12:50 PM. Day 16.
Jae-min stood in the storage room doorway. The gauge read one hundred and eight liters.
"One hundred and eight. Sixteen days at minimum cycle. Two hours on, one hour off. Rotate the heaters. Let the temperature drop in the empty rooms during the off-cycle," Jae-min thought, cold arithmetic ticking behind his sternum.
But minimum cycle meant turning off heaters where people were sleeping. Forty-three people across four units. Children in two of them. The generator was feeding all of them — two heaters in the bunker, three junction boxes, the water pump, the heaters in the three neighboring units on the fourteenth floor.
"At full draw — every heater running, every room heated — four days. Maybe five if the cold doesn't spike overnight," Jae-min thought, the math collapsing into a single hard number.
Four days wasn't a plan. It was a countdown.
The storage room hummed with the generator's vibration, the tremor bleeding through the reinforced floor into his boots. Diesel fumes and heated metal. The taste of the air was copper and cold — filtered through concrete and machine oil.
Two reserve jerry cans against the far wall — twenty liters of emergency fuel he refused to touch. The rest were empty. Four of them stacked beside the tank from the Shell station run four days ago, their contents long since poured in and burned.
The shelves behind the jerry cans held ammunition, canned goods, fuel stabilizers, batteries, medicine, thermal clothing, tools. Every centimeter optimized.
No luxury. Only function.
Rico appeared behind him. His face was carved with lines that hadn't been there a week ago.
"Spitting distance," Rico said, his voice rough,
"Then we refill," Jae-min said,
The informant was waiting by the front door. Coat buttoned. Hands in his pockets. Bare hands.
He looked at Jae-min. Measured. Waiting.
Jae-min pulled on his coat. The Surgeon Scalpel rifle was in the void — unchanged, unfrozen, waiting in the same condition he'd stored it.
Ammunition. Cold-weather gear. Everything else he needed was already there.
"Five stops. Gas station. Police station. Army base. IKEA. Mall of Asia," Jae-min said, his jaw set,
"Order?" the informant asked,
"Fuel first. Everything else second," Jae-min said,
The informant opened the door.
The cold hit like a wall. −70. Same as yesterday. Same as last week.
Same as it would be tomorrow.
The temperature had locked itself at minus seventy three days into the freeze. It fluctuated — a degree warmer at noon, a degree colder at midnight — but it always reset. Always came back to −70.
Outside, Metro Manila lay buried under ten meters of snow. The fourteen-story building was one of the tallest structures still visible, its rooftop poking from the white expanse like a stone in a river.
The frozen peaks of condominiums and office towers rose around it — the Makati skyline reduced to teeth in a white jaw, their windows dark, their facades glittering with frost.
Between them, the snow had compressed into canyon walls of ice-blue. Hard-packed. Dense as concrete. Three weeks of accumulated weight had turned each street into a trench barely wide enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder.
The snow surface had gone concrete-hard where foot traffic had packed it. Beneath that crust lay powder so deep a man could sink to his waist if he stepped wrong.
Tunnels had been carved through the deepest drifts by survivors. Low, narrow passages barely tall enough to stand in. Their walls scalloped by wind and refrozen melt.
They took the stairs. Fourteen floors down. Each step a negotiation between balance and ice.
— • • • —
The gas station was buried under ten meters of snow. Its roof was a shallow ridge in the white expanse. Jae-min knelt on the frozen forecourt and pressed his palm flat against the ground.
He reached downward — tearing a narrow void channel into the earth beneath the station. The resistance was heavy. Dense. He pushed harder.
His fingers broke through into the underground tank cavity. Three large steel cylinders, buried horizontally beneath the forecourt. The diesel tanks.
Fuel thick and viscous, frozen at the bottom but still liquid near the center where ground insulation had preserved residual warmth. The smell reached him even through the void — dark honey, petroleum, the sweetness of fuel that hadn't gelled.
He opened a void tear inside the first tank. Drew the fuel upward through the channel like siphoning water through a straw.
Four minutes. The second tank took six. The third was nearly empty.
Three tanks. Approximately twelve hundred liters.
