Into The Madness of The Corrupt

Whats on your shoulder?

"Ava!" Elijah yelled.
He ran up to her and hugged her. Sophia, Ella, Jobe, and Nene doing the same.
"I feel horrible guys." Ava said.
"Why?" Ella asked.
"It's just like... he's gone. It should've been me." Ava said.
"No guys, he's actually gone. Like no coming back." Kayla stated.
"I don't get it though, how is that even possible?" Jobe asked.
"The card said if you die in this dimension, your souls will be eradicated from existence." Jenny said.
Everyone looked scared.
"Why are the sprinklers on in the mall?" Elijah asked.
"It was part of the challenge. We can actually take out hazmat suits off now guys, the fog is gone." Ava said.
"Guys we can't be fucking around though, actually... this is some real shit." Jenny said again.
"What do I do with this crystal, guys?" Ava asked.
"Oh yeah... I forgot you weren't there when they explained this." Jobe said.
"When we get a crystal, we're supposed to bring it downstairs and put it in its place on the water fountain. We need to fill all the places up on the water fountain if we want to escape. When we do it'll break the magical barrier around Earth and give us the power to kill Evalah." He explained.
"Oh okay, well then let's go put it down there." Ava said.
They walked downstairs, and found their way to the water fountain. Ava put the crystal in an empty space where it fit in the fountain, it glowed a bit after she put it in. A beautiful sage green glow. As she did this, suddenly they heard an alarm ringing from behind them in the other part of the mall, it sounded like the alarm your phone played in the morning when you're waking up for work or for school. The group went over to check it out. It was that blue screen with the clock on it. It had just turned to 12:00am, meaning they now only had about 6 and a half hours left until sunrise.
"How many slots are there in the fountain guys, that's how many monsters we'll have to go through to get out of here?" Elijah asked.
"There's seven, we just filled one slot so now there's six left." Nene stated.
"So only 2 of us are gonna survive? What's even the point of doing this if almost all of us are gonna die?" Kayla said.
"It's better than none of us surviving? I don't know!" "But what I do know is that there's only about 6 hours left until the sun rises and we need 6 more crystals. We need to hurry or else of us will die." Ella said.
The group heard a loud humming noise coming from outside. They went to see what it was. When they went outside a cicada landed on Jobe's shoulder.
"Agh! What the fuck get it off me!" He yelled. He smacked it off of his shoulder, it making that horrible loud sound that cicadas make when they're disturbed as he did so. Ella laughed at him.
"Oh my God Ella, you know how much I hate those things! They're always near my house and now they're here! I thought this place couldn't get any worse!" He rambled.
"Haha!" She laughed. She didn't say it in a regular way, she said it in a fast way with a weird voice. Her and Jobe would always laugh like that.
They would also do this really annoying high pitched squeal when something cringy or funny or weird happened. And if they hadn't seen each other for a while, when they finally would, they would grab each others hands and jump in a circle for five minutes doing a combo of the high pitched squeal while laughing at the same time. It was their thing. Ava would do this thing with Jobe when they would quote funny memes on tiktok and mock each other annoyingly every five seconds. That was their thing. One thing they all shared together however was their sense of humor, and love for food. They loved making really inappropriate jokes when anything they said sounded weird. They would have big hangouts with each other where they'd splurge a bunch of money on food and eat it together while talking about their lives. They were best friends, even if Ava was Jobe's cousin, he still considered her as a best friend as well as a cousin. Soon after Jobe swiped the cicada off of his shoulder, a cicada flew onto Ella's shoulder. She screamed super loud and swiped it off of her shoulder, Jobe laughed at her. Then they heard multiple cicadas doing their loud buzzing. Multiple were landing on the groups head, shoulders, arms, legs... everywhere. They knew there was something up.
"Guys what's that noise?" Nene asked.
It was that same loud humming from earlier. Now it was even louder. It sounded like it was coming from the sky. Kayla looked up,
"Holy shit." She said. There was a dark spot in the sky, it was being partially illuminated by lightning in the sky shining and disappearing. She realized that it wasn't a dark spot, it was a brood of cicadas. And it was getting closer.
"We need to get the fuck inside. Now!" Kayla yelled.
"Why?" Jenny asked.
"That thing in the sky is the fucking cicadas!"
As Kayla said this, the cicadas started swarming the mall, making a collective noise as loud as 10,000 vacuums vacuuming at the same time. They were flying around everyone. They then looked at the top of the mall, seeing the silhouette of what looked to be a 8 foot tall creature... its body was not built like a human. It made a hissing sound and jumped to the ground,
"Give them kisses..." it said in a course dark voice being drained out by mucus from its throat. It was big, and was covered in slimy white scales all over its body. It had a thorax like an insect and two big legs it walked around with claws at the bottom of them. It's face had 12 red insect eyes over its face. Its arms were 2 white, giant insect appendages. The ends of them were sharp and heavy. It used them to walk around, aiming to strike every living thing in sight with them.

"This one will be the one to end them." Evalah said as she watched from atop the mall.