Day 11. 7:12 AM.
-70°C exterior.
20°C inside.
Unit 1418.
Concrete didn't crack but screamed, the bones of Shore Residence 3 shuddering laterally in a full tectonic displacement that sheared anchor bolts from their moorings and made the rebar inside the walls sing at a frequency that set human teeth on edge.
Ji-yoo's coffee cup launched off the kitchen table in a dark arc and shattered against the far wall in an explosion of fragments and steaming liquid that splashed across the plaster like a Rorschach blot written in brown and white.
Rico's rifle clattered to the tile and skidded two feet before his hand closed around the barrel on pure reflex, thirty years of muscle memory operating faster than thought.
Alessia grabbed the kitchen counter with both hands and knuckles bloodless against the granite, her stethoscope swinging against her chest and the metal disc clinking against the counter's edge like a small clinical bell.
Jennifer was already on her feet with the passive scan flickering behind her sternum, the cold blue glow stuttering as four hundred heartbeats spiked simultaneously through the building and the collective adrenaline surge hit her telepathy like a fist to the solar plexus.
"It's moving." Jennifer announced, a grim certainty flattening her voice.
Yue materialized in the center of the room with no warning and no sound, just the air folding and the faint taste of ozone coating the back of the throat, her jian at her hip humming with the resonance of two spatial frequencies re-synchronizing after her blink.
"Southeast. It's walking. Slow. But it's walking toward us." Yue reported, a clinical urgency stripping her voice of all warmth.
"How fast." Jae-min demanded, a sharp calculation driving the question as his palm pressed flat against the cold polycarbonate of the glass slider.
"Twenty meters a minute. Maybe less. It's limping on the sealed leg. But it's coming." Yue answered, a cold precision calculating behind her marble eyes.
'Twenty meters a minute. Eight hundred meters. Forty minutes. Maybe less if the thread keeps pulling it toward me like a beacon.' Jae-min calculated, a cold arithmetic running behind his eyes.
The violet light through the curtains was brighter now, close enough to cast shadows with weight behind it, the oppressive density of something vast approaching.
'It feels me. It knows I'm watching.' Jae-min sensed, a cold inevitability settling over the realization. 'The thread is pulling it forward like a fish on a line through the heart.'
'Same. Close. Stay. Same.' the entity pulsed, a desperate yearning pulling through the void.
"It knows I'm here. The thread is acting like a beacon." Jae-min declared, a grim conviction.
Jennifer crossed the room and stopped two steps behind him, not beside him.
'Not beside him. Not when Alessia is watching. She gets the beside. I get the behind.' Jennifer accepted, a bitter geometry mapping the space between them. 'That's the arrangement.'
"Can you sever it." Jennifer questioned, a careful hope thinning her voice.
"I tried. The thread regenerates the moment I cut it. It's not a leash. It's a blood vessel. Shared anatomy. Cutting it hurts both of us." Jae-min answered, a frustrated acceptance.
"Then we need to move. Get everyone out of the building before that thing reaches us." Jennifer urged, a protective desperation.
"And go where? Minus seventy outside. We'd freeze before we hit the ground floor." Rico countered, a practical realism anchoring his gruff voice.
"Then we go up. Roof access. If the distortion field hits the building, the upper floors go last." Jennifer proposed, a fragile hope.
— • • • —
The group chat exploded with phones buzzing across the building, four hundred devices vibrating in four hundred pockets.
[Mrs. Dela Cruz - Unit 1308]: THE BUILDING JUST MOVED.
[Vicente Gutierrez]: EARTHQUAKE? IS THIS AN EARTHQUAKE?
[Mr. Villanueva - Unit 1322]: FIFTEENTH FLOOR. CRACKS IN THE WALLS. MY WINDOWS ARE BOWING.
[Anna - Unit 1410]: DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING
[Celia Magno]: LOOK OUTSIDE. THERE IS SOMETHING OUT THERE.
[Mrs. Santos - Unit 1305]: WHAT IS THAT LIGHT. IT'S GETTING CLOSER.
