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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, World-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 25 : The Anomaly's Gaze
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[Time remaining until The Great Freeze: 6 Days]
[Status: UNCHARTED VARIABLE / HOSTILE CONTACT]
[Location: Arlen's Apartment, 4th Floor - West Jakarta]
[Time: Day 6 - 03:15 PM]
Arlen sat completely paralyzed inside the suffocating, pitch-black confines of his plastic micro-tent, his chest heaving violently as his lungs desperately pulled in the stale, freezing air. His heart hammered against his ribs with a concussive force that made his entire body tremble, leaving him feeling physically nauseous. His mind was a chaotic, swirling mess of shattered logic and fundamentally broken rules. The terrifying image of that spatial distortion kept replaying behind his eyelids like a cursed, inescapable film reel.
"God... that is completely insane. That is just absolute, impossible madness," Arlen whispered to himself, his voice shaking uncontrollably in the dark. He dug his thick, gloved fingers into his own hair, pulling the strands painfully tight in a desperate attempt to ground his spinning brain.
Before he could even begin to process the collapse of his entire survival timeline and the horrifying realization that his manuscript was flawed, another wave of commotion erupted from the ruined street below. This time, the noise cutting through the freezing atmosphere was not the mechanical, rhythmic clatter of high-caliber gunfire or the guttural roars of mutated beasts. It was the raw, desperate, and agonizing sound of human voices.
People screaming, begging, and crying out into the merciless cold.
"Are you kidding me? Now what?" Arlen hissed through his teeth, his lingering terror rapidly twisting into a sharp, jagged spike of sheer frustration.
Even though every single survival instinct in his body screamed at him to stay buried under the heavy fleece blankets and disappear into the darkness, his morbid curiosity and the absolute necessity to gather information completely overrode his fear. He crawled out of the tent on his hands and knees, ignoring the painful, biting chill of the ceramic floor tiles seeping through his pants, and pressed his face back against the small, triangular gap in the window tape.
The heavily armed squad in the dark gray winter camouflage had not progressed very far down the road.
They were currently being intercepted at a shattered street corner by a group of wretched survivors who had just emerged from the flooded, frozen basement of a nearby convenience store.
There were about ten of them in total. They looked like walking skeletons, shivering so uncontrollably that their teeth chattering was almost audible even from a distance, their faces pale and gaunt with pure terror and the biting cold.
A middle-aged man at the very front of the pitiful group fell heavily to his knees in the black snow, reaching his trembling, frostbitten hands out toward the squad leader wearing the dark blue tactical coat.
"Please!" the kneeling man's voice was hoarse and cracked, drifting up through the crystal-clear air to the fourth floor with agonizing clarity.
"There are little children down there in the dark! We are freezing to death! You have massive guns, you clearly have supplies and food... please, take us with you! We will do whatever you want!"
The heavily armed squad did not lower the muzzles of their customized assault rifles even a fraction of an inch. They stood in a perfectly disciplined, cold semi-circle, leveling their weapons directly at the chests of the huddling, desperate survivors.
Arlen kept his eyes entirely locked on the leader. The man did not shift his weight, did not show a hint of surprise, and did not move a single muscle in response to the crying civilians. He simply stared down at the kneeling man with a look of pure, clinical annoyance.
But as Arlen watched closely, he noticed something deeply unsettling about the leader's demeanor. The man's gaze was entirely devoid of the raw, frantic panic that should naturally plague any human being during the first week of a global apocalypse.
Instead, his eyes carried the heavy, exhausted, and utterly desensitized weight of a veteran who had walked through this exact frozen hellscape a thousand times before.
The leader let out a slow, visibly tired sigh, shaking his head slightly as if he were encountering a tedious, repetitive glitch in a software program rather than a group of dying human beings.
"Always the exact same at this intersection," the leader muttered under his breath, though the absolute silence of the frozen city allowed his low voice to carry. He looked back down at the weeping man. "You hold zero value in this sequence. You are just a useless drain on resources. Do not block my designated route."
"Please! We are going to starve to death down there! Just give us a little bit of food!" the man wailed hysterically, lunging forward slightly to grab the snow-covered hem of the leader's dark blue coat.
The reaction was instantaneous, flawless, and horrifyingly brutal.
The leader simply raised his left hand, which casually gripped a small, suppressed submachine gun. With an absolutely fluid motion that lacked even a microscopic ounce of hesitation, adrenaline, or emotion, he pulled the trigger.
Thut-thut-thut-thut-thut.
Five dull, muffled pops echoed through the intersection.
The middle-aged man and the four starving people standing directly behind him collapsed to the ground in a fraction of a second. There were no dramatic, drawn-out screams of agony. Their lifeless bodies hit the solid black ice with a heavy thud, their spilled blood steaming visibly for a fleeting moment before the lethal -15°C air instantly transformed the crimson pools into frozen, dark red slush.
The remaining five survivors shrieked in absolute horror, scrambling backward on their hands and knees like terrified prey, their faces twisted into masks of pure, unadulterated terror.
"Don't make a simple thing difficult," the leader muttered, his tone sounding exactly as if he had just swatted a mildly irritating mosquito that he had already swatted a hundred times before.
He did not even bother to check the bodies to ensure they were dead. He simply stepped directly over the bleeding corpses, his dark boots leaving bloody footprints on the black ice, and continued his march down the center of the road.
Arlen violently ripped his face away from the freezing glass, sliding down the concrete wall until his back hit the floor. He was shaking uncontrollably, struggling to pull oxygen into his burning lungs as his mind raced to analyze the horrific execution he had just witnessed.
"Holy shit... those guys are walking nightmares," Arlen gasped, covering his mouth tightly with his trembling, gloved hand.
"No hesitation whatsoever. No shred of empathy. They didn't even blink. I need to stay miles away from that kind of madness."
"I know human history and basic survival logic prove that surviving in numbers is the absolute best strategy during an apocalypse, but joining a faction like that is just a highly efficient way to get myself executed for breathing too loudly."
He took a long, shuddering breath, forcing the rising tide of panic back down into his stomach. He scrambled back into the claustrophobic safety of his micro-tent, dragging the heavy laptop onto his lap as his brain shifted away from pure terror and entered a state of rapid, high-speed analytical processing.
"Forget the manuscript," Arlen cursed under his breath, his fingers drumming nervously against the plastic casing of his computer. "The danger level of this entire city just multiplied exponentially. But why? Why are they here? How do they have powers this early?"
Arlen stared at the glowing blue screen, forcing his mind to dive deep into the very core mechanics of the world he had created, analyzing not just the environment, but the specific tropes and behavioral patterns he had just witnessed.
"Think, Arlen, think. Look at the details," he murmured, his eyes narrowing in the dark.
"That squad didn't move like frightened survivors. They didn't check their corners with the nervous energy of someone discovering a new threat. They moved with the absolute, casual confidence of someone speedrunning a level they have already memorized. They deliberately made noise to lure the mutant pack out because they knew exactly how many dogs would spawn, where they would come from, and exactly where to shoot them."
He thought back to the leader's chilling words. Always the exact same at this intersection. You hold zero value in this sequence.
"Sequence? Who uses a word like that to describe human beings begging for their lives?" Arlen whispered, a profound, sickening horror washing over him as the pieces of a terrifying new theory began to click together.
"And that spatial void... that wasn't an elemental mutation. That was an 'Inventory Skill'. That is a highly specific trope from an entirely different genre of fiction."
Arlen looked down at his own trembling hands. He had spent years writing The Frozen Era as a gritty, realistic, hard-sci-fi survival apocalypse where humanity had to struggle brutally against the cold and slow biological mutations. He had explicitly banned magical conveniences like infinite inventories to maximize the suffering and logistical nightmares of his characters.
"And those eyes... those eyes weren't the eyes of a man who just watched the world end seven days ago," Arlen deduced, the realization causing the blood to freeze in his veins far faster than the ambient temperature of the room.
"A person doesn't get eyes that dead, that utterly devoid of human empathy, in just one week. That takes years. Years of grinding through an apocalypse."
The horrific epiphany struck him like a physical blow to the chest.
The terrifying accuracy of the weather anomalies and the biological evolution of the mutants had convinced Arlen he was trapped directly inside his own story. He had rationalized the apocalypse as a perfect manifestation of his exact written words.
But what if he was wrong? What if his story was not the only script in play?
"My novel is just the foundation," Arlen whispered to the empty, freezing room, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and absolute terror.
"It's just the stage setting. The world is using my lore as the skeletal framework. And everything else has crashed the play."
"That leader... he acted like he had already lived through this."
If his theory was even slightly accurate, it meant the rules of survival were infinitely more complicated than he had ever imagined. Uncharted variables existed in the world. Forces, entities, or anomalies entirely outside the boundaries of his manuscript were actively operating in the ruined city.
People possessed powers he had explicitly forbidden, bringing with them the chaotic, unpredictable elements of entirely different timelines or dimensions.
The safety net of his absolute knowledge vanished instantly. The comforting illusion of predictability dissolved into the freezing air. He possessed a broken rulebook that only told half the story.
"If that man really is re-living this apocalypse, he must've knows every single hidden cache, every future disaster, and every valuable resource in this city," Arlen analyzed, his stubborn, independent nature surging forward to replace his lingering panic.
"And maybe to him, I am just another useless NPC. Another variable that he might swat out of the way if I cross his 'designated route'."
He looked toward the solid concrete wall separating his bedroom from the adjacent apartment, Unit 402. His earlier plans of quietly waiting out the storm were now entirely obsolete.
If the rest of the surviving population was mutating, and anomalous veterans from different timelines were actively hunting for resources while he sat shivering in a plastic tent, he would eventually be swept away like dust.
"I have to remain an absolute anonymous," Arlen finalized his immediate strategy, gripping the hatchet tightly.
"If I do not exist on their radar, or simpler they can't identify me, I cannot be executed by them. I am entirely on my own right now, and I have to be smarter than the anomalies that will occurs to stay alive. I dont care what they gonna do but, i'm not gonna let go of my life that easily."
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS