When the two girls gave Vas enough room to sit up on his own, he glanced towards the doors. Hours had passed.

Vas still felt lightheaded, like the world itself was shaking ever so slightly.

“I think,” came Fem’s voice, “We should probably stay here a few more days.”

The two girls nodded.

“At least until I stop coughing. And I think you could use some rest, Vas. Real rest.”

“We don’t need more Risen to test yet anyways,” Selene said soothingly.

Fem and Alex both nodded in agreement.

Were they expecting Vas to argue?

He felt like it’d be a monumental task to stand up, not to mention executing a mission that could potentially get them all killed.

Vas opened his mouth to agree with them, and at that moment the shaking world stopped its trembling.

Selene looked around. “Was that an earthquake?”

“I didn’t notice things were shaking until it went so still.” Alex didn’t normally get nervous, but she was obviously on the verge of panic after the day’s events.

Only, something was wrong. Something was very wrong. The stillness was unnatural.

Had it been an earthquake? It had felt more like a constant thrumming. Vas had thought he was the only one who could feel it.

“You all felt it?” He asked the question just to confirm. “I thought it was just me. It felt like my heartbeat.” Alex shook her head and put her hands on her face.

“Like a heartbeat.”

It sounded familiar. It felt familiar. There’d been similar tremors before the lights went out years ago. Tremors like a heartbeat. Vas had been distracted with his Risen father at the time.

Experts had been speculating that the tremors meant volcanic activity, but had been unable to find an actual source.

Then everything had gone dark.

But not dark from ash, simply dark from lack of electricity. Lack of fire.

If the tremors were back, if they’d been happening for years, what did it mean? They didn’t feel like normal quakes.

Suddenly, Vas stood up. Without the world shaking, he realized he’d been imagining his weakness.

As Vas stood, so did the hairs along the back of his neck. He looked out the door from a distance, at a building on the far corner. Hundreds of paces away from their location, due to the wide streets.

He watched it like it might move.

And just as he started to think he might be crazy, it did.

The entire building seemed like it lurched as a shimmering cloud spread out from it.

They had seconds.

“Cover your ears and run towards the stairs!” Vas pulled Alex and Selene with him. Fem reacted quickly, and they all obeyed without question.

If it was a volcano, Vas had thought there might be a shockwa—

BOOM!

Thunderous, beyond any sound Vas had ever heard. Like a gunshot except louder. Bigger in a way that Vas couldn’t even fully perceive. It passed through Vas in an instant and made him feel like jelly. He and his friends fell to the floor.

Vas looked back just in time to see millions of shards of glass rushing towards them, and he pushed Fem and the others into a crevice next to the stairs before rolling after them. His ears rang even though he’d covered them. With shock he realized he could feel blood trickling down his cheeks, from his ears.

Through the piercing ring, Vas heard a similarly sharp sound as countless shards of glass crashed into a wall and shattered.

Vas tried to ask if everyone was alright and even felt the vibration in his throat as he spoke. However, he couldn’t hear anything aside from the ringing.

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Alex was crying again and so was Selene. Fem’s face looked like he couldn’t take much more either. Vas could feel tears on his own face. They rolled down until they mixed with the trail of blood running from his ears.

Vas tried to grab his friends, and then realized he was already holding onto Fem and Selene.

The three of them were looking at him.

Vas came back to his senses at that moment. There were more of them. They needed to group up.

He tried to say “upstairs” then gave up when they just looked at him blankly.

He said it again, this time letting go of Fem to point up the stairs.

This time Alex slowly nodded, and the other two didn’t take much longer to understand.

Vas attempted to stand and fell over after a few moments. It was remarkably hard to stay balanced without his hearing.

The whole near-death experience thing probably played into the difficulty as well.

Vas stayed up on his fourth attempt, and was the last of the group to accomplish the deed.

The small group crunched a few steps of shattered glass before they started up the stairs. The glass was shattered so finely that it almost seemed like it was snow on the ground.

After around ten minutes of slow progress, Vas and the others made it to the first research floor.

Tapo, Zy, Azul and Joust were sitting in the stairwell, surrounded by dozens of Risen corpses. Blood was everywhere.

There were bandages over chest wounds, arm wounds, leg wounds. Zy had a bandage over his head, which covered one of his eyes.

The group sat back-to-back with each other, as if watching for Risen.

Three of them greeted Vas, the girls and Fem with hugs. Joust kept his back to them, watching the open door in front of him. Vas clapped Joust’s shoulder and the man nodded without turning away from his station.

Vas examined the scene. How had so many Risen escaped from their bonds? This looked to be all of them. Sleepers were less aggressive than the other Risen.

Vas cleared his throat loudly, hoping some of his hearing would be back. It wasn’t.

Tapo tapped Vas on the shoulder and handed him a piece of paper with words written on it.

It read:

“They all started screaming at once.

They chewed off their limbs to get free and attacked us.

We would have been fine, but that was when the giant boom hit.

They weren’t even affected by the boom, but shattered glass slowed down a few of them. Until they used glass shards as weapons.

Zy lost an eye from the glass.

Whatever that boom was, it woke up the sleepers.”

Vas looked up blankly and handed the paper to Alex, who was leaning over it like she wanted a turn.

The boom, Vas thought, was a volcanic eruption. If it woke up these sleepers…

Vas rushed into the hallway in front of Joust. He turned into the first room on his right, stepping over corpses and narrowly avoiding a fall.

He finally reached his objective: the large hole in the wall that had once been a window. Vas leaned out of the opening, careful not to but his hands on jagged edges.

He looked out and saw the sun setting in front of him. West.

He looked down and saw thousands upon thousands of Risen in the streets. There were so many that Vas couldn’t even see the ground in many areas.

They were all walking to the direction at his right. To the north.