Tap, tap, tap.
In a brightly lit basement, a group of humans with fairly rosy complexions were confined in clean, odorless cells.
With their clean clothes and healthy complexions, no one would have guessed they had been imprisoned for four days and nights, if not for the panic in every pair of eyes.
When footsteps echoed through the basement, these people, who had already begun to understand their situation after the great upheaval, panicked like mice catching the scent of a cat. They scurried into the corners farthest from the basement entrance, looking exactly like a huddle of quails.
Reason told them the cells were only so big, with nowhere to hide, but instinct still drove them to huddle together and tremble, stubbornly believing there was courage in numbers.
Relying on his youth and strength, Leo pushed the frail women in his cell to the outside and crouched in the innermost corner, burying himself behind other people, utterly disregarding how his actions pushed those women to the brink of death.
As the footsteps drew closer, everyone trembled and stared toward the sound in terror, as though it were a summons from the Grim Reaper, the judgment brush of the King of Hell. Clearly, they were familiar with these footsteps.
Listening to the approaching footsteps, Leo used his thick arms, built through years of exercise, to pull the two women in front of him closer and closer, like wrapping himself tightly in clothes against the winter wind. He wanted to block the prying eyes outside, keeping his head firmly lowered and praying the visitor would not see him, abject and shameless.
If he were still on Earth, Leo would never have done this. Hiding behind women, even using them as shields—any man who did such a thing would have been nailed to the pillar of shame for life, reviled for hundreds of years.
But they were no longer on Earth...
Their former morals and values did not suit their current circumstances.
Tap, tap, tap.
The footsteps were like drumsticks beating on their hearts, every step making the people in the cells quake with fear.
At last, the footsteps stopped outside the cells. Leo kept his head lowered and his eyes tightly shut, only his ears pricked to listen to the sounds beyond himself, sounds that filled the entire world with fear and awe.
With over a dozen people crowded together, trembling constantly, Leo suddenly thought of newly hatched chicks. When they opened their eyes and saw humans, they huddled in a corner just like this, the strongest on the inside, the weakest forced to the outer edge.
There were no words, only a few mocking chuckles, followed by desperate pleas for mercy and curses screamed in utter terror.
"Please, let me go. As long as you let me go, I'll do anything..."
"You ******, I *****!"
Leo clutched the clothes of the two women in front of him, desperately shielding himself. He had already learned the pattern: these footsteps came every day, and each time, only three to five people were taken.
Once today's people were taken away, those left could live another day.
Only twelve people remained in the cell. Even with the best luck, the survivors could only live another three or four days, but his survival instinct made Leo want to live until the very end.
"I can't die. I still have to find my family, and her... I can't die. I absolutely can't die."
Through this brainwashing self-talk, Leo once again interpreted his despicable behavior as perfectly honorable. Every man for himself, or heaven and earth would destroy him.
Besides, none of the people in the cell knew one another. If he survived to the end through his own abilities, who could object?
As the curses receded into the distance, the sound of the basement closing followed. At that moment, everyone knew they could live another day.
No one spoke in the now very spacious cell. The familial closeness of the beginning had long since vanished.
Their bold declarations of surviving together and rebuilding Earth's civilization had long since disappeared. Everyone still alive was now an enemy, an enemy who determined whether they could live another day.
Leo occupied the innermost spot, the place that gave him the greatest chance of escaping that terrifying creature's notice.
Besides staying alert for those deathlike footsteps, he had to pay even more attention to the others in his cell. After all, this spot meant more chances to survive.
Leo could barely remember how many people he had driven away with his fists when they tried to take his territory, even women and children.
Leo had long since accepted reality. He was no longer in that peaceful country, that peaceful society. Remembering everything he had seen and experienced in the preceding days chilled him until his mind nearly collapsed. Instinctive terror made his entire body shake uncontrollably, his teeth chattering as fast as a woodpecker searching for lunch.
It had been a wonderful afternoon like any other. Leo had just closed a two-million deal, from which he could earn at least fifty thousand.
He was wondering how to reward himself when he saw the azure sky turn into shattered tempered glass, densely covered in cracks...
To the vast sky, they were merely cracks, but to humans, those cracks allowed them to see the boundless universe beyond the sky with the naked eye...
This was no beautiful spectacle, nor some once-in-a-millennium cosmic flicker. The sky was being torn apart.
Like dough being kneaded in a mother's hands, the sky was forcibly twisted into all kinds of shapes by an unimaginable power.
Before the changes in the sky had stopped, the earth, which had once supported the reproduction of countless lives, suddenly revealed its most violent side.
A bottomless fissure several kilometers wide abruptly tore open in the earth. Like the earth god opening his enormous mouth, it swallowed half the city in an instant. Who knew how many people plunged into the bottomless abyss without even a chance to scream, along with the supposedly supremely sturdy reinforced concrete.
Leo watched with his own eyes as the client he had just seen off drove a luxury car worth over ten million straight into the depths along the fissure, without turning back.
His fifty-thousand commission was gone...
At that moment, Leo wanted to run, but his legs seemed welded to the ground, unable to move even a fraction. Though his mind was practically swearing, his body remained as stiff and immobile as a zombie.
This was the response to fear taken to its extreme.
Leo had watched documentaries claiming that small animals could not move when confronted with predators at the top of the food chain. He had not believed it.
Now he did!
He really could not move!
Before the earth's gaping fissure had finished eating, Leo watched a hundred-story landmark tower in the city center get thrust into the sky by a mountain rising from underground, ascending faster than a rocket...
The sudden upheaval sent countless tiny black dots falling from the sky. Leo knew they were people!
A mountain range forming the backbone of the world, which should have taken millions or tens of millions of years to form, was completed in an instant.
The freshly formed backbone of the world carried vast quantities of groundwater. Water veins that should have nourished all living things now became raging waves, sweeping across the land with unstoppable force.
Watching the surging waves, Leo actually found himself thinking that a brand-new freshwater lake would surely form here.
Nature's uncanny handiwork had claimed untold lives in that brief instant. The power humanity possessed seemed so laughable before a force that could be called the destruction of Earth.
No one in this city could possibly remain alive!
Surviving the next second alone would take incredible luck.
Leo abandoned the thought of fleeing. With earthquakes, floods, and all sorts of other disasters beyond anything in human history, he could not escape.
The cracked sky could hold out no longer. It seemed to let out a mournful cry that resounded throughout the universe, its only resistance against the unknown force before its death.
Boom!
A thunderous crash could be heard across the entire Earth. Before the shattered sky could leave its last words, it flew into outer space.
The atmosphere that had protected Earth for billions of years vanished completely, replaced by a pitch-black opening directly onto the universe, leaving Earth's life utterly unprepared as it faced cosmic rays that could kill it instantly.
Without the atmosphere's protection, there were more than cosmic rays to contend with. Earth's oxygen would soon be sucked dry by the universe, adding a suffocation aura's death effect to the disaster-ridden planet.
But at that moment, no one was thinking about any damned cosmic rays or suffocation. There were too many disasters for anyone to care about a few more lethal ones.
They were going to die anyway. What, could they die twice?
Leo found a kitchen knife and prepared to kill himself.
If he had to die, he chose a way that would cause him less suffering.
When the kitchen knife was only a millimeter from his artery, countless white beams suddenly shot down from the great hole in the sky that opened onto the universe. Leo, who was not dead yet, was instantly enveloped in a white beam.
At that moment, Leo distinctly felt the storms and radiation outside being completely shut out. Even the oxygen that had begun to grow thin became plentiful.
Faced with a world-ending disaster, he had actually survived?
Leo watched the white beams from the sky strike every living thing with precision. These living things included not only humans, but living animals and plants. Anything still alive was struck.
Even over the city he had declared utterly dead, countless beams descended. Human figures, animals, and plants beneath the ruins slowly rose into the air within the beams.
Earthquakes, floods, erupting wildfires, cosmic rays, suffocation...
Before this white beam, none of them could harm Earth's life.
Against the backdrop of the world's destruction, hundreds of millions of lives were saved.
It was as though a miracle had manifested, divine radiance shining...
"I survived."