Jairuzu's friend CPO Terrell "T-Dog" Moore was the lone operator for the Pewter Squadron of the US Navy's DEVGRU at Kojima Naval Base. Pewter Squadron's whole schtick was responding to parahuman threats. Within DEVGRU, it went by several nicknames, including Task Force SNAFU and SEAL Team Six-Six-Six.

It had been decades since the last major kaiju alert. Due to the Pewter Squadron's limited remit, CPO Moore was assigned to a makeshift office in a repurposed gardening shed near the edge of the base. If he ever felt slighted by this decision, he never showed it.

T-Dog took the space and made it his own. He installed a small zen rock garden off to the side. He even built a doghouse for Little T-Dog, the therapy rottweiler assigned to help deal with his PTSD.

The relaxed workload gave T-Dog plenty of time to focus on the intelligence-gathering aspects of his job. That's why he quickly caught on to the jump in suspicious activity that started on April Fool's Day. Since the month began, there had been daily reports of disappearances of individuals with significant connections to magical and parahuman communities in the region.

The first report involved Haresh Patel, a 17-year-old honor student at the Shaunakiya Esoteric Academy, a clandestine boarding school for magick users, just outside Mirzamabad in Telangana, India. Unverified intel suggested that he may have been abducted under duress but it was still largely speculative, at that point. What T-Dog knew for sure was that Patel was the leading candidate for ascending to minor godhood. The boy's corpse turned up several days later in a gutter in neighboring Rakshasapur, drained of its vital essence, with a burlap sack around his head.

Less then 24 hours after Patel went missing, Divina Rahman-Moustakas disappeared from Tempat Damai, the resort she co-owns and operates on Pulau Bahaya, a private island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. A yogini and minor Instagram celebrity, most of her followers are drawn to her 'fitspo' posts and resemblance to Olivia Munn. But she was on the Pewter Squadron's radar for her lesser-known talent: clairvoyance. Her current whereabouts remained unknown.

Things became personal for T-Dog with the next incident: the kidnapping of retired Captain Neal "Sully" O'Sullivan, a former commander for SEAL Team Six-Six-Six. Neighbors reported that Sully and his wife were snatched from their apartment in San Hudas, Pampanga. The perpetrators were described as robed assailants wearing luchador masks, who dragged them into a black SUV with no license plates. This distinguished the incident from the usual violent episodes in The Philippines' government-backed drug war.

By themselves, each of these cases would not be enough to give Pewter Squadron cause for alarm. What made them dubious was the timing. All of them happened during the witching hours between midnight and 3AM.

As soon as T-Dog began investigating the gritty details, the connections began to reveal themselves: Sully attended the same art auction as Rahman-Moustakas' husband the month before, something he would never do unless he was pursuing some kind of magick-related lead. A well-liked homeroom teacher from Shaunakiya had recently joined a wellness retreat in the Andes that included staff from Tempat Damai. It quickly became apparent that T-Dog was becoming the kind of investigator he used to mock, filling his office with photos, reference documents, and newspaper clippings. All his research points were connected by color-coded string, establishing links both mundane (peer groups, corporate affiliations, supply chains) and esoteric (magickal disciplines, cult practices). He jotted keywords on the whiteboard and scribbled observations on Post-It notes, searching for occult messages.

He reached a breakthrough after running the names of the disappeared through an algorithm that converted them into all kinds of dead languages. When transliterated into Enochian, they were nearly an exact match from a partial list of "Harbingers from the Far East" mentioned in the Pursglove Scrolls. The Scrolls were a lesser prophetic text, allegedly penned by an Elizabethan soothsayer and contemporary of John Dee. The close match seemed particularly bizarre, as the Scrolls were largely regarded as an elaborate forgery, even within occult circles.

But if the Scrolls did contain truthful elements, then it meant the disappeared had used their true names in their ordinary lives, knowingly or not—the magickal equivalent of using 'password' as one's password. However, this also meant that T-Dog could reasonably determine who might be targeted next.

