Rain had fallen all day from late in the afternoon.
Lagos remained alive at ten that night.
Traffic crawled, their headlights slicing through glass buildings around them as street vendors folded up their inventory. Cars honked at everything and nothing.
A music, not being played near him, was loud enough to be irritating a nearby neighborhood.
Adams Albert leans over his balcony of his apartment, watching the city pass into night with him.
He sips idly from a mug of coffee in one hand, the other tapping with his phone.
He glances down at it, eyes skimming the incoming text messages.
Three.
All from the same name.
Elena.
Adams smiles.
His phone is already ringing before he can take a breath.
"You’re calling me while I look at your missed texts?", he says, answering the second ring.
"You ignored me," Elena says.
"I was busy."
"Wasn’t," Elena laughs.
"It’s bad."
"What with?"
Adams looks back at his coffee cup.
"Whether or not I need to make myself another cup of coffee."
Elena chuckles.
"You’re unbelievably annoying,"
"I’ve been told,"
"Are you coming tomorrow?"
"Come where?"
"My place."
Adams frowns.
"We’re going out,"
"So why ask if I’m coming?"
"Because you have such a terrible brain, I thought you’d forget."
Adams grins.
"I’ll be there."
"Promise?"
Adams’ smile wavers slightly at the sudden gentleness in her voice.
He makes a promise.
"Goodnight Adams,"
"Goodnight to you too, Elena."
She hangs up before he can ask more.
Adams watches the text message scroll off the screen for a while before he puts his phone on the table.
Adams and Elena have been dating for nearly two years, and it didn’t get anywhere dramatic.
Two kids have fallen in love as equals in every possible meaning of the word.
They bickered.
They annoyed one another, patching up wounds over nights at one another side.
Sometimes days passed without saying a word in between.
Adams liked that.
At least something could be simple in his life.
Adams puts the cup down, finishing the warmth as he turns back inside.
A cramped place filled with a couch and television, a cheap dinner set with mismatched plates in their kitchen and some books, books on his bed and clothes folding waiting patiently for their turn.
Nothing special or worth saving.
Adams was certain of that.
His eyes fall on the clock, dark numbers blinking to life.
11:47PM,
His heavy eyelids feel the gravity pulling them down.
Adams puts his phone on the table again as he walks to the switches, but as he throws them all down every single light inside his apartments dies simultaneously.
"Power outage?", Adams muttered.
No answer.
Adams looks out his phone: Black.
No reception.
Adams presses the top button of his phone but nothing.
In fact, the whole city has stopped.
All noise has disappeared, all music. No cars. Not even the rain was a thing of sound now.
Adams walks closer to the balcony.
Something was wrong.
He opens the blinds, but cold air brushes his face as Lagos spreads beneath Adams with lights vanishing.
Millions of people are looking up at them.
Adams looks up too.
Everything had gone too fast.
The skies had turned black.
Stars are gone?
Just not there, hidden in a cloudy smog.
Adams looks back at the mass of bodies on the street, then back up again, his breath hitching in his throat as another white trail lights up the night sky.
At first, he thinks it’s lightning; the flash of it dancing down, splitting the night from end to another, a second later.
Someone screams at the next one and begins to pray.
Adams couldn’t pull his gaze from the wall in the sky as it drew closer.
It reminded him of something, something huge. Something continental but somehow suspended as if floating above the world from below.
Massive towers appeared out the landmass, connecting each massive structure with floating bridges stretching between them, rivers of strange lights flowing out and pooling in massive pools of liquid light.
Adams looks upward dumbfounded. His heart thunders in his chest.
"What the hell..." was the only word he manages as a long slow breath, hissing in air.
Adams hears something more, and the ground rumbles around him, something deep and not thunder rumbling in, a sound like an ancient leviathan.
Adams watches as the great ship continues to lower and the chaos of people running as car crashes sound like waves of another strange current, but suddenly the city has transformed with sirens screeching.
Adams pulls out his phone again, wondering what has happened, and his instinct goes in on Elena.
"Where are you, Elena?"
Adams’ fingers find their way to where his power bank is suppose to be as another flash of light hits Lagos.
In this instant, all screens in whatever city the humans had filled with them lit up with the same set of unfamiliar symbols around a circle.
「[GLOBAL EVENT DETECTED.]」
More words follow one after another on different displays with strange markings all over them.
Adams reads one of the messages before being distracted by another in the corner of his eye.
「[HEAVENFALL PROTOCOL INITIATED.]」 Admas eyes the next display, hands trembling.
「[PLANETARY SYSTEM DEPLOYMENT BEGINNING.]」
The streets erupted with screams of chaos as hundreds ran, some not having time to even stop, or be stopped.
Adams’ phone rings again as it did before, only this time it vibrates, his hands flying away from each other, then finally he manages to calm themselves before looking back down.
The screen had turned to white, another floating open of some sort hovering just above his phone, not an app, not a message.
「[WORLD SYSTEM INITIALIZATION]
[Planet: Earth]
[Population: 8,214,,]
[Compatible Species Detected.]
[Humanity: Accepted.]
[Awakening Process: Beginning.]」
Adams stares at the unfamiliar words.
"Accepted?"
A strange pressure blooms in Adams, something tight like his muscles all over him.
People on the street were falling down to the ground. Screaming or not moving at all.
A man several floors lower has suddenly started glowing, the bluish light engulfing his body.
Someone screamed he was on fire before the sidewalk broke underneath where he was and Adams fell backward.
Something struck the road in the distance, exploding with enough force that dust and debris shot into the air and across the street.
Adams instinctively covered his face to the force, blinking through the bits of it, and when he looks back, a strange shape has appeared where the explosion had been.
It had four legs and the skin was black and longer than a person’s arms would be with a fanged mouth that had too many teeth, its eyes the dark red color of a fire pit smoldering.
People ran, and the strange thing looks around as it charges at the nearest one.
Adams’ heart pounds in his chest, never before has he seen something like this.
Another message appears before him on his floating window, words flashing from it with increasing speed before halting to show more text for him in the moment.
「[Hostile entity detected.]
[Classification: Unknown.]
[Threat Level: Low.]」
Low?
Adams laugh.
This thing tore into a random parked cars like it was made of paper, and someone else screamed, then in the commotion, Adams took the first thing he could in his bare hands, a metal chair, his hands shaking.
"This can’t be real,"
His phone vibrates again in Adams’ fingers, and suddenly the message changes, the display having only a line as a title.
「[Would you like to begin your Awakening?]
YES
NO »
He stares at the lines, a small bit of his thumb poised to tap before the words change again.
「[Scanning host...]」
Adams looks up at the screen again, brows knitting together.
"Why,"
Then, all at the same time, darkness covers over everything as the screen goes away, until it flicks again and another line appears.
「[ERROR.]」__
Adams looks back at the screen.
Again.
「[ERROR.]」
Adams’ phone is warm in his hand, the sensation not unpleasant until another line flashes to appear above the others just then.
「[Unauthorized existence detected.]」
Adams has no understanding what it means but it doesn’t matter as his phone rings from the next person.
Elena.
Adams answers eagerly, and he pauses to listen to a panting voice at the other end of it.
"Adams?
"Where are you?"
"I’m at home,"
"Stay there. Lock the doors."
"I can see something outside."
"I know.
No, Adams!"
Her voice is trembling with something different for once.
"It isn’t one of those creatures.
Adams stops abruptly.
"What do you mean?"
"I can see something in the sky."
He looks up, watching the great thing in the heavens above.
It had paused in its decent, but a new crevice has opened behind it, revealing something far larger peering through it with a set of strange, inhuman eyes.
Elena’s whispers brush over his senses at a strange, hushed timbre, pulling his attention back on his phone, not the mass above and away them with hundreds of thousands feet above the earth.
"Why does it look like it’s watching us, Adam...", she says, his heart beating heavily in his chest.
He looks up at it, and sees two big eyes for a long, long moment in the sky through the holes where lights flickered out, blinking.
The whole world shudders as it rises, and every system display the same one message.
«[WELCOME TO THE NEW AGE.]»
At midnight, our old world ends.
And as the last traces of light fade into nothingness, none know it yet. But Adams has already met its end. Something far stranger just begins now.