The incident occurred far too suddenly, without the slightest sign or early warning of any kind preceding it.
Inevitably, not a single person inside the building had time to escape when the entire structure of the hospital collapsed completely due to the chain bombing.
There were at least around twenty thousand people—consisting of patients, medical personnel, visitors, students, and staff of Seijo High School, among others—who were inside the hospital grounds.
The catastrophe did not stop there.
The shockwave produced by the explosion surged outward, sweeping across a radius of hundreds of meters, shattering shop windows across the street and sending sharp shards of debris flying in all directions.
The fragments of concrete and iron, hurtling like bullets, instantly injured and even killed innocent people who happened to be passing around the outside area of the hospital.
In a matter of mere seconds, the peaceful and quiet morning situation transformed into a real-world hell that no one had ever predicted.
Cries of weeping and hysterical screams immediately shattered the silence.
People fortunate enough to survive the shockwave began to panic, running in all directions without a destination, colliding with one another in an effort to save themselves from the thick, black plumes of smoke.
In another corner, there were also people who could only stand in a daze with blank stares, their brains completely paralyzed and not yet able to process the horror that had just unfolded right before their eyes.
Meanwhile, the most heartbreaking sight came from the unfortunate people lying drenched in blood upon the asphalt; severely injured or killed instantly from being thrown by the shockwave and struck by the flying debris of the building collapse.
Not long after the dust of the explosion billowed high into the sky, the police command center was suddenly inundated with emergency calls from a massive number of people at the exact same time, everyone hysterically reporting the incident of the hospital's collapse.
Realizing that this was a crisis on a national scale, the Japanese Government immediately declared the highest level of emergency status.
Without wasting any time, the entire armada of evacuation teams, firefighting squads, police forces, ambulances, right down to the relevant medical institutions from all corners of the city were directly dispatched to the scene as quickly as possible, their sirens wailing as they cut through the streets of Tokyo.
Around the perimeter of the ruins, technological modernity ironically accelerated the spread of this horror to all corners of the world.
People who were lucky enough to be uninjured began pulling mobile phones from their pockets. With trembling hands, they posted this horrific incident to various social media platforms in the form of photos and short videos.
Several of them even went live, acting as impromptu reporters amidst the billowing smoke that still smelled of gunpowder and burning flesh.
In less than ten minutes, the internet was instantly filled with a new mass panic.
In short, chaos was the single most accurate word to describe the situation that morning.
If the situation outside the perimeter area was already that bad and harrowing, then one could imagine how much more severe and horrifying the condition of the victims currently trapped inside the jaws of the collapsed hospital building structure was.
The concrete spaces that were once places of healing had now mutated into a mass grave that was dark, cramped, and filled with death.
Thousands of tons of building materials—snapped concrete pillars, shattered glass, bent iron frames, as well as chest-tightening cement dust—buried anything beneath them indiscriminately.
Behind the giant piles of debris heaped high, the condition of those who died was truly deeply heartbreaking.
Many of them had their bodies crushed instantly, sandwiched between two thick slabs of concrete that collapsed from the upper floors.
Lifeless corpses lay scattered in agonizing positions, buried under gray dust until their faces could no longer be recognized.
However, the most horrifying part was not those who died instantly, but rather those who were still breathing yet in a dying state, buried alive inside total darkness.
From within the crevices of the quiet darkness of the ruins, faint groans of pain and whimpers for help began to be heard, weakly echoing back and forth to one another.
"He-help... anyone... my leg..."
"Mother... it's cold... dark..."
Those hoarse voices sounded so utterly desperate, coming from the throats of victims choking on the thick cement dust.
Some of them were pinned in unnatural positions, with broken bones pressing against their internal organs.
Every time they tried to draw a breath to scream for help, excruciating pain slammed into their chests, causing their voices to gradually grow smaller, weaker, and finally vanish completely as their consciousness was snatched away by a Shinigami working overtime.
Beneath the scorching morning sun now obscured by billowing smoke, the macro view of the ruins looked deeply terrifying.
Fresh red blood began to seep out slowly from between the cracks of the concrete and the debris of the building.
The blood flowed to form small streams that trickled onto the ground, staining the gray color of the cement dust into a contrasting deep red.
The continuously expanding seepage of blood served as proof that beneath this mountain of concrete, time was racing cruelly against lives on the brink of death.
"Cha... Charlie-kun... Tell me this... tell me that all of this is just a nightmare..."
Amidst the harrowing silence beneath the crushing weight of the ruins, Mahiru's voice trembled violently.
Her usually blushing face was now deathly pale like a corpse, her beautiful eyes wide with shock as she gazed at the tragic sight surrounding her.
Just a few minutes ago, her classmates and acquaintances were still laughing, chatting, and interacting warmly with her in the waiting room.
But now, they all lay lifeless.
Those young bodies were horribly mangled, crushed by thick slabs of concrete into a mash of flesh mixed with blood that stained the debris of the building.
"Ugh..."
Mahiru quickly covered her mouth with both hands, her body bending over in a shiver as she tried with all her might to suppress the surge of nausea battering her stomach.
Her mentality was completely unprepared to receive a visual dystopia this graphic.
Gazing at the suffering Mahiru, Charlie let out a heavy breath. There was a flash of regret in his eyes.
"I'm sorry..."
He felt guilty because, as a Savior, he had failed to prevent this disaster from happening right before his own eyes.
"Come on, Charlie. This is absolutely not your fault! You know that, right? It must be said, the enemy this time truly used any and all of the most unscrupulous means just to be able to complete their objective," a woman's voice spoke in a firm tone.
Not far from where Charlie and Mahiru were standing, Elena launched a sharp critique against her colleague's nature, which she considered too easily swayed by the mood and prone to burdening himself with unnecessary guilt.
Tactically, the protection methods the two of them used when the explosion occurred were indeed very different.
Unlike Charlie—who protected himself and Mahiru using a high-level causality manipulation concept that mimicked Gojo Satoru's Infinity defense through the intermediary of his Hundred Gauntlets, where all the debris and shockwaves heading toward them suddenly slowed down and stopped in midair as if hitting an invisible barrier—the power mechanism used by Elena was far more straightforward and less complex.
If the area around Charlie and Mahiru appeared clear of debris, then Elena, who was tasked with protecting Amane, was currently standing inside a thick ice dome structure that formed a giant igloo.
The ice dome emitted an aura as cold as the poles and possessed a highly absurd level of density.
The ice structure proved to be formidable, capable of bearing the pressure of hundreds of tons of weight from the collapsed hospital building ruins above it without showing the slightest crack.
After all, the ice Elena had manifested just now was not ice element magic, but rather a pure application of the ability of her Longinus-Class Sacred Gear—Absolute Demise.
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