eighteen, but the war had already toughened me.

They called me The Runner because I could navigate ruined terrain like it was second nature. scouting ahead, slipping through patrols, vanishing and reappearing in cracked sneakers.

We weren’t polished soldiers.

We were firefighters who now burned alien strongholds, surgeons who now delivered death with plasma rifles, hackers who poisoned enemy networks, and street kids turned into something far more dangerous.

We fought like cornered animals raw, desperate, unstoppable. Not for glory. Not even always for hope.

We fought because we had nothing left to lose.

And somehow, together, we became the one thing the invaders had never expected to feel:

Fear.

As Jamaro drags me deeper into the ruins, my legs finally start cooperating again. The pain is still there, but so is the fire. The same fire that kept me running for three years.

I glance at Jamaro’s blood-streaked face. Byson’s brother. The man who just charged through hell to pull me out.

“You always show up at the worst possible time,” I mutter, voice hoarse.

He gives a low, grim chuckle. “Someone has to keep your fast ass alive.”

We push forward through the crumbling alley. Behind us, distant gunfire and alien clicks fade slowly.

But I can still feel it. that thing stirring deep in my neural interface. Something buried far beneath the city has noticed me.

And for the first time since the sky tore open, I wonder if running will be enough this time.

Because whatever is waking up inside me…It might be faster than I am.