[ENG] What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
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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 16 : Calamity (4)
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[Time remaining until The Great Freeze: 14 Days]
[Status: POST-SEISMIC RECOVERY]
[Location: Viper's Bunker - "The Silo" (100m Underground)]
[Time: 08:10 AM]
The screaming of the metal stopped.
Viper stood in the center of the Hangar Bay, his boots planted wide on the steel grating. The air was thick with a haze of dislodged rust and concrete dust, visible in the harsh beams of the emergency floodlights.
"Sound off!" Viper roared. His voice echoed through the vast, cylindrical chamber, cutting through the ringing silence.
One by one, the thirty Fangs unbuckled from their shock-absorbing seats inside the APCs. They spilled out onto the deck, checking their resource and weapons.
"Sector One, clear!"
"Sector Two, clear!"
"Hull integrity holding!"
Viper grabbed the railing of the command platform. The metal was hot to the touch, Friction heat generated by the massive hydraulic dampeners fighting the earthquake.
He looked up at the ceiling of the Silo, a hundred meters above. The massive blast doors, designed to withstand a direct nuclear hit, remained sealed.
He walked over to the primary structural monitor. The screen displayed a wireframe model of the bunker.
[Hull Pressure: 98%]
[Hydraulic Fluid Levels: 45%]
[External Sensors: OFFLINE]
Viper tapped the glass over the pressure gauge. "The earth tried to crush us like a soda can. But we are still here."
He looked at the squad. They were shaken. Their eyes darted to the walls, listening to the groaning of the rock settling outside the hull.
"Check the armory," Viper ordered, his tone leaving no room for fear.
"Secure the munitions. If the hull bent, the racking might have snapped. I don't want a grenade rolling off a shelf and finishing what the meteor started."
He turned back to the console. The external cameras were dead, crushed by the shifting tectonic plates. They were blind. Buried under a hundred meters of rock and an ocean of volcanic mud.
"We are a submarine now," Viper muttered, engaging the sonar systems.
[Location: FrostBite's Bunker - "The Nexus"]
[Time: 08:15 AM]
THUD.
The Maglev Isolation System disengaged abruptly. The entire floor of the server room dropped three inches, slamming onto the concrete foundation with a bone-jarring impact.
FrostBite gasped, his hands flying to his headset.
"System report! Talk to me!" he yelled, his fingers dancing across three different keyboards simultaneously.
The room was bathed in pulsing red light. The hum of the servers was deafening, a frantic whir of cooling fans spinning at maximum RPM.
[SERVER CLUSTER A: STABLE]
[SERVER CLUSTER B: REBOOTING]
[COOLING SYSTEM: CRITICAL]
FrostBite spun his chair around. He didn't check the computers first. He checked the glass display case behind him.
The limited-edition figurine—Neon Genesis Evangelion Unit 01—had toppled over, leaning precariously against the glass. But it was unbroken.
"Thank God," FrostBite exhaled, wiping sweat from his upper lip.
He turned back to the real threat. The screens showed a wall of red warnings.
The earthquake hadn't destroyed his servers, but the ash cloud was killing his cooling.
"External intakes 1, 2, and 4 are blocked," he analyzed the readout, his eyes scanning the data streams. "Ash density is off the charts. It's choking the filters."
He typed in a command sequence, overriding the safety protocols.
Clack-clack-clack.
[COMMAND: SEAL EXTERNAL VENTS]
[COMMAND: ENGAGE LIQUID NITROGEN TANK 2]
A loud hiss filled the room as the emergency coolant began to circulate through the server racks. The temperature gauge on the screen slowed its climb, then stabilized.
FrostBite slumped back in his racing chair. He pulled up the global communication feed. The map of the internet was disintegrating.
Nodes in the Philippines, Japan, and Australia had gone dark. The undersea cables were severed.
"The world just went offline," FrostBite whispered, watching the connection lights blink out one by one.
He looked at the local network, the encrypted channel connecting him to the other Pillars. It was still active. A thin, fragile thread of data weaving through the destruction.
"Okay," he cracked his knuckles, the blue light of the monitors reflecting in his glasses. "The hardware survived. The network survived. Now let's see who else is still breathing."
[Location: Logistik Raya Warehouse Bunker, Cikarang Industrial Zone]
[Time: 08:20 AM]
The relentless bombardment of meteorite fragments finally ceased.
The deafening explosions that had rocked the industrial estate for the past twenty minutes faded, replaced by the crackle of a thousand uncontrolled fires.
Inside the concrete loading bay, the air was thick with the acrid stench of cordite, pulverized cement, and melting plastic. Tank slowly uncurled himself from his braced position against the structural pillar.
IronClad stood up beside him. The Elite operator meticulously brushed the debris off his tactical vest, his face completely hidden behind his ballistic mask. He moved with the calm, terrifying efficiency of a machine.
"The kinetic shower has passed," IronClad reported, his deep voice muffled by his respirator. "Awaiting your orders, Pillar Tank."
Tank wiped the sweat and dirt from his eyes. He walked heavily toward the heavy steel blast door leading to the surface. He bypassed the electronic controls, fried by the localized electromagnetic pulses from the impacts and gripped the manual locking wheel. His thick, calloused hands strained against the metal.
With a harsh groan of unlubricated steel, the deadbolts retracted. Tank pushed the heavy door open just enough to step into the reinforced observation slit overlooking the factory yard.
The heat hit him instantly. It was a suffocating, blistering wave of thermal energy radiating from the burning ruins of Cikarang. The textile plant across the street was a collapsed mountain of twisted girders. A row of delivery trucks in the yard had melted down to their chassis, the rubber tires reduced to puddles of bubbling black sludge.
