Chapter 192: Unexpected Survivors
Until not long ago, she had been in that dimension. But then she felt space itself react around her, and the next moment she found herself here, in this remote place, somewhere she never expected to return to so soon.
She wondered whether Evan had brought her here, or whether it was caused by something else entirely, but either way, she had no way of finding out, not while she was in a city that appeared almost completely deserted.
Or at least, that was what she thought.
But when she extended her spiritual sense to sweep the area, curious to see exactly what condition the city was in after all this time, she caught five life signs.
The discovery left her puzzled. There shouldn’t have been any signs of life in a place like this, nothing could survive within the city, let alone whatever lay beyond it.
So she decided to look closer, and to her surprise, there really were five living beings. Humans, to be precise.
"Well, now this is an unexpected sight," she murmured, her gaze settling on the outskirts of the city.
Strange sounds echoed first, followed by the sight of several figures sprinting through the ruined streets. Five of them, in particular.
Two women, three men.
One of the men looked to be in his mid-forties; the other two, barely past twenty. Of the women, one appeared to be in her late twenties and was clearly the one leading the group, judging by how the others fell into step behind her, following her every move.
The other was younger, barely twenty by the look of her.
All five were in rough shape.
Wounds littered their bodies, and their clothes had long since seen better days, torn, stained, barely holding together. Some of them bore strange dark marks across their skin, patches that looked almost like bruising, except they pulsed faintly with something that wasn’t quite natural.
None of it slowed them down. They ran at full speed, driven toward some unknown destination, not daring to look back for more than a fraction of a second at a time.
Because something was chasing them.
Behind the group, strange shapes moved through the gloom, half-submerged in shadow, like living ghosts torn straight out of some nightmare.
They snarled as they came, low and guttural, and their limbs were wrong in a way that was hard to define. Some stretched into long, gnarled appendages with a vaguely humanoid shape; others were hunched and bestial, running on four limbs like creatures that had forgotten they were ever meant to walk upright.
All of them, without exception, closing in from behind.
The five of them had no time to think, no time for anything but running. Their breath tore at their lungs, their muscles burned, but stopping meant only one thing, and none of them were willing to accept it, not after surviving this long in such a wretched place.
The woman in the lead, gritted her teeth as she shot a quick glance at the group behind her. The younger girl was struggling, her legs threatening to give out at any moment, her face pale, slick with sweat mixed with blood.
"Almost there," the woman said, her voice broken by exertion but steady. "We just need to hold on a little longer."
No one answered. No one had the breath to spare.
One of the two younger men stumbled, his foot catching on the rubble of what had once been a paved street. He pitched forward, a strangled cry tearing from his throat as his knee slammed into the stone.
"Marcus!" the middle-aged man shouted, slowing for just a moment, already turning back.
"Don’t stop!" the woman leading the group snapped, but it was already too late. The older man had turned around.
"No, I’m not leaving my son in the hands of those things," he shouted, sprinting back toward the fallen boy.
The boy on the ground seemed to have hurt his leg, judging by how he struggled to rise, pain written plainly across his face.
"Dad-" he managed, just as the older man reached him, hauling him up and back onto his feet, pulling him straight back into a run.
The whole thing took only moments, but the creatures behind them closed the gap in that brief window all the same.
Their snarls grew closer, louder, as if they could sense the weakness that had just been shown and were feeding on it.
They’d nearly caught up, something both the father-son pair and the three running ahead noticed with dawning horror.
"Damn it... as if things weren’t bad enough already." the woman in front snapped through gritted teeth, breaking her stride and spinning around in an instant to face what was coming.
Of the five, she was clearly the strongest.
Her long black hair whipped around her as she moved, and her borwn eyes seemed to flicker faintly, a golden-orange glow rippling just beneath the surface, as she closed the distance to the two stragglers in a single burst of speed.
"Miss Elena-" the older man managed to get out before she cut him off with a glance.
"Keep going. I’ll hold them off," she said. The man opened his mouth to protest, but she gave him no chance to.
Sparks scattered from a ring on her finger, and a dark sword, larger than she was, materialized in her hand.
Given its size and what was likely considerable weight, most people would have struggled to even lift it. She gripped it one-handed without the slightest difficulty.
A golden halo wrapped around her as the glow in her eyes intensified. Her hair began to shimmer, shifting from black to a fiery reddish-orange in an instant.
A powerful aura rolled off her and settled over the area, one that did nothing to slow the creatures down. If anything, it seemed to excite them further.
Seeing that, she narrowed her eyes, already bracing to strike.
’Tch. Deformed bastards. Just die already,’ she snarled in her mind, and with the hilt of the dark sword gripped tight in both hands, she swung it in a wide arc in front of her. A blast of reddish-orange light tore free from the blade and shot forward at full speed toward the creatures.
They seemed to sense the energy of the attack and, strangely, grew even more excited by it. But the strike never landed. An instant before it could connect, it detonated, and a deafening explosion rocked the area, one powerful enough that even the three running ahead spun around to see what had happened.
All they caught sight of were flames rising into the air, followed immediately by the woman’s figure as she caught up to them at full speed.
"Don’t slow down. We’re almost in the safe zone."