Chapter 12: Things Are Getting Worst

By day sixty of the endless deluge, the global television broadcasts had completely flatlined.

The emergency broadcast tones that had droned across public television for weeks were replaced by the harsh hiss of static. Satellite television uplinks dropped one by one as relay dishes on mainland skyscrapers were dragged into the murky depths or had their backup generators drowned.

The modern world—a hyper-connected web of digital commerce, social media, and twenty-four-hour news cycles—retreated into silence.

Only St. Jude’s Spire still watched.

Inside the island’s Tier-4 underground data facility, humming beneath layers of chilled nitrogen lines and electromagnetic shielding, technicians pulled down the dying breaths of the planet’s internet through hardwired orbital receptors. The data was thin, stripped of commercial noise, and almost entirely comprised of military distress bands and rogue peer-to-peer radio transmissions.

Julius sat in his personal quarters, draped in a soft cashmere robe, eating a plate of freshly sautéed tilapia and buttered asparagus harvested barely an hour earlier from Clara Chen’s vertical biospheres.

On the forty-foot panoramic digital display across his living room wall, three feeds played simultaneously.

One feed showed Paris. The Seine had swallowed the lower boulevards weeks ago, but now water lapped against the second tiers of historical stone facades. The iconic Eiffel Tower stood like a skeletal mast rising out of an inland sea, its lower girders caked in river silt and drifting vehicle carcasses.

The second feed was an aerial scan of Manhattan captured by a high-altitude autonomous weather drone. Central Park was an enormous brown lake. The avenues had become violent river canals where debris swept past the drowned canopies of Fifth Avenue storefronts.

The third feed was the system interface on Julius’s smartphone, resting on the polished marble coffee table beside his crystal glass of water.

A dull electronic chime sounded from the phone.

Julius dabbed his mouth with a linen napkin, picked up the device, and unlocked it.

A new system notification sat pinned to the top of his screen, glowing with an ominous crimson outline:

[Trial Update: Phase 1 — Day 62]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 488/500]

[Casualties Recorded: 12]

Julius raised an eyebrow.

Twelve dead already.

Two months into the Trial. No monsters had clawed out of subterranean depths. No extraterrestrial fleets had glassed the continents. No hellish dimensional rifts had spilled forth demons.

It was just water.

Ordinary, relentless, uninterrupted water.

Yet twelve candidates—individuals endowed with SSS-rank talents that defied physics, biology, and the natural laws of the universe—had already had their souls wiped from existence.

Julius tapped open the [World Chat]. The interface was grim. The bravado, the arrogant swagger, and the posturing from two months ago had vanished, washed away like salt in the storm.

— [NightCrawler]: Who died? Does anyone know who the twelve are?

— [GaleForce]: Pyromancer Jack is gone. His channel went silent two days ago. He was trapped on top of a cathedral in Rome. The storm never broke, he couldn’t ignite damp wood to stay warm, and he drowned when the roof collapsed under the water weight.

— [IronHide]: B-rank ’Aquatic Adaptation’ guy died too. He thought he could swim through the river in Munich. Got pinned against a submerged railway grate by an eight-knot current and crushed by a shipping container.

— [Viper]: You can’t eat superpowers. That’s the problem. I haven’t had clean water in five days. Everything in this godforsaken city tastes like sewage and motor oil. My guts are on fire.

— [Titan_01]: Shut up! I have fifty boxes of military crackers in my tower. If you want some, bring me antibiotics. I have an infected gash on my thigh from a sheet of corrugated tin and my leg is swelling up like a balloon.

— [Bloodhound]: Titan, you idiot, you have SSS-Class Titan Body. How did a piece of tin cut you?

— [Titan_01]: My power only turns my skin to stone when I activate it! I was sleeping, you bastard! The water rose while I was knocked out from exhaustion and a floating piece of metal sliced my calf open! It’s green! Does anyone have penicillin?! I’ll trade you ten assault rifles!

Julius scrolled past the frantic messages with a cold, detached expression.

It was almost comical.

When the players stood before the great obsidian monolith in Heaven’s Realm, they had viewed survival through the lens of combat manga and video games. They imagined epic duels against apocalyptic overlords. They thought about punching dragons, cutting down armies of the undead, and dodging explosions in slow motion.

None of them had thought about sanitation.

None of them had considered that an SSS-rank physical powerhouse could die from drinking floodwater infested with Escherichia coli. None of them realized that a warrior who could shatter a tank with his bare hands was entirely helpless against sepsis when a rusted nail punctured his skin while foraging for food in the dark.

A human body—even one blessed by divine talents—was a biological machine. It required three liters of potable water a day. It required roughly two thousand calories of clean nutrition. It required dry clothing to stave off trench foot and hypothermia, and it required sterile environments to heal minor lacerations.

The combatants had spent two years sharpening their claws while sleeping in rented apartments and squandering their time on street brawls.

Now, civilization was gone, and their claws were useless. You couldn’t threaten cholera with a broadsword. You couldn’t incinerate dysentery with a fireball without burning your own entrails to cinder.

Julius set the phone down and looked through his private glass viewport.

Beyond the 8K camera feed, high up on the surface of St. Jude’s Spire, the Atlantic was a raging nightmare of black swells and howling eighty-knot winds. The rain fell like iron needles, relentlessly pounding the jagged cliffs.

Yet down here, in his quarters, the underfloor heating kept the room at a steady twenty-two degrees Celsius. The air circulating through the discreet wall vents had been scrubbed three times through charcoal banks and HEPA purifiers.

In the hospital two levels below, Dr. Halloway was currently inventorying two hundred crates of untouched amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin, and sterile surgical sutures.

In the farms, Clara Chen’s workers were packaging fresh greens and vacuum-packing smoked fish.

In the armories, Colonel Mercer’s men were running tactical reload drills in climate-controlled ranges, well-fed, dry, and thoroughly rested.