The city greeted them with silence.
Leaving the camp behind, Ulysses and the boy crept through streets drowned in debris. Cars lay overturned, their windshields shattered. Power lines drooped like black vines across intersections. The air carried the stench of brine and rot, mixed with smoke from distant fires that never seemed to burn out.
Ulysses kept the boy close, scanning every alley for movement. The city had changed, not just in its broken buildings, but in the way it watched. Windows felt like hollow eyes. Every shadow seemed to breathe.
They passed a church whose doors hung open, its pews gutted by floodwater. A dozen people knelt inside, praying to statues streaked with mud. Their voices rose and fell, desperate, ragged. Ulysses paused at the doorway, torn between respect and pity.
The boy tugged his sleeve. "Why don't we go inside, Kuya?"
"Because prayer doesn't fill stomachs," Ulysses muttered, though the bitterness in his own voice startled him. He regretted the words instantly when he saw the boy's frown.
They pressed on. Near a collapsed pharmacy, they scavenged a half-empty box of crackers. Ulysses broke it into pieces, handing the larger portion to the boy. The child chewed slowly, eyes fixed on the sky.
The red moon was still there, faint in daylight, a smudge of blood behind the clouds. People in the street glanced upward often, some with fear, others with grim resignation. No one spoke of it directly, as if naming it would make it fall.
By midday, they reached an avenue where the asphalt had buckled into jagged ridges. A burned-out bus blocked the way, its metal skeleton groaning in the wind. Beyond it, Ulysses heard voices, dozens of them.
He crouched low, signaling the boy to follow. They slipped through the cracked windows of a storefront and peered out.
A procession was moving down the street. Men and women barefoot, their clothes torn, their backs lashed raw. At the front marched a man with a wooden cross strapped across his shoulders. Behind him, others wailed hymns, dragging chains, smearing their faces with ash.
The boy gasped softly. "Kuya… what are they doing?"
"Flagellants," Ulysses said under his breath. "They think punishing themselves will stop the end."
The boy's eyes widened. "Will it?"
Ulysses shook his head, though unease gnawed at him. "No. Pain doesn't bargain with the heavens."
Yet as the procession passed, Ulysses felt something stir in the air, a strange, heavy stillness, as though the city itself held its breath. The people whipped themselves bloody, chanting louder, their voices rising into the broken sky.
And Ulysses realized with dread that the prophet's fire wasn't alone. Other voices, other movements, were rising across Manila, each claiming to hold the answer.
The world wasn't just fracturing, it was splintering into a thousand desperate faiths.
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End of Chapter 25