The collapse of the church administration building was not instantaneous. After a rumbling crash, the entire building began to split apart in clearly visible, sharply defined sections, like an upright rectangular cake cut into many pieces with a knife. Now, those pieces were sliding in all directions.
Just then, immensely thick black chains emerged from the ground around the administration building. They rose up, binding and supporting the separate sections as they collapsed.
And so, although the building had collapsed, it had not completely collapsed, remaining in an exceedingly bizarre architectural arrangement.
The chains that had suddenly appeared were probably part of the formation originally meant to protect the building.
But there was a particular problem with how the formation operated, or rather, with its very design: it primarily defended against intrusion from outside, not from within.
As a result, the chains supporting the building's sections were not simply holding them motionless. The force of the chains was visibly tightening around the areas they enclosed, gradually cutting deeper. It probably would not take long before the chains themselves crushed the sections of building they had bound.
Still, this gave the people inside the administration building an opportunity to evacuate.
Kallen ran to the foot of the administration building and found that its foundations had sunk. The ground-floor lobby, which had once required climbing a tall flight of steps to enter, had now become an open basement. People kept running out through it and climbing out of the pit. Kallen crouched beside it and began reaching down to pull people up.
During this process, people occasionally fell from the sections of building wrapped in chains overhead. From time to time, he heard sounds like bags of cement hitting the ground, much like swatting mosquitoes in summer.
As he pulled the people