[Celestial Academy — Central Courtyard — 11:18 AM]
Twenty minutes since the third creature had emerged from the ground.
The Academy's central courtyard no longer looked like the same place.
The tiles in the center had been pushed up from below when the creature came out — forty‑kilogram stone blocks displaced as if they were paper. Four of the courtyard's eight decorative trees had been uprooted by the initial movement. The windows of the east building were all shattered, the stone frames cracked three stories up.
And the lesser creatures.
They had been emerging for twenty minutes.
In groups of six every three seconds at first. Then the rhythm changed — more irregular, denser.
It was no longer possible to count them individually. The central courtyard had enough that the ground between them was occasional space rather than normal space.
Two meters each.
