Shoba POV

Once the entire sleeve was halfway through, the rest of the arm shot out and landed on the ground. Shoba's eyes glared distressingly wide, he could do nothing but helplessly stare at the severed arm oozing out a thick dark carmine liquid from its joint.

Silence befell the entire heavens, a stillness that almost borderline the small fractured shells of their sanity.

But then...

"GRAAAAAAH!" The first scream pierced the heavens.

"WHAT THE HELL! R-R-RUN!"

Chaos ensued as most of the crowd scattered away from the portal at once. A lot of the elderly folk either ended up being nudged aside or falling over. Shoba cast a stunned gaze at everyone; only himself, Mr Fujiwara, the man dressed in a fisherman's garb, and a few others only took a few steps back.

He noticed a clear air of vigilance suddenly surrounding them all. Shoba carried the feeling they were preparing themselves for whatever was poised to show itself.

"Kukukuku...begin"

Shoba's eyes shot open; this time he clearly heard something. A sinister voice spoke into the air beside him; that wasn't something he misheard.

'Wh-who...what is th-that'

He frantically tossed his gaze towards the faces of those close enough. Judging by the pale looks on their faces, they heard it too. 'Damn-damn what the hell is going on tonight.' Shoba felt his fists tightening to the point his knuckles turned white. He was scared; he had no shame in admitting to that truth. He was completely and undoubtedly scared, tired, and annoyed at himself for leaving his hour at this time of the night.

Mr Fujiwara was the first to speak.

"We need to...l-leave." The moment those words left his quivering mouth, Shoba heard a frightening sound directly behind him.

Wuwuwuwuwu

Almost out of instinct, Shoba's body froze as though a smoking gun was pressed directly against his skull. He had never felt this sensation in his entire life. Fear? This felt like something way beyond that feeling. He knew if he moved, even breathed wrongly...he was...dead.

"Kukuku...you...boy...you can hear me?"

An icily grated voice stroked the nape of Shoba's neck. Now he was almost certain something was behind him. His first thought was to signal towards the others. But the moment his eyes shakily shifted towards them all, he saw their heels and their backs; they were running. Slowly, as though time had bound them in a mystified trance.

"Shit-shit-Shit! I must be dreaming...y--yes...this is all one bad dream."

"You see? Kukukuku... weaklings. Humans...they are all so...weak!" The sinister voice exclaimed.

Shoba felt the temperature suddenly plummet to extremely cold conditions. He heard his teeth softly clattering against one another. And then the very air around him began to tremor. That same whirring sound he heard before the arrival of the portal appeared again. However, this time around, he saw countless portals forming all over the place.

"They say in the face of disaster, lesser beings tend to form coalitions to overcome the threat of extinction," Shoba heard it say.

I was told, your mortals are different. Across the worlds, it was foretold of a chosen planet, a race of folk who were by far closer to godhood than others. And yet...all I see are ants."

Shobas eyes darted from portal to portal, he counter 15 hovering all over the place, cold sweat trickled down his face. There was no escaping what he sensed was poised to come next.

"Wh-what...what are y-you?" He managed to stammer without removing his eyes away from the horror.

"I...well, let's see...kukuku. Is seeing so disbelieving"

"Huh?"

Something caught Shobas attention, forcing him to lower his eyes. Cast against the ground before him, he blinked once and met a tall silhouette falling away from his body. Only the figure was of a being, a slenderly tall being with curved horns, a long robe and two glaring scarlet eyes.

A single word flashed across Shoba mind.

"D-d-d-demon?"

"Boy…I welcome you…to the beginning of humankind's end...kuku-enjoy the nightmare."

From one of the portals, Shoba noticed the tail of a convertible slowly appearing; from another, he saw the front tire of a motorcycle.

The top of a building slowly unearthed through another.

His eyes jumped from portal to portal. He felt anguish strangling his fast-beating heart. Shoba braced himself, knowing almost exactly what was poised to take place. Time almost came to a standstill. Seconds gently turned into agonizing minutes. The eerie sound filled his ears again, the near-distant, ghostly hoot of an owl. Shoba lowered his eyelids and tightly scrunched them together, biting his lower lip out of frustration.

'Wake up...please wake up.'

He willed to the heavens, to the Gods, to somebody that this was one big nightmare.

Onwards, his heartbeat continued to thrum.

Ay any given moment...time...would choose to flow again.

