I feel like I'm walking through déjà vu. I went back ten years, watching the world collapse again. Screaming, anger, terror and the raw fear enraptures the very air of this city. It stings as I walk out from the abandoned reception room on the ground floor and out the clear glass doors that were the final barrier from reality and its collapse.

The streets marred with smoke and fire, the crash of water in the distance drowned out by the crumbling buildings and the Sprite taking a leisurely stroll down the centre of a major street on a few streets up. The fucker was huge, like I was staring at the Iron Giant but...rocks. Sirens and gun fire clash with the screeches of the Hexers and the Miasmic storm, all mixing together like a melancholic song that meant nothing but death.

I had no way of knowing where X would have gone but I ran down the street in front of me, heading in the same direction as the big guy. He was a massive target and something the I'm hoping X would follow. People are still running around in fear and terror and I was an observer. An outsider. Though the panic driven screams in my direction made me remember that no one would be used to Lady. Everyone else would see her as another beast roaming the streets.

"Noisy. Scary. Bright. Foolish." She half trots beside me. Though the 'foolish' bit was directed at me.

I wanted to quip back at the jab but the sound of a building crumbling in on itself like a Jenga tower made my mind blank instead. I watch one of the high-rise apartment complexes just collapse, smoke and dust curling out like the ground sucked it up. And the noise was deafening. The debris causes several car crashes and the packed traffic panics. More bodies scramble onto the streets, running in terror and reckless abandon.

High above in the Viking's building, I felt a detachment from everything below, like watching a painting...on fire... But here on the ground...it was an apathy of walking through a park...on fire. But for all of the mayhem...I felt it's missing something. Like a silence before the storm. Miasmic beasts began to swell the city, running through with bigger numbers, a myriad of beasts warped by shadow and crystal, accompanying their forerunner down the streets towards the tower. The Hexers causing more chaos in their wake like a slow-moving force; like tar, filling the streets with another type of toxicity. It was choking and maddening.

Sweet, sweet. Oh where is the sweet melody? Darkening. Maddening. Sing my lullaby!

Oh shut up. I press a hand on the building pressure behind my eyes as a scream pulls me jarringly back to reality.

Looking up, I see a woman scrambling back from her partner or friend who was hanging their neck awkwardly to the side, staring at her while mouth dripping with the blood of someone's freshly torn out throat hanging down like missed food. The body twitching in a pool of blood at their feet. She runs away while the madden sunken eyes follow and the teeth part with an unnatural noise escaping to signal the start of a chase.

My does a somersault in my ribcage as a heavy mass lands directly in front of me. It was a person. Landed awkwardly on the pavement, their joints spread at impossible angles and their dead face with a manic smile plastered across it. The crazy suicides...

Their smile echoes through my brain and I freeze. Too much of the nest has spread this far. Their actions are escalating. The nest is growing too rapidly. Pretty soon the physical mutations will start growing instantly...

Why? Just why would anyone do this? Is anyone even gonna survive this shitshow that I've snuck front row seats to? In this distance I hear another loud crash and I wasn't sure if it was a building, jet or rampaging creature.

My attention is drawn away for a moment by the sound of gunshots going off down another street to my left and feel Lady pushing on me to move. I noticed that the BFG rock had moved a lot further away than I expected and my body autopiloted to give chase. I swallow down the nausea, moving away from the body and chase after the Sprite.

As it moves at a fast but leisurely pace (what happens when tall people walk with short people, I am short people), I couldn't help but stare up at the sky, passed the still standing buildings. I was half expecting to see X fly through the buildings, monsters and machines but was also acutely aware of the last defence of the Fence's orb. The very last safety line the city had to the outside world. I keep thinking the Fence's protection was going to blink out...of-

A painful in-head shriek rips through my skull that dies out just as suddenly and the Hexers howl in the distance. I look around, expecting a Queen or her Alpha to attack but I see instead the Fence's bluish-purple shield that marred the sky just blipped out of existence.

...The Fence is down!? I look over to see the few flying cars crash back down like kites that have the wind taken from them. Other cars and electric billboards all shutdown. The city just lost all of its power.

I hope Oz and his Hollow Kite were ok...

We've just arrived at the next step up from shit creak without a paddle...We're in spicy diarrhea town and there's a flood and no boat or paddle. Mental imagery really isn't helping.

The Tower was still standing but it wasn't... It felt like an ominous empty husk. Something disrupted the power supple of the Tower. It was still alive...but cut away...Like it was folding in on itself. The Rock must have also heard what I did as it stops to look at the tower for a second, while swatting at the army's efforts to stop it. It lets out another weird shriek before continuing its slow path.

That...whatever it was with the Tower just disrupted both the Hexers and Miasmic Beasts....and caused thousands of deaths. What the actual fuck is going on?

As if to answer my point, Miasmic beasts that basically looked like the unholy offspring of a dragon, bird, horse and demon had entered the stage. Their opaque black bodies were hard to distinguish from a distance but the glowing blue patterns around their insect like exoskeleton gave a distinction of a lizard-like horse head stuck on a dragon with weird elongated bird-like structure to it. Their wings were a delicate incandescent membrane that flowed from their forelegs and were more insect-like in appearance but still connected like bat-wings on a dragon. Skyhorses...This just means the Wyrms are bound to be next in this menagerie. I've never really seen Skyhorses before and I think I need a gulp of that unsee juice right about now cos they always signal a bad...maybe permanent storm.

They immediately went after the army and jets, tearing into them like rabbits before a bunch of scaly hawks. A few perfectly formed alpha hexers join in on the action, tearing at everything around them. They were almost perfect copies of the helmeted hexer that almost got me back in Bellasera. Except they had odd, almost triangular shaped heads, almost like a demonic praying mantis.

A familiar flash of gold cuts in between the three-way fight. X was leaping across the buildings, meeting the Hexers and miasic beasts head on, either using them as stepping stones or dodging heir attacks to try and strike in his own. But his main target was the Sprite. As he went after it, his attack lands but it just as easily bonces off and he was knocked off-balance at the last second and the buildings weren't close enough to act as a platform.

I watch this in slow motion as I could see that he was trying to work out how to gain back some ground and tries to move but I could see he was going to miss as the building begins to collapse under him and he had no way to manoeuvre to the building next to him.

He's falling.

No. No. No.

I pull my hand forward and feel a tug as splintering and mishappen metal, concrete and ice pull out from the side of the nearby building to form a platform directly under him. He lands with a catlike grace.

He probably had a dumb look on his face but he was too far up for me to see it.

I was panting hard, noticing that everything was now looking at me. The humans all ready to shoot me down where I stand. The Hexers seeing their next meal. And the Miasmic Beasts not sure what to do with the new addition.

"Kae!"

X's panicked voice rings in my ears and I look up, not really understanding why he's so frightened. He was rushing towards me, abandoning everything and everyone in a scramble.

Oh. My dumbass managed to run up almost underneath the collapsing building and I had no way of moving away in time. I notice this this while the debris falls with a rush as metric tons of concrete and metal starts falling directly towards me.

Well. Fuck.

Everything went into sudden stilted silence as I felt the weight of the world crashing down on me.

And I welcomed the dark.

"Kae!"

My turn.