A/N: Wanted to try mama!au.

When Kai brings the last guardian to Earth, holding Tao tightly by one wrist and tapping his foot impatiently while Lay checks for negative side effects of the travel through space’s boundaries, the others are ready for battle. They are hidden around the city, cleverly concealed at the tops of skyscrapers and in the bowels of the city’s subway and sewer systems. The city is Tokyo, where the first rays of dawn will hit on the last day of the world. Its inhabitants slumber, unknowing of the peril that awaits them, but the guardians know better.

The darkness has come at last, to claim the light and cast the world forever into shadow and chaos. Its soldiers are many and strong, but the guardians have to win, and there lies their advantage. They are desperate, and this lends strength to their bodies and endurance to their muscles, if not courage to their hearts.

When the sunrise begins on the eastern horizon, strangely muted and gray, Sehun and Luhan are atop a skyscraper, where they can best work their powers. Luhan is the first to spot the dark specters racing across the waves and building tops, and he signals to Sehun. The younger guardian raises his arms above his head, and a great bank of air rises from below, churning into a windstorm. In the distance, they can see lightning split the sky now roiling with clouds, and they know Chen has spotted the specters as well.

At this point Luhan raises his arms as well, and a thousand knives fly to him from all over the city, out of drawers and cabinets and window displays until they are hovering around him, blades glinting in the early morning light.

“Wait,” Sehun warns. “We’re not ready yet.”

“I know,” Luhan replies, sweat beginning to bead on his brow with the effort of holding so many different objects aloft.

Towards the south a fire begins to leap towards the sky, crackling the hottest shade of blue-white as it consumes the first specters, changing them into wisps of dark smoke. The waves in the bay become choppier and larger, each one cresting higher than the last so the valley in between them is as deep as a chasm. This combines with the wind and lightning to create a storm that blows the specters this way and that, drowning them underneath the furious water. Sometimes as the specters are into the waves or approaching a tall wave too fast to stop, the water suddenly freezes, solidifying so the specters are frozen within or are crushed against a sudden wall of merciless white ice.

To the north there is a horrible grinding noise that sounds more like a bomb detonating, and the earth splits, sending buildings and rubble collapsing on the specters. A figure flies overhead, carrying another precariously as it soars over the waves, where more specters are approaching. Suddenly a blinding white light comes from the figure being carried, and the specters below explode into forgotten instances of shadow.

More specters are creeping into the city itself and up the sides of the skyscraper, but suddenly they slow as if the air around them has thickened to the consistency of molasses.

“Now,” Sehun says, in the midst of conjuring a tornado.

Luhan drops his arms, and a thousand knives fly into the slowing specters, impaling each one in the pit of its stomach, the raw place where the most primal of feelings resides and where the specters can be killed instantly. They scream as they die, a high-frequency keening that mortals cannot hear, only guardians. Both Luhan and Sehun wince as they hear it, because it reminds them of terrible realization and anguish.

The first wave of darkness has been repelled, but countless more will follow. The guardians take a moment to think of their companions, how they, united, are mankind’s last hope.