[Gabriel Angeles]: I'M ON THE 10TH FLOOR AND I CAN SEE IT. IT'S HUGE.
[Milagros Manahan]: JESUS CHRIST IT MOVED. IT MOVED.
'What am I supposed to say? Don't worry, there's a sixty-meter spatial nightmare walking toward our building and my brother is connected to it by an invisible thread?' Ji-yoo fumed, a helpless frustration coiling in her chest.
She put the phone down.
"Tell me what to do." Ji-yoo demanded, a fierce loyalty hardening her jaw.
— • • • —
7:24 AM.
19°C inside.
The entity was six hundred meters out, and the distortion field touched the outer edge of the residential compound, and the world outside began to fold.
The parking structure groaned first with reinforced concrete bending like wet cardboard, pillars bowing inward and the ceiling cracking in a diagonal fault line that ran from corner to corner and spalled concrete dust in pale gray cascades.
Cars slid sideways with the grinding shrieking protest of tires on concrete that no longer held a level plane, a white sedan T-boning a delivery van and a pickup truck rolling onto its side and crashing through the barrier to plummet two stories to the lower level.
The fence around Shore Residence 3 warped with steel twisting like taffy under the spatial distortion, chain links stretching and snapping and folding inward like the whole compound was being squeezed in a fist.
Inside Building B, the tremors intensified with plaster dust drifting from the ceiling in fine white particles that caught the violet light and hung in the air like snowfall, coating every surface in a thin film of powdered concrete.
Alessia pulled the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink, the plastic case cracking when she yanked it free, with the cold making the polymer brittle and the hinges snapping like breaking knuckles.
'A thousand crash carts. A thousand doses. I have never once let my fingers shake when the blood was still warm.' Alessia reminded herself, a controlled discipline locking her hands in place. 'Not starting now.'
She set it on the kitchen counter and started counting supplies with the click of plastic latches and the rustle of sterile packaging and the sharp clinical smell of isopropyl alcohol cutting through the stale recycled air.
Gauze and antiseptic and surgical tape and four morphine auto-injectors lined up on the granite like soldiers at attention, the orange caps bright against the dark stone.
'Four morphine auto-injectors. Forty residents minimum with cardiac risk.' Alessia calculated, a controlled terror gripping her rational mind. 'Four doses for a city of the dying.'
Jae-min watched her work for a moment, the way her fingers moved precise and economical with each motion stripped of excess, then crossed the room and put his hand on the small of her back, warm and deliberate.
She leaned into him without looking up, automatic and gravitational, and his fingers traced up her spine slow and deliberate, then settled at the nape of her neck with his thumb brushing the soft skin beneath her hairline.
She shivered, not from the cold.
"If the building comes down." Jae-min began, a tactical realism softening his voice.
"Don't." Alessia cut in, a fierce refusal snapping through her.
"I'm being realistic." Jae-min pressed, a measured patience.
"You're being fatalistic. Stop it." Alessia countered, a fierce fear hardening her indigo eyes.
'She's terrified. Using fury to keep from falling apart.' Jae-min read, a tender understanding softening his gaze. 'The kind of scared that masquerades as anger because anger has teeth.'
"You're not dying. I'm not letting you die. We clear?" Alessia commanded, a desperate love blazing beneath.
He kissed her forehead and his hand drifted lower, cupping her hip and pulling her flush against him, casual and proprietary, his fingers pressing into the curve of her waist through the denim.
She grabbed his collar and pulled him into a real kiss, brief and hard with her teeth catching his lower lip, the taste of antiseptic and coffee and something sweeter underneath.
His other hand squeezed the curve of her ass, casual and proprietary, and her breath caught and her fingers curled harder into his shirt.
'He's touching me like the world isn't ending. Like there's no sixty-meter god outside.' Alessia admitted, a furious tenderness burning behind her ribs. 'And the worst part is that it works.'
When she let go her hands were shaking and she went back to counting supplies with crimson ears.
