Stanley and the other two arrived outside of the secret compartment of the mansion and made their way up the stairs.

When they arrived by the stairways, they realized that it was all filled to the brim with people. They had all come here to take shelter from the rest.

"What’s going on here...?" Freddy couldn’t help but ask as he looked around.

"The young, the old, and the helpless are being protected from what I can tell," Sheila said, looking at the people around her. "The strong and capable ones should be trying to fight the Nova outside."

Freddy became a little alert when he heard that. "My... my father, he’s injured and can’t fight," he said. "Is he here?"

Freddy tried searching for his father, mother, or little sister, but he couldn’t see anything at all. He even tried calling out to him, but there was no one that recognized him at all.

Freddy panicked. "I need to go find my parents," he said and ran off.

Stanley was about to run as well when Sheila grabbed his arm. "Let him go," she said. "We need to go to the cave and find a way to open it."

She had already tied a bunch of bandages around her broken arm, hanging it from her neck to give some support. She knew she needed to do something else, but she didn’t have the strength for it.

Stanley jerked his hands-free from her. "I’m going to kill the Nova," he said and ran outside.

"You... you can’t... Urgh!!!" Sheila grunted as she ran after the two. The mansion was crowded the further out they went. She knew that they had to be walking to the right where they could go back to the cave, but she also knew she couldn’t do it alone.

At the very least, she needed the help of the man in front of her, who she suspected to be one of the few people in the world that had not yet been recognized as what they were.

A Nova.

Stanley let most of his anger control him for now. He wanted to go kill the girl that was responsible for his brother’s death. Only then would he truly be happy?

In his anger, he neither heard nor cared for the sorrowful cries of the ones that he ran past. He didn’t care about the possible feeling of tragedy that his friend in front of him was feeling.

Walking outside of the mansion, Stanley immediately stopped. There was a crowd of people outside the mansion that were watching something. They had completely filled up the outside, with not a place to even watch from.

Freddy had stopped already as well. He was panicking not knowing what to do.

The ground constantly rumbled under their feet, and they couldn’t see what was going on at all.

"There!" Sheila shouted from behind them. As they turned, they saw her pointing toward something.

Stanley looked in that direction and saw the massive tower that stood tall. Stanley was told it was a tower where people stayed in and watched out for possible intruders. He wasn’t sure anymore.

Still, it was a good place to look from.

He immediately ran in the tower’s direction, surprisingly arriving next to it in a matter of seconds.

"What was that?" he couldn’t help but ask himself. "How am I so fast?"

He found the door to the tower quickly and ran it. A circular stairway was set up inside and he ran up the tower.

With each step, he crossed nearly 10 steps as he leaped his way to the top of the tower. He couldn’t understand it yet, but he felt that his strength had gotten much stronger than before.

He wondered how strong he was now and why, but now was not the time for that. He arrived at the top in a circular room with windows on all sides.

There were multiple people in the tower already, hanging around the empty room that had a few of the machinery that was inside the mayor’s hideout.

Was this supposed to be something similar to that? From what he could tell, it was all destroyed though, so he stopped caring about it.

He instead turned toward the people who were constantly gasping in surprise and went over to the window and saw why they were doing so.

It was then he saw the true horror that everyone but them had already witnessed.

Halfway up the 1st and 2nd quadrants, there was a swarm of Crawlers that destroyed everything as they made their way up the slope.

Stanley looked at the amount of Crawlers and his heart dropped in fear. What was this? What was going on? Why were there so many crawlers making their way up the slope?

There were hundreds of them, each one as ferocious as the next. Brave men and women were fighting the monsters that made their way up, but Stanley’s heartbeat only got faster seeing all that.

There was no way they could ever defeat those crawlers.

Defenders struggled to kill a single one of those monsters on their own. If two fought in a small location, the danger multiplied nearly tenfold as the unpredictability of the situation got all that worse.

At 10, you were pretty much guaranteed to die even with a hundred different Defenders if you couldn’t separate them far enough.

With 100, Stanley saw no chance for a single one of the people in the town to survive at all.

Was this the Nova’s doing? Was she the one that sent those monsters up the slope?

Stanley’s thirst for revenge lessened at the sight of something so fearful. Watching hundreds of crawlers crawl all over each other in a swarm as they slowly killed everything and everyone that tried to stop them was a horrible scene that woke him up from his moment of anger and frustration.

He slowly backed away from the window and started making his way down.

There was no way to win against this at all, even with all of his new powers. He needed to find a way to leave this place.