Chapter 4 : The Bruised Sky

⋟────────────────────╮

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 4 : The Bruised Sky

╰───────────────────⋞╯

[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 25 Days]

[Location: Jakarta, Indonesia]

[Temperature: 34°C (Night)]

The night did not bring relief. The sun had set hours ago, but the asphalt of the city refused to release the day’s heat. The air was heavy, stagnant, and tasted of exhaust fumes and dust.

Arlen sat on the small, chipped balcony of his apartment, fanning himself with a stiff piece of cardboard. Below him, the city sprawled like a chaotic circuit board, traffic lights blinking through the haze.

He checked his phone. The notification badge on the Information Club app was glowing red.

[Members: 34]

Arlen raised an eyebrow. "Thirty-four? It doubled the new member since yesterday."

The QR codes he had pasted, incripted in the ARG he makes, were working better than he expected. He did a quick mental calculation.

"If all thirty-four of them buy the book at launch price...," Arlen muttered, a small smile playing on his lips. "That covers rent. And I still have more to eat some expensive meat."

He tapped into the chat. The dynamic had shifted. Its not just about the Pillars posting cryptic updates anymore.

The new members, like User_22, BlueJay, RedMamba, were active, and they seemed... Cautious.

And slowly, the new members were spiraling into panic about the weird news, GPS failures, TV static, spinning compasses.

Then, the "Pillars" stepped in.

> [User: Viper]: Cut the chatter. Panic kills faster than the cold. <

> [User: Viper]: GPS relies on satellite triangulation. The ionosphere is disrupting the signal. Switch to analog maps immediately. Stay off the main arterial roads if you don't want to get gridlocked by confused drivers. <

Arlen chuckled softly, shaking his head.

"Analog maps," Arlen muttered to himself. "Paper maps, Viper. Just say paper maps. He makes getting lost in Jakarta sound like a tactical military operation. 'Ionosphere disruption'... he probably just means the signal is bad because of the clouds."

Then, FrostBite chimed in.

> [User: FrostBite]: Lol, the server lag is real out there. Global comms are rubber-banding hard. Don't trust the HUD, guys. Trust your eyes. I'm scrubbing the net for raw data now, the official news feeds are just lagging behind the patch notes. <

Arlen grinned. He recognized the gamer slang immediately.

"Rubber-banding," Arlen translated in his head. "That annoying glitch in video games where you lag and snap back to where you started. FrostBite really treats the whole world like a buggy video game server. And 'Patch Notes'? He thinks the news is just a slow developer update. Classic."

> [User: Seraph]: Fear is a lack of faith, little ones. Do not be troubled by the spinning compass. We do not need North. We only need the Architect’s direction. <

"And there's the religious sermon," Arlen sighed. "Seraph really sells the 'Cult Leader' vibe. Scary charismatic."

Then, a message from the newest Pillars member appeared.

> [User: Apothecary]: It's not just interference. I’m measuring a spike in atmospheric ionization. The air is literally becoming electrically charged. The chemical bonds in the upper atmosphere are being excited by an external energy source. <

Arlen scratched his head. He had to pause to digest that one.

"Atmospheric ionization... basically, static electricity on steroids," Arlen deciphered, impressed by the jargon. "She's saying the air is buzzing with energy. Fancy way of saying 'lightning storm coming', but she makes it sound like science fiction. She must be a chemistry major or something."

Arlen shook his head. The synergy was incredible. The soldier, the gamer, the cultist, and the scientist, they were weaving a narrative so tight it felt real.

He switched apps to the browser. But The headlines were confusing.

* "Aurora Borealis Visible in Equator?"*

* "Massive GPS Drift Reported Worldwide."*

Arlen looked up from his phone. He leaned over the balcony railing and looked at the sky above Jakarta.

Usually, the city lights drowned out everything. But tonight, he saw it.

A faint, sickly violet smear stretched across the dark expanse, pulsating slowly like a vein beneath infected skin.

"Chemical pollution," Arlen reasoned, though he didn't quite believe it. "Must be factory smoke reflecting off the heat haze. Or maybe a light show from the Gelora Bung Karno stadium."

He looked back at the chat. The new members were panicking again. He needed to calm them down, to guide the narrative even more as attention farm to his ARG.

He decided to drop a line from Chapter 5, a passage he had written about the moment everything start to collapsed.

He typed, wiping sweat from his screen.

> [The Architect]: Do not fear the lights. The sky is merely bruising because the shield is breaking. It is the bloom before the wither. Watch it, but do not trust it. <

He hit send.

The reaction was instantaneous.

> [User: Viper]: Copy that.<

> [User: Apothecary]: Shield breaking... magnetic decoupling. Of course. That explains the ionization. The hypothesis holds.<

Arlen leaned back, satisfied.

