Terrell Starr High School, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Monday, October 7th, 2019. 07:22f.

The world was scheduled to end that day, at rush hour, which was not until roughly eleven hours later. On planet Earth, more than seven billion sentient beings went around their daily lives. Some were asleep, others were going to sleep, while a few just woke up. Among them, was a seventeen-year-old girl.

The sun had yet to rise over the horizon. The celestial sphere never missed an appointment and today it would shine upon the Peach State in twelve minutes. Yet the sky was already painted in shades of blue and light orange, a few stubborn stars who didn't get the memo still shining thinking it was yet night.

Sara got off the school bus and followed the flux of students to the school grounds.

"Hey, Sara!"

"Good morning, Sara!"

"My angel!"

Boys and a few girls swooned left and right.

Flapping her white wings at the compliments, Sara smiled and waved at the other teens. When she transferred to the high school two and a half years ago, she sent shockwaves. A national celebrity, Sara and her almost nine yards of wingspan were impossible to miss. She looked at the trio waiting for her.

"Hey, guys? How are the most wonderful ladies in the whole school?" Sara grinned.

Mary let out a short burst of giggles. Pamela raised her hand to exchange a high-five. This time, nobody worked in the business of bursting their perineum with a black latex dowel. Christine winked at her. The blonde still unsure of where her sexual preferences laid. It was platonic and she was already hooked up with a certain football player. She respected the boundaries Sara imposed, though. But they were all her friends, her clique. The popular girls at school. Sara made a point to give each one of them a warm hug.

Sara turned around and addressed her crowd of admirers.

"Hey, everyone! We're having the bunker livestream party today," Sara said. "Make sure to let everyone know. Everyone's invited, even your parents! You have to come! We'll party like the world is going to end! Sixteen hundred sharp, cadets! Dismissed!"

The kids laughed, cheered, saluted, and went to class.

Sara had tears at the corner of her eyes. She worked hard. Really hard. Commercials, video and photo shoots, appearances on live TV, crowdfunding, fundraising, and training. Through a certain Major, she managed to try at piloting military helicopters and earned praise from the pilot officers. She had a video collaboration with the DOD official channel to boost recruitment all over the nation.

She was a huge name in the prepper community. Major canned food brands sent her literal metric tons of samples and she bought even more with a big discount.

She had four years to prepare. To train. Sara felt readier than ever for what was about to come. She was going to wrangle victory out of this tragedy. She was going to save hundreds.

In these years, she lobbied to make October 7th the National Prepper Bunker day. It would be the third time the date was celebrated nationwide. She entered sponsorship deals with hunting, survival, and emergency food companies and organizations. She even had her own brand of camping and survival gear. Today, people all over the world would go into their bunkers for a simulation. Sixteen hundred hours sharp.

What Sara intended was to have the biggest amount of people in her giant bunker built in place of an used car dealership right next to Hickory Ridge landfill. She partnered with a company specialized in building big shelters from California who had about five other bunkers similar to hers all around the country and one in Europe.

Her shelter could host seven hundred people and an equal number of pets and livestock for up to five years without access to the surface. It was designed to withstand blasts similar to those the USA used on Japan at the end of WW II. It had a library, all sorts of power tool (courtesy of Home Depot), 3-D printers, stocks of seeds, fertilizer, food, a massive water reservoir, a stock of spare solar panels, coal-powered electrical generators, lots of coal, disassembled wind turbines, everything the best survivalists in the nation could think of.

She also had spare alternators and brand-new industrial-size Lithium batteries (from that car company that stole a scientist's name) to bring the nearby solar plant (formerly a landfill) back online as soon as possible. 1 gigawatt of power right on her doorstep.

The place cost her sixty million to build, including the land. It was hers only on name. The real owner was a holding and a lot of the funds was raised through crowdfunding and angel investment. Sara's brand was worth a lot.

This time, she felt like beating the Apocalypse.

She also spent the last two years opening the Mana Channels of as many people as she could. She had to hide it under a veneer of being a spirit healer but the results some of her "patients" displayed quickly dispelled any skepticism. Some people, like Brent and Mary, Pamela, Christine, Hainsworth and some volunteers even had their Mana channels cleaned to the point Sara was confident they would stay awake through Armageddon. She went slowly over the years and used a brand of black mud that was popular skin treatment (FDA approved, even) to disguise the cleansing as some therapeutic bullshit.

Sara made sure that every major character in this drama and their families would have a fighting chance. She even arranged to have Martha Hainsworth and "friendzone" Ted dining home with her father. And she also got Corporal Peterson AKA the Necropolis King transferred to Nevada.

She didn't want to jinx it so she didn't vocalize or thought how confident she was.

*

*

Rooftop, Sara's underground bunker, Conley, Clayton County, Georgia. Monday, October 7th, 2019. 17:40.

Some would say there was no better day for Armageddon than a Monday. They would soon learn there was no such thing. All days of the week were equally bad.

