Though the house's interior was less chaotic than the tumult outside, the scene remained hauntingly bizarre. Faded traces of the original beige walls peeked out beneath the cover of a bright golden liquid. A young man with silver hair, a pale complexion, and a slender frame of about five feet eight lay sprawled on the floor. His clothes were stained with blood and streaked with the same mysterious golden substance that tinted the walls and floor.
Strikingly, golden rain poured inside—not through holes in the ceiling, but as if summoned from nowhere. Whenever the raindrops touched inorganic matter, like the furniture or a wall, they left behind a fleeting gilded sheen, almost slipping past without lingering. Yet when the droplets met living matter—be it the young man or even the fruits and vegetables on the table—they behaved differently. The tiny drops pierced flesh like corrosive needles. Although the young man had fainted long ago, he winced with each drop that fell, a torturous event repeating roughly every thirty seconds.
Time had lost meaning since the rain's arrival—a phenomenon that had seemingly put every living creature into a perpetual sleep. Now, the young boy resembled more of a statue forged from gold and blood. His earlier expressions of pain quieted into stillness. Then, all at once, his eyes snapped open, and the rain ceased. Across the world, other beings stirred, each emitting a shimmering golden aura and being bathed in a reddish-gold hue.
Yet he remained an enigma. His eyes, though, matched neither the golden radiance nor the mundane—one moment blue, they now glowed with a deep, unsettling purple. He radiated no aura at all. Even as blood still covered him from head to toe, the luminous golden sheen had completely vanished from his body. At that moment, the young man, stained with blood and marked by eerie purple eyes, looked nothing short of monstrous.
Bob, the young man, though, was now awake, lacked both the courage and the physical strength to stand up. He was certain now that he would not make it out alive. It was now that a loud, deafening sound echoed throughout the world. When all hope was lost, and he was sure that he could not escape his fate, the young man felt his injuries recovering. Only moments later, the young man found his body in a completely recovered state. Even the scar he got from the visit that morning to the current site of his company's new project seemed to have vanished. Standing up from the floor, with unexplained newfound strength and stamina in his body, he found that though his house seemed to have suffered no damage otherwise, every piece of furniture, the walls, and even the floor and the ceiling were now completely golden. The state outside looked even more chaotic, with the sky as Bob looked out from the window completely blood red and the Earth gold. He saw some people lying outside on the street, covered in blood, just like him, but he found no single living being awake. Looking around, his eyes fell on the lying body of a cat that used to roam around in his neighbourhood. The cat, though at the first glance appeared to be just any other normal animal, the young man could see a strange golden radiance oozing out from it. The aura was not visible, but for some reason, he could not explain, he could just feel it.
He wanted to step outside, check out what was happening, seek out help if anyone could provide any at all, but something told him that if he stepped outside right now, he wouldn't make it back inside. Before he could further dwell upon the matter of going outside, the cat opened its eyes. The cat's eyes, instead of the usual blue, appeared to be a very dark shade of red. Looking at its eyes, even from a distance of more than 10-meters gave Bob the illusion of looking at a bottomless abyss
Soon, the others on the street began to transform as well; as they awakened, their eyes mirrored that same disconcerting red and gold luminescence. For a fleeting moment, Bob hoped the strange aura and the color of everyone's eyes were merely a residual aftereffect of the rain—a harmless echo of nature's fury. However, this hope vanished the instant he saw their faces: utterly expressionless, not displaying the typical human shock or sorrow but a vacant emptiness beyond comprehension. Petrified by the ghastly scene, he listened in horror as another thunderous sound shattered the air, igniting a frenzy. In a shocking outbreak of despair, the people outside began to mutilate themselves and lunge at one another. Bob, looking outside at these people, trembled; his body shook with fear of himself turning into one such monster and doing God knows what.
Any trace that remained of what they once were had vanished as the creatures body began to swell up and grow in size. The cat that he saw earlier now turned over three times its initial size. It jumped up and attacked what once was a Labrador, but now seemed to be a ferocious monster with a body larger than two meters and claws and teeth as large as several inches. The cat bit its neck and ripped its head off, but was unable to survive for much longer as a large, blurry figure swung a metal bat at the cat, making the place where the cat was moments before into a bloodied patch on the now broken road.
As scary as it might be for a monster of that size to get squashed in a single hit by a baseball bat, what horrified Bob more was the identity of the one holding the bat. Though only traces of her original appearance remained behind the bloodied face and the now monstrous physique, Bob, could tell that the two-meter-tall monstrous being holding a decapitated head in one hand and a bat in the other once used to be just a sweet five-year-old girl who, with her round green eyes and the beyond the world smile could bring nothing but joy to everyone around her. It was easier to recognise the decapitated head's owner. Adele's eyes were closed, but her face still resembled that of a human. Behind her bloodied face, she had the same expression of agony as those who had just begun to show signs of transforming into those monstrous creatures.
His breath quickened, and his heart started to beat at a faster rate as he saw the events unfolding. His knees gave up, and he crumbled down on the floor, his eyes flooding. It was then, when he saw the people he was familiar with in that state, that he realised the true horrors of the current state of the world. Seeing a once filial girl who loved her mother holding the decapitated head of her mother, whom she most probably killed, stripped away any remaining courage Bob had to look outside the window. Even with his body in perfect condition and full of strength and stamina, Bob's legs could not support him any longer. He sat on the ground, leaning on the wall with his eyes closed and his hands covering his ears.
After what seemed to be hours, the screams outside paused as the world fell into an eerie silence. But before he could stand up and check the situation outside from the window, his stomach churned as he puked up the very same golden liquid that once covered the world. The purple hue in his eyes deepened as a purple radiance, similar to the golden one that had enveloped others, surrounded him. It was at that moment that another thunderous sound shook the world, and Bob lost consciousness. The purple radiance, however, continued to emanate from Bob's body as it continued to grow in intensity. The light spread out at an unfathomable speed. It only took a hundredth of a second for the light to spread beyond the city and a few seconds to cover more than half the world, destroying everything, whether it be buildings, infrastructure or even life in its wake.
By then, the golden radiance too started retaliating. The red sky now turned into a mixture of purple and gold. The ground that had earlier grown silent was brought back to chaos. The conquest for control between both the radiances seemed to have started affecting the lives too, as nearly half the creatures were obliterated, and the others seemed to approach that state soon. Of the two radiances, neither one seemed to have the upper hand; their quest to defeat the other continued for hours until all the oceans and seas dried up, buildings and mountains crumbled, and life ended. No, not all life. There was still one person, at the very centre of the purple radiance, who, though, seemed to have his clothes reduced to ashes and his complexion very weak was still breathing.
All of a sudden, the two energies retreated and the chaotic world seemed to calm down as a divine green energy spread throughout the world, winds seeming to calm the very universe began to chime. In that moment, time itself seemed to have stopped as both the energies retreated, leaving a barren, dry world with a single human.