"Shield," Arlen laughed. "They treat my metaphors like actual physics. I say 'Shield', Viper probably gonna thinks 'Defense System', Apothecary thinks 'Magnetosphere'. Lmao, i'm a genius."

He didn't know the truth.

He didn't know that Apothecary was literally watching a sample of distilled water in her lab begin to boil at room temperature because the pressure.

He didn't know that the "Purple Bruise" was actually cosmic radiation slamming into the unprotected atmosphere, cooking the sky.

To the 34 members, it was like a confirmation of the prophecy.

A notification popped up.

> [User: Tank]: [User is typing...] <

Arlen watched the bubble pulse for a long time. Five seconds. Then Ten seconds.

But no message came. The user stopped typing.

"Shy lurker," Arlen shrugged.

"Probably just wanted to ask what he need to do."

He drained his water bottle. It was warm.

He looked at the purple smear in the sky one last time.

"I should include this in the sequel," Arlen mused. "The Purple Sky Arc. Catchy title."

He went back inside to sleep, oblivious to the fact that the radiation coming through that "bruise" was already beginning to bleach the leaves of the trees in the park outside.

***

[Identity: Marco, 29 Years Old, Logistics Driver]

[Location: A small housing complex, Cikarang - West Java]

The heat in Cikarang feels like pressed down in a heavy way. It was 10:00 PM, but the thermometer on Marco’s porch stubbornly read 34°C.

The air smelled of heated asphalt and the faint, chemical tang of the nearby industrial factories.

Marco sat on the terrace, shirtless, a kretek cigarette burning slowly in the ashtray. Beside him lay Bruno, his five-year-old Doberman mix. Usually, Bruno was alert, a proud guardian who barked at every passing motorbike. Tonight, the dog was pathetic. It's panting heavily, tongue lolling out, eyes wide and unblinking.

Marco wiped sweat from his neck and scrolled through the Information Club chat on his phone.

He shook his head as he read the latest nonsense.

> [User: Viper]: Perimeter secure. Motion sensors calibrated to infrared. Standard optics are useless in this heat haze. <

> [User: Seraph]: The lambs are gathering. We have enough wool to survive the winter. The Architect protects. <

"Psychos," Marco muttered, exhaling a cloud of clove-scented smoke. "Talking about wool and infrared sensors while I'm out here melting. Do these people even pay electricity bills?"

He looked down at Bruno, scratching the dog behind the ears.

"They're crazy, right, boy? A 'Great Freeze' in Indonesia? It’s practically an oven out here."

Bruno didn't react. He didn't lean into the touch.

The dog was staring intently at the night sky.

Marco followed his gaze. Above the glow of the streetlights, the sky looked wrong. It wasn't black. It was bruised like a faint, pulsating violet smear stretching across the darkness.

"Just pollution," Marco told himself.

"Chemical flare from the industrial estate."

But Bruno wasn't looking away. A low, vibrating growl began to rumble in the dog's chest. It wasn't a growl of aggression, it's more like a growl of terror.

"What is it, Bruno?" Marco asked softly, reaching out to pet the dog's head to calm him down. "It's just the sm—"

Snap.

Bruno whipped his head around, teeth baring inches from Marco’s hand. The sound of jaws snapping shut on empty air cracked like a whip.

Marco jerked back, kicking his chair over. "Hey!"

He stared at his dog, shocked. Bruno had never, ever snapped at him.

But the thing looking back at him wasn't Bruno.

The dog’s eyes were dilated, the black pupils swallowing the brown irises completely. He wasn't looking at Marco with recognition. He was looking at him with the wild, desperate panic of a trapped animal. His hackles were raised, not in anger, but in a primal response to something invisible.

"Bruno?" Marco whispered, his heart hammering against his ribs.

The dog whined. A high-pitched sound of pure pain and scrambled backward. He didn't attack. He squeezed himself under the plastic patio chair, shaking violently, hiding from the sky.

Marco frowned, his breath catching in his throat. He suddenly remembered the paper he had found that day.

Page 2: The Bestiary.

Caption: "When the field drops, the radiation rewrites instinct. The scavenger becomes the hunter. The guardian becomes the coward."

Marco looked at the trembling dog, then back at the purple bruise in the sky.

"The guardian becomes the coward," Marco repeated the words, a cold chill running down his spine despite the heat.

"Coincidence," he told himself, rubbing his wrist where the dog had almost bitten him. "It's just the heat. The heat is making everyone crazy. Even the dogs."

But as he reached for his cigarette, he noticed his hand was shaking.

He looked at his phone. The [User: Tank] text box was open.

He started to type, then stopped.

"Tell me this isn't real," he wanted to ask.

But looking at Bruno cowering under the chair, Marco realized he didn't want to know the answer.

›› To Be Continue ‹‹

—KS