— • • • —
7:31 AM.
18°C inside.
Four hundred meters.
Jennifer pressed her back against the wall beside the glass slider frame with her eyes closed and her passive scan humming behind her sternum, every heartbeat a distinct signature, every frequency a separate voice in a choir of four hundred screaming souls.
'I learned to read it like braille. The telepathy gives me rhythms. Pulses. The percussion of human terror on four hundred instruments.' Jennifer processed, a weary precision parsing the data.
Her nose started bleeding again, a thin warm line of copper sliding down her upper lip, and she didn't wipe it because the scan was more important than the symptom.
'Four hundred heartbeats screaming in my skull. And through all of it, his heartbeat is the only one I can't read.' Jennifer agonized, a weary devotion dragging at her focus. 'The silence that's louder than all the noise.'
"Ninth floor. Elderly couple. Heart attack. Unit 902. The wife is having a cardiac episode." Jennifer reported, a clinical detachment forced over the exhaustion.
Rico moved toward the door with his hand already on the rifle stock. "I'll go." Rico volunteered, a fatherly concern.
"You won't make it in time. The stairs are jammed. Seventh floor residents are already in the stairwell trying to get down." Jennifer countered, a quiet realism.
"Then what do you suggest." Rico pressed, a measured urgency.
"I suggest you stay here and protect the people you can actually protect." Jennifer answered, a quiet desperation hiding behind the practicality.
Yue stood at the glass slider with her arms folded and her marble eyes tracking the entity through the violet shimmer, the jian at her hip humming with the spatial resonance of the distortion field pressing against her own frequency.
'The gravitational harmonics are shifting. Each pulse creates a standing wave. If I can map the frequency, I might predict the next structural failure.' Yue calculated, a rigid discipline forcing her mind toward the analytical. 'That's useful. That's data. That's something I can control.'
The warmth pulsed anyway, stubborn and reckless, and she pressed her thighs harder together and forced her attention back to the entity's distortion field.
— • • • —
7:38 AM.
Three hundred meters.
The entity's distortion field hit Building A.
The east-facing wall crumbled, not explosively but slowly, the way a glacier moves, the concrete turning to powder fine as talcum as every grain of sand and cement released its grip and the whole face of the building dissolved like a sand castle meeting a tide.
Rebar bent like rubber and twisted and sagged like candle wax, groaning at a frequency so low it was felt in the chest rather than heard. Glass shattered in cascading sheets, thirty stories of tempered glass popping in sequence from bottom to top, each pane fracturing in a concussive starburst that caught the violet light and scattered it across the compound like broken stars.
The sound reached them four seconds later, a deep grinding crunch like the earth itself being chewed.
Victor Reyes and his forty cops were in the Building A basement.
"Building A is collapsing on the east side. There are people in the basement. Armed men. Thirty to forty of them." Jennifer reported, a grim precision.
"Victor's men." Rico identified, a quiet familiarity.
"You knew they were there." Jennifer pressed, a careful wariness.
"Jae-min told me." Rico confirmed, a deliberate calm meeting her eyes.
'Of course he knew. He knows everything.' Jennifer realized, a bitter admiration warring with frustration. 'He probably has ten contingencies for Victor Reyes no one else knows about.'
"What do we do about them." Jennifer questioned, a worried concern.
"Nothing. They're not our problem." Rico answered, a quiet pragmatism carrying the weight of hard choices.
— • • • —
7:42 AM.
17°C inside.
Two hundred and fifty meters.
The entity paused.
The violet glow was so bright now that the curtains were useless, the entire living room bathed in purple light that pulsed with the rhythm of something vast and alien and dying.
It stopped walking, and Jae-min felt it through the thread: the pulling stopped and the beacon went silent, the entity waiting with a restraint he could feel in the vibration of the thread like a dog sitting at the edge of a rug, trembling and not crossing until invited.
'Close. Same. But not come. Not unless same says.' the entity asked, a trembling restraint shaking through the void.