His nose was bleeding when he stood. He wiped it on his sleeve.
"Enough?" the informant asked,
"Six weeks at full draw. More if we ration," Jae-min said, his jaw tight,
"Forty-three people across four units. That's a lot of heaters," the informant said, raising an eyebrow,
"Then we get more fuel next trip," Jae-min said,
— • • • —
The police station was four blocks north. Small precinct. Two stories. The reinforced armory door was locked, frozen, bolted from the inside.
Jae-min tore a void opening directly into the armory. A surgical tear through reinforced steel. The edges of the cut precise and geometric, as if the metal had been removed by a laser rather than ripped by a dimension that didn't belong in this universe.
Gun oil. Metal. Gunpowder residue. The smell hit him before he could see the inventory.
Cold steel under his fingers as the void widened.
He pulled. Rifles first — a dozen M16A1s, stock-folding variants with cracked plastic furniture. Sidearms — Glock 17s in holsters, stacked in a locker. Shotguns — Remington 870s, pump-action, four with sling attachments.
Ammunition next. Crate after crate. 5.56 NATO.
9mm. 12-gauge buckshot.
The brass links clinked through the void like distant coins.
Body armor — Level IIIA vests, six, stiff with cold. Flashbangs. Smoke grenades. A riot shield, cracked but functional.
Fifteen minutes. The void sorted everything into rows.
The informant was standing in the lobby.
"You can reach through walls," the informant said,
"When I need to," Jae-min said,
— • • • —
The army base was twenty blocks southeast. Fort Bonifacio. Perimeter fence collapsed.
Guard towers empty. Barracks dark.
The armory was in the basement. Stocked for a company. The air down here was warmer — below the frost line, the concrete still held residual heat from the building's HVAC system. It smelled of cordite, old canvas, and rubber.
M4 carbines, forty of them, in storage racks. M203 grenade launchers, six units in a separate cage.
Ammunition — thousands of rounds in sealed crates. Fragmentation grenades. Smoke. Flares.
Night vision. Communications equipment — radios with frozen batteries.
He pulled it all. Rifles by the dozen. Crates by the dozen. The M4s took longest — one at a time, fifteen seconds each, ten minutes total.
Ammunition faster. Bulk pulls through sealed crates, brass links clinking through the void.
When the armory was empty, bare shelves. Racks without guns. Lockers without vests. The void had swallowed a company's worth of firepower and left nothing but cold concrete and the ghost smell of gun oil.
— • • • —
IKEA was a tomb. Three floors of display rooms buried under snow through cracked glass. The wind had found its way inside and frozen everything — display kitchens with ice on the countertops, bedroom setups where the sheets had frozen stiff as cardboard. The smell was sawdust and cold plastic.
Jae-min bypassed the showroom. Tore through the employee door into the stockroom warehouse.
He pulled selectively. Mattresses — vacuum-sealed roll-packed units, twenty of them, the plastic cold and slick under his fingers. Thermal blankets. Sleeping bags rated for sub-zero.
Table frames. Chair kits. Shelving units. Cabinet flat-packs.
Kitchen supplies — pots, pans, utensils, plates. Each piece went into the void, stacked in a section he tagged as furniture. The metal clinked softly as it vanished into the dark.
Twenty-five minutes. The stockroom stripped of everything useful. Bare shelving stretching into darkness, the aisles empty as a cathedral.
— • • • —
Mall of Asia was a frozen maze. Jae-min entered through a loading dock on the east side. Frozen bodies near the entrance. He stepped past them.
The supermarket on the ground floor. Massive. Aisles stretching into darkness, freezers frozen solid. The cold had preserved everything.
The smell was faint — canned tomatoes, the chemical bite of frozen plastic packaging, the ghost of coffee from the next aisle over.
He didn't browse. Opened void tears at the end of each aisle and drew contents in bulk. Canned tomatoes — gone. Beans — gone.
Rice, sack by sack, twenty-kilo bags vanishing in steady succession.
Pasta. Cooking oil. Salt.
Sugar. Coffee. Powdered milk.
Cereal. Bottled water. The void swallowed each category whole. Aisles emptied in seconds.
