“Duly noted.” Zack Dooms nodded: “Just be warned that we will not stand idly by should you, or your friends at the Division try to hurl baseless accusations at us in an attempt to hurt our brethren - especially if you’re acting pinning the doings of some other players on us. Under the circumstances, we have no choice but to let you go, but don’t ever underestimate our determination to seek vengeance and justice.”

“Yes, you are definitely famous for being forgiving and graceful.” Caroline shook her head and turned to the others: “Looks like we have to go now, I don’t think we’re gonna learn anything new here.”

“At least we know where all that energy is funneled to.” Thomas sighed then shrugged: “Let’s go.”

“My bad for bringing that fucking thing here.” Jason sighed as he waved his hand and gave everyone a thin silver energy shield as they proceeded to walk out the door to this room and started heading up the winding stairs.

While they were still in the staircase tunnel, the stairs, the walls, even the entire underground structure started shaking. The amplitude of the shake was still low, but it seemed to be growing stronger.

“Fuck, an earthquake.” Jason laid his hands on the wall as well as the stairs below and said: “Let’s head out, NOW!”

The team started rushing through the staircase as fast as possible. The quakes were getting more frequent, more violent and thus the walls and stairs below seemed to start cracking up. The staircase was about three to four storeys high, and by the time the reached the surface into a walk-in freezer whole pieces of slaughtered butchered and processed livestocks hanging from hooks attached to metal grids on the ceiling, as well as transparent tanks of live fish and crustaceans inside placed at the corners of the room. And with the earthquake ongoing and growing in its force, the livestocks were bumping around and swinging from side to side, while the water in the tanks splashed at the walls and lids of the tanks, causing the fish and the crustaceans inside to be in a state of panic due to their bodies being thrown around and being repeatedly bumped into the tanks themselves.

“These livestocks - don’t they look too - ” Thomas pointed at one of the processed bodies close to him, but before he could finish, he was dragged to the door of the freezer by Aimee and Caroline.

“Crack!” Something seemed to have fallen onto the top of the freezer, and a giant piece of debris penetrated the ceiling. And within the span of a few seconds, it sunk deeper into the freezer.

“Go! Go!” Jason blasted open the door and said to everyone.

Laura headed out of the freezer first, and right after getting out she cast a levitation spell and conjured an energy shield on the crumbing ceiling outside, to prevent the debris from falling on anyone coming out behind her.

More cracking sounds came from all around them as they came out from the freezer and found themselves somewhere at the back of the restaurant building - the interior design of the building was simple yet traditional, and everything looked like they once had some level of beauty to them. But now everything was either cracked up or falling off from where they were.

“Boom!” The entire restaurant building seemed to be hit particularly hard by the earthquake, as its main structure had started splitting apart and almost half of its outer walls crumbled and fell. The ground around the perimeters of the restaurant sunk as if there were deep ditches and cracks underneath the concrete and tar surface. The ground on which the restaurant stood was now somewhat “cut off” from the rest of the area due to the sunken ground around, and one could see the broken wires and water pipes in the large cracks. Some of the vehicles parking nearby, including normal cars, SUVs and even one mail delivery truck, were unfortunate enough to be parked either right where the cracks were or near them, and due to the ground shaking fell into the cracks.

When Jason and Caroline led their team out of the restaurant building and reached the edge of the cracks, they noticed that there seemed to be something else that caused the entire area of the restaurant building to be “isolated” like this - there were traces of energy in the air concentrated around the cracks, indicating that the cracks might not have appeared naturally due to the earthquake.

Faint cries, moans, curses and screeches of hundreds if not thousands of voices seemed to be coming from the deeper parts of these cracks, and though they seemed distant and weak at first, they were gradually growing louder and stronger.

“The energy pool inside the house - ” Caroline looked back at the crumbling restaurant building.

“It’s leaking.” Jason and Laura said at the same time.

Some kind of bubbling, vibrating and glowing iridescent liquid seeped out from the bottom of the cracks, and its level slowly rose, along with the expanding of the cracks and the destruction of the restaurant building.