The Core: The Dark Enemy

9. The dark enemy

For the inhabitants of earth, the day that the Uplift happened was a day that would never be forgotten.

For the many who were sleeping at the time, having missed the panic that flooded billions of hearts in the moments when the light of the sun was taken away, they awoke to a new world.

To a new way of living.

For those who witnessed the darkness suddenly descend they were given an inside look at the power of a cosmic invader. There was no fight, no determined and impossibly lucky human hero capable of defeating the odds and liberating all of humanity from a blundering and badly written alien force. Nothing played out like any of the books or movies created by man. If an alien force could traverse the stars to reach our tiny planet, a young home yet unable to advance to living on other planets within its very own solar system, surely there would be nothing that we could do to stop them.

Indeed, there was only overwhelming power on display.

Everyone was touched, and everything was inspected by the light-absorbing black material. Some described it as liquid quicksilver by those that were fortunate to be near active light sources at the time. It was able to move at impossible speeds and was able to change its shape to suit any function. In the first moments of its arrival, it diffused, turning into mist, and spread everywhere as though searching for something before reconverging and... changing the local environment.

Trash was taken away, things were repaired and cleaned, and wonders were beheld by millions.

Across the planet, things changed nearly instantaneously to the human eye as Kevin, Nurse, and all of his AI went to work at protecting the earth from the traps that Magus had set up.

They almost didn't make it in time.

One weapon must have been set on a hair trigger setting because Kevin's swarm had to encapsulate the blast and rapidly moving area-of-death arrays as it was being dispersed in the middle of a busy city. It might have been pre-planned by Magus, perhaps an extra laugh at Kevin's expense as Tela radiation pulses began to randomly decimate cities as he was talking.

As it was, the hundreds of small orbs designed to flood the city with lethal levels of radiation managed to blast through dozens of skyscrapers in the first instant before Kevin's swarm could arrive. Critical structural damage was achieved in several of the buildings, causing Kevin's swarm to need to shore up the buildings and to encapsulate the small deadly arrays before they could do more damage.

Many people died, either from being in the blast radius or from being instantly cooked alive. It was a tragedy that made Kevin, all of him as the swarm, work even harder.

Many thought they were going to die in those first moments as the sky went dark.

That is until the Tutors arrived.

—

Melody averted her gaze as a new patron entered the darkly lit hallway and smiled at the lineup of women available for his selection.

It wasn't a kind smile, no, it had a bitter evilness to it. A taint of pain and despair to come to whichever girl or girls he picked. There were guys and boys in the lineup as well but Melody could tell by how his eyes flowed past them as to which sex would be the bearer of his needs.

She didn't even know what time it was... it could have been early morning or late at night for all she knew. She didn't have many bright memories anymore, not since this hell began.

She had been on vacation, a cruise actually, just enjoying her life with her sisters when suddenly she had lost consciousness while walking back to her cabin late one night.