Sixty meters tall and older than the planet and starving and dying and standing in a frozen courtyard asking Jae-min if it could come closer.
'Please. Same. Please. So cold. So empty. Please.' the entity begged, a raw desperation cracking through the void like ice splitting under pressure.
Ji-yoo stepped up beside him and looked at him with black eyes flat as gunmetal and her jaw set.
'He's the only one who understands. The only other person carrying something that doesn't belong in a human body.' Ji-yoo vowed, a fierce devotion hardening her chest. 'And I will not watch him be consumed.'
"Kuya. Whatever you're going to do. Do it now. Because if that thing takes one more step and you haven't decided, I'm going to decide for you." Ji-yoo commanded, a fierce protectiveness blazing through every syllable.
"And what would you do." Jae-min challenged, a quiet challenge testing her resolve.
"Kill it." Ji-yoo declared, a cold certainty dropping from her lips like a blade.
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min started, a cautious patience.
"Kuya." Ji-yoo cut in, a hard shift dropping her voice to something colder.
The temperature in the room seemed to drop, not from the entity but from her.
"I'm a reaper. That's what I do. I reap things. And right now there's a dying monster outside our building connected to you by a thread made of the same stuff in your chest. So either you find a way to fix this without dying, or I put it down myself." Ji-yoo threatened, a terrifying resolve hardening her black eyes.
The gravity in the room dropped, and everything that wasn't bolted down lifted two inches off the ground, coffee mugs rattling and papers floating and Alessia's stethoscope suspended in the compressed air and the couch cushions rising.
'I meant it. Every word. I will crush that thing if it kills him.' Ji-yoo vowed, a primal fury forging the thought into something immovable. 'I don't care how old it is. He is my twin. My blood.'
'She just threatened to kill a spatial entity with her bare hands. And the terrifying part is I believe she could do it.' Jennifer realized, a chilling admiration cutting through her fear. 'The gravity isn't a threat. It's a promise.'
'She can say it out loud, in front of everyone, without shame. And I can't even say his name without my voice cracking.' Jennifer envied, a quiet grief settling behind her sternum.
"Ji-yoo. I need thirty minutes." Jae-min commanded, a commander's precision cutting through the tension.
"Thirty minutes." Ji-yoo repeated, a suspicious wariness narrowing her eyes.
"Give me thirty minutes to find another way. If I can't figure it out by then." Jae-min laid out, a measured calm.
"Then I handle it." Ji-yoo sealed, a grim acceptance.
He nodded, and Ji-yoo's fingers unclenched, and the gravity settled, and everything dropped back down, the coffee table cracking when it hit the floor along a stress fracture that had been forming for days.
"Thirty minutes. I'm timing you." Ji-yoo declared, a fierce tenderness burning beneath the threat.
She walked to the balcony and slid the glass slider open, and the minus seventy air hit her face like a wall of razor blades, the cold searing her lungs and the moisture in her nostrils crystallizing instantly.
She stood at the railing facing the entity two hundred and fifty meters away and raised one hand, the air between her palm and the entity's chest compressing visibly, the space warping like a heat mirage with the frozen air distorting and bending and the light refracting through a single point of impossible gravity.
'It's a statement. A wall of force made of nothing but my will.' Ji-yoo declared, a lethal defiance blazing through the compression. 'Come closer. I dare you.'
The entity didn't move, but its flickering slowed and its form stabilized slightly, like her gravity was somehow anchoring it.
'Why is my gravity anchoring it? The compression should destabilize it further.' Ji-yoo wondered, a confused frustration warring with the exhaustion. 'What is this connection?'
— • • • —
7:48 AM. 16°C inside.
Jae-min sat back down in the center of the room cross-legged with his hands on his knees, and his eyes closed, the violet light painting his closed eyelids purple.
Alessia knelt in front of him and pressed her forehead against his with her breath mingling, and her eyes closed, her fingers finding the back of his neck and holding on.
"When you go in there. Come back." Alessia commanded, a desperate demand trembling beneath the softness.
"Always." Jae-min promised, a quiet conviction.
