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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, Wolrd-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 13 : Calamity
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[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 15 Days]
[Location: Arlen's Apartment, West Jakarta]
[Time: 07:15 PM]
Arlen stared at the laptop screen, his mouth slightly open. The cursor blinked at the end of Apothecary's final message.
> [USER: APOTHECARY]: Brace for collision. <
"Collision?" Arlen squeaked. His voice cracked, sounding incredibly small in the empty room.
He stood up, knocking his chair over. He grabbed his hair, pacing in a tight circle around his desk.
"I was just trying to sound cool! I just wanted them to watch out for the dogs! I didn't said anything about a meteor was hitting!"
He looked at the window. The sky outside was a bruising purple, darkening rapidly. The air in the room felt heavy, charged with static electricity that made the hair on his arms stand up.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced his chest.
The Pillars were safe. But he? He was on the fourth floor of a cheap apartment building made of questionable concrete.
"Move. Move!" he yelled at himself.
He scrambled over a pile of dirty laundry and sprinted to his closet.
He dragged out the Type-A Survival Case.
He fumbled with the latches. His hands shook so violently that it took him three tries to open it.
He pulled out the Tactical Bodysuit.
t was heavy, reinforced with Kevlar weave. He stripped off his t-shirt and jeans, hopping on one leg as he tried to jam his feet into the suit.
"Stupid zipper. Come on!"
He managed to zip it up to his neck. He felt ridiculous, like a cosplayer preparing for a convention that was being held in hell. But the weight of the armor gave him a sliver of comfort.
Next, the room.
He looked at the window he had boarded up with plywood. It wasn't enough. If the shockwave hit, that glass would turn into a shotgun blast of shrapnel.
Arlen ran to his bed. He grabbed the mattress, heaving it off the frame. He dragged it across the floor, grunting with effort, and slammed it upright against the window.
He grabbed a roll of industrial duct tape. He didn't measure. He didn't cut neatly. He tore strips with his teeth, taping the mattress to the wall, to the desk, to anything that would hold it in place.
"Stay there. Please stay there," he muttered, slapping the final piece of tape.
Then, he turned to the door.
His instinct screamed to lock it. To bolt every latch he had installed.
But Arlen stopped.
He remembered a documentary about earthquakes. Doors jam.
If the building shifted, the frame would warp. If the door was locked, he would be sealed inside a concrete tomb.
He ran to the door and unlocked it. He undid the three deadbolts.
He opened it just a crack—barely an inch—and jammed a thick rubber doorstop into the gap.
"Escape route," he panted, backing away. "If the roof falls, I run. I don't get stuck."
He grabbed his Gas Mask and the Tactical Knife, clutching them to his chest.
He retreated to the safest spot in the room, the corner formed by two load-bearing walls, right next to his "Fortress of Cans."
He sat down, pulling his knees to his chest.
He looked at the laptop one last time. The chat was silent. The Green Dots on FrostBite's map were blinking steadily.
Arlen closed his eyes. He wasn't the Architect right now. He was just a terrified writer who had accidentally guessed the end of the world.
"Please," he whispered to the empty room. "Let the building hold."
Outside, the wind stopped.
The birds stopped screaming.
The city fell into a terrifying, unnatural silence.
***
[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 14 Days]
[Location: Rooftop of Logistik Raya Warehouse, Cikarang Industrial Zone]
[Time: 07:00 AM]
Tank stood on the edge of the corrugated metal roof, his arms crossed over his chest. He chewed on an unlit cigar, his eyes fixed on the eastern horizon.
The morning air was heavy, tasting of sulfur and static. The sky wasn't blue; it was a bruised, sickly violet.
Below him, the Cikarang Industrial Estate was waking up. Trucks were idling in the yards of neighboring factories. Security guards were changing shifts. They had no idea that the clock had already run out.
Tank checked his watch.
07:00:15.
"Showtime," he grunted.
The Flash
It started with a violation of the sky.
High above the atmosphere, a tear of blinding white light ripped through the clouds. It was brighter than a welding arc, instantly drowning out the weak morning sun.
A massive sphere of superheated plasma streaked across the heavens, moving from West to East. It left a scar of burning fire in its wake, a contrail of destruction that vaporized the moisture in the clouds instantly.
To the workers below, it looked like a dragon made of pure energy was diving into the Pacific Ocean. They froze, shielding their eyes, paralyzed by the sheer majesty of the object.