The freezer section. Void tear inside the industrial unit. Pulled everything — meat, vegetables, meals, seafood. Frozen solid and going into storage exactly as they were.
His nose bled again. He wiped it on his sleeve. Kept pulling.
The pharmacy in the adjacent anchor store. Tore through the wall. Antibiotics.
Painkillers. Bandages.
Antiseptic — the sharp smell cutting through the cold. IV fluid bags. Syringes.
Surgical tape. Everything a field hospital needed.
Forty minutes. Supermarket shelves bare. Pharmacy counters empty. The mall had been hollowed out from the inside, its contents transferred into a dimension that didn't exist in the physical world.
"You hollow the world and the void swallows it whole. A black hole in human form," Saem crackled, flat,
The informant appeared at the end of the aisle. Stopped when he saw the empty shelves.
"How much?" the informant asked,
"Enough," Jae-min said,
— • • • —
The walk back took an hour. They moved through snow canyons — the narrow trenches carved between buildings where ten meters of accumulated snow had compressed into walls of blue-white ice on either side.
The sky above was a thin strip of grey between the canyon walls. The cold pressed down from it like a physical weight.
Jae-min's joints ached with every step. His left hand was stiff inside the insulated glove, the fingers slow to respond, lagging two seconds behind every command.
The frostbite from days ago had crossed from surface to tissue, but the insulated gear had stopped it from advancing. Still stiff. Still slow. But answering.
His vision was blurred — watercolor smears of grey and white, the details dissolved into haze. Colors bled at the edges. Shapes lost their boundaries. The repeated void tears had cost him.
The informant navigated. Jae-min followed.
Shore Residence 3. Fourteen floors of ice and concrete. They found the building's entrance through a tunnel carved into the snow pile against the lobby — a tight, shoulder-width passage cut by survivors and refrozen into a corrugated ice tube.
They climbed the stairs. Fourteen flights. Jae-min's legs burned. The informant went first, testing footing, pointing out hazards.
— • • • —
The hallway. Unit 1418. Jae-min opened the door. Stepped inside.
Twelve degrees. Felt tropical. His frozen skin screamed with the sudden shift.
Rico was in the living room. He stood when Jae-min entered.
"You got it all?" Rico asked, straightening from where he'd been sitting,
Jae-min pulled the first item from the void. A twenty-kilo bag of rice. Cold from the supermarket's frozen aisles. He set it on the kitchen counter.
Reached back in. Another. Another.
Fuel cans next. Jerrycans, each one full, set beside the storage room door. Then ammunition crates. Medical supplies.
Furniture flat-packs came last — mattresses, shelving, chairs, each one pulled from the void and stacked against the wall. The vacuum-sealed plastic crinkled in the warm air.
He unloaded for twenty minutes.
The living room floor disappeared under bags of rice, cases of canned goods, and boxes of medical supplies. The kitchen counter vanished under pots, pans, and utensils. The hallway filled with jerrycans and ammunition crates.
Rico opened the storage room door and started transferring diesel from the jerrycans to the tank. The generator hummed. Steady. Fed.
Jae-min sat on the floor against the wall. His hands were shaking. His vision had gone from bad to worse — the blur spreading, the colors bleeding further, the shapes dissolving into a single grey wash.
"Four days?" Rico asked, his eyes on the fuel gauge,
"Six weeks now. Maybe more if we ration," Jae-min said, his voice steady,
Rico paused. Looked at the line of jerrycans. Counted them. Did the math.
"That's a lot of generators," Rico said, looking from the jerrycans to Jae-min and back,
"Four units. Forty-three people. Every heater counts," Jae-min said,
Rico nodded. Went back to pouring.
Jae-min leaned his head against the wall. Through the concrete, he could hear the faint hum of the neighboring unit's heater — forty-three people on the fourteenth floor, warm because he'd emptied a gas station, a police station, an army base, a furniture store, and a shopping mall.
The void had swallowed it all. And now it was giving it back, one item at a time.
The informant stood by the front door. Coat still buttoned. Watching the supplies pile up. He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.