"Liar. You went into the void for six seconds last time and came out with blue lips and a dying heartbeat." Alessia accused, a fierce terror cracking through.
"Then I'll come back faster this time." Jae-min countered, a tender defiance brushing his lips against hers.
She kissed him longer than before with her fingers curled into his shirt and her knuckles white, the taste of antiseptic and coffee and the faint salt of tears she wouldn't admit to.
'If you die in there, I will drag you back myself.' Alessia vowed, a pragmatic fury burning through the terror. 'I didn't survive medical school and this apocalypse and my own stupid crimson ears to lose you to a sixty-meter void creature.'
When she pulled away, she stayed on her knees close enough to catch him if he fell, and his hands found her waist and pulled her closer, and his fingers splayed warm against the small of her back.
Yue watched from the glass slider.
'Every micro-movement registers. The shift of his weight. The angle of his shoulders. His center of gravity tilting toward her like she's the sun.' Yue registered, a clinical precision failing to suppress the observation. 'Stop. Do not think about his hands. Do not think about where they were.'
The heat pulsed anyway, and she pressed her thighs together and stared at the violet light until her eyes burned.
Jennifer sat behind him with two fingers on his spine, the contact light and clinical, the blood from her nose dried on her upper lip.
'Two fingers on his spine. Light. Clinical. It's devotion dressed as duty. And everyone in this room knows it.' Jennifer admitted, a quiet shame bleeding beneath the resolve. 'Let me keep the heartbeat. That's all I ask.'
He reached for the thread and the void opened cold and deeper this time, the entity closer and the thread shorter and the connection stronger.
'It's breathing. Or something like breathing. Two hearts in two different bodies finding the same frequency.' Jae-min perceived, a cold wonder opening in his chest.
'Same.' the entity whispered, a fragile recognition trembling through the void.
"Me." Jae-min acknowledged, a steady grounding.
'Come. Please. So empty.' the entity pleaded, a desperate hunger aching through each concept.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere." Jae-min confirmed, a steady resolve.
'Same. Same. Same.' the entity repeated, a reverent desperation shaping each iteration like a prayer.
'It's been waiting since before the solar system formed. Waiting to be spoken to by something that could hear.' Jae-min realized, a terrible weight settling behind his sternum. 'And I'm the first thing that answered.'
He pushed deeper past the hunger and the loneliness to the real wound, and the entity was incomplete with gaps and missing pieces and voids within the void, absences that ached like phantom limbs.
'Ji-yoo's gravity is holding it together. But the real wound isn't physical. It's been bleeding since before the solar system formed.' Jae-min perceived, a cold recognition mapping the damage.
"What happened to you." Jae-min pushed, a careful probe examining the fracture.
'Before. Long before. Fight. Break. Run. Bleed. Empty since.' the entity echoed, an ancient grief crushing through each fragmented memory.
'A war. It fought something and lost and has been falling apart ever since.' Jae-min realized, a cold horror opening in his chest. 'Bleeding void energy across the cosmos like a wounded animal leaving a trail of blood in the snow.'
"What did you fight." Jae-min pressed, a tactical necessity.
'Other same. Not like you. Bigger. Mean. Angry. Broke the others. I ran. Still broken. Still running.' the entity resonated, an ancient terror shuddering through the void.
'There were others. Something killed them all. This one ran. It's a survivor of an extinction event.' Jae-min deduced, a freezing dread crystallizing in his chest. 'File it. Deal with it later.'
"If I feed you. Directly. Right now. What happens." Jae-min tested, a calculated risk.
'Empty stops. Cold stops. Same gets strong. Strong enough to heal. Really heal. Not just seal. Fix. Become whole.' the entity answered, a desperate hope surging.
"And I die." Jae-min stated, a flat certainty.
'Yes.' the entity confirmed, a sorrowful acceptance softening the word.
'It said yes without hesitation. Because it doesn't understand that killing me is wrong.' Jae-min understood, a chilling compassion weighing down the realization. 'To it, empty is the same as dead. It doesn't have the framework for guilt. Only for hunger.'
