The Roc

It is incredibly awkward to navigate yourself between traffic on your bike while wearing a full sized backpackers backpack with a samurai sword sticking out the top.

I am intentionally neglecting to constantly reiterate the massive amounts of pain that my arm was causing me. It is not nearly as impressive to talk about your past if you moan and groan about how much pain your wound was giving you. Needless to say I did not maintain my normal biking pace.

Traffic was getting so bad that people started getting out of their cars to see if they could identify the culprit for the horrible traffic. I wound my way around the cars in the people intending to get out of this mess as soon as possible.

It was about 5:30 PM the peak of rush hour. The sun was still relatively high in the sky because it was June. A shadow suddenly seemed to be cast over everything that I could see. I judge this to be especially drastic considering it was a cloudless sky until this point.

Looking up to the sun that was shining just a second ago all I could see is a dark moving mass as if the densest cloud had just moved over the city at a terrifying pace. It took a full 3 seconds for whatever it was to stop blocking the sun. I looked behind me desperately trying to figure out what I had just seen.

I heard a concussive sound and an enormous wind knocked me from my bike to the ground. Looking up from the ground on my back I finally figured out what the book was talking about when it said myths and legends would be waking up once again. With one flap of its wings it had created a 40 mile an hour wind. In the sky above the city there was an enormous bird slowly gliding. Its wingspan had to be at least 50 meters.

I immediately knew that outside of military force there was nothing that humanity could do to stop something of such gargantuan proportions.

There above me was the most massive bird I had ever seen. It flapped its wings a few more times slowing down and landed on the top of the tallest building in the city. This simple action, that normal birds do all the time, caused a humongous disaster on the streets of the city. The wind currents of the air coming off the wings caused a number of miniature cyclones to speed down the streets of the city. This flipped buses and cars and threw people against buildings and trees.

I luckily was in the opposite direction to this disaster. I jumped back up to my feet and grabbed my bike intending to ride as fast as I could away from this horrendous monster. There was no way for humanity to oppose such a creature, as they were now. So the only option was to flee.

I looked back at the creature one last time, and this is what saved me from having my eardrum shattered. I saw that the creature had puffed up its chest and opened its beak, and I immediately flung my hands to my ears. From this moment onward I was very thankful that I had my thought acceleration. The horrifyingly loud screech of the bird followed just a second later. The horribly loud sound reverberated with all of the windows in the city causing many of the windows in the skyscrapers as well as those in the cars to shatter into tiny shards.

This was the turning point in the mentality of everybody within the city. It was not clear to most people how much the world had changed. Almost everybody was baffled about the mass hallucination that took place just hours ago, but they did not realize as I had after reading that book that nothing was the same as it was just a day ago.

This was the true start to E day for most people. Mass panic is not something that you really want to be in the middle of. In hindsight it was probably not the best idea for me to head towards the most populated area in the city, even if I needed better treatment for my current wound.

I realize there was no hope of me being treated at the hospital with the current calamity that had befallen the city. My first thought in this situation was astonishingly utilitarian. "How in the world am I going to be able to ride my bike with all this broken glass on the ground?" I knew that I had to get off the streets. Partially because of the monstrous bird that just appeared, and partially because it is hard to predict how people react to such events.

There are two options in situations like this run or hide. If you are insane you can add the third option, fight, but considering the fact that that gargantuan beast was about as large as a football stadium with its wings spread it seemed unlikely that I would be able to do any significant damage to it.

Hiding stood out to me as one of the better options at this point. This was because I figured something that large would have an immense amount of trouble dealing with small confined spaces.

Decision made I grabbed my bike picked it up and started running to the nearest open building. This was an enormous hassle however I figured having a functional bike would be very useful in the near future. The building I went to turned out to have a miniature shopping mall on the first floor.

The place was crowded with people running and screaming. There did not seem to be any rhyme or reason to the movement of the crowd. It seemed a whole lot like everybody had picked a random direction to run in just because at this point in time it seemed like running needed to be done.

I came into the shopping mall through the shattered window because regardless of how I considered it, it was unlikely for me to be able to get my bike through the revolving door.

