The dark-skinned girl with braids came back, her boots skidding across the cold stone as she sprinted straight toward Axel.
As it turned out, as they all ran scared for their lives, the short, red-haired boy had suddenly doubled down in pain. Clutching at his torso, he collapsed to his knees, completely unable to take another step. He could no longer hold on to the immense, suffocating pressure raging inside his chest. And in that agonizing moment, it finally clicked.
The awakening..
.....
Following the sudden freeze, a roaring wall of blue flames erupted across the threshold, consuming an even larger part of the advancing swarm in an instant.
The blistering blue fire came straight from the short, red-haired boy. He was still trembling violently on his knees, his eyes wide with a mix of shock and residual terror. He had pissed himself at some point during the sheer agonizing panic of surviving.
"Get up! I've got you!" the girl with glasses shouted, rushing over to Axel.
She hooked her arm beneath Axel's shoulder, taking his weight and helping carry him away from the doorway as blood continued to seep from his wounded legs.
As they dragged him deeper into safety, a shimmering, light purplish barrier expanded across the entrance, locking into place over the threshold. The scaled, tortoise-like bugs slammed hard against the translucent energy field, their translucent wings beating uselessly as they found themselves completely unable to cross.
At this point, heavy blood loss was rapidly making Axel delirious, his vision swimming as a lightheaded dizziness washed over him. Looking up at the short, red-haired boy, he let out a weak, raspy laugh, his chest heaving with exhaustion. Yet despite the chaos, Axel kept holding on to the dense energy surging inside him, convinced down to his core that letting go would mean immediate death.
"Come on, move your feet!" the girl with glasses grunted, strain evident in her voice as they moved him deeper inside the safety of the corridor.
All around them, the rest of the awakeners had finally stopped holding back the aether, allowing their stored energy to cascade outward in waves.
What none of them realized in the heat of the struggle was the historical significance of what they were enduring. The thing with previous years of awakenings was that the average duration a person could suppress the power before being forced to release it was only between three to five minutes. The absolute elites of past generations could hold out for ten minutes. And the absolute best of the best—the rare exceptions in recorded history—had only ever managed twenty minutes.
Due to the overwhelming panic, the current average awakeners had managed to hold on for forty-plus minutes. For those who had taken the elevators, once their awakenings finally burst forth, there were zero casualties among them.
Meanwhile, the millions of people who had fled into the barracks and the surrounding buildings had been desperately suppressing and holding onto that explosive energy for over two hours.
Those who were still awake and standing amidst the unbearable strain finally reached their breaking point. As they surrendered to the pressure, they unleashed powers of untold proportions, shattering the air with devastating force.
Without realizing it, humanity had just gained elites of elites.
They just had to survive long enough to use them.
Leaving only Axel, who was still desperately holding on.
Since no one else in the room was holding the aether in anymore—everyone around him having surrendered to the flow—all the stray, uncontained aether in the atmosphere began to gather around him in a dense, invisible vortex. It surged directly into his body, filling him to the absolute brim and pressing violently against his brain until the agony amplified to an agonizing peak.
Axel gritted his teeth, his jaw trembling violently as tears of blood squeezed from his eyes. His body convulsed under the overwhelming pressure, every nerve ending screaming as he struggled just to stay alive.
Yet, paradoxically, that blinding, excruciating pain was the only thing keeping Axel awake. He felt his pulse weakening, the dark pool of blood beneath his mangled legs growing colder, and he knew down to his marrow that he was dying—and that if he surrendered to the darkness now, he would never wake up.
He did not want to die. The thought of leaving his mother alone—leaving her to face this unforgiving world without him—anchored his fracturing mind to reality.
"I can't die here," Axel rasped through blood-slick lips, his fingers digging into the stone floor. "Not yet..."
Outside the barracks, the bugs suddenly started behaving weirdly. They abandoned their frantic clawing at the rest of the surviving students, their translucent wings buzzing in a frantic, synchronized pattern as the entire horde pivoted in unison. Drawn like moths to a violent flame, they began rushing blindly toward Axel's position, completely obsessed with the sheer density of aether concentrating around him.
Around him, the newly awakened students struggled to maintain their offensive. Though they possessed powerful abilities, most only had limited resistance to the violent side effects of their own powers. The pyromaniacs could only withstand so much heat before the backdraft scorched their skin, and the ice manipulators suffered severe frostbite as cold seeped into their flesh.
Only a few abilities did not carry such brutal consequences. Those wielding force fields and telekinesis maintained their defenses with far less physical strain, watching in horror as the swarm hammered relentlessly against the force field, desperate to tear through to Axel.
The short girl with glasses, whose name was Isla, was all that stood between Axel and being torn apart by the relentless swarm.
Sweat poured down her face as she pressed both hands forward, maintaining the shimmering barrier that sealed off the corridor to the building where Axel lay. But as more and more bugs battered furiously against the force field, their scaled bodies slamming against the translucent energy with horrific force, she started feeling the crushing mental load. An agonizing throb built behind her temples, making her vision blur behind her lenses as the strain threatened to snap her focus.
"Isla, can you hold it?!" shouted Mia, the dark-skinned girl with braids, hovering over Axel's bleeding form.
"I... I'm trying!" Isla gasped, her voice trembling as her knees shook under the pressure.
Seeing that the horde had completely stopped focusing on them and was instead piling frantically against Isla's barrier, the remaining awakeners took their chance. Panicked and desperate to survive, they quickly fled deeper into the barracks, abandoning the threshold entirely.
Their hurried footsteps faded down the hall, leaving only Isla, Mia, and Gael—the red-haired boy who had pissed himself out of fright—standing alone in the dim passage, staring in utter horror at the countless bugs mounting right outside the glass-like orb.
Hairline cracks began to spread across the surface of the force field, spider-webbing outward from the places where the bugs slammed their weight.
In the brief, horrific silence of the siege, all four of them realized they had formed a strange, unspoken bond forged in shared trauma. When the crowd fled, Mia, Gael, and Isla had gathered around Axel purely on instinct, driven by the instinct to protect the one who had held the line.
Though, looking at the horde breaking through, they bitterly regretted it now.
Mia stood over Axel, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps as she stared down at her hands. The severe frostbite from her icy power had taken its toll—her left hand had frozen solid and snapped clean off, leaving the right arm as nothing more than a ruined stump at the wrist. Blood dripped onto the cold floor as she braced herself beside the others, waiting for the barrier to shatter.
The tortoise-like bugs moved in relentless waves, launching violent, coordinated attacks against the cracking surface of the barrier. Step by step, the small group was forced to move back deeper into the corridor, their boots slipping on stone as the pressure mounted.
"It's not going to hold!" Isla cried out, blood running from her nose as the mental strain threatened to crush her focus.
The forcefield splintered violently, spiderwebbing with deep fractures, and just as it was about to collapse completely under the weight of the horde, everything stopped.
A sudden, unnatural stillness washed over the passage. Every single bug froze mid-air and mid-stride. Then, with a horrific, sickening crunch of folding carapaces, the creatures began to gradually compress into themselves. Over a million bugs collapsed inward, their scaled bodies crushing into dense, lifeless husks before falling dead onto the blood-stained ground.
High above the threshold, the glowing warning glyphs flickered. At some point during the chaotic defense, the alert had turned from red to yellow.
They had been so entirely caught up in the brutal fight, losing all awareness of their surroundings and paying no attention to the broader station systems, utterly focused on the desperate struggle just to survive.