Wes Moretto doesn’t expect to spend his eighteenth birthday framed for murder. But when he realizes his supposed victim is a monster from another world, the stakes escalate fast. Trapped in prison, Wes is given two impossible options: fight a near-hopeless legal battle, or abandon his family to enroll in a military academy known as the Citadel.

At the Citadel, Wes is inducted into the Holenai: warriors who wield magic born from the physical manifestations of their souls to combat demons from another dimension. Thrust into a world of monsters, rigid hierarchy, and dangerous new beginnings, Wes struggles to survive without the family he left behind. But when his younger sister is kidnapped by the very demons he’s been trained to destroy, Wes begins to suspect that his conscription was no coincidence at all.