Read The NextWorld 02: Spawn Point for Free Online Page B

to knock her over. But she remains resilient.
    “Cyren. What is that?”
    She turns her shaking eyes toward me, the flashing lights of the static gleam from the tears forming on the surface. When her pupils have locked on to mine, she squeezes my hand and says, “It's a virus.”

00110101

    From high above, echoing through the world, we hear a groaning noise that sounds like an aching hunger inside the stomach of a giant. The concussive blast of the sound sends out a wave of sand and throws us both to the ground. I cover my ears, trying to stop the noise from shattering my ear drums.
    When I scramble to my feet, I can see the distortion of the sky bending outward, like something is pushing on it from the other side. The pixels and the binary code elongate as the sky stretches downward. It keeps growing until it reaches its maximum tension. The groaning stops and the distorted static hangs there, teasing me with a moment of peace. I believe, for half of a second, that it's over.
    Then the sky shatters.
    Each tiny pixel bursts out in a radius, sprinkling to the ground like the ash of war. In its wake, it leaves a hole where there are no clouds, there are no stars, there is only the blackness, the emptiness, the nothingness that surrounded me upon my death.
    That scene, that image, freezes me in place. My feet weigh twenty times more than they should. My muscles weaken. I can't move. I can't speak. I can't do anything other than stare at the hole in the world.
    Cyren is yelling something from behind me, but I'm not listening. Her hand sets on my shoulder, pulling me away from the moment, but nothing inside me acknowledges her existence. I'm lost in the face of oblivion.
    “Arkade!” she screams my name, her voice powerful and desperate.
    It shakes me. I'm able to turn, however slowly, and see the terror in her face.
    “Run!” she yells, pulling on my arm.
    Her words don't make sense.
    “Run? From what?”
    Time slows down. Her eyes raise from me to the sky. She pulls harder.
    “From that!”
    I turn and look over my shoulder even as her Level 100 strength rips me from my immobile fear. My feet stumble through the sand, trying to move sideways because I can't tear my eyes away from the sky.
    From the blackness, the coiled body of a giant worm descends toward the world. Its wrinkled flesh unfolds as it stretches toward the ground. Its movement seems slow, but I soon realize it appears that way because of its size. The mouth of the beast opens and a thousand razor sharp teeth encircle the gaping maw, spinning around the circumference like an inverted buzz saw. Inside the mouth is an endless throat of nothingness, waiting to swallow anything. Everything.
    Cyren's hand grips my wrist tighter. She's screaming, but the words are incoherent above the heartbeat that's throbbing in my ears. My feet move faster, trying to catch up to her. She's dragging me, I know it, but I still can't look away from the apocalyptic monster plummeting toward the desert.
    Right as the mouth of the worm reaches the ground, the tail breaks free from the hole in the sky, leaving the emptiness behind it. When the worm plunges into the desert floor, I'm expecting some immense quake, like a bomb that will shake the world, but there's no impact. It's as if the desert disappears as the rotating teeth devour it. The worm dives deep into the sand before curling back upward, leaving the absence of anything in its wake.
    It's consuming.
    Swallowing.
    Deleting.
    The terror in my body forces me to look away. I can't comprehend what I'm seeing. Logic is taking too long to process. I go primal. Fight or flight. I dig my boots into the sand, pushing myself away from the threat. Cyren doesn't need to drag me anymore. We're both running at full speed.
    We cross over a large dune when my gamer brain kicks in. I swipe my hand in the air and open my inventory of magic items. My muscle memory helps me scroll to the exact spot in the alphabet for my Boots of Speed. I