On the other side of the fractured dimensions, millions of miles away from the Alced plateau, a standard afternoon in New York City turned into the end of days.The sky over Manhattan didn't turn dark; it unraveled.At exactly 2:42 PM, the standard blue horizon ripped open, revealing jagged, bleeding fractures of absolute violet and deep crimson that crawled across the atmosphere like cracked glass. The sun became a distorted, pulsing eye, its light fluctuating violently between brilliant blinding white and a sickening, dim gray.In the middle of Times Square, thousands of people froze, their smartphones slipping from their hands as the digital screens turned to static and melted. The massive electronic billboards flickered, sparkled, and dissolved into grey ash, their frames tumbling into the crowded streets below.Then, the gravity began to fail.A yellow cab, traveling at forty miles an hour down Broadway, suddenly lost its grip on the asphalt. The tires spun uselessly in mid-air as the two-ton vehicle lifted three feet off the ground, floating weightlessly alongside swirling clouds of garbage, stray papers, and shattered glass. People screamed, scrambling for handrails and light poles as their own feet drifted off the sidewalks, the fundamental laws of physics bending to a force they couldn't see.In the suburban sprawl of New Jersey, the earth itself began to reject its own weight. Large swathes of topsoil, ancient oak trees, and the asphalt of quiet cul-de-sacs broke away in massive, jagged chunks, drifting upward into the fracturing sky like islands of dirt. The tethers that had subtly bled the Earth of its vitality for centuries were snapping one by one under the pressure of Chris's rage, and the world was pushing back.Inside a high-tech observatory in California, alarms blared in a deafening chorus. Scientists stared in catatonic horror at their tracking monitors. The spatial equations that governed the rotation of the planet were dropping to zero."The atmospheric density is evaporating!" a technician gasped, his face dripping with sweat as he floated slightly above his leather chair. "It's like something is literally turning off the gravity grid from the inside out! At this rate, the tectonic plates are going to decouple by sunset!"Deep within the oceans, tidal waves miles high began to swell, drawn not by the moon, but by the catastrophic spatial shift rippling through the dimensional fabric.The Great Nothing had awakened. And on Earth, humanity was running out of time.