Tank didn't freeze. He turned around and walked calmly toward the heavy steel hatch leading inside.
He grabbed the handle and looked back one last time. The object disappeared over the curvature of the Earth, plunging toward the deep ocean thousands of kilometers away.
"Brace for the impact," Tank whispered.
He jumped into the hatch and spun the locking wheel shut.
Then, after a while ...
*Boom!*
CRACK.
The sonic boom arrived with the force of a bomb.
The shockwave hammered the warehouse. Every window in the Cikarang Industrial Zone shattered simultaneously. The glass rained down like jagged hail.
The corrugated metal roof groaned and buckled under the pressure change, but the reinforced beams held.
Inside the concrete loading bay, Tank landed on the floor. His men were already in position, braced against the structural pillars.
"Stay down!" Tank roared. "The ground comes next!"
The Quake
Two minutes later, the Earth rang like a bell.
The meteor had struck the Pacific seabed with the force of a billion tons of TNT. The shockwave traveled through the planet's crust, ignoring distance.
The floor of the warehouse shake so violently..
It felt like standing on the deck of a ship in a hurricane. The concrete slab beneath them heaved upward, then dropped a foot.
Tank watched the CCTV monitors on the wall.
The camera outside showed the factory across the street, a textile plant with a high sheet-metal roof.
The ground liquefied. The foundation of the textile plant snapped.
With a slow, terrifying groan, the entire building folded in on itself. The roof collapsed, burying the machinery and the workers inside under tons of steel.
Another monitor showed the highway. The asphalt cracked open like a zipper. Cars were thrown sideways, skidding into the ditches as the road buckled into waves.
The roaring was absolute. The sound of earth grinding against earth, of steel shearing, of concrete turning to dust.
Inside Tank's fortress, the lights flickered and died. The emergency red floodlights kicked in instantly.
Dust fell from the ceiling, coating Tank's shoulders. But the walls that reinforced with Tank's paranoia and FrostBite's money, did not crack.
The rolling motion slowed, then stopped.
Tank stood up, brushing the dust off his tactical vest. He looked at the static-filled screens showing the ruins of the industrial park.
***
[Location: FrostBite's Bunker ]
The world outside was crumbling, but inside the Nexus, the world was... floating.
FrostBite sat strapped into his racing chair, his knuckles white as he gripped the armrests.
Around him, the Maglev Isolation System was screaming.
The entire server room floor had detached from the bunker's concrete shell. Powerful electromagnets levitated the racks of supercomputers three inches into the air, allowing the earth to shake violently underneath them without toppling the hardware.
WHIRRRRR-THUD.
WHIRRRRR-THUD.
The hydraulic stabilizers on the walls pumped furiously, counter-acting the massive rolling waves of the earthquake. The room swayed like a ship in a storm, tilting left, then correcting right.
"Stabilizers at 85%!" FrostBite yelled at the empty room. "Come on, baby, hold it together!"
On his screens, the external camera feeds glitched. He saw a brief image of the Monas square, the pavement cracking open, streetlights snapping like twigs, before the signal cut to static.
Inside, a shelf of anime figurines rattled violently behind the protective glass. One limited-edition figure of a magical girl toppled over.
"NO!" FrostBite screamed, more terrified for the plastic doll than the tectonic plate shifting. "Not the limited edition!"
But the servers hummed on. The green lights blinked steadily. The magnetic cushion held the data safe above the trembling earth.
[Location: Viper's Bunker ]
One hundred meters straight down, the earthquake felt different.
The bunker groaned. The sound was deafening, like the scream of a dying whale amplified by a thousand speakers. The millions of tons of rock surrounding the steel tube were trying to crush it like a soda can.
In the Hangar Bay, the thirty Fangs sat in the APCs, strapped into their shock-absorbing seats. They were silent, their eyes wide, feeling the vibrations rattle their teeth.
General Viper stood in the center of the bay. He refused to sit. He held onto a support railing, his legs bent to absorb the violent heaving of the floor.
Dust rained down from the ceiling vents. A bolt sheared off a overhead gantry, shooting across the room like a bullet and embedding itself in the wall.
"Hold!" Viper roared, his voice cutting through the mechanical shrieking.
He looked at the pressure gauges on the wall. The external rock pressure was spiking.
[STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 92%]
[HYDRAULIC COMPENSATORS: MAX LOAD]
The bunker was fighting back. The massive titanium ribs of the bunker expanded and contracted, breathing with the earth, turning the lethal energy into heat and noise.
Viper stared at the ceiling, imagining the soil churning above them.
"You have to try harder than that."
[Location: The Sanctuary ]
In the deepest bunker, the quake was a pendulum.
The Sanctuary was built like an inverted skyscraper suspended in a void. As the shockwave hit, the entire 50-story swung.
Seraph stood on the Oculus deck, gripping the railing. The entire city beneath her tilted five degrees to the west, then slowly swung back to the east.
CREAAAAAAK.
The sound of the massive dampeners echoing through the shaft was low and haunting.
Below her, the water in the purification plant sloshed violently, spilling over the containment tanks. In the residential blocks, furniture slid across floors.
But there was no screaming.
From the speakers, Seraph's voice Echoing. She was singing A low, hummed melody that she used to calm the children in the orphanage.
And the 2,000 Echoes joined in.
Huddled in the Central Plaza, holding onto each other as the floor pitched and rolled beneath them, they began to chant.
"The Earth breaks... The Root holds..."
The combined sound of thousands of voices chanting in unison drowned out the terrifying groan of the shifting tectonic plates. They turned their terror into worship.
Seraph looked down at her swaying kingdom, her eyes glowing in the dim emergency light. The massive structure danced with the earthquake, bending but refusing to break.
"Dance," Seraph whispered, smiling as the world tried to shake them off. "Dance for me."
***
[Time: 07:15 AM]
The rolling of the earth had stopped, replaced by a vibrating stillness. But the silence didn't last.
From outside the reinforced concrete walls, a new sound emerged. It wasn't the deep rumble of the ground anymore. It was a high-pitched, tearing shriek.
Siiiuuuuuu...
BOOM.
The heavy steel blast doors of the warehouse shuddered. Dust rained down from the rafters.
Tank scrambled to the main console. The earthquake had knocked out half of his external cameras, leaving only static on screens 1, 3, and 5.
But screens 2 and 4 flickered back to life.
What Tank saw on the monitors made the earthquake look like a mercy.
Monitor 2: The Highway (Toll road Jakarta-Cikampek)
The elevated highway had already cracked from the seismic wave, leaving cars stranded in a gridlock of panic. People were abandoning their vehicles, running on foot.
Then, the sky opened up.
It wasn't just a single rock. Its even look like a shotgun blast.
Hundred of glowing streaks slashed through the violet clouds. Debris from the main meteor's tail ranging from the size of a house to the size of a motorbike was raining down on West Java.
Tank watched in horror as a fragment the size of a motorbike slammed into a fuel tanker stuck in traffic.
There was no delay neither its cinematic pause.
Flash.
The tanker disintegrated. A sphere of orange fire blossomed instantly, engulfing the twenty cars around it.
The shockwave blew the guardrails off the highway, sending burning vehicles tumbling down onto the streets below.
Monitor 4: The Industrial Zone
The camera panned over the factory district.
A chemical processing plant two blocks away was still standing after the quake.
Then, a jagged rock, glowing white-hot from atmospheric friction, struck the main distillation tower.
It went through the steel structure like a hot knife through butter.
CRUMP.
The tower collapsed, spewing toxic green gas and igniting a firestorm that turned the sky an emerald green.
"It's look like an airstrike," Tank whispered, his face illuminated by the explosions on the screen. "It's a goddamn artillery barrage."
He saw a stray fragment hit a residential cluster of shophouses (ruko). The entire building ceased to exist, replaced by a crater of smoking rubble.
The randomness was the most terrifying part.
One factory was untouched. The one next to it was a burning crater.
A family running down the street was spared, while a police car fifty meters away was crushed by a falling piece of sky.
Tank gripped the console. The sounds outside were a cacophony of whistling death and thunderous impacts. The ground shook with every hit, a staccato rhythm of destruction.
Thump.
Thump.
CRACK.
Thump.
"The quake broke their legs," Tank growled, watching the fires spread across the horizon. "The rain is finishing them off."
He grabbed the radio handset, his knuckles white.
"Status check! Anyone near the skylights, pull back! If the roof gets hit, we seal the sector immediately!"
He stared at the screen, watching Cikarang burn under the relentless bombardment of the heavens.
The Great Freeze hadn't even started yet, and the world was already on fire.
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS