Chapter 15 : Calamity (3)

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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?

Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action

Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, Wolrd-Freezing, Super power

Chapter 15 : Calamity (3)

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[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 14 Days]

[Status: VOLCANIC CHAIN REACTION - PHASE 1]

[Location: The Philippine Archipelago]

[Time: 07:20 AM]

The shockwave from the Pacific meteor raced through the Earth’s mantle at 8,000 meters per second. It bypassed the deep ocean floor and slammed into the tectonic roots of the Philippine Mobile Belt.

The ground in Luzon buckled instantly.

Sector 1: Mount Pinatubo (Zambales Mountains)

Mount Pinatubo, the sleeping giant that once cooled the global climate, awoke with Apocalyptic fury.

Pressurized by the violent seismic jolt, the magma chamber beneath the mountain detonated. The pressure exceeded the structural integrity of the rock within milliseconds.

KRA-KOOM.

The entire summit of the mountain disintegrated.

A vertical column of superheated ash, pumice, and gas shot forty kilometers into the stratosphere, piercing the cloud layer like a spear of grey death. The sheer force of the ejection shattered windows in Manila, ninety kilometers away.

Gravity reclaimed the heavier debris immediately.

The collapse of the eruption column birthed a pyroclastic flow, an avalanche of burning gas and pulverized rock.

Moving at 700 kilometers per hour and burning at 1,000 degrees Celsius, the grey wall rolled down the slopes. It consumed the dense jungle, vaporizing trees and wildlife instantly. It swept over the evacuated villages at the foothills, burying them under thirty meters of boiling ash.

The landscape transformed from a lush green tropical forest into a lifeless, grey moonscape in less than two minutes.

Sector 2: Taal Volcano (Batangas)

South of Manila, the smaller, deadlier Taal Volcano faced a different catastrophic failure.

Situated in the middle of a caldera lake, the magma breached the crater floor and collided directly with the water.

Flash Steam Explosion.

The lake water flashed instantly into superheated steam. The rapid expansion created a shockwave equivalent to a tactical nuclear warhead.

A massive "Base Surge", a horizontal hurricane of wet ash, boiling steam, and ballistic rocks in exploded outward from the center of the lake.

The surge flattened the surrounding towns of Talisay and Agoncillo. It stripped the flesh from trees and leveled concrete structures.

Instead of fire, Taal rained down a suffocating, concrete-like mud. The wet ash coated the ruins of the province, hardening rapidly as it cooled, encasing the destruction in a grey, stone tomb.

The sky over the Philippines turned a bruised, choking black. The two massive plumes merged, driven by the trade winds, forming the vanguard of the darkness heading West.

[Location: New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea]

[Time: 07:22 AM]

While the Philippines burned, the tectonic fracture raced eastward, striking the Bismarck Arc.

Sector 3: Mount Rabaul (New Britain)

Mount Rabaul, sitting on the edge of the Pacific plate, detonated with a unique and terrifying electrical intensity.

The friction between billions of jagged ash particles moving at supersonic speeds generated a massive static charge within the eruption column.

Snap. Crack. BOOM.

The mountain transformed into a generator of chaotic energy.

Violent bolts of purple and red lightning—a phenomenon known as a "Dirty Thunderstorm"—tore through the black clouds. The lightning arced continuously around the crater, forming a cage of electricity that illuminated the destruction in strobe-light flashes.

The shockwave from Rabaul slammed directly into the harbor.

The water recoiled, then surged back. A localized tsunami scoured the coastline, dragging the ruins of the port and the burning vegetation into the boiling sea. The ocean turned grey, choked with pumice stones floating on the surface like a massive, grinding raft.

The Earth screamed.

The combined energy of Pinatubo, Taal, and Rabaul, three VEI-6 eruptions occurring within two minutes of each other, created a seismic resonance that traveled faster than the wind.

In Indonesia, the ground jerked with a sharp, vertical kick.

This new tremor felt distinct from the earlier rolling motion of the Pacific meteor. It was a vibration, a deep, resonant buzzing that rattled teeth and cracked glass.

High above the equator, the aftermath began to coalesce.

Driven by the strong easterly trade winds, the ash columns from the Philippines (North) and Papua (East) drifted toward each other.

They collided over the Celebes Sea.

They merged into a Megaplume.

From the satellite view, it looked like a bruise spreading across the planet’s skin. A continent-sized blanket of sulfur dioxide and silicate dust blotted out the sun.

Beneath this drifting continent, the temperature plummeted. The tropical heat vanished, replaced by a damp, suffocating chill.

The wall of darkness, now hundreds of kilometers wide and twenty kilometers high, moved West with the inevitability of a sunset. It devoured the light, the heat, and the sky.

It marched straight for Jakarta.

***

[Status: SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTION DETECTED]

[Location: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA]

[Time: 07:30 AM WIB / 05:30 PM Local Time (Previous Day)]

While the Ring of Fire screamed in the East, the true monster awoke in the West.

