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Hector could scarcely comprehend what he was witnessing. The visual noise in front of him was just as confusing as the overwhelming aura information, and the Scarf certainly wasn't much help, either. Just trying to parse through everything required the entirety of his focus.

Civilians? He couldn't sense anyone, but maybe they were just getting lost in all the madness.

Then the groundswells began to take a more noticeable form. The massive chunks of earth sharpened themselves into smoldering spires.

And from them, even more mayhem emerged.

His aura senses picked it up first.

A swarm. Hundreds of little auras. Maybe even thousands. And they were so alien in their structure that he could scarcely be sure that they really were souls and not something else entirely.

They spilled from the rock formations like fire ants out of a hill, scuttling down the side and out onto the open street. Or up the sides of buildings. Or flying through the air.

Those definitely were not insects, though. It took a second to register, but that was a sea of tentacles and splashing blue-green ooze.

And the auras. Confusing though they still were, one thing, at least, was clear. They were the source of hostility that he'd sensed.

A pure, distilled intent. Destroy and devour. Reduce and absorb.

Overwhelm and conquer.

Instinctively, he wanted to dive headfirst in there and start getting in the way. Causing problems for whatever these freaks were. But he wasn't alone out here. He had a group of people to think about. Abandoning them wouldn't be smart, especially when he knew next to nothing about these weird tentacle monsters.

Before he could decide to head back down to the ground, however, yet another disruption arrived. And it was only telegraphed by the briefest flash of a new aura.

Hector didn't even get the chance to wrap his mind around it before he saw colossal structure there, encasing almost everything in front of him within a giant black box.

It was sudden and so massive that its appearance left a shock wave in its wake, nearly throwing him off his hovering platform.

And just like that, the swarm of invading monsters seemed to have already been contained.

He rose up even higher into the sky, only to see more gargantuan boxes filling the city, even covering entire clusters of skyscrapers.