Eruption

At the same moment.

Jean, the captain of the team that had played against Altin's team when the first signs of the 5th force began, was sulking on the stands.

Ever since that day, he had had frequent fights with Altin's friends, most notably François. Once, they had even come to fists, the result being Jean shamefully beaten.

He enjoyed watching Altin and Julien, in the same team, fighting against François and Paul, in the opposite team. He also didn't miss that Altin very obviously tried to avoid his friends. He remembered that the anomaly had started after HE kicked the ball high in the air.

Who knows if he had something to do with it, after all.

At that moment, he saw Altin stopping moving and curiously throwing gazes all around him. Then, he heard Altin shouting, "Stop the game!" at the referee.

It looked like Altin was about to discredit himself to Jean, so he decided to record a video, zooming on Altin's face.

---

Altin felt too worried. Pressure had accumulated to the point he thought that the situation was too dire to ignore.

He had run towards the referee, screaming to stop the game, saying: "We must stop the game! Something very dangerous is about to occur! Everyone must leave!"

Many people heard him, but nobody moved, except François, Julien, and Paul.

This resulted in the game being paused.

Now, Altin considered how to convince everyone to leave at once. So many people watched him, but they didn't seem to believe him.

François, Paul, and Julien joined him.

Time... was running out.

There was no time.

Altin explained to his friends: "Just a while ago, the tingling feeling was no more than a gentle push; now, whenever I allow myself to feel it, I feel like my head is going to explode. This has never happened before."

François, Julien, and Paul took no time to understand how grave the situation.

"Even I feel it..." Julien said.

They nodded.

"We must hurry..." Altin pressed. He was trembling of fear now. He had the worst possible feeling.

Among the four, the less shy one was François without an ounce of doubt, perhaps because of his tall and strong body. He said: "Julien, ring the fire alarm in the gym; everyone else, we try to convince people to leave."

They spread out, shouting to everybody to leave because an anomaly was about to occur.

This time with 2 more voices added to Altin's, everyone's attention was picked.

People considered whether they should leave. They had yet to see anything weird or unique.

They started to doubt.

"Hurry..." Altin thought to himself. He felt lethal danger.

Typically, he wouldn't expose himself openly; after all, he was shy to anyone not his friend.

However, the urgency of the situation created an urge that exceeded everything.

He shouted with as much air as he could gather: "We must HURRY! We must GO, NOW! Or we'll DIE!".

He had screamed so desperately that his throat hurt, but he had succeeded in shaking people's minds. At that moment, he had even exceeded the voice of François.

"You heard him! I feel it too! An anomaly is about to appear!" François boomed with an equally sonorous voice a moment after.

And then...

The fire alarm rang.

People started to run towards the exit of the gym. Panic had finally infected them. A total of 6 classes, each with 30 students, for a total of 180 students, all ran towards the double-doors marking the exit to where safety awaited them.

Seeing that, Altin, Paul, and Julien dared not stay any longer. They followed the flow towards the exit. They acted intuitively, their fear gripping their stomach and heart cold as ice.

Every second, a dozen people would rush out of the gym.

Altin was among the firsts to exit.

Once outside in the schoolyard, he ran a good distance away from the gym and paused to find his friends. He began to relax; he didn't feel any lethal danger anymore.

Julien, Paul, and Altin found each other quickly. When Altin realized François was nowhere in sight, he asked: "Where is François? Where is he?"

"I don't know; I thought he ran with us to the exit," Paul said.

"I... think I saw him talking to people just before I crossed the exit doors," Julien remembered.

Realization suddenly dawned on them.

François had stayed to convince whoever stayed to leave.

Ugly faces appeared on each of the three.

"We can't leave him..." Altin murmured to himself. He feared for François as much as he feared for his life. His heartbeat began to beat incredibly fast.

He decided to come back to the gym. "Stay here!" He said to Paul and Julien while he ran furiously back to the gym.

At that moment, few people were still coming out of the gym. Most of the students had left already, gathering outside to discuss what was happening among themselves.

The closer Altin came to the gym, the more uneasy he felt.

The foreboding that he was walking back into a death trap threatened to overwhelm him again.

He clenched his fist.

Finally, he arrived at the double doors. He walked in.

There he saw him.

François arguing with a group of students around their age, sitting casually on the stands, some playing with their phones.

"You have to leave now! This is serious! You'll die if you stay! Go, GO !" Altin heard François say.

"Naaa, leave us here, you psycho. Nothing is happening, see? We'll wait here till everyone comes back." One of the students replied.

They were ignoring the alert thrown by Altin and his friends.

Altin considered what to do. "We can't wait..." He thought.

He decided in half a second.

He ran towards François, took his arm, and pulled him towards the exit. "François, we die if we stay a second later; forget about them, please!"

Altin pleaded François with his eyes.

Unfortunately, François was both heavier and taller than him. So pulling him wasn't easy.

François noticed how scared and pleading Altin's gaze was. A part of him wanted to leave as soon as he could; another part refused to abandon the students in front of him, even if they were wrong.

François had it rough in his childhood. Just like Altin, Julien and Paul, he had become orphaned early in his life. He was the child of a man who killed his mother, later killed by the police during his arrest.

The tragic story had been immediately known by the neighborhood. At that time, François was still a child aged 6 years old. He had just started primary school, but already his life was destroyed.

His situation came to the other kids' ears, and he was bullied a lot.

He spent the first few years of school with no friends and nothing else but daily fights. As a result, he grew more robust than his peers. But, sadly, he also grew lonelier. He felt life was unjust.