He pulled back and his eyes snapped open.
Alessia was still there kneeling with her hands on his shoulders and her fingers dug into his shirt, and his body was shaking and sweating with frost on his eyelashes and ice glazing his lips.
Jennifer had both hands flat on his back with her fingers white from the pressure.
"Eight minutes. You were gone for eight minutes." Jennifer reported, a tight control masking the terror.
"Did you find anything." Alessia pressed, a frantic hope searching his face as her thumb traced his jawline.
'Carotid pulse. Steady. Pupils equal and reactive.' Alessia diagnosed, a physician's instinct masking a lover's terror. 'If I stop checking, I start falling apart.'
"It's broken. Not just wounded. Something fought it. Killed the others like it. It ran. It's been running and bleeding void energy ever since." Jae-min revealed, a grim clarity.
"So feeding it would kill you." Jennifer concluded, a hollow acceptance.
"Yes." Jae-min confirmed, a flat acceptance.
Rico set a fresh cup of coffee from spatial storage in front of Jae-min, still hot and still fresh with the steam curling upward in the violet light.
"Then we need another source. Can you make void energy? Without using yourself as the source." Rico questioned, a tactical pragmatism.
Jae-min stared at the coffee with the steam curling and the surface trembling with each pulse of the entity's distortion field.
"I don't know." Jae-min admitted, a rare uncertainty cracking his composure.
— • • • —
7:56 AM.
Ji-yoo hadn't moved from the balcony with her arm still raised and the gravity point still hanging between her palm and the entity's chest, smaller now and weaker but visible.
She was getting tired.
'Twenty-two minutes left. My arm is shaking. My essence is draining.' Ji-yoo agonized, a fierce exhaustion dragging at her bones. 'I'll hold this until my arm falls off. Until there's nothing left of me but a woman standing between a monster and her brother.'
"Hey." Ji-yoo called out, a defiant challenge in English.
'Not same. But warm. Not empty.' the entity resonated, a confused wonder rippling through the thread.
Ji-yoo flinched as a pressure settled in her chest, not hers but a foreign sadness that sat in her lungs like a stone.
'Something traveled through the thread. Through Kuya's connection. Through my gravity. It's sad.' Ji-yoo realized, a reluctant empathy cracking her warrior's resolve. 'This sixty-meter god is actually sad.'
'Doesn't matter. Sad things still kill people. Stay focused.' Ji-yoo corrected, a cold discipline snapping the empathy shut.
She lowered her hand and the gravity point dissipated and the air settled back into normal physics.
"Twenty-two minutes, Kuya. Don't make me do this." Ji-yoo urged, a desperate faith clinging to the countdown.
— • • • —
8:01 AM.
The south wall of Building A collapsed completely with a roar of thirty stories of concrete and steel folding inward, each floor collapsing onto the one below in a chain reaction that sounded like God drumming His fingers on the roof of the world.
Victor Reyes and his men poured out of the basement entrance alive and battered and coughing, coated in dust that made them look like soldiers carved from ash, rifles up and scanning for threats they couldn't understand.
They saw the entity and every single one of them stopped walking and stared, rifles going slack in their hands.
Victor Reyes didn't stop but ran toward Building B toward Jae-min.
"Armed group. Forty men. Coming from Building A. They're heading for the main entrance." Jennifer reported, a controlled urgency.
Rico moved to the front door and locked it and dragged the sectional in front of it, the heavy furniture scraping across the tile.
"They won't get through the stairwell in time. The lower floors are probably already blocked by residents trying to evacuate." Rico assessed, a tactical practicalism.
"They don't need the stairs." Jennifer countered, a quiet intuition. "One of them. Tall. Clean-shaven. Sharp jaw. He's broadcasting intent. He's coming here for Jae-min."
"They're not even looking at the entity. Forty men running through a courtyard with a spatial god standing in the middle." Yue observed, a clinical disbelief narrowing her marble eyes.
