Chapter 54: The Road to the Ruin
Chapter 54: The Road to the Ruin
A while later, Vesna returned, dragging Lěng Ruò Yān along.
Pushing, more accurately. Vesna placed both hands on the black-haired girl’s back and pushed her toward Ethan, while Ruò Yān walked with the expression of someone being hauled to a place she had no wish to go. Three puppets drifted silently behind her, and even those lifeless wooden puppets gave off an air of discontent.
She stopped a few paces from Ethan, crossed her arms, and looked him up and down.
"Let me be clear." Her voice was icy. "I’m guiding you not because I want to. It’s because Vesna asked. That’s all. Don’t go thinking that just because I threatened you last night, I’m now voluntarily playing navigator for you."
Ethan hadn’t even had time to answer when a voice no less cold spoke up beside him.
"Who said anyone needs you to come along?"
Laira.
The dragon stepped up half a pace, her red-orange eyes looking straight at Lěng Ruò Yān, and in her voice was all the annoyance that had built up since the night before.
"You only need to point us the direction, that’s enough," Laira said. "We can go on our own. And I’ve got no craving to share a road with the kind of woman who spends all day aiming puppets at the back of people’s necks like you."
Lěng Ruò Yān whipped around, like a cat that had just had its tail stepped on.
"The kind of woman?" She raised an eyebrow, her voice climbing higher. "Who are you calling the kind of woman? At least I’m not a guard beast that only knows how to bare its fangs whenever someone comes near its master."
"What did you just call me?" The flame began to kindle in Laira’s palm again.
"I called you a guard beast. Something wrong with that?" Ruò Yān’s three puppets stood upright. "An arrogant dragon that tucks its tail and turns obedient over a single tap on the head. If that’s not a guard beast, then what is it?"
"You—"
The air between the two women immediately stretched taut, red fire and puppet threads trembling at once, exactly like the night before.
And right in the middle of it, Vesna clapped her hands once, her voice cheerful.
"Oh, wonderful." She smiled, the butterfly wings at her temples fluttering. "Only a day and Laira and Ruò Yān are already this close with each other. A trip together is sure to be a lot of fun."
Both Laira and Lěng Ruò Yān turned to glare at her.
"Who’s close with her?!" the two said in unison, then immediately turned to glare at each other for having said the same line.
Ethan stood in the middle, raising a hand to rub his temples.
"..."
He began to seriously consider the possibility that stepping through a death gate of unknown difficulty might be more pleasant than walking several days’ road between these two.
In the end, they set off.
The sun was already high when the four of them, Ethan, Laira, Lěng Ruò Yān and the three puppets drifting silently behind her, left Springtide Village and headed toward the ancient ruin Vesna had pointed out. Vesna saw them off to the edge of the village, gave Ruò Yān a few words of instruction, then stood watching after them until their figures vanished behind the hillside.
The road wasn’t easy going.
Lěng Ruò Yān led the way, and it had to be admitted, Vesna had been right about her. She knew the terrain to an astonishing degree. She knew which patches of ground looked solid but were actually hollow beneath, which spots had a plant that gave off poisonous spores, which places should be gone around rather than crossed. Many times, she raised a hand to signal a stop without explanation, and only a few seconds later, something, a swarm of small venomous creatures, a patch of collapsing earth, would prove why she had stopped.
Ethan quietly took note of it. However prickly she was, she truly knew what she was doing.
Laira, for her part, kept her distance from Ruò Yān, walking close beside Ethan, occasionally shooting a glare toward the front. But her anger had cooled somewhat, partly from fatigue, partly because the wound on her wing still ached dully whenever the terrain grew rough.
They walked in silence most of the time.
Until they crested the top of a hill, and the scene below opened up before their eyes.
It was a city.
Or more accurately, had once been a city.
Stretching out below the valley were the ruins of an ancient metropolis. The high-rise buildings were now nothing but bare skeletons, cracked and broken concrete, shattered glass long since gone dull under the dust of time. Vines and moss blanketed the fallen walls. The roads of old were now split open, weeds growing up through every gap. In the distance, a bridge broken in two spanned a river that had run dry.
This was a trace of the world before the apocalypse. The world of eighty years ago, when humans still lived on the surface without need of protective walls, when the sky had not yet been ripped open by the Void.
Ethan stopped at the top of the hill, looking down, and a strange feeling rose up in his chest.
Nostalgia.
Not nostalgia for this place, he had never set foot here. But nostalgia for what it evoked. The buildings, the roads, the look of a place that had once had people living in it. It made him think of Safe Zone Number Seven. Think of the streets he had once walked every day to reach the warehouse. Think of his own small room. Think of a life that, however wretched, however looked down upon, had at least been a place to return to.
Now he had nowhere left to return to.
He had been pushed outside every wall, standing on an unfamiliar hill, looking down at the skeleton of a dead world, and wondering whether he would ever get to walk down an ordinary street again, without being a wanted man.
Laira, standing beside him, saw the expression on his face. She said nothing. She only gently placed her hand on his, a silent touch.
Even Lěng Ruò Yān, a few paces ahead, stopped. She didn’t turn her head, but she didn’t hurry them either. Perhaps a Partner abandoned by her own master understood too what the feeling of having nowhere left to return to was like.
For a moment, all three of them stood there, silent, looking down at the ruins.
Then Lěng Ruò Yān suddenly went rigid.
Her three puppets immediately stood upright, turning toward the same direction.
"Stand still," she said quietly, her voice having lost all its usual prickliness, replaced by an icy vigilance. "Nobody move."
Ethan immediately fell silent, his combat instinct rising. Laira drew her hand back, the flame silently kindling in her palm.
"What is it?" Ethan asked, his voice just barely audible.
Lěng Ruò Yān didn’t answer. She only raised one finger, pointing toward the city ruins, where the tallest of the crumbling buildings rose up.
Ethan looked.
And his heart seemed to stop.
At first, he thought it was a collapsed highway, or some crumbling structure spanning between the buildings. Something long, colossal, winding through the dead metropolis.
Then that something moved.
It was a snake. But to call it a snake was like calling a mountain a pebble. Its body was so massive it could swallow a whole building whole, so long that when its head had already reared up high into the murky yellow sky, its tail was still hidden behind the high-rises at the very far end of the city. Its entire body was covered in hollows, deep and pitch-black, looking like the countless eye sockets of human skulls melted down then fused together. Where its head should be, a colossal skull-like structure jutted out, and in the middle of its forehead, a yellow symbol glowed dimly, a mark Ethan didn’t recognize, but the eye on his forehead ached faintly when he looked at it.
The monster coiled itself amid the ruins, its colossal body forming twisting loops slung across the buildings, and it radiated a pressure that made the air around it seem to congeal.
All three of them stood frozen stiff on the top of the hill.
This was no ordinary monster. Ethan knew that immediately, by an instinct deeper than reason. This thing belonged to no classification humanity had ever recorded. It was ancient. It was colossal. And if it discovered the three of them, he wasn’t sure even Laira could stand against it.
But the monster wasn’t looking their way.
Its colossal skull head was aimed in another direction, toward the far horizon on the other side of the city, as if it were waiting, or listening, for something they couldn’t see.
It didn’t yet know they were here.
"Don’t breathe hard," Lěng Ruò Yān whispered, every word taut as a bowstring. "It hasn’t seen us. If we back away very slowly, very quietly..."
She hadn’t even finished the sentence.
When on the horizon the monster was looking toward, something began to glow.