"W-What... what happened...?"
My body was stiff, very stiff.
The way my body was positioned while I was knocked out ensured the least amount of comfort when I woke up.
It felt like I aged thirty years with the amount of backpain I was met with.
I placed a hand over the back of my head, feeling a strange liquid start to wrap around my fingers; it was undeniably blood.
"Why didn't I just die...!?"
I forced myself to stand up, using the wall as leverage as I navigated around the store and grabbed a package of bandage rolls.
While I wasn't trained at all, maybe if I just wrapped it around well enough, it would help lessen the bleeding.
Didn't really have a choice either way.
roll...
roll...
roll...
After I was done, I ended up looking like a mummy, but at the very least, I think it did the trick.
The amount of pressure and wrapping I did should be enough to stop the bleeding, well... if that's what I was supposed to do anyway.
I have no idea what I was doing...
But I have another problem this time, while the sounds of the beast from outside seemed to disappear, the ice wall hadn't...
This place didn't even have a backdoor exit; it was so run-down and unsafe that it would likely never pass any inspections.
Honestly, the only reason this place was still open was that any inspector who showed up assumed there had been a mistake in the records.
Because there was no way this actual pile of rubbish was a convenience store.
"Can I thaw through the ice...?"
I grabbed a big rock on the ruined floor, using it as a tool to smash through the ice.
THUD!
The moment the rock touched the ice, I felt a strange vibration travel across my entire body, and in the next second...
BOOM!
It launched me in the opposite direction, my back hitting the wall this time, but it wasn't hard enough to make me bleed, luckily.
CRACK!
"G-God dammit!"
I forced myself up again; the cracking sound was definitely a big concern, but I didn't feel any pain from it at all.
Maybe it was something else?
I looked behind me to confirm, and it turned out that being launched by the ice was a blessing in disguise.
The wall behind me was left with a crater, as if the concrete itself was made of plastic.
And that was my salvation...
The walls were so stupidly and terribly constructed that I could escape through them...
I couldn't help but feel dumbfounded at this discovery; literal concrete was softer than ice.
"…Wow."
I stared at the hole for a solid second.
Then another.
Then I stuck my head through it, half-expecting the wall to suddenly decide it wanted revenge.
Nothing happened.
No alarms. No collapse. No magical backlash.
Just a jagged, human-sized hole leading out into what used to be an alley.
"Best construction money can buy," I muttered.
I squeezed through, scraping my shoulder on the way out, and immediately regretted it.
The smell hit first.
Burnt asphalt, smoke, something coppery that I really didn't want to think about too hard.
The alley opened into the main street.
Or… what was left of it.
Cars were overturned like toys. Streetlights bent at impossible angles. One building down the road had simply vanished, replaced by a massive crater rimmed with ice that hadn't melted at all.
And scattered across the street were...
Bodies.
Some human.
Some… definitely not.
My stomach churned.
"Okay," I whispered. "Okay, this is fine! Totally normal Monday!"
It was not, in fact, normal.
But humour was the only thing I had at this point to maintain my sanity; if I tried to take things seriously, I'd probably break down.
I took a cautious step forward, then another, keeping my back close to the building. Whatever that monster was, I didn't see it anymore, but that didn't mean it was gone.
That was when I noticed something else.
The air felt… wrong.
Heavier. Like it pressed against my skin instead of flowing around it. Every breath felt thicker than it should've been, like I was breathing through water in the depths of the ocean.
The pressure was flattening.
Crack.
Ice.
Not the decrepit wall behind me, but the street itself.
Thin lines of frost crept along the asphalt, spreading outward from the crater of the disappeared building, crawling unnaturally fast.
"…Nope."
I turned and started moving the other way.
I'd rather not risk getting myself frozen by something that broke every logical thing I knew about ice.
I turned to round another corner in the alley, only using the most unknown and unused paths available back to my home.
While I didn't have much, it was better than nothing.
Couldn't even go to a nearby mall or store to grab a baseball bat or something; other people likely already had that idea.
And I wouldn't want to risk meeting other people in a world like this.
If movies taught me anything, people were more dangerous than monsters.
Actually... no, both are equally just as dangerous.