T-Dog called on Jairuzu as soon as he figured it out. He promised to fill him in on the gory details when he arrived.

T-Dog stayed late in his office on that fateful night. He was expecting different sets of visitors. But which one would get to him first? He wasn't about to take any chances. Little T-Dog stood guard outside, prepared to attack.

The answer came just after midnight. It began with the insistent sound of flapping wings, then a maddening Caw! Caw! Caw! It seemed to come from all directions.

Little T-Dog went berzerk, howling and braying at the intruders. For a brief moment, he managed to dig his teeth into one of the trespassers before that horrifying snap! He let out one last futile mewl as the life drained out of him.

The door to T-Dog's office flew open. As he predicted, the intruders were tengu—avian demons with long, beak-like noses. But they were inexplicably dressed in matching business suits, like salarymen from the 1980s. He almost let out a chuckle as he faced the intruders.

He knew there had to be just two of them; three at most. But their mind-warping abilities made it seem like there was a whole flock of them surrounding him. Even with all his training, this was not the kind of psy-ops one could reasonably prepare for. He wasn't quite sure where to aim but he pointed his M11 semi-automatic pistol at the tengu in defiance.

"Come and get me, you bird-faced motherfu—"

When Risu and Jairuzu saw the gutted corpse of Little T-Dog outside the Pewter Squadron office, they knew they had arrived too late. Filled with righteous anger, the pair stormed into the cramped workspace.

By that point, the tengu had already finished defiling T-Dog's body. They were haphazardly ransacking his office, as if they were looking for something in particular. The creatures literally dropped everything they were doing when Risu entered the room, channeling their wrathful attention on her.

The demons resorted to their usual sensory trickery but it didn't work on Risu. Her clarity of purpose gave her the focus needed to see through their illusions.

The fight was quick and intense, despite the close quarters. Risu dispatched one tengu with a flashkick, leaping backward in show of equal force and grace. Her limb made impact directly against its long nose, briefly taking it out of combat. The next one tried sneaking up on her, but she knocked it out with butterfly twist.

The third tengu wisely attempted to grab Jairuzu instead, whose reflexes were not quite as sprightly as Risu's. The fell bird quickly learned that the older human was still capable of a sudden leg sweep takedown.

Realizing they were outmatched, the tengu regrouped and fled to the outside, where they could readily escape into the pre-dawn skies.

Jairuzu offered a quick prayer for the repose of his old pal's soul. He decided to leave the body as it was, for investigators to find in the morning. In the meantime, they had to make sense of T-Dog's notes before anyone else on the base could realize what happened.

In truth, T-Dog's research was a disorganized mess. He was at his best as a field operative; analyzing esoteric data was not his forte. The tengu's interference just made it worse. Nevertheless, after spending a few intense hours poring over his notes, it was possible to spot key concepts and recurring themes.

There was a chart filled with persons of interest. Each one had a symbol next to their name identifying them as 'Bonders', 'Releasers', or still uncertain. There were several mentions of the phrase "Fiat Dendo", which Jairuzu translated as "Let it be unsealed".

Most worryingly, one word kept coming up again and again: Yg-Turazoth. Jairuzu recognized it as the Romanized name of an extraplanar being, regarded as a cosmic perversion in Shinto esoterica. The Pursglove Scrolls claimed its appearance in the prime material world could bring on an epoch referred to as the Longest Gloom.

Somehow all of this was related to the upcoming Walpurgisnacht festival. The disappearances were all just set-up for the grand finale at the end of the month.

Risu and Jairuzu weren't entirely sure about the details of this grand conspiracy. But at least they had the identity of the most likely next target. Kauri Turei was an editor at Kina Digital, the New Zealand VFX company that became famous for doing those blockbuster high fantasy movies. Jairuzu opened the travel app on his phone and booked the next flight to Cookville.