The explosion of utopia - 7

Kaito looked up.

"What the hell was that?"

High above, where the sky curved around the edge of the dome of Utopia-7, a titanic crack opened in the protective structure like a fiery scar. The dome, that perfect dome that enveloped the city in its invisible shield, was now fractured. The glow that normally made it look like the real sky flickered, and the crack opened wider, as if an inconceivable force was pushing from the other side.
"Let's see!" Kaito shouted, tugging on Korrin's arm.

They climbed the hill of the meadow, where the holographic vegetation was beginning to fade. From there, they had a clear view of the sky... and of the crack, now expanded to several tens of meters long. Other citizens, on terraces or squares, were also watching in disbelief.

Suddenly, the center of the crack swelled, forming a dark oval. A gigantic pupil emerged from its core, opening with exasperating slowness. A colossal eye, as vast as an entire square, hovered just beyond the fracture. Its iris was a swirl of violet and crimson hues, and its gaze... it was not of this world.
"It's an eye..." Yuki whispered, her voice strangled with fear. Korrin stepped back a little, clutching the crystal key to his chest. The eye watched them. Not the city. Not the planet. At them.

And in an instant, without warning, the eye emitted a pulse. It was not light. It was not sound. It was a wave of pure rupture, a signal of logical destruction that traveled through the air like a knife through fabric, a pulse that sounded not at first like exploding crystals, but like a thousand voices whispering in unison from the void, as if the universe itself had forgotten its own language.
The dome of Utopia-7 exploded.

Thousands of fragments of solid energy, containment crystal and frozen plasma flew in all directions. A ring of fire spread along the edge of the rift, as if the city was being erased from a divine simulation. The sky collapsed in on itself.
From the meadow, the children watched as entire towers in the center of the city buckled. One of them, the commercial spiral of the North Zone, split in two and fell on a residential area. The lights of the skyscrapers went out one by one, while columns of fire and dust rose as if the city was being swallowed by hell.

The hexagonal plate of the dome spun in the air like a coin that had been tossed by the blind gods of the end. It reflected the broken light of the sky, spinning slow, beautiful and doomed. For an instant suspended in time, it seemed to dance. Then it descended.

With a sharp, metallic whistle that split the air and pierced not only the eardrums, but also reason, it rushed over the city. Its impact was brutal, precise, surgical. It pierced the heart of the administrative tower like a celestial scythe.
A transport capsule went down in flames, leaving a black trail in the air before impacting a floating park. Emergency sirens began to sound, first from one point, then from all. Drones were plummeting, people were running in panic, and above all... the eye was still open, unmoving and silent.
On the fourteenth floor, Liran - a soft-spoken accountant, with a back hunched by years and a schedule always marked by repetitive tasks - typed one last message to his wife: "I'm late, save some-". The word was left incomplete. The monitor exploded in front of him as if he had been shot straight from the stars.
He had no time to comprehend. His body was dismembered by the shock wave before he could let go of the cup he was holding. His right arm flew straight out the window, with the mug still intact, as if fate had a sense of humor.
Two floors below, Mirai, the receptionist, was painting her lips while humming an old song about hope and blue skies. The sharp rap of an arm against her desk snapped her out of her trance. Coffee-still hot, still aromatic-splashed her white dress with scarlet stains.

"Is that... vanilla coffee?" she managed to mutter.

There was no response. The roof gave way, and an avalanche of concrete, steel and fire buried her before she could let go of the lipstick tube. Only silence remained, punctuated by automatic alarms and echoes of the collapse.

On Main Avenue, the shockwave not only broke windows and raised debris: it frayed reality itself.

First, the air trembled. A visible distortion, as if the world were an oil painting that someone had just crumpled. Then came the din: a low, impossible sound, as if the sky were cracking from within.

Three teenagers were perched on a low ledge, amid nervous laughter and bets on who would capture the best angle with their drone-toy. They wore caps with LED lights, holographic T-shirts that changed color with the sun. One of them raised his arm, pointing to the collapsing dome in the distance.

"It's going straight to the central district! This is going viral!" he shouted, seconds before the wave reached them.

It was as if time stood still just for them.

Their bodies disintegrated in reverse order of life: first the caps that flew off like dry leaves, then the clothes that burned in a fireless combustion. The skin peeled off in sheets of bloody smoke, leaving the muscles red-hot for an instant. Then bones exploded into splinters polished by the force, disintegrating before they hit the ground. The last to fall were his drones, still spinning, capturing the last fractions of the disaster like disembodied eyes.

The nearby walls were splashed with a deep, vibrant red, as if a celestial painter had emptied his brush on the canvas of the world. No trace was left of who they had been, only the echo of their screams trapped in the ruins.

A few meters ahead, an old man was still at his stall selling luminous flowers. He had survived wars, solar crises, total blackouts... but not this. The last thing he did was adjust the hologram of his granddaughter on his watch. She was a little girl with golden curls and a blue dress, dancing with flowers in her hand.

"Grandpa, look, I made myself a wreath with the daisies from the garden!" laughed the digital girl, oblivious to the chaos.
When the wave reached him, his body vanished in the blink of an eye. There was no scream. There was no blood. Only his smoking shoes remained on the cracked asphalt. The hologram was still on, projecting the girl in a loop, repeating the same phrase over and over again in front of the most absolute silence.

The air was permeated with smoke, ash and that unnatural silence that follows a tragedy, when screams still don't know whether to escape or get caught in the throats. Korrin, on his knees, his eyes glazed over and his body covered in stardust, barely seemed to breathe. Next to him, Yuki hugged his legs, trembling, his gaze fixed on a non-existent point, as if the world had ceased to make sense.

Only Kaito was moving.

He was dazed... but standing. His chest rose and fell violently, as if the air was denied him, as if the weight of everything he had just seen wanted to crush him too. He took a step. Then another. The earth crunched beneath his feet, which still trembled with the echoes of the collapse, but he moved forward.

When his gaze met Korrin's, something exploded inside him.

The girl's pendant, that blue crystal key that her father had entrusted to her, began to glow. Not with a strong, aggressive light, but with a tremulous, almost sad glow, as if it knew that something terrible had just changed the course of the world. The blue sparkle danced like a star caught in a tear.

Kaito swallowed saliva. He took another step. He clenched his fists.

"Real men are not those who feel no fear," his father's deep voice recalled, one night under the old tree in the garden. "They are those who, though they tremble inside, stand up...because there are others who cannot."

Kaito closed his eyes for a second. Then, he shouted, "Korrin! Let's go! We have to go!".

She did not respond. The light in the pendant pulsed with more intensity, as if she knew that time was running out.

And then, he felt it. That slimy crunching sound in the distance. That sound, like dry twigs being twisted... or bones being crushed by invisible teeth.
Kaito turned on his heels. He saw them.