Centuria Books · Manifest Destiny: A Texan Crusade
Manifest Destiny: A Texan Crusade — Read the First Chapter
Texas gets isekai’d—so one stubborn man and his dog decide to build a republic one bloody mile of road at a time.
Chapter 1: The Last Good Breakfast
John Garcia’s last normal morning started with burned tortillas, black coffee, and Max judging him from the kitchen tile.
The dog sat square in the strip of sun by the back door, ears high, yellow eyes fixed on the skillet. He had the patience of a saint when deer were moving and the morals of a thief when breakfast meat was involved.
“No,” John said.
Max thumped his tail once.
“Still no.”
The tail thumped again, harder, because Max understood negotiation better than most men John had worked with.
John scraped the eggs onto a plate, folded the least-burned tortillas around them, and checked the old .30-30 leaning by the mudroom. The rifle was clean. The truck was gassed. His pack had water, a first-aid kit, two knives, spare socks, fence pliers, and enough jerky to keep him angry instead of hungry until lunch. It was the kind of Saturday that made sense. Chores first, then a drive southeast to help his cousin look at a lease fence that hogs had torn up.
His phone buzzed on the counter.
Rosa: You coming by after?
John thumbed back: If Tavo’s fence doesn’t eat the whole day.
Rosa: Bring dog. Not your attitude.
John snorted.
Rosa had been saying some version of that since they were kids, back when her mother still made all the cousins sit at the folding table in the garage because the grown-ups claimed the kitchen. John typed three different answers, deleted all of them, and settled for the only one that would not start a family trial before breakfast.
John: Dog yes. Attitude depends on traffic.
He put the phone down before she could send back a lecture.
The neighborhood outside his rental duplex had started making Saturday noises. A mower coughed two houses over. Mrs. Delgado’s wind chimes clicked on the porch next door, little tin saints tapping together in the breeze. Somewhere down the block a man yelled at a teenager about leaving the gate open, and the teenager yelled back that he had not touched the gate, which in John’s experience meant the gate was definitely open.
Normal.
Blessedly, stupidly normal.
John had never been the kind of man who trusted big normal. Banks called it stability right before fees went up. Politicians called it order when they wanted people to stand still and get robbed politely. Work supervisors called it policy when they meant the answer was no and they were too lazy to say why. But small normal he trusted. Burned tortillas. Max begging without begging. Mrs. Delgado watering three tomato plants like they were parishioners. Rosa threatening his attitude by text.
Small normal was worth fixing fences for.
He wrapped the breakfast in foil because Tavo would forget to eat until noon if nobody shoved food at him. Then he split one strip of bacon in half, set the smaller half on Max’s bowl, and pointed at the dog.
“That was not negotiation. That was me being generous.”
Max inhaled the bacon and looked ready for a second ruling.
“Court adjourned.”
John checked the pack again because checking things was cheaper than being surprised. Water. Gauze. Tape. Spare socks. Flashlight. Two knives. Box of .30-30 in the side pouch. He added an extra bottle of water after a moment, not for himself. Tavo always claimed he brought enough and always lied. John did not think of that as kindness. It was just easier to carry water than listen to a grown man get heat-stupid by ten in the morning.
A supervisor at the yard had once called that toxic over-preparation, like a man carrying water and bandages was making a political statement against payroll optimism. John had let the kid talk because arguing with clipboards wasted daylight. Fences still broke. Men still bled. Somebody still had to be ready when the meeting ended and reality showed up.
His phone buzzed again.
Rosa: Mama says if you pass Delgado’s, check her porch light. It flickered all night.
John sighed like this was a burden instead of exactly the sort of thing he would have done anyway.
John: Fine.
Rosa: See? Attitude.
He ignored that because she was right.
Max rose before the sound reached the road.
That was the first wrong thing.
The dog did not bark. He did not trot to the door. He stood so fast his claws clicked, hackles lifting from neck to tail, muzzle pointed east like something had called his name from beyond the city.
John set the plate down.
“Max?”
The kitchen window turned white.
Not bright. White. Solid. Like someone had poured noon into the glass and frozen it there. The radio on top of the fridge screamed static. John’s phone flashed once, hot enough to sting his fingers, then died black.
Outside, every bird in the neighborhood hit the air at the same time.
The floor dropped.
