People alive and dead were still being salvaged from the wreckage. I froze for a moment, in shock at the enormity of it all. Being there, in person, with all the sights, sounds, and smells, was not incomparable to watching video recordings. Everything was so much more raw and desperate.
I stepped forward, and a female police officer walked up to talk to me, but I darted away before she had the chance. My ability to see through the rubble and into people’s bodies proved to be of invaluable utility here. It allowed me to detect and distinguish life signs and lack thereof.
With my strength, I could effortlessly move objects weighing tens of thousands of tons. I could envelop whatever I touched within a protective, tactile, telekinetic field. This ensured that the structures I manipulated wouldn’t collapse under their own weight and prevented any risk of the ground beneath me from giving way.
Prioritizing areas where fires raged and buildings collapsed, I passed over many who suffered burns or injuries from shattered glass. I mainly played a search and rescue and support role. The first body I found among the extinguished fires was a twenty something year old woman who had suffocated through smoke inhalation.
I almost threw up from the sight and smell and clutched the body close for a moment, but barely pulled it together. I delivered the body to the nearest officers, then darted to the location of another person trapped in the rubble. Another one that stuck with me. This one was alive, though badly wounded, a boy pinned from his left arm, so I ripped my dress and tourniquet his limb to prevent the dead limb from poisoning him.
The rescuers told me “Tatemono kara hanarete kudasai!”, the meaning of which was obvious from context, so I lifted the crushing mass from his arm, and he pulled away.
I dropped it, then turned to grab the boy and delivered him to a triage site where the workers told me, “Dōmo arigatō gozaimasu!”
Not soon after I began helping, I saw a fourteen-year-old boy clap his hands together as if in prayer and place his hands on the rubble. The ruin’s chemistry and form warped, making a victim easily accessible.
I saw another woman telekinetically lift stones, while another warped metal to gain access to the wounded. Yet another manipulated the flow of air to deliver oxygen to those in desperate need. One woman seemed to telepathically divine the locations of still-living victims, while others manipulated water from opened hydrants and the inland sea to help put out the fires still raging across the city. Some, helping the fire department, even seemed to control and diminish roaring flames.
During this lengthy ordeal, I came across a woman trapped with her forearm clamped with a tourniquet and partly crushed under rubble. I darted to them and lifted the mass of concrete off her, and they pulled her out. After that, I immediately rushed to the next victim. The living takes precedence over the dead, but I intended to exhume everyone, both living and dead.
Eventually, I noticed people who looked like career soldiers from some unknown nation taking part in these humanitarian efforts. Their uniforms revealed they did not belong to any of the global superpowers which defined the geopolitics of this multipolar world. They wore helmets with heads-up displays and a semantic translator, bringing with them medical and rescue equipment unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Some of it looked like something out of a hard science fiction novel and yet others like something straight from high fantasy, though that latter bit was more sparingly used. They showed seemingly all manner of phenotypes, which made the origin of this organization nigh indecipherable, with a greater variation than one could find in all the United States and Brazil.
In that moment, I realized, in my emotional distressed induced tunnel vision, I did not realize that they had been here before I was. I finally noticed the abundance of unmanned aerial vehicles surveying the terrain for any sign of life.
A man who could fly, lift heavy structures without them collapsing, and seemed to see through solid objects was among them. Another was a girl who could seemly to turn ashes back into what they were before, a man who could heal people from even mortal wounds just by touching them, among other extraordinary powers. Someone who seemed to be an African pygmy, clad in that same uniform, rode atop a gigantic bird which, when landing, warped the structures upon which it fell to release the people trapped underneath.
As I continued, I noticed a Germanic man with blonde hair and blue eyes who seemed to stop all the vital functions of a woman with a single touch. My heart stopped, and the ground exploded under my feet as I raced towards him.
Suddenly, I heard a voice in my head scream, “She’s not dead!” as some invisible force tackled me to the ground.
I hopped up to my feet unharmed as the voice continued, “He’s not killing them; he’s placing them into a state of suspended animation. It’ll last until they get to a healer who can patch them up, potentially buying them decades.”
I looked around in confusion as a man in the distance waved at me to get my attention and pressed his index and middle finger to his temple, as the voice explained, “I’m a telepath. I’ve been scanning the region to find people trapped in this hellscape.”
It took me a moment to register the implications of that revelation. I asked him, “So all he has to do is touch the mortally wounded and they won’t die?” He explained, “I know what you’re thinking, and I’ve already got the go-ahead from my superiors.”
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The implications of that action didn’t cross my mind. I was tunnel-visioned on saving as many lives as we could, but I had a feeling that the man I was talking to told his superiors what I was doing and got permission to cooperate.
I grabbed the man who could induce suspended animation, whose nameplate read Schatz, and lifted him into a bridal carry, telling him, “Hang on!” I wrapped a tactical telekinetic field around him to negate the effects of inertia and exploded forth, doing exactly what I had been doing before, but now prioritizing the otherwise expectant deaths.