Making a quick judgment right as I got inside, I ran to the shop that seem to be the smallest with the least amount of people nearby. It was also a plus that it was one of the only shops that was still open with the power outage.

It seemed that most of the shops had shut their doors, or had put down their metal shutter signifying they were no longer open. Once I got into the shop I put down my bike, put my back to the counter, and slid down to the ground hoping that I could finally get a rest. I figured it was unlikely that the giant bird would immediately zone in on this specific location and attack.

I took a quick look around to get my bearings. It appeared that I had chosen a new age healing store as my safe haven. There were a good number of crystals and oils among other things around the shelves. There was one mid-30s woman behind the counter looking at me with the most curious of expressions. It was as if she wanted to be displeased with me for barging into her store with the bike but she was more intrigued about what was happening than anything else.

There were a few younger girls in the back that look completely terrified with the entire situation. The running mass of people outside the store did not appear to be shoppers, but were simply the office goers from the higher floors. They were all trying to get away from the bird in whatever way they could. Either by getting to the garage so they could drive out of here as quickly as possible or simply running the other direction.

I originally thought that I would have some time here to really process what had just happened. In the end I had far less time than I had originally thought.

The first signs that a tragedy was about to happen more surprisingly innocuous. A pigeon fluttered into the mall from one of the broken windows. Pigeons are common enough sight in the city that nobody took a second glance. Nobody thought to consider that generally pigeons would avoid a screaming crowd of people. Following that a surprisingly large number of pigeons started appearing on the frame of the broken window.

I took notice at this point completely oblivious to what was happening, but still acknowledging that this was drastically different behavior than what I would expect from pigeons.

Suddenly this group of pigeons took flight into the building bee-lining straight to the screaming crowds. The tones of the screams started changing drastically once the birds made contact. They were screams of pain rather than screams of desperation. It appeared that the birds where using every weapon at their disposal to cause as much pain as possible to the panicking people. Talons and beaks were scratching and pecking as if they were starving and the last bit of food was human flesh.

This group of birds continued to attack the people while more and more birds started flying through the windows. It was no longer just the pigeons but a menagerie of different types of birds. It did not include only city birds as well there were many birds such as hawks and owls that looked completely out of place in a downtown mall.

I knew things were about to get bad for me. I turned to the woman behind the counter and quickly asked "Can you close the shutter?" pointing to the same shutter that was down for so many of the other shops around the mall.

She seemed to be thinking along those same lines because she immediately nodded digging in one of the drawers for a pair of keys. I took off my backpack but kept on my bike helmet. It was about to get desperate and I figured I needed as much protection as I could get.

I pulled my samurai sword out of the backpack and unsheathed it. Stepping out of the store, I turned back and shouted that I would try to keep the birds out of the store for as long as I could. I was really hoping that she could get that gate closed as soon as possible.

When I turned back to the birds it was shocking how much closer they were to me. The increased perception speed made it appear that the birds were moving a half speed. now birds flying at half speed are drastically easier to hit with a katana then those flying at full speed, but the issue is that my muscles also still only move it half speed, and there were tens of birds coming my way.

I was forced to improvise the most effective bird killing strategy that I could come up with. It turned into a game of intercepting the birds with my sword rather than swinging my sword for each bird that needed to be killed. There is far less muscle movement required to align the sword so that the birds will fly into it then there is to slice the birds out of the sky one at a time. The first few birds that came died with very little fanfare. I never realized that bird were such fragile things, but as the numbers of birds increased it became drastically more difficult to prevent any from passing me, and getting into the store.

After what seemed to be an hour, but most likely was 30 seconds, I heard a call behind me. "I am closing the shutter now. Get in here as quickly as you can." It jumped backwards just as the shutter slid downwards.

The timing could not have been more perfect, but it seems that still wasn't enough because just as the shutter slid past our knees a silver-ish blur shot past my leg into the store. I sliced at it just as it was moving past me, but instead of the normal splash of blood or crunch of bone that I had been seeing and hearing until now, there was a clang and a shower of sparks as my katana hit something that was clearly not a simple massive of feathers and bones.