John slammed into the cabinets shoulder-first. Plates jumped. Coffee leapt from the mug in a brown sheet. Max skidded across the tile and hit the back door hard enough to crack the lower pane.
Then the world made a sound too big to be thunder.
It had weight. It shoved through John’s ribs, squeezed his heart, and dragged a grunt out of him before he could bite it back. The white window split into a thousand hairline cracks of blue. Through them he saw his backyard fence, the hackberry tree, the narrow strip of alley, and above it all a sky that was not Texas.
Two moons hung over San Antonio.
One was small and red.
The other had teeth.
John did not have time to understand that, because the System arrived.
[ADJUDICATION LAYER ONLINE]
[REGIONAL TRANSFER COMPLETE]
[POPULATION PACKAGE: TEXAS]
[INITIAL CONDITIONS: LEVEL ONE]
[SURVIVE]
The words did not appear on the wall. They appeared behind his eyes in white block letters, clean and cold and impossible to blink away.
Max barked once, a deep chest-crack of sound that snapped John back into his body.
Something hit the roof.
Not a branch. Too heavy.
The ceiling bowed above the breakfast table. Dust sifted down. John grabbed the rifle by the mudroom with one hand and Max’s collar with the other. The dog strained toward the back door, not away from it.
“Heel,” John said.
Max obeyed, shaking with rage.
A claw punched through the ceiling.
It was black, hooked, and long as a framing hammer. It scraped through drywall, caught the ceiling fan, and ripped the whole thing upward in a burst of sparks and plaster.
John fired through the hole.
The rifle cracked inside the little house like the hand of God slapping sheet metal. The thing above screamed. Wet black blood sprayed down through the broken ceiling, thick as used oil and stinking of rotten pennies.
[COMBAT REGISTERED]
[UNCLASSED HUMAN – LEVEL 1]
[WEAPON COMPATIBILITY: ADEQUATE]
“Adequate?” John shouted. “Did my life just get a C-minus?”
The roof tore open.
A head shoved through. It looked like someone had built a coyote out of knives and bad decisions. Too many eyes. Too much jaw. Skin like burned leather stretched over a skull that did not fit any sane animal. The bullet had taken one eye out, and black fluid ran down its muzzle in ropes.
Max launched.
John barely got the door open before the dog hit the monster’s hanging forelimb. Max clamped down and twisted with all the ugly, practical violence bred into dogs that knew hogs did not quit because you asked nice.
The monster screamed again. Its other claw punched down.
John fired from the hip.
The shot blew three teeth and a strip of jaw back into the yard. The creature jerked. Max dropped, hit the tile, rolled, and came up with fur full of plaster.
[COMPANION CANDIDATE DETECTED]
[BOND OFFER: HUNTING DOG / LOYALTY: ABSOLUTE / UTILITY: HIGH]
[ACCEPT?]
John did not know what accepting meant. He knew the monster was still moving and Max was between it and him.
“Yes,” he snarled.
Heat slammed from his chest down his left arm and into Max like a thrown chain. The dog yelped. John almost dropped the rifle as a second heartbeat kicked under his own, fast and furious and not human. It felt like a co-op partner had just been hardwired into his chest.
[COMPANION BOND ACCEPTED]
[MAX – COMPANION HOUND – LEVEL 1]
[SHARED SKILL UNLOCKED: PACK SENSE]
The world sharpened.
John smelled the monster. Not with his nose. With Max. Hot blood. Roof tar. Fear-sweat. Wrong meat. He felt the thing’s weight through the boards as if its paws pressed on his own skin.
“Move left,” John said, not knowing whether Max could understand the words or the shape of the intent behind them.
Max moved left.
The monster lunged down through the broken ceiling. John stepped right, braced the rifle against the doorframe, and fired into the soft place under its jaw.
The head burst.
Bone fragments peppered the cabinets. Black blood slapped the breakfast plate and drowned the eggs. The body convulsed above them, claws raking insulation, then slid off the roof with a heavy crash into the side yard.
[KILL CONFIRMED: ROOF JACKAL, JUVENILE]
[XP AWARDED: 40]
[COMPANION XP AWARDED: 40]
[LOOT AVAILABLE]
John stood in his kitchen with plaster in his hair, blood on his face, a dead phone on the floor, and a dog whose heartbeat still echoed in his chest.
The word loot hung behind his eyes. Great. His life had loot boxes now.
