Chapter 194: A Year of Starving
Seeing that the creatures couldn’t cross the boundary, the five of them let out a collective, ragged sigh of relief, several of them immediately collapsing to the ground, their legs giving out now that they no longer had to run.
Even Elena, the strongest of the group by a wide margin, let out a slow breath at the sight, the tension in her shoulders easing for the first time in what felt like hours.
Her gaze fell on the four others as they caught their breath, chests heaving, and then drifted further ahead, toward the area they had finally returned to, the place that had become something like a home in this nightmare.
A complicated tangle of emotion surfaced in her eyes as memories of the past year, all the long, grinding months spent in this place, came flooding back all at once, unbidden and unwelcome.
After BranLeaf had been struck by the calamity brought on by her own father’s actions, thousands of others had been buried alive along with the great stump that the city itself had been built upon.
Many had died instantly, crushed without warning. Others, still alive in those first terrible moments, had watched in absolute horror as the Hollows arrived, as the crack tore open across the sky itself, as a colossal hand descended to deliver the final blow to thousands more who might have otherwise survived.
And then, finally, that pillar of light, unleashed by someone’s attack, an attack that closed the fracture in the sky, but in doing so swept away everything else caught within its range as well, indiscriminate in what it destroyed.
When she’d seen that pillar of light come crashing down over the area where the remains of the great stump scattered, she’d thought, with a strange and hollow certainty, that it was the end. That everything was finally over.
But instead, it seemed her nightmare hadn’t ended there at all. It had only just begun.
This place was strange, wrong in a way she couldn’t fully put into words, filled with an energy that made her heart shudder every time she let herself think too long about it.
She’d found herself in the outskirts of the city almost immediately after, an area where many others had ended up just like her: some half-dead already, others wounded and barely clinging to consciousness, and a few, like her, still relatively intact, though that state hadn’t lasted long.
Because the first horrors of this city hadn’t taken much time at all to arrive.
At first, the people suffered from hunger. There was nothing here, no inhabitants, no plants, nothing at all. Inevitably, that scarcity sparked chaos and disorder among the few survivors, until at some point they split into two separate groups.
One was led by Elena herself, made up mostly of the elderly, children, and the wounded. The other was led by a handful of Awakeners who, had it not been for her overwhelming strength, would have already torn apart the weaker survivors and used them as food.
That standoff didn’t last long, though, because at a certain point the other group could no longer hold itself back. They stopped hiding what they were doing, no longer bothering to keep it away from her group’s sight. They began openly hunting down the weakest among them and using them as rations.
Seeing this, Elena understood that even that small remnant of humanity clinging to the survivors was slipping away, piece by piece.
She understood why they did it. Hunger did things to people, stripped away everything civilization had built on top of instinct.
But understanding didn’t mean she could accept it. She couldn’t stand by and watch it happen again and again.
So when one of them tried, for what must have been the hundredth time, to cause trouble for her group, something in her finally broke. She killed all of them. Every last one, sparing only those who had been victims within that group themselves, the ones who had never touched the flesh of another human being.
It solved one problem. But it did nothing to solve the one underneath it, the desperate situation they were all still trapped in.
Exploring the city itself wasn’t an option, only the outskirts were survivable.
If anyone tried to push further in, toward the heart of the city, they would die the moment they crossed a certain threshold, sometimes after no more than a single step past the boundary.
And if they went the other way, out past the outskirts toward the violet mist surrounding the city, that was where those strange creatures lived, ready to hunt them all.
In short, they were trapped. Boxed in on every side, with nowhere left to run.
Hunger gnawed away at their rationality and tortured all of them for days on end.
But after about a week, people began to notice something strange. No one grew dehydrated. No one starved to death, not truly, not even though every last one of them felt the gnawing emptiness clawing at their insides without pause.
No one died of natural causes at all. The hunger stayed with them, a constant, grinding torment, but it never actually killed anyone.
That went on for weeks. Then months. No one ever died from it.
It was as if this place had decided, deliberately, to keep them alive and torture them for as long as possible. If not through starvation, then through those creatures prowling the mist beyond the boundary.
And if not through the creatures, then through each other, through the internal conflicts that kept resurfacing again and again, because being trapped in the same place for nearly a year had eaten away at whatever sanity most of them had left.
That erosion led to more deaths eventually, deaths that had nothing to do with hunger or monsters at all, and slowly whittled Elena’s group down from what it had once been to the miserable handful of five people it was now.
She knew this couldn’t go on forever.
So she’d tried, more than once, to head toward the mist itself.
At least going that way didn’t mean certain death the moment they crossed the outskirts.
They could move through the mist without immediately being killed, as long as they kept their distance from the creatures lurking within it.
But what she and the others discovered instead was that the mist itself was saturated with Void energy, thick enough that merely lingering near it for too long was enough to infect them.