The morning came quietly, wrapped in mist.
Graduation day.
Neon banners lined the university's skywalk, the words "CLASS OF 2147 REBUILD THE FUTURE" scrolling across holographic panels. Drones hovered overhead, streaming the ceremony live to thousands across the megacity. The ocean glittered beyond the glass towers like polished steel, calm, perfect, deceptive.
I stood among the crowd in my dark-blue gown, the synthetic fabric stiff against the humid wind. Around me, laughter, applause, the flicker of camera flashes. The world, for that moment, felt normal.
Shane brushed past and fixed my collar. "You look like you wrestled with this thing."
"I did," I said. "It won."
She smiled, soft but fleeting. "After today… what do you think happens to us?"
I thought for a moment. "I think the world keeps moving. Whether we're ready or not."
Her gaze lingered on the sea behind the stage. "Then I hope it's not boring and more kind."
When my name was called, I stepped up to receive my diploma. Cameras flashed. People clapped. The dean shook my hand. It should have felt like an ending and a beginning, but instead, it felt like a countdown.
The sound started low.
A subsonic hum that rolled through the air like thunder caught in metal. The holographic screens glitched, a brief ripple of static that distorted the faces around me. People paused, murmuring, uncertain.
Then the ocean screamed.
It wasn't a sound meant for human ears, more like the roar of tectonic plates grinding together. Birds flew upward in panic. The entire skyline seemed to tilt for a heartbeat.
Alarms wailed through the megacity. Emergency drones burst from their docks, broadcasting on every channel:
"WARNING!!! HYDROSTATIC ANOMALY DETECTED. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. FLOOD EVENT LEVEL OMEGA."
The stage collapsed under the first tremor. People scattered.
Through the chaos, I caught sight of Shane, frozen, looking toward the horizon. I followed her gaze.
The sea was rising.
Not in waves, but as a single, impossible wall of water kilometers wide, towering over the city like the sky itself was folding downward. Lightning danced inside it, illuminating shadows that moved. Gigantic shapes, their silhouettes pulsing with bioluminescent veins, like living constellations.
Twelve of them.
Each different. Each gigantic.
The nearest one, a figure crowned with ringed appendages, half-serpent, half-humanoid breached the surface with a sound like mountains breaking.
I couldn't breathe. Every instinct screamed to run, but I couldn't look away.
The giant raised its gaze toward the city. For a heartbeat, I felt it see us, not as prey, not as enemies, but as something beneath its very existence. A flicker of consciousness brushed against my mind, cold and ancient.
'The world remembers.'
The words weren't spoken. They resonated, inside the skull, in the blood, in the pulse of the earth.
The flood struck.
A shockwave of water shattered the seawall, obliterating the lower districts. Buildings folded like paper. The crowd dissolved into panic. I grabbed Shane's wrist, yanking her toward the skyway leading to the upper dome.
People screamed. Sirens wailed. The light turned blue, everything bathed in that cold, underwater hue as if the sun itself had drowned.
We made it inside the school's central atrium just as the emergency barrier activated a shimmering dome snapping into place around the structure. Outside, the world blurred beneath the crushing weight of the ocean.
We stood there, soaked in silence, watching the sea press against the glass.
Humanoid Fish, real and monstrous, drifted past. Shadows the size of skyscrapers loomed just beyond the shield, their outlines too massive to comprehend.
Someone whispered, "It's the end."
But it wasn't.
Not yet.
Because when the flood came, it didn't wash humanity away. Not all of it, anyway.
I turned to Shane. Her hand was trembling in mine.
I tried to smile, though the weight in my chest said otherwise. "Looks like boring was never an option."
She laughed, a short, broken sound, and leaned her head against my shoulder as the world outside swayed like a dream.
The speaker above crackled to life.
"EMERGENCY FLOOD PROTOCOL INITIATED. ESTIMATED DURATION: TWELVE HOURS."
The countdown began.
And that was the day the old world drowned and something new began to breathe beneath the surface.