“No,” John said.
The System did not answer.
“I am not looting my own roof monster before I know if Mrs. Delgado is alive.”
That sentence would have sounded crazy yesterday. Today it sounded like priorities.
Max sneezed black blood off his nose and trotted to the front door, then looked back when John did not move fast enough. Pack Sense tugged at him. Not words. Pressure. Smell-memory. The old woman’s porch: menthol rub, potting soil, coffee with too much sugar, the little dog she had lost last winter, and fear so sharp it felt like foil on John’s tongue.
“Yeah,” John said. “I smell it. Which is going to bother me later.”
He shoved three loose cartridges into his pocket, grabbed the first-aid kit from the pack, and kicked the broken back door fully open because the front might have glass. Outside, the air had the wrong weight. The two moons hung above the roofs. One red. One toothed. Power lines sagged though no pole had fallen. Across the street, Mr. Benavides stood in his driveway in pajama pants, holding a golf club and staring at the sky.
“John?” he called. “What the hell is going on?”
“Inside!” John shouted.
Mr. Benavides did not move. He kept staring upward with his mouth open, because people did that when the world got too big. John understood. He still wanted to slap him.
Something skittered along the gutter of Mrs. Delgado’s house.
Max was already moving.
John ran after him through the side yard, boots sliding in monster blood and wet grass. Mrs. Delgado’s porch light flickered even though the sun was up, blinking in a rhythm that made John’s teeth ache. Her front door was open three inches. A thin gray hand reached through the gap, fingers too long, nails worrying at the chain lock.
Mrs. Delgado was on the other side of the door, praying in Spanish and trying to shove a chair under the knob with one shaking arm.
John did not have a clever plan. He had a rifle, a dog, and a growing hatred for anything that put its hands through old women’s doors.
“Max, low!”
Max hit the porch first and slammed shoulder-first into the gray thing’s wrist. John planted one boot on the welcome mat, shoved the muzzle through the door gap above Max, and fired.
The thing shrieked. The hand tore free, leaving two fingers twitching on the threshold. Mrs. Delgado screamed too, but she did not stop pushing the chair.
[KILL ASSIST REGISTERED]
[CIVILIAN PROTECTION EVENT: MINOR]
[REPUBLIC CREDIT SEED: +1]
[CIVIC FUNCTION OBSERVED: protected survivors strengthen claim authority.]
“Republic what?” John snapped.
The door chain rattled. Mrs. Delgado’s voice came through, thin but alive. “Juanito?”
“It’s John, ma’am.”
“I know your name. I am scared, not senile.”
That almost made him laugh. Almost.
“Stay inside,” he said. “Lock everything. Don’t open for anything that talks weird.”
“That includes half the men on this street.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Max barked from the porch steps.
Not at Mrs. Delgado. East again.
John looked down the block. More doors stood open. More people shouted. Something dragged a trash can into the street and began eating the plastic wheels. Mr. Benavides finally ran inside when a bird with too many legs landed on his roof.
Small normal was gone.
That left work.
Outside, San Antonio screamed.
Sirens rose, cut out, rose again. Gunfire popped from three directions. Somewhere to the north, something big enough to shake windows bellowed over the city.
Max looked at John.
For the first time in ten years of owning that stubborn animal, John knew exactly what the dog meant.
More.
John worked the lever and chambered another round.
“Yeah,” he said. “I noticed.”
The front window flashed with white letters.
Not inside his head this time. Across the sky.
[WELCOME, TEXAS]
[YOUR BORDERS ARE UNDER REVIEW]
[FAILURE CONDITION: EXTINCTION]
John looked at the ruined breakfast, the monster blood crawling down his cabinets, and the dog waiting for him at the door.
He should have felt chosen. He should have felt blessed or cursed or whatever word people used when the universe kicked in the door and handed them a job.
Mostly, he felt pissed about the tortillas.
Chapter 2: Wall of Light
The dead roof jackal twitched in John’s side yard like it was arguing with death.
Max stood over it with his legs stiff and his teeth black to the gums. The dog had one ear split at the tip and plaster dust caked along his back. Every breath came out of him in a hard chuff. He wanted the thing to move again.
John wanted it to stay down long enough for him to figure out why his whole neighborhood sounded like a slaughterhouse.
