Chapter 321: Destruction
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to my Amy. Happy birthday to you."
Amanda chuckled as she looked at the small cake Kyle had baked for her.
The little conical party hat looked almost comical on him, and the rest of the setup was no different. A handful of balloons decorated the room, while the soft glow of the candles cast a warm light between them.
"Come on now. Make a wish," he said, placing the cake between them before lighting the single candle.
"Hmm..."
Amanda closed her eyes. Whatever wish she made brought an even brighter curve to her lips.
A moment later, she opened her eyes and gently blew out the candle.
Suddenly, Kyle blew a party horn and grabbed a small confetti popper, twisting its cap with enthusiasm.
Nothing happened.
He twisted it again.
Still nothing.
"Agh, this thing."
Amanda broke into laughter and took it from him. With a simple twist of the knob, the popper finally went off, sending a shower of sparkling confetti straight onto Kyle.
He froze beneath the glittering mess.
Amanda laughed even harder.
"Ah... it was supposed to fall on you, but anyway. Here, cut the cake."
He urged her forward, holding the knife out to her.
As Amanda began cutting into it, he quickly added, "It might be a little burnt. I made it in a pan."
There was a hint of guilt in his voice. He had messed up a little while following the recipe, and for the first time, Kyle found himself regretting never having bothered to buy a microwave.
Amanda took a bite.
She hummed in delight, her eyes lighting up as she tasted it.
"This is really good. I swear."
Kyle’s lips curved into a small smile.
"Well, I made sure there was plenty of chocolate."
He paused before letting out a quiet sigh.
"Sorry. I couldn’t do anything more than this."
Amanda frowned.
"What do you mean, just this? This is the best birthday I’ve ever had."
Kyle laughed softly.
"You celebrated your birthday at the biggest hotel in the city, surrounded by your family. What could possibly be here that you didn’t have there?"
"You."
The single word left her lips without hesitation.
And somehow, that simple answer silenced him completely.
She leaned closer and whispered, "You can make any day the best day of my life, Kyle. That is how much influence you have over me."
The words softened something within him. Kyle leaned in and captured her lips in a gentle kiss.
She tasted sweet.
"Careful now. If you keep kissing me like this, we might end up celebrating my birthday in my birthday suit."
Kyle chuckled at her teasing before pulling back.
"What did you wish for, Amanda?"
She narrowed her eyes.
"Do you really want to know?"
He nodded twice.
"Yes, I do. You looked pretty content with it."
Amanda exhaled softly and lowered her gaze.
"Between the two of us, I want to be the first to leave this world."
Kyle’s shoulders sagged.
"Why... would you wish for something like that?"
She shook her head.
"Even a single day without you in this world would feel like a burden. So, I would rather go first..."
Tnnng
For some reason, the memory flashed through his mind as he stood there, staring at the lifeless body of the woman he loved.
Gone.
She was dead.
Veronica. Blake. Everyone.
They were all dead.
Kyle stared at them.
His eyes no longer resembled human ones. The pupils had thinned into vertical slits, gold bleeding into the sclera like ink spreading through water.
The ground beneath his feet had already scorched black, the asphalt bubbling at the edges of his shadow.
Ethan had burned into nothingness. Not even ash remained where he’d been standing, only a faint outline pressed into the concrete like a photograph left too long in the sun.
The growing Genesis inside him kept swelling, feeding on grief it didn’t know how to hold, and the surface of him could no longer contain what it was being asked to store.
A hairline crack split the ground near his boot. Then another, branching outward like frost on glass.
The railway yard groaned, metal shrieking against metal as one of the tracks buckled upward, sleepers popping loose one by one.
A boxcar tilted, slow at first, then toppled with a crash that scattered gravel in every direction.
The trembling spread. Streetlights flickered along the yard’s perimeter before their bulbs shattered outward, glass raining down like hail. Somewhere close, a dog was barking itself hoarse.
Kilometers away, beneath the Temple under PSC’s protection, something deep in the earth answered.
A low hum built first, felt more than heard, rattling teacups off shelves and setting off car alarms in the streets outside.
The hum climbed into a whine, and the whine climbed into a scream of stone and steel.