Shoba saw each portal filled with a distinctive object now, halfway poised from shooting out.

Silence...and then..."Damn it all." He exhaled releasing his balled fist.

Shreeeeeee !

Vrooooooom !

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Crash!

"N-n-nooooooooo!"

"Ahhhhhhhhh-HELPPPPP"

BOOOOOOM !

"Arghh!"

The songs of carnage sang.

Shoba's once predictable and somewhat boring world flipped upside down. The screams of the surrounding people were drowned away by the bombardment of these randomly displaced objects being hurled out of the portals. A car pinned a neighbor of his against the wall, the top of the building had flattened a group of others fleeing.

The little boy who was standing beside the man dressed in a fisherman's garb was drenched in his youthful tears, trying to lift the heavy motorcycle off the old man pinned underneath it. But his legs were already broken. Shoba's body turned cold, he lightly shuddered and turned to another side, where he found that chubby woman who lived a few floors away from him. She was crouched in a nearby corner, sobbing her eyes out, her nightgown covered in blood.

Mr. Fujiwara's corpse was strung on top of a lamppost. Half of his body was missing. Shoba saw the pool of blood gathered by the foot of the lamppost, and the broken framed glasses of his, floating along the surface.

Even now, all Shoba could think of was perhaps how long it would take for him to wake up from all of this. His brain had a weird way of processing large scores of information. The man who diagnosed him as a child long ago once told him that he could perhaps notice every small detail about this world. Only it wasn't a healthy way for the human brain to operate. Shoba wasn't sure if it was because he still felt this was all a dream, as to why he didn't move yet. The callous scene of death before his very eyes, had surprisingly left him in this serene state he had never felt before. He felt somewhat…at peace.

Shoba imagined he might've remained there, idle and unmoving, if it wasn't for the middle-aged woman who ran straight towards him and harshly grabbed him by his shirt.

"HELP ME! Please Help! She-she's gone m-my baby…HE-HELP MEEEE." Shoba finally felt what he should've been feeling moments ago.

Seeing her dried tears and the mucus running down her nostrils, the disheveled hair along with those rattling fear-stricken eyes, she had drawn him by force back into reality. He could feel his body listening to him again.

"Y-yeah…l-lets go find her," he said unconvincingly. Just before he took a second step, Shoba twisted his neck around. But he found nothing. That sinister voice had disappeared. But the icy tone still crawled down his neck.

Both Shoba and the woman raced around the area still covered in carnage. His first time seeing a dead body was tonight. Now he had seen many more. He fought the growing urge to throw up. Many times along the way, he stopped and held his stomach. They ran beneath the apartment complexes; in the shadows, he could hear more people screaming and running away in panic. They had been running for almost 10 minutes. There was no sign of her little girl. Shoba turned the corner where he found himself at a dead end; there was a small open storage unit room where the rubbish bins were kept. But in the corner of his eye, he saw something idly standing by one of the disposal units in the corner.

"Shea! Sh-shea is that you?" The lady almost stumbled past Shoba; he reached forward and snatched her by her wrists. Something was wrong. Since he spotted the figure in the corner, by the amount of noise they'd made, he expected anyone sane to have noticed them by now. But that short, hunched figure hadn't moved a muscle.

'Something is wrong? This is wrong.'

His senses were screaming to him, but he couldn't talk

"Get off me! Sh-shea that's my baby! SHEA IT's ME!." Her protests soon turned into her forcefully escaping free from Shoba's hold. He half-heartedly stretched out his hand again, knowing she was already out of his reach.

She arrived by the side of the hunched figure in the corner.

"My baby, it's me…Mummy is finally here- come here, Shea, come to-"

SPLISHHHH

Before Shoba could even blink, he saw a spray of red ribbons flying through the air.

His heart skipped several beats, and another soul-sucking gasp escaped through his gaping mouth. The woman's head rolled off her body. For a few moments, her body lifelessly stayed there, like a doll without its head. Shoba hadn't processed the idea of death yet. It was clear his brain had still believed this was all a dream. Perhaps dreams were real, and reality was false.

The woman's body keeled over and collapsed. In the wake of such terror, Shoba lost the feeling in his entire legs; he buckled under his own weight and found himself seated against the cold ground.