Heat rolled off the asphalt in front of the house, wrong for the hour and worse for the season. It shimmered above the cracked road, bent the parked trucks, and made the stop sign at the corner glow red through a film of ash. Dead traffic lights swung over the intersection of Southcross and the little feeder road, clicking in the hot wind.
Across the sky, far to the north and west, a wall of light rose where horizon should have been.
It was not lightning. It did not flicker. It stood straight and white, a hard shining sheet that climbed from earth to cloud and kept going until John’s eyes watered. He could feel it in his teeth. Not pain exactly. Pressure. Like biting foil, like standing too close to a transformer box, like the whole state had been welded shut around the edges.
Max growled at it.
“Yeah,” John said. “I see it.”
A woman screamed from three houses down.
John checked the rifle by touch. Four rounds left in the tube, one in the chamber. He had a box in the truck and two more in the closet, but the closet was behind a kitchen full of monster blood and a roof with a hole in it. The truck keys were on the counter. His phone was dead. Water was in the pantry. Fuel was in the truck.
Simple list. Bad order.
The scream came again, sharper this time, and a child’s voice broke under it.
Max looked at John.
John looked at the dead monster, the empty street, the wall of light, and the rifle in his hands.
“Don’t give me that face,” he said. “I’m going.”
Max was already moving.
They cut across Mrs. Delgado’s yard because the gate was open and the street had glass all over it. Mesquite branches scraped John’s shoulder. A sprinkler head hissed mud from a cracked line. The whole block stank of hot tar, blood, and the bitter chemical smell that came when insulation burned.
Mrs. Delgado lay on her porch with her house dress torn at the hip and one leg bent wrong below the knee. She had a kitchen knife in one hand and a little boy pinned under her other arm. The boy’s face was gray with shock. A roof jackal crouched on the porch rail above them, smaller than the one John had killed, but quicker. Its too-many eyes tracked Max.
“Mijo,” Mrs. Delgado rasped. “The back door locked. He locked us out.”
John did not ask who.
The jackal sprang.
Max hit it sideways in the air.
Dog and monster crashed into the porch swing. Chain snapped. Wood cracked. The jackal raked Max’s flank, opening three red lines under the dust. John stepped past Mrs. Delgado, jammed the rifle muzzle almost into the thing’s ribs, and fired.
The round punched through it and blew meat across the porch siding.
[KILL CONFIRMED: ROOF JACKAL, JUVENILE]
[XP AWARDED: 35]
[COMPANION XP AWARDED: 35]
Max shook the body once and dropped it like a bad rag.
Mrs. Delgado’s eyes fixed on the white letters John knew she could not see.
“Was that God?”
“No ma’am,” John said, because it came out before he had time to make it gentle. “I don’t think God’s this rude.”
The boy made a sound that might have been a laugh if his grandmother had not been bleeding into the porch boards.
John slung the rifle, hooked his hands under Mrs. Delgado’s arms, and dragged her off the porch. She cried out once. He hated that. He hated the sound in a deep, hot place, but the porch roof above her was bowed and something scratched inside the attic.
“Who locked you out?”
She spat on the grass. “Peters. HOA president. Said sick and injured draw monsters. Closed the cul-de-sac gate with people outside.”
John looked down the block.
At the end of the street, the fancy wrought-iron emergency gate that nobody was supposed to use had been pulled shut and chained. Five people stood on the wrong side of it in the sun: an old man with a bloody towel on his head, two teenagers, a woman carrying a baby, and a heavyset man in a security vest holding a pistol.
Inside the gate, on the safer side, Harold Peters stood with bolt cutters in one hand and three neighbors behind him. Peters wore pressed shorts, deck shoes, and the kind of clean polo a man wore when he thought order belonged to him. He had a revolver tucked into his belt.
“Stay back,” Peters shouted at the people outside. “We have to maintain a defensible perimeter.”
Something moved on the roof behind the woman with the baby.
John’s hands tightened on Mrs. Delgado.
He was not a smart man about speeches. He knew that. He had lost arguments with mechanics who charged him twice because he got mad at the wrong sentence. He did not know what words beat “defensible perimeter” when the man saying it had the key. Peters was talking like a bad tutorial NPC, and people were about to die because of it.
Max did not care about words.
The dog barked once toward the roof.
John saw the monster shape flow over the tiles.
“Down!” he yelled.