He quickly became friends with Julien Altin and Paul when he met them years after. Unlike other kids, they did not care who his parents had been. They did not care where he came from.

The four boys were a strange and unusual band of friends that wished for soul-likes people around them. They had each other, and them only, but it was enough.

In the band, François was quick to become the band's guardian. With time, he became used to protecting the group. Now, he felt it was his duty to help his peers in peril when he could.

Perhaps because life was indeed terrible for him, he had chosen for himself a path opposite his father's: protect who he can.

He didn't want to leave the students on the bench alone, for they may die if he gave up on them.

Slam!

Altin punched François in the jaw. "Now !!! Now!!!!" He was in a full-blown panic.

François forgot everything and ran with Altin towards the exit.

As they ran, a weird tremor spread through them.

They felt as if every cell in their body had trembled as if the ground was shaking. However, the floor wasn't shaking. It was still.

They didn't look back and kept running towards the exit; it was seconds away, but it felt like it was kilometers away.

In this extreme terror, they heard: "Guys! Look at that? What is it? It looks like..."

The tremors that shook their body in the weirdest of ways intensified. They couldn't hear anything anymore. They felt as if they were in a sound-proof box, itself in another sound-proof larger box, such that no sound could be heard except their frantic heartbeats.

One second...

"RUN!!!" One of the students behind them shouted.

Two seconds...

Three seconds...

Wooossh. François and Altin exited the gym as two rockets would. At three meters away from it, they felt they could hear again. So they ran a bit further, stopped... and finally looked back.

Two of the students who had stayed behind were running towards them; they apparently said something judging how their mouths moved. But no word came out.

Behind them was a dazzlingly weird scene. The gym's interior was quickly replaced by what appeared to be a gas of all colors. The gas was mainly of the brown of the gym. It seemed denser close to the ground, and it was spreading at the running speed of a man all around the gym interior.

Except for the two students running at that very instant, there was no one else still to be seen.

The gas furiously continued its mad spheric expansion.

A second later, the gas caught up to the two students running. They were almost at the exit now, but they would need a crucial second to really make it outside.

Altin looked dazed at the two figures as they became encompassed by the brownish gas spreading everywhere. But, then, the strangest thing happened: the two students appeared to "dissolve" into the gas, and their existence seemed to disappear at this very exact moment.

The scene shook everyone watching, and once more, people ran.

They ran as far from the gym as they could.

Altin did, too, so did his friends.

Only after a minute of running without looking back did they stop.

They had reached the schoolyard's outer wall.

And so, they looked back.

The gym was no more.

In its stead, a vast crater stood. It was slightly larger than the gym size in width and in-depth. It took the form of a spherical cavity.

Instinctively, Altin knew the danger was over. He felt no more tingling in the back of his head.

He, and François, Julien, and Paul stood side to side. They had naturally gathered with no word between them when they felt the tingling feeling entirely disappear.

Julien broke the silence to ask Altin and François: "Are you alright ?"

Altin, his voice still shaking, said: "We are, we are safe."

Then came François, he said:" We escaped just on time, but..."

François clenched his jaw. He couldn't admit to the death he witnessed.

However, there was no need to speak.

Julien, Paul, and Altin understood.

"You did everything you could, François... A second more, and we would have died." Altin consoled François.

"I know, but... I knew them. They..." François couldn't find the words.

An intense feeling of exhaustion washed over the four boys.

They stared at the crater mindlessly while sirens, already, could be heard.

---

The anomaly, this time, had resulted in a tragic accident.

13 students and one teacher had disappeared, presumed dead.

The news was announced that same day's evening show, at 7pm.

It shocked Paris once more, reminding the inhabitants that nowhere was safe in this increasingly strange world.

Altin, François, Paul, and Julien stood in their dorm room watching TV.

The journalist was interviewing various school students who had witnessed the tragic accident.

She turned towards a youth-looking 16 y.o boy, which Altin recognized immediately as Jean.

"Have you seen how the anomaly started?" She asked Jean. She moved the microphone close to Jean's mouth. He said: "I.." Jean seemed to take a decision. "One of our classmates started shouting that everyone had to leave. I took a video. A few minutes after, the fire alarm rang, and people left. At that time, I ran toward the exit."

The journalist had stopped listening to him when Jean mentioned he had a video. "Can we see that video?" She asked. For her job, videos were precious scoop material.

Jean nodded and played the video, moving the phone's screen as close to the camera as possible. Despite the phone's small size, the camera was of excellent recording quality. The video zoomed in on Altin's face as he was shouting to the referee. But a second later, the journalist turned the camera away.

She stood in front of the camera and said: "We will analyze this video and come back with it shortly; thank you." Then, the feed changed to show another interviewee. It seemed the journalist had chosen to stop the video as soon as the faces of the people involved in the accident were shown too clearly. The TV station had to first blur the faces before showing the video to the public.

--

However, at the same moment, a bald man in a gloomy room with two other men dressed in black instructed:

"Pause the feed. Now".

And the feed paused on the laptop, controlled by a man at the right of the bald man.

"Come back to the frame where the face of the boy appeared. The boy who threw the alert." The bald man instructed.

The feed came back a few frames earlier when Altin's face was clearly shown on the TV.

The bald man narrowed his eyes; grinning, he said: "We need that boy. He seems to have a power related to the anomalies. Maybe he can help, don't you think?"

The man at his left replied: "Yes, boss. Maybe he can help us retrieve the goods. What do you want us to do ?"

The bald man replied with an emotionless voice: "Kidnap him and anyone with him."