"They can't see it properly. The distortion field warps perception. To them it's probably just a light source." Jennifer explained, a quiet understanding.
"Or they're too focused on what they want to kill." Jennifer added, a worried suspicion.
"Either way. They're coming. And we've got maybe ten minutes before they breach this floor." Rico estimated, a steely urgency.
Jae-min stood with his eyes clear and his jaw set.
"Ji-yoo." Jae-min commanded, a commander's authority snapping through the single word.
"Take the perimeter. Anything comes through that door that isn't me, put it down." Jae-min ordered, a tactical precision stripping all warmth.
"Yes, Kuya." Ji-yoo confirmed, a lethal joy lighting her black eyes.
She cracked her knuckles with five distinct pops that echoed through the corridor, and the gravity in the room surged heavy and crushing with every loose object slamming into the floor.
'Finally. Something to kill. Something to crush.' Ji-yoo exulted, a warrior's hunger blazing through the fatigue. 'This is what I was made for. Standing between my brother and anything stupid enough to threaten him.'
She paused at the door and glanced back over her shoulder. "Also, Kuya. Put a child in her already. The world's ending. There's no paperwork. No priests. No government. Just blood and names and the people who survive. So make sure her blood carries ours. You're welcome." Ji-yoo declared, a defiant affection cracking through the battle-readiness.
She was through the door before he could respond.
'A child. He's going to give her a child. A small thing with his eyes and her jaw.' Jennifer realized, a devastating envy crushing the air from her lungs. 'I want that. God forgive me, I want that more than anything.'
'But that's not my story. That's hers.' Jennifer surrendered, a bitter resignation accepting the truth. 'I'm the woman on the floor with blood on my lip and a heartbeat counter where my heart should be.'
'His child. Something that grows. Something that kicks.' Yue processed, a dangerous heat flooding through her abdomen. 'What would it feel like? His hands on my waist. His breath on my neck.'
'Stop. The entity. Forty armed men. The building is collapsing. This is not the time.' Yue enforced, a desperate discipline slamming the door on the fantasy.
Her thighs pressed together so hard her muscles trembled and the heat didn't stop.
Alessia's ears went crimson from her jaw to her hairline, the flush visible even in the violet light.
'Ji-yoo. That woman. I'm going to kill her. Put a child in her already. Who SAYS that?' Alessia fumed, a mortified fury blazing behind her blue eyes. 'And the worst part is I wouldn't say no.'
She kept her face buried in his shirt and refused to look up.
'My sister. Everyone is dying. The building is collapsing. There's a spatial god in the courtyard and forty armed men coming up the stairs.' Jae-min processed, a weary affection softening the thought. 'And her last words before going to war are telling me to get Alessia pregnant.'
Rico leaned against the doorframe with a slow, knowing grin spreading across his weathered face.
"Well. At least she's not recommending herself this time." Rico murmured, a warm familiarity softening his gruff voice.
'No children. Two marriages buried under deployments and silence. Sixty-two years and nothing to show for it but bad knees and a rifle.' Rico reflected, a quiet grief settling into his chest. 'But these two are mine. As their uncle and by choice. By every breakfast and every training session and every nightmare I sat through.'
'So if that girl wants this family to grow instead of shrink, that's fine by me.' Rico admitted, a tender hope softening the old soldier's eyes. 'That's everything I never got to have.'
He said none of this out loud but just watched them and grinned.
— • • • —
Outside, the snow had risen past the ninth floor of the buildings across the compound, and the entity's weight had cracked the frozen surface, sending fractures spider-webbing through the ice canyons between buildings.
Ten meters of snow had buried a city with only rooftops breaking the white plain, black stubs against the endless pale void with edges blurred by the distortion field rippling across the horizon.
And a spatial god stood in the courtyard between buildings, flickering like a dying star, waiting for permission from the only thing in the universe it recognized as same.
Two problems. One entity. Forty armed men. And a thread connecting a logistics manager to something older than the planet itself.
Eighteen minutes.