But this time she had four years to prepare. Sara had four hundred and sixty-seven people in the bunker. All of them with enough clearance in their Mana Channels to survive what was about to come, a few of them, like Mary, clean enough to stay awake and function. She wasn't sure if Granny Amelia Hernandez would make it; she was too old. But Sara did what she could.

She sat on the roof and watched the Celestial drama unfold once more.

She saw the valiant Heavenly Host on its final charge. Angels of various shapes, from humanoid giants made of glinting gold to balls of feathers and eyes with eight wings. Yet they all radiate Divinity, a glory to behold. She felt she could spend an eternity witnessing each detail of their marvelous figures which appeared as detailed as if up close, regardless of the infinite distance. She could see it all in rich detail as if they were an inch from her nose.

Her Fate was to witness that scene, no matter the dimension she traveled to.

On the other side, the depths of sulfurous caves full of tormented, wailing souls and molten magma, wicked chains, and rivers of smoldering blood, caustic vapors which could melt flesh in seconds. And the demons. Wicked hulking beings made of bone, pulsing rotten flesh, pus, clotted veins, twisted sinew, horns, fangs, bones attached all wrong. Creatures that shouldn't move yet had the feline grace of an apex predator as they tensed to strike. Barbed spears, jagged swords of impossible geometry intended to cause as much pain as possible.

The denizens rose from the pits of hell as the demonic hordes rushed to battle against the heavenly host on the other side, defending the gates of paradise. It was far, far away yet she could see every blow, every demon slain and every celestial downed in the massive clash. Frozen by fear and awe, she could only witness the final battle as it grew to occupy her whole field of view, unobstructed by mundane things like concrete, or the steel of the fire stairs outside her window. Her Fate was to be a witness.

Her heart still clenched for the Heavenly Host as it seemed that every Celestial was a dumb drone, despite their beauty, as they dutifully marched to their death in the Final Battle. Sara's augmented reflexes and senses took it all in. A normal human mind would be mired in the big picture, blurring as it tried to preserve itself from the madness. Not her. She watched every exchange with bated breath, even though she'd seen it a handful of times before.

Heaven and hell crumbled and fell on Earth. It was as if the sky itself was torn asunder and a gash impossible to exist in the tridimensional world opened all over the planet. Mountains of sulfur and pits of magma, rocks of all kinds fell from Hell as chunks of pearly towers and idyllic meadows of Heaven did the same. No place on the planet seemed to be safe from the infinite shower of debris.

Yeah. Fuck those bastards. Did they really have to use Earth as their cosmic landfill?

Reality bent and folded as the two realms weren't satisfied with sending only their inhabitants into the fray. A majestic castle standing atop the clouds trembled under the cataclysmic battle below, its exalted halls crumbled and met the torrential downpour from the rivers of steaming blood and smoldering magma dragging the souls of the damned in a whirlpool of madness... The pristine walls, battlements, and machicolations crashed upon the abyssal depths, extinguishing billions of penitents. Another pulse of eldritch energy escaped these two dimensions and washed over the mortal realm.

And there it was. Mana bathed the Earth. She could hear people screaming downstairs, could smell the burnt flesh. She also could hear the volunteer first responders lending aid to the people below, moving them to cooling baths, putting bags of ice on their bodies. All to help them endure the infusion of Mana. Her heart ached for those who wouldn't survive. She asked herself if she could've done more.

Sara wept for humanity.

The debris ignited in the atmosphere and the combined glow of millions of meteorites drowned the dying rays of the sun, leaving trails of dark smoke behind, clouding the firmament, and choking the atmosphere. Her gaze focused on one singularity, a glowing golden meteor, too small for the naked eye. Just as before, she could see it in an uncannily crisp definition. And it was coming straight at her.

What?

Was it Verachiel again? Sara summoned her scythe and prepared.

A burst of power sent the shower of debris away, clearing the skies above Atlanta. Not even the smoke clouds were spared and sunlight filtered in a huge cylinder over Georgia. It was bigger than before. And yet the golden projectile kept approaching, slower than free fall but still fast.

The bolide didn't collide with the rooftop. Instead, it stopped and let their glow wane. The golden shell dissolved into nothing, faded as if someone pulled an alpha channel slider in an image editor.

She was surprised by what she saw. Three rings of golden metal, covered in eyes, each ring with two wings that reached a hundred feet in each direction. The rings themselves were forty feet wide.

Instinctively, she knew it was another type of Celestial. A Throne. She also felt the kinship in her soul. The identity of the visitor from Heaven was as clear as daylight to her.

The girl's voice broke the silence of a million screaming meteorites.

MDW: This is an experiment. I'm sorry if your browser's reader mode breaks the spoiler tag. You should disengage it to read the last line of this chapter, below. I'll repeat it at the start of the next one, just to make sure nobody misses it.

"Welcome to Earth, dad," Sara said without a smile, her voice laced with Mana. The tears still flowed down her cheeks but the girl managed to glare at the Celestial. "Mighty nice of you to drop and visit."