The woman dropped over the baby. The old man froze. The teens ran the wrong way, straight along the fence where they had nowhere to go.
John set Mrs. Delgado behind a live oak, put the rifle to his shoulder, and tried to aim past the gate bars. Too far for a clean shot with people moving. Too much iron in the way. Too few rounds.
The wall of light pulsed at the edge of his sight.
Pressure drove through his teeth and into the bones of his face. Road signs flashed behind his eyes, not words, not yet. Southcross. Bexar County. Neighborhood limit. Private gate. Texas.
Texas.
The gate was not a border that mattered.
The thought came with such force that John staggered.
[UNREGISTERED CIVIC BARRIER DETECTED]
[SURVIVOR ACCESS CONFLICT]
[TEMPORARY CLAIM ACTION AVAILABLE]
[COST: HEALTH, STAMINA, CLAIM PRESSURE]
[ACCEPT?]
“What the hell is Claim Pressure?” John said. “Is that a debuff?”
The roof jackal pounced.
“Yes!”
Pain knifed up from the soles of his boots. It ran through his shins, snapped into his hips, and hooked behind his ribs. For one ugly second John felt every fence line in the block, every porch step, every painted curb, every front door where somebody hid and hoped the screaming stayed outside.
Then his left palm burned.
A white line shot from his hand across the grass, down the sidewalk, and under the gate.
It hit the chain with a sound like a hammer on a church bell. The chain burst apart link by link. The gate swung inward.
[TEMPORARY SAFE LINE ESTABLISHED]
[RADIUS: 42 YARDS]
[DURATION: 11 MINUTES]
[PENALTY: CLAIM PRESSURE 3/10]
John dropped to one knee and vomited coffee into Mrs. Delgado’s grass.
The people at the gate ran.
The jackal landed on the old man.
Max reached it first. He slammed into the monster’s hind leg, drove it off balance, and took a claw across the shoulder for it. John stumbled up with his mouth burning and the rifle heavy as a railroad tie.
The old man was screaming. The baby’s mother was screaming. Peters was screaming too, but from behind his neighbors.
“Shoot it!” Peters yelled. “Somebody shoot it!”
John aimed at the monster’s head and saw Max in the line.
“Leave!” he snapped.
Max did not leave. He changed.
The dog flattened, shoved under the monster’s neck, and dragged its head sideways with his whole body. John fired the instant the skull cleared Max’s back.
The bullet took the jackal through the eye and smashed it into the gatepost.
[KILL CONFIRMED: ROOF JACKAL, ADULT]
[XP AWARDED: 80]
[COMPANION XP AWARDED: 80]
[SKILL SEED DETECTED: CLAIM PULSE]
John worked the lever and nearly dropped the rifle because his left hand would not close. Two rounds left. His palm had a thin white mark burned across it, not a cut, not a scar. A line. It ran from wrist to middle finger like someone had drawn a road under his skin.
Peters shoved past the woman with the baby and pointed at John.
“You broke the barrier.”
John stared at him.
“People were outside.”
“They were compromised. You don’t understand containment. I was maintaining order.”
The old man had both hands clamped around his torn scalp. Blood ran between his fingers. One of the teens was sobbing so hard he could not stand. Mrs. Delgado’s grandson crawled to his grandmother and put his small body in front of hers as if that would stop teeth.
Something in John went quiet.
It was not clever. It was not clean. It had no speech attached.
He walked to Peters, took the revolver from the man’s belt before Peters understood he was close enough, dropped the cylinder open, and pocketed the rounds. The empty gun he set on the curb behind him, out of reach.
“Hey,” Peters said.
The problem was not the revolver or the instinct to lock a gate. Plenty of men on this street kept rifles for the exact reason John did. The problem was pointing steel at bleeding neighbors instead of what was coming over the roof.
John hit him.
One punch. Not fancy. Not brave, either. Just a fist across a mouth that had said too much while better people bled. Peters fell on his backside in the grass and looked up with hurt outrage, as if the world had broken a rule by letting consequences touch him.
“You can help carry Mrs. Delgado,” John said, “or you can stay here and explain containment to the next roof dog.”
“Jackal,” the little boy whispered.
John looked down.
“What?”
“The letters called it a jackal.”
John’s stomach went cold. “You saw them?”
The boy nodded. “Only after you made the white line.”