Tank gripped the edge of the observation slit, his knuckles turning white. He stared at the horizon.
The purple, bruised sky was dying.
From the East, a colossal, churning wall of absolute blackness crawled across the heavens. It was the Megaplume, the combined volcanic ash clouds from the Philippines and Papua, driven by the stratospheric winds. It looked like a solid tidal wave of charcoal and bruised clouds, swallowing the sickly violet light with terrifying speed.
Lightning bolted continuously within the belly of the dark mass, flashing in violent shades of crimson and purple, illuminating the millions of tons of silicate dust suspended in the air.
Tank watched the shadow of the Megaplume race across the ruined industrial park. The line of darkness swept over the burning factories, devouring the smoke columns.
When the shadow hit Tank's warehouse, the world went completely dark.
The morning sun was eradicated.
Pitch-black midnight claimed the sky at half-past eight in the morning. The sudden absence of solar radiation caused an immediate, violent atmospheric reaction. The blistering 40°C heat vanished, replaced by a sharp, biting chill that sliced through Tank's sweat-soaked jacket. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees in a matter of seconds.
"The sun is gone," Tank whispered, his breath puffing out in a faint white mist. "The Architect's timeline is absolute. The Long Night begins now."
IronClad stepped up behind him, staring into the pitch-black void. "We hold the Gateway in the dark, Sir."
Tank closed the heavy steel shutter, plunging the bunker back into the red glow of the emergency lights. He walked back to his communication console, his fear hardening into a cold, unbreakable resolve. He was the Sentinel. He would sit in the dark and wait for the beasts.
[Location: The Lab, Apothecary's Private Bunker - South Tangerang]
[Time: 08:25 AM]
Eighty kilometers away, Apothecary ignored the end of the world outside her window.
Her laboratory was a hazard zone. The violent earthquake had shattered dozens of glass beakers, pooling highly corrosive hydrochloric acid across the white ceramic tiles. The air scrubbers hummed aggressively, struggling to filter out the toxic chemical fumes.
Apothecary sat hunched over her central workbench, her boots resting inches away from a puddle of bubbling acid. A jagged piece of glass had grazed her cheek during the initial tremors, leaving a thin trail of half-dried blood tracking down to her jawline. She completely ignored the pain. Her eyes, wide and manic behind her thick glasses, were locked onto the glowing screens of her electron microscope and biometric simulators.
She was analyzing the survival probability of the human body against the incoming data.
"The volcanic winter alters the baseline," she muttered rapidly to herself, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "The silicate ash blocks 99.8% of solar radiation. The ambient cold will bypass standard thermal clothing within three hours of exposure."
She picked up a vacuum-sealed pouch of her 'Vitality Sludge' (Batch 4). The dark green, moss-like paste was a masterpiece of extreme biochemistry. But staring at the dropping temperature graphs on her monitors, Apothecary realized it was not enough.
She sliced the pouch open with a scalpel and squeezed a thick dollop of the sludge into a reinforced glass petri dish. She placed it under the thermal scanner.
"Batch 4 relies on capsaicin and caffeine to trigger the body's natural exothermic response," she analyzed, staring at the chemical breakdown on her screen. "It forces the metabolism to burn fat reserves for heat. But the body will run out of fuel. The human heart will give out under the strain of continuous tachycardia."
She spun her chair around, grabbed a heavy titanium lockbox from the urviving shelf, and slammed it onto the desk. She entered a twelve-digit passcode. The box hissed open, revealing a row of small, glowing blue vials.
These were the synthesized extracts from the mutated animal tissue she had discreetly acquired and studied over the past week.
The hyper-aggressive cellular structures found in the rabid dogs and rats held the key to surviving the impossible cold.
"I must integrate the mutation," Apothecary whispered, her voice trembling with the thrill of forbidden science. "The animals adapt by accelerating cell division and ignoring pain receptors. I must splice the alkaloid structures of the Vitality Sludge with the irradiated cellular enzymes."
She carefully extracted a single drop of the glowing blue fluid using a micro-pipette. She held her breath, steadying her shaking hand, and released the drop directly onto the green sludge in the petri dish.
The reaction was violent and instantaneous.
The green sludge hissed, boiling rapidly. The color shifted from dark green to a deep, pulsating crimson. The thermal scanner beside the dish blared a sudden warning. The temperature of the small blob spiked to 45°C and held perfectly stable, radiating a steady, powerful heat without consuming itself.
Apothecary leaned back, a manic, triumphant smile stretching across her face.
"Batch 5," she breathed out. "The true Evolution Catalyst. It doesn't just warm the body. It rewrites the thermal regulation system."
She looked up from the petri dish to the large monitor displaying the external surface cameras.
Just like in Cikarang, the Megaplume hit South Tangerang with the force of a cosmic blackout. The burning ruins of the elite housing complex vanished into absolute darkness. The screen showed nothing but pitch-black static, filled with the swirling, glass-like flakes of falling volcanic ash.
Apothecary watched the darkness swallow her cameras. She felt the chill seeping through the reinforced concrete walls of her bunker. The Architect had orchestrated the perfect extinction event, clearing the board of all weaknesses.
She grabbed her microphone, pressing the broadcast button for the restricted Pillar channel.
"The sky is dead," Apothecary announced into the dark, her voice echoing with chilling clinical detachment. "The temperature is dropping exponentially. But the cure is ready. I have conquered the frost."
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS