The Crumbling World

It was an ordinary spring day in the year 2081 in Florida.

The trees were beginning to open their backside and adorn themselves with gentle leaves. Birds were tweeting happily in the wind as sunlight gradually brightened the classroom.

Among the students was a young man named Kaiden, who was particularly enjoying the beauty of nature.

He sat with his arms folded, and his head rested heavily on his cobalt blue notebook. One of his notes was marred by a drooling thread, making it appear indistinct. Suddenly, the silence in the classroom was broken by a loud slap.

"..."

The teacher had struck Kaiden's hand with the ruler to wake him from his sleep.

Kaiden awoke in a daze and noticed the drool on his cheek, which he hastily wiped away with his sleeve.

The teacher - an attractive woman in a short scarlet skirt, black shoes, and a snow-white blouse and low-cut T-shirt - leaned over his desk and asked him a question,

"If you think you can sleep in my class, then I guess you should be able to answer that question."

With those words, she placed a piece of chalk on the table and returned to her teacher's desk.

As she walked there, she noticed the boys blatantly looking at her legs and butt, while the girls shook their heads in disgust.

"Typical... " some of them grumbled.

Kaiden just stared at the chalk and looked as if he was half asleep.

His eyelids were half-closed, and more drool slowly dripped from his mouth.

If he hadn't propped his arms parallel on the table, his head would probably have slumped onto it immediately. So he tilted just slightly across the table. His friend nudged him and whispered,

"Wake up, sleepyhead."

Kaiden startled again and jumped up slightly. He realized he had fallen asleep again, and vowed to really stay awake this time.

Dazed, with disheveled hair and drool on his cheek, he grabbed the tiny piece of white chalk and made his way to the blackboard.

The teacher just looked at him seriously and said, annoyed, "If you can't solve it, just don't do it.

But remember this: I don't care what problems you have at home. There will be no more sleeping in my class!"

Kaiden barely listened, focusing only on the math problem. He looked at it, smirked, and finally wrote down the answer. The whole class seemed impressed, but the teacher couldn't believe it.

She had written a difficult 11th grade problem on the board, and Kaiden seemed to have solved it effortlessly in his head.

The teacher stood frozen and finally slumped down in her chair as if she had become a lifeless doll.

"How can a 10th grader solve such a difficult 11th grade problem?" She wondered, stunned.

Kaiden looked at her impassively and said, as if it were a matter of course,

"If that's all there is to it, then I'll go back to sleep."

He left the piece of chalk on the teacher's desk and calmly returned to his seat.

A wooden chair and a table of the same material provided him with a comfortable place to sit. His eyes wandered over the beautiful red-blue sky as he looked out of the window.

The gentle rustle of the wind and the chirping of the birds accompanied him.

Kaiden slowly closed his sleepy eyes and fell into a deep sleep. A few minutes passed, and he began to snore softly. Although this disturbed the lesson, the teacher left him alone, for he had more than earned it.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty, finally thirty.

An immense vibration suddenly swept through Kaiden.

Confused, he opened his eyes and looked to the right. His friend stared wide-eyed at the window, right where Kaiden had been sleeping before.

As he looked out aswell his brows raised immediately .

His blue eyes, slightly streaked with gray, widened as never before. His black pupils narrowed significantly.

What he saw made his field of vision explode with yellow-red hues and a giant glowing yellow mushroom- No, an atomic bomb.

Kaiden couldn't believe it. The mushroom seemed to extend into space. How could something be so big, but be so far?

It was then that he remembered something that he had forgotten from the shock:

the shockwave.

 He suddenly grabbed his friend and threw him to the ground as if a lion had snatched its prey. He continued to shout loudly for everyone to get down on the ground immediately.

But, regrettably, it was already too late.

The other students were mesmerized and seemed dazzled by the beauty of the monstrous mushroom.

Until it was broken by a tremendous bang and the earth shook. Kaiden shouted at his classmates, but they could not hear him because of the deafening noise.

Some of them rushed to try and cover their hands, while others fell to their knees in shock. But fate took its cruel course.

In an awful instant, most of the students were pierced by thousands of tiny glass fragments as if they were shot by a machine gun.

Others were horrifically stabbed and cut into as good as two halves. Some survivors desperately pleaded for help, despite the painful voids in their bodies.

The classroom was drenched in splashes of crimson streams of blood, and the walls seemed to be caked and decorated in horrific images of death.

Out of 31 students, 27 now lay their mutilated bodies on their classroom floor.