"Come here!" Kael yelled at everyone outside of the space, who jumped towards him. It wasn’t easy considering how they were being thrown around.
Many of them didn’t even know that this magnitude was just the global average right now, much milder compared to what those near fault lines and volcanoes experienced.
Kael and Naia grabbed the nearby column, finding the timing and pattern; they took advantage of the ground movements to get to the sole column inside the restaurant’s private room.
When an earthquake hit, if they were without cover, the best course of action was to stick to the sturdy structural members, the most accessible of which were columns.
She made a rough estimate of the earthquake’s magnitude and a modern building should be able to withstand it.
As for what might happen later, like if things get excessively dangerous, Naia would just put everyone in space, and then she’d get Kael to teleport them out. After all, she couldn’t teleport out of solid surfaces, but Kael could.
Anyway, until then, those who must experience the disaster firsthand should experience it.
The others had a much harder time amidst all the shaking. They couldn’t even stand upright anymore, their knees buckling almost as soon as the shaking began.
Linlin was a bit lucky because she was next to Naia, so she was already holding on to her. Gale, Linlin’s new BFF, was next to Linlin, so she managed to grab the other’s arms.
Hans was a bit farther away and ended up by the window. His face was smooshed against the glass panel, and his eyes reflected the shaking of the buildings outside as well as the panic of the crowds at street level.
Fortunately, all loose items in the private room had already been taken by Naia before, so the people there only had to endure the shaking of the ground and not the risk of getting hit by loose furniture.
However, things rarely go completely according to people’s plans.
Crack!
All the shaking caused the false ceiling above them to buckle, and a random ficem board flew smack at Uncle’s face. Fortunately, Naia managed to wrap her rope dart around him to pull him towards her and out of the way of the violent debris.
But ceiling boards never came alone. There was a whole ceiling’s worth of them. Naia considered placing the ceiling in her space. It was just that it was still attached to the structure.
The building was quite big, and she wasn’t sure she could place it in her space in this situation. Not to mention, she could even lose consciousness if she overestimated herself.
The space was anchored to her. If she fainted, the others wouldn’t be able to enter in case of an emergency.
In the end, Kael did most of the rescue. He teleported where they were, grabbed Hans and the others, and then guided them to the column as well.
The earthquake lasted several minutes. It might not seem like a long time, but when you’re the one shaken around, it feels like forever.
Linlin knew that they were currently ’training’, but a few minutes in, she tearfully shifted her shaking head to look at Naia.
"Can...we...go...into...the...space?"
Her voice was incoherent. She blamed the fact that her brain was becoming mush!
Naia looked at everyone whose face had paled both from terror and physiological problems. She timed it, and it had been a few minutes, and figured they had been shaken enough, placing them in the space.
This left Naia and Kael outside the space, and the two of them decided to peek at the chaos outside.
The building itself was sturdy, and most of the buildings around should be fine for a while. They walked, balanced, training their muscular core in the meantime.
The people outside were screaming, some rushing to the exit, while others looked for a surface to hide under—which was the standard operating procedure taught in schools.
However, the intensity of the earthquake wasn’t that weak, and many people slid out of their hiding places due to the floor’s shaking, ultimately having either the partition or something on the ceiling drop down on them.
"When will it end?"
"Will the building be able to handle it?"
"What if it can’t?"
This question triggered more panic-driven decisions, with many people who had been hiding trying to rush towards the door, only to fall smack on the floor.
One unlucky bastard fell on a glass shard that had broken earlier. He no longer got up, and people looked in horror as blood leaked out of his head.
"KYAAA!"
"Call 666! Kyaaa!"
"You think we haven’t tried calling?! There’s no dial tone!!"
Other than subtly taking in the loose items in the restaurant, Kael and Naia didn’t do much else and just teleported to the roofdeck area.
They watched as the chaos on street level unfolded.
For now, many people inside the surviving buildings did not know that it was even worse outside.
They were ants in the grand scheme of things, so they could only helplessly be carried by the shaking ground.
There were some cracks that appeared along the streets, and a few buildings—older ones—also showed signs of giving in.
The loose items outside the buildings would find themselves meters away, and these ’loose items’ were mostly people.
The cars and people on the streets were being thrown around the streets or against buildings. Several electric poles fell down, squashing people and cars around them.
There were also many people trapped between cars, squashed harder and harder as the ground shook, soon unable to breathe, struggles futile.
The buildings were definitely shaking much more, like lone bamboos amidst a storm. They watched as a few buildings started cracking and giving way. Some fell down from the top, some gave way at the bottom.
Their breath hitched when the building across fell forward—right at their building—but fortunately, due to the shaking of the ground, it landed on the adjacent building instead.
Kael’s hand was wrapped around her waist, helping her keep balanced. "How many people do you think died in this small town today?"
"Scores, at least," Kael said with a sigh, his tone making people unable to imagine he was standing on shaking ground. "Maybe a few hundreds."
It was a weekend, and from what he could see, the buildings that gave way were old office buildings. Hopefully, they were empty at this time.
There were also a lot of sinkholes that showed up, swallowing cars. Kael’s ability could make sinkholes worse, so he didn’t try to stop them.
Kael’s attack ability was imploding or exploding space itself, but it had to have a mass to anchor on. Imagine a fabric representing the dimension of the reality space. Kael could pinch a mass or slightly stretch it out.
If he decided to do this on a human head, it would either implode on itself as pressure pressed onto the head on all sides, or it would explode as it was pulled out.
In theory, he could also manipulate blank space by grabbing onto the existing molecules there. However, it was akin to grabbing water. Back in the past life where his control was all over the place, this was an impossible feat.
In this life, he hadn’t had the time to explore it yet. He was too busy trying to stand up, after all.
As they watched the world shake, the two were definitely not as they looked.
The Fall happened a few weeks in advance.
Granted, there had always been a range for error, but they didn’t know it would be so big.
The data they knew was collated data from various survivors as well as records in the weather stations, satellite stations, etc. that they had managed to obtain through the years.
Through this, the humans had managed to make a summary of what happened in the two years of natural disasters as well as the approximate timeline to it.
But now that it happened earlier, their confidence that the same things would happen within the same duration faltered.
Naia felt calloused hands wrap around hers. She blinked and turned her head to the man next to her.
He was already holding her waist with one arm, settling her into his embrace as they balanced themselves from all the shaking. Now, his free hand had, at some point, lifted one of her hands and rubbed it with his warmth.
"Nothing changed," Kael said. "We’ll still beat it together."
...
The ground’s shaking finally calmed about five minutes later. In that short amount of time, it felt like they had entered another world.
The sky was morbidly reddish-grey; smoke bellowed from all over, whether from fires, explosions, or from the utter destruction of various buildings and development.
Death was everywhere, and screams and sobs echoed all over. There was no part of the world that had not been scarred and did not see blood flowing into its soil.
No one emerged unscathed, though their minds and spirits were far more broken than their bodies.
There was one resounding question in everyone’s mind: What are we going to do now?
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