Deep beneath the picturesque geysers and pine forests of Wyoming, a magma reservoir the size of a mountain range reached its breaking point. The seismic resonance from the Pacific impact acted as a frequency key, unlocking the geological pressure that had built up for six hundred thousand years.

The ground in the park swelled upward by ten meters in a single second. The famous Old Faithful geyser vaporized, blasting superheated steam into the twilight sky.

The entire sixty-kilometer-wide caldera collapsed into the magma chamber. This catastrophic subsidence forced the molten rock upward with the violence of a planetary shotgun blast.

BOOM.

The sound defied terrestrial comparison. It ruptured eardrums across three states.

A pillar of ash, rock, and glass shot fifty kilometers into the mesosphere, dwarfing the eruptions in Asia. It punched through the atmosphere, flattening the clouds and spreading out like a dark, cancerous flower against the edge of space.

The explosion annihilated the landscape.

A radial shockwave, moving at supersonic speeds, flattened every tree within a hundred-kilometer radius. The ancient pine forests of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho snapped like matchsticks, laid flat in a concentric ring of death.

Following the shockwave came the pyroclastic surge.

A wall of hurricane-force heat, that burning at 800 degrees Celsius. Swept across the American Midwest. It incinerated everything in its path. Towns, highways, and wildlife vanished instantly, replaced by a barren, smoking grey wasteland.

High above the chaos, the jet stream caught the massive injection of sulfur dioxide and ash.

The plume expanded rapidly, darkening the entire North American continent within hours. But it didn't stop there.

The stratospheric winds carried the veil eastward across the Atlantic, racing to meet the darkness coming from Southeast Asia.

Apothecary watched the satellite feed from her bunker in Indonesia, her face illuminated by the blinking red light of the "Extinction Level Event" warning.

The map showed two black stains spreading across the globe, one from the East, one from the West. They reached out to each other like grasping hands, ready to strangle the planet in a chokehold of a long winter.

The Long Night was no longer a prediction.

***

[Location: Arlen’s Apartment, 4th Floor - West Jakarta]

[Time: 08:00 AM]

The tremors refused to cease. The Earth, agitated by the distant detonations of the Ring of Fire, kept shivering, sending continuous waves of vibration through the bedrock of Jakarta. Arlen sat pressed against the wall of his living room, his arms locked around his knees. The tactical helmet felt heavy on his head, and the gas mask dug into his jaw, but he dared not remove them. The air inside the room was thick with pulverized drywall, a white fog that swirled violently in the beam of his flashlight with every fresh jolt.

"Just hold together," Arlen whispered, his voice sounding tinny and hollow inside the mask. "Don't crack. Please, just don't crack."

He stared at the ceiling, tracing the jagged fissures spreading across the plaster like spiderwebs. He imagined the weight pressing down on it. The thousands of tons of steel and concrete that used to be his neighbors' homes.

Above him, the severed torso of the building groaned. The structural wounds where the upper floors had been obliterated were bleeding concrete. Massive slabs of masonry, twisted steel girders, and the crushed remains of furniture from the higher levels began to slide loose.

They cascaded down the sides of the building, scraping against the exterior walls with a screeching tear that sounded like the shrieks of a dying machine.

Thud. Crash. BOOM.

The impacts were rhythmic and heavy, shaking the floorplates beneath Arlen’s boots. Every time a multi-ton chunk of the upper floors slammed into the wet ground below, the entire room jumped.

He squeezed his eyes shut, his heart hammering against his ribs. He waited for the final crush, the moment gravity would finish the job the meteor started. He felt small, a microscopic insect trapped in a box while giants stomped on the lid.

"What is this?," he muttered, a hysterical laugh bubbling up in his throat. "I wrote scenes like this a dozen times. But I got the sound wrong. It’s so loud. Why is it so loud?"

But the destruction outside worked in a paradoxical way. The debris did not crush the lower levels. Instead, the falling ruin accumulated rapidly at the base of the tower.

The shattered remains of floors five through ten piled up, mixing with the thick volcanic mud coating the streets to form a dense, heavy sludge. This mixture of wet ash, jagged concrete, and twisted rebar formed a massive, sloping rampart around the building's foundation. It rose higher and higher, burying the first, and second floors in a chaotic, solid embrace.

Arlen felt the shift in the building’s behavior physically. The sickening, nauseating sway that had plagued the structure since the first quake suddenly dampened. The loose, trembling vibration stiffened into a rigid, tomb-like stillness. The mounting debris outside acted as a crude buttress, clamping the remaining four floors in a vice-grip of stone and steel.

He opened his eyes, looking around the dark, dusty room. The swaying had stopped. The creaking had stopped.

"It stopped moving," Arlen realized, uncurling his stiff legs. He look out at the window, at the bottom, he can find a rising mound of grey rubble and mud pressing against the building at the both side.

Staring at the wall of debris that now Covering the first and second floors. "Did It just... buried me."

The apartment was no longer a swaying tower vulnerable to the wind and earth. It had become a buried bunker, entombed and reinforced by the very catastrophe that had destroyed its skyline.

›› To Be Continue ‹‹

—KS