He couldn't follow what took place next. But Shoba was too occupied with the scene before his very eyes right now. That hunched figure's body began to expand. What he once thought was a little child turned out to be this obsidian-colored being. Its entire body was made out of an oozing and bubbling slimy agent, slowly growing bigger as time passed by. It towered close to at least 9ft and was wide enough to wrap itself around a car.

Shoba scurried back to his shaking legs, he dared to not remove his eyes away from this abomination. As if the oozing fleshy thickness wasn't disturbing enough, countless moving eyes and open mouths covered its entire being. The grotesque form reminded him of an ancient disaster, one that shouldn't exist and was perhaps…immoral to even look at.

Refusing to bear witness to this any longer, Shoba twisted on his heels and darted away as quickly as he possibly could. He couldn't stop. He refused to stop; he ran and ran faster than he had ever ran in his entire life. The winds whipped through him. He was gasping for breath but still, he ran, feeling a terrible feeling closing in on him. If he stopped now…he was-he was dead.

Shoba kept his head low and his feet motoring forward through the chaos. His emotions were all over the place as he forced himself to avoid taking in his surroundings. The chaos was gut-wrenching; if he paid attention for a few more seconds longer, he knew his will might break. He still couldn't remove himself entirely from it all; how could he even think that was possible seeing the lifeless bodies of the old and the young sprawled against the ground like that?

The fires and explosions birthed across the housing complexes, with cars lodged into the side of the highest-rising buildings.

Shoba felt his strength almost drain away from his bones; his eyes remained poised against his feet lethargically stomping towards a complete halt. Instantly, he was keeled over his hunched knees, gasping for air desperately like a fish out of water. It took him a few moments to gather some form of normality throughout his body. Eventually, he did lift his sunken head upright, his mind filled with a hazy shroud trying its best to contemplate his next move. Shoba's eyes finally settled on the scene present before his gaze, and not for the first time tonight, he was shocked to the point his gasps filtered brokenly through his slightly opened mouth in whimpers.

The residential streets of his home had turned into a complete state of chaos right now. Was this hell? The golden embers of countless flowers bloomed into the nightly air; Shoba was darkly reminded about the murals of the apocalypse, or very yet, what he pictured in his dark dreams what the end of the world might look like.

With strained homes toppled by the arrival of different kinds of things that shouldn't be here, Shoba noticed a gigantic-sized wing from a plane splitting one of the tall building complexes right through the middle. Several cars turned into pieces of scattered debris. The roads themselves were filled with potholes, pipes lodged into the surface like butter. With small floods running down the dark streets, he could hear sparks crackling from the loose open wires sprawled nearby. Many of the tall telephone poles had fallen. Throngs of bodies littered the streets, and Shoba could see the mouths of those alive wailing towards the empty heavens. Only the burning cars, the half-torn face of neon signboards, and the whirring alarms sounding drowned their cries away. For one strange reason, it was only now that he understood this calamity had struck the entire region. Perhaps the entire island itself was in disarray. What about...the whole world?

"M-mother?" Something fearful jolted through Shoba's entire body. The images of the two women he cared about the most in the entire world flashed through his mental. A surge of deep fear ran through his entire being; he could feel his entire arm shaking, as though cold ice suddenly poured into his blood. Without thinking a second longer, Shoba twisted on his heels and bolted down the dark streets with the luminous twilight skies above him. Somehow, tonight felt like the worst nightmare he had ever dreamt. Even the moon's presence weighed heavily on him, like a demon, or a devil...watching him.

Shoba ran until all the bones within his body had ached so much they numbed Thankfully, he felt the noise soften, since just up ahead he saw the familiar grey-stoned steps leading up into his apartment complex. His anxiety slightly softened at the sight of his familiar home. He could almost hear his Dad's laughter playing through his thoughts. His Mom's stern words, and Ringos snide questions.

'Please...please be alright.'

The only positive Shoba could hold onto was that this side of the neighborhood was relatively quieter compared to the other streets he had just about escaped out from. He discovered the last remnants of his energy and scaled the staircases two at a time. Once he reached the iron door, he used his fob to stir the automatic door open. The elevator tended to take too long; Shoba had no time to wait, so his body moved out of instinct and climbed the dozens more heavier steps leading up to his apartment.

HIs heartbeat raced, but he caressed hope inside of his heart. Rehearsing his own internal thoughts as a way of steadying his anxious heart.

'They'll be alright. Everyone will be alright. Calm down Shoba. Everything is ok.'