The city began to glitch.
In one blink, it became pixelated—flattened like an 8-bit game. The next, it warped into something out of a hyper-stylized animation, shifting from frame to frame with distorted gravity. Nothing held form.
Colors exploded in waves—red, cyan, yellow—spiraling into erratic lightning that tore across the skyline. Mino winced and shut her eyes; it was to bright and colorfull.
A tremor rattled beneath them.
"Ack?!" Yuruki slipped on the floating terrain—an island of cracked stone suspended in midair.
The group gasped. For one terrible second, hearts froze.
But then—thump—her fall was broken by a vertical column of hollow stone that rose out of nowhere, stretching endlessly beneath her like a ribcage of earth.
"I'm fine!" Yuruki called, her voice echoing upward.
Still, panic rose. Mino's thoughts scattered, breath tight.
What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? Are we gonna die here?
"Is the world ending?!" she cried.
Yoku's mechanical arm shot out and grabbed her by the sleeve just as she slipped. He pulled her in. "Stay close!"
The landscape convulsed again.
Snow began to fall—but only in patches. Some flakes were pink, others bone white. In other sections, thick clouds coiled like smoke, hiding entire buildings in mist. Leaves spiraled from nowhere. Somewhere, it began to rain. Hard.
Then came the animals.
They emerged like ghosts—anthropomorphic beasts, half-glimpsed. Transparent in parts. Walking the city. A pink elephant floated past, trumpet silent, before colliding into a billboard and vanishing in shards of color.
The group leapt down onto another plane—another broken chunk of road now hovering like a skybridge.
They weren't alone.
Pixelated characters. fantasy creatures. Beasts and Monsters. A monstrous head—ten meters tall—rose above the buildings, its four long arms crawling over rooftops, meat-like and lined with blinking eyes. Fish floated overhead in the sky, swimming through clouds as if the world had sunk underwater.
And everywhere: light. Not sunlight, but encrypted lightning—pulsing runes etched onto monoliths. Entire buildings shimmered with alien script, glowing in bright, unnatural white, rewriting the architecture like a glitched simulation.
The ground turned to sky. The sky turned to ocean.
A massive, floating square of water hovered above them, filled with fish, coral, and fragments of wreckage. Below it, stars flickered. Parts of the city bent into new landscapes—hills of pink moss, trees that sang. Music played from nowhere, a slow, off-key lullaby.
Yoku dropped to his knees in a pink pasture. His hands dug into the moss.
"Haaah…" he gasped. "I can't… I can't keep up with this…"
But he didn't stop.
Somehow, they reached a real floor again. Stable. Solid.
Above them, a dragon cut through the clouds. Below, gelatinous slimes absorbed twisted steel beams, and iron...
Then—
Everything stopped.
The chaos from the darkness stop and contracted, as if sucked into a hole of the portal in the ceiling. All light vanished. Floating debris fell. The sky returned.
BOOM. A colossal impact as every suspended thing slammed into the ground, shaking the city to its roots.
"OH MAN!" Yoku cried.
The three of them—Yuruki, Mino, and Yoku—sprinted, legs burning, toward a tunnel carved into the wreckage of the city.
Dust rained. Metal groaned.
Yoku fell, landing hard. Mino stumbled off his back.
They lay there, sprawled. Breathless. Burned out.
Yoku pinched his own cheek, blinking. "Hff… What the duck was all that?!"
"Hff… That… was… something," Yuruki managed between gulps of air.
The three of them lay there, arms stretched, fingers twitching with leftover adrenaline.
After a long silence—
"…Am I alive?" Yoku asked.
Yuruki sighed. "Tell that to myself. Ugh. I'm never going outside again…"
She ruffled her own hair, still shaking. "Ever."
She glanced at Mino.
"You okay there, kid?"
Mino blinked slowly. "Well… my legs are kinda numb. But I'm probably fine."
"Can you stand?"
Mino opened her mouth… paused.
Yuruki didn't wait. She reached down, grabbed a handful of dust—and clenched her fist.
The texture, the weight of it—everything hit at once.
And for a moment, they all felt it again.
That terrible, silent existential dread