TUUUUUNG!
Golden light tore upward through the Temple’s floor, punching a crater into the earth beneath it.
Support beams folded like paper. The dome above cracked down the center and caved inward, swallowing the floor and the PSC personnel in a single breath.
"What?! Fuck, run away!"
"Help me, somebody help me!"
"Contact the base, contact the base now!"
Soldiers scrambled for the exits. Some made it to the doors before the light reached them and burned the shape of their bodies into the walls.
Others were simply pulled backward, boots dragging furrows into the floor, arms flailing uselessly against a pull no muscle could fight.
It didn’t stop there.
In another city, a second Temple answered the call and split open along its foundation, a sinkhole of light devouring the plaza above it, fountains and benches and a line of parked cars folding into the pit like toys swept off a table.
A third followed. A fourth. Within minutes, every Temple across the globe had cracked open in the same golden ruin, one after another, like dominoes set up across continents and knocked down by the same invisible hand.
Rifts everywhere answered in kind, venting heat that turned rain to steam and grass to cinder in the space of a breath.
Their residents were burned to crisp before they understood what was happening to them.
People carrying Genesis of their own felt the surge ripple through them, a call answered against their will. Some grit their teeth and endured, veins lighting gold beneath their skin. Others weren’t strong enough.
They simply came apart, bodies unraveling into showers of golden fragments that drifted upward like sparks from a dying fire, then winked out.
The secret the government had spent decades burying was no longer a secret. Aether was visible now, undeniable, written across the sky in fault lines of light stretching from horizon to horizon.
But no one was left seated to record it, no camera steady enough to capture the whole of it.
Everyone who might have borne witness was either running from the wave of destruction rolling toward them, or had already been swallowed by it, becoming part of the very silence that would remain after.
The tremors were not limited to surface and the people.
Deep beneath the crust, something ancient and patient stirred awake. Fault lines that had slept for millennia woke together, threading fire across ocean floors and mountain roots alike.
The ground didn’t just shake anymore. It breathed, rising and falling in slow, sick heaves, like a body trying to hold in a scream.
Volcanoes long thought dead cracked their calderas open one by one. Smoke first, thin and grey, curling up like a question. Then ash. Then fire, spewing molten rock in arcs that painted the night orange for hundreds of kilometers.
The oceans reacted next. Water pulled back from coastlines in eerie, glassy retreat, exposing seabeds that hadn’t seen sunlight in centuries, stranded fish flopping in the mud, old shipwrecks emerging like skeletons unearthed from a grave.
Clouds began to gather where none should have formed, boiling upward into shapes too symmetrical to be natural, rings of pressure spiraling outward from every point a Temple had once stood. Lightning stitched between them in constant, silent flashes, too far apart to hear the thunder, too many to count.
The air itself grew heavy, thick with the smell of ash and ozone and something sweeter underneath, almost like burnt sugar, the residue of Genesis burning through flesh and stone in equal measure.
Satellites in orbit caught the first true image of it before their circuits fried and their feeds went to static: the planet wrapped in threads of gold, faint at first, then bright enough to be seen from the dark side of the moon, veins of light spreading beneath the skin of the world like something waking up inside a body far too small to hold it.
Cities that had stood for a thousand years folded into themselves like paper caught in a fist.
Bridges that had carried millions of footsteps snapped their cables and dropped into rivers already too hot to hold fish.
Entire coastlines redrew themselves in the space of a single night, maps rendered obsolete before anyone was left alive to update them.
Somewhere in the chaos, the moon itself seemed closer than it should have been, the tides answering a call that no longer made sense, pulled by something stronger than gravity ever was.
The world did not end all at once.
It ended the way a candle drowns in its own wax, slow, then faster, then gone, the last thread of gold light guttering somewhere over an ocean that no longer had a name for what it had become.
And at the center of all of it, kneeling in a scorched railway yard beside the body of the only person who had ever made him feel human, was him.
The one who ends it all.
Just then.
When the planet itself was caving in, ready to exploded into fragments....everything stopped at once.
Not because Kyle willed it. No, he was not in his mind to will anything.
But because somewhere far away, a deity made a certain decision.