I experienced no physical fatigue, although with every dead body and dying person who couldn’t be saved, I felt a different fatigue, of a psychoemotional nature, build. With all this power, I was helpless to save these people, but that made everyone whose life was salvageable more important, and every life saved with a tap of a finger more miraculous. The closer to the epicenter we got, the more horrible the devastation almost as if we were taken after Dante, trudging down from Limbo into the deepest pit of Hell, into true Pandemonium.
Shattered glass had injured or even killed some people. There were people blinded by the flash and defended by the blast’s tremendous thunder. The impact caused buildings from residential to skyscrapers to collapse, crushing to death and trapping countless people and coating much the terrain in poisoned dust. Crushed in skulls, severed and or crushed extremities, impalement, broken body parts, ruptured organs, and hemorrhaging internal and external were witnessed by the rescue teams. Many of those who were salvaged would die in hours or weeks because of acute radiation syndrome. The G² Impact did not discriminate between men, women, children, the elderly, citizen, or foreigner.
The worst of it was the heat injuries. Superficial thermal radiation burns are red without blisters. Moist redness and clear blisters characterized superficial partial-thickness burns. Then there were the blistering yellow or white, deep partial-thickness burns. To the leathery white and brown full-thickness burns.
Human beings reduced to charring down through fat, muscle, and bone with eschar. To the living victims, these fourth-degree burns were painless, with all pain receptors within the affected area having been killed, but the full-thickness burns surrounding them were extremely painful.
The smell of burning or cooked human flesh, one of the worst smells you couldn’t even imagine, was a unique scent. It made ever more overvivid with my heightened olfactory sense. I could smell the individual chemical components of the human body dispersed in the air. Thus, it became increasingly apparent that some people nearest to the kaijū at the time of detonation had likely been vaporized.
The people who sifted through the devastation put aside their fears of radiation syndrome. Most people salvaging lives and bodies from the wreckage had no protection from the radiation because of the sheer scale of the calamity, but out of this world-ending fire, others like me came out of the woodwork. At a jerry-rigged treatment center, I saw an aerokinetic woman purify and supply air directly to kittens and a mother cat, while a hydrokinetic man repeatedly washed over their bodies with water from a bottle, presumably collecting the radioactive contaminants. The kitten awoke and meowed. The mother shortly after breathed on her own again, though she didn’t wake up while I was there. Not remotely comparable to a human life, nevertheless, something to lift their spirits, as well as mine, on this terrible day.
The longer this dragged on, the more visibly exhausted Schatz became. It hadn't occurred to me that these people could be worn out from overusing their abilities, but it makes sense: if the overuse of cognitive faculties could cause mental exhaustion, then it would make sense that the abuse of these powers could cause something similar. Exhaustion wasn’t a luxury I had, so I wouldn’t stop. I dropped Schatz off at the nearest triage zone for him to work his magic for as long as he could.
Disaster medical assistance teams divide patients into various ‘categories’ based on the severity of their wounds during mass-casualty incidents. EMTs designated those with life-threatening, but treatable, injuries as Category I with a red tag. Those afflicted with serious, though not life-threatening injuries were given a yellow tag to identify them as Category II. Category III comprises the ‘walking wounded’ with minor musculoskeletal or soft tissue injuries and designated with a green tag. The dead or fatally wounded, otherwise known as ‘Expectant’, are given a black tag then separated as Category 0 and abandoned in a makeshift on site morgue. The only treatment living patients in Category 0 receive if they are lucky is pain medications, which in this catastrophe quickly ran out.
I kept pressing on out of fear that, if I stopped, I might not be able to get back up again. In this form, I did not need to sleep or rest and so carried on for hours on end. I was determined to leave no one behind. My speed, strength, stamina, and senses allowed me to accomplish in moments what a rescue crew might take hours. The heat of the fire was intense and while I could feel it, my skin and clothes proved impervious to its burning touch and so I felt no physical pain.
When this terrible day was finally over, having combed the entire disaster zone, often leaping up to one kilometer into the air just to get a bird's-eye view with my “x-ray” vision; after returning to the outer edge of this Hellscape to provide whatever help I could despite the language barrier, which I found bridged by these unidentified soldiers.
I turned to leave when one woman I apparently saved called out to me as “Rorīta Purinsesu!”
I turned around.
“Sankyū!” she said.
It was apparent to all that I was emotionally drained, but the gratitude on her face was more beautiful than the Mona Lisa. As soul-crushing as this all sounds, the miracles interspersed within the horror made it bearable, reminding me that even when seemingly in this glimpse of the apocalypse, there might still be something to be grateful for. I responded with a thumbs up and a smile, then darted away at superhuman speed, making my way back home along the same route as I arrived. The daylight in Japan turned into night in the US and within the city limits of New Providence, I re-entered my home unseen through the window.
My sleeping self awoke as I entered the window. It was early in the morning and there was a sense of dread that overcame my smaller self when she saw my face. The smaller me steeled herself and standing up dispelled my giant self, which doubled over as it vanished. Now together again, I covered my mouth, nauseous and grief-stricken, and doubled over onto my knees, careful to not make too much noise. The initial shock was mitigated by the sense of gratitude for the many lives that we saved, for the emergency response personnel like Schatz, and for the girl who said, “thank you”.