Chapter 637 - 624: Terrible

[Realm: Álfheimr]

[Location: Dominion of Oz]

[Winkie Country]

"How terrible..." The words left Paimon’s lips in little more than a whisper.

She stood almost completely still as she looked across the ruined settlement, her expression subdued by what lay before them.

Mikoto did not feel the same uneasiness.

He could understand where her discomfort was coming from, however. He simply did not share it in quite the same way. His red eyes moved steadily across the remains, taking in the details.

They had finally found traces of life.

But they were only traces.

There was no movement anywhere around them. No voices or signs of someone having recently passed through. Nothing that suggested the settlement had survived in any meaningful sense.

Only evidence that people had once lived here.

The homes were small, round structures made almost entirely from tin, though calling them homes now felt generous. Dozens of them were scattered throughout the plains, each one rusted, torn apart, or partially collapsed. Some had been reduced to little more than bent sheets of metal lying across the earth. Others still retained enough of their original shape to make it possible to understand what they had once been.

Long fences made from the same dull tin surrounded portions of the settlement, though they had long since been torn down. Some sections had fallen completely flat, while others leaned at awkward angles, half-buried beneath grass and dirt.

But it was not the ruined homes or the broken fences that held their attention.

It was the bodies.

Various skeletons were strewn throughout the settlement, discarded where they had fallen or where they had been left afterward. Old, tattered clothing still clung to their bones in places, faded by time and exposure. Some skeletons lay partially beneath the wreckage of the homes, while others remained completely exposed to the open air.

There were enough of them that it was impossible to mistake what had happened here for anything mundane.

"Hm, so this slaughter occurred some time ago. " Echidna mused, looking over the remains without any visible disturbance.

Her reaction was unnervingly calm. She examined the settlement as though she were studying the remnants of something far more mundane.

Mikoto crouched slightly, his attention settling on one of the skeletons.

He studied the state of what had once been a body with considerably more care than he had given the buildings. Unlike the tin homes, which had clearly suffered from years of exposure, neglect, and physical destruction, the skeletons themselves were strangely well preserved.

Wildly intact.

There were no obvious signs of violent dismemberment or scattered bones, suggesting that the bodies had been torn apart by beasts. Even the clothing, despite its age, remained attached to many of the remains.

And there were not even old bloodstains.

That detail bothered him more than the corpses themselves.

His red eyes narrowed slightly.

("Hm, my Chthonia detects a static-like presence.") Mikoto internally noted. ("Like a Null Schema was used.")

The sensation was small, but it was there.

Echidna seemed to arrive at a conclusion of her own.

"A Manus Dei was responsible, it seems. " Echidna informed, her gaze sweeping over the settlement. "Even the ley lines here seem particularly weakened. Whatever occurred here did more than simply kill the inhabitants. Something has left the land itself diminished."

"So something that saps away energy and life force, huh?" Mikoto surmised, looking around the area.

His tone remained relatively flat, but his eyes continued moving from one ruined home to another.

Paimon merely could not help but send the two of them incredulous looks.

Her blue eyes moved between Mikoto and Echidna, then back toward the skeletons.

They were discussing the nature of the slaughter calmly. As if the dead scattered around them were another piece of information to be catalogued.

("Am I the only one disturbed about this?") Paimon internally questioned.

["Fool."]

The growling voice within her head was the only thing that answered.

Paimon ignored it.

She refused to give the voice any satisfaction, even as she continued staring uneasily at the remains.

"So much for finding anything resembling civilization," Mikoto scoffed.

There was more irritation than disappointment in his voice.

They had spent more than an hour exploring the plains in the hope of finding some indication of where they were, where the others might have gone, or where they could find someone capable of providing useful information.

Instead, they had found ruins and dead people. And yet another indication that this strange land was considerably less welcoming than it had any right to be.

The next best option would have been to fly around and obtain a better vantage point.

Mikoto considered it.

From above, he might have been able to see farther across the plains, perhaps identify another settlement or some structure hidden beyond the horizon. But the thought felt much too random to him. There was no guarantee that looking from the sky would accomplish anything beyond giving them a larger view of the same empty landscape.

More importantly, he doubted he would easily spot Gretel and the others from such a distance.

His red eyes slowly passed over the destroyed homes once again, lingering on the decayed corpses.

("From what I remember from the story, the people who lived here were tinsmiths or something, and the Wicked Witch of the West oversaw this place,") Mikoto internally mulled.

He had never been particularly interested in fairy tales. He had never been the type to spend much time caring about stories that were supposedly nothing more than children’s fiction. At the time, there had never been much reason to.

Now, standing in the middle of a world that had seemingly taken those stories and made them real, it was difficult not to wonder whether his previous indifference had been a mistake.

A regretful course, considering the state of this world.

"Any next grand step to our journey?" Echidna questioned.

Her eyes remained on the settlement as she spoke, though there was dryness to her tone.

"We have been exploring for more than an hour without any sign of life that wasn’t Deseruit Beasts. And now we find some in a state like this. Suffice to say, our luck of finding any live ones dwindles by the minute."

As annoying as Echidna was, Mikoto could not deny that she was right.

Their search had yielded almost nothing.

The plains seemed to stretch endlessly around them, and every promising sign had ultimately led to another dead end. Even when they finally encountered something that suggested civilization, it had only led them to a settlement that had apparently been dead for some time.

"Hm?"

Mikoto’s attention shifted.

Before he could ponder the situation any further, something suddenly struck his mind.

His expression changed only slightly, but his focus sharpened immediately.

"My soldiers found something," he suddenly stated.

"Those knights you summoned earlier?" Paimon questioned.

Mikoto nodded his head.

"One spotted Goiim. She’s alone."

The irritation that had been sitting beneath his expression eased somewhat.

At least that was something.

They had spent long enough wandering through the plains without a clear direction. Finding one of their scattered companions gave them an immediate point to work from, and more importantly, it meant they had finally found someone they actually knew.

"We’ll just teleport."

He decided.

A second later, a large circular glyph ignited beneath their feet.

The markings spread outward in a ring, light forming beneath Mikoto, Paimon, and Echidna.

The spell should have been straightforward.

It was not.

Just as the glyph fully ignited, Mikoto’s red eyes widened minutely; something was wrong.

"Shi—"

BOOM!!!

The explosion came a second later.

It happened so suddenly and without warning that none of them were prepared for it.

The ground beneath them ruptured as a violent burst of force tore through the area. The teleportation glyph collapsed almost instantly, its formed structure breaking apart beneath the blast as the force ripped through the earth and displaced the air around them.

Dust, dirt, pieces of metal, and grass were thrown outward.

The shockwave tore through the settlement with enough force to send debris skidding across the ground, while the earth beneath their feet cracked and gave way. The air seemed to lurch from the sudden release of energy.

Smoke rapidly surrounded the area.

It swallowed the ruins and obscured the landscape, leaving almost nothing visible beyond vague silhouettes moving through the haze.

A few coughs sounded from Paimon; she had been sent flying by the explosion.

Her body struck the ground hard enough to roll across the dirt before she finally came to a stop. For several seconds she remained there, stunned, one hand pressing against the ground as she sluggishly began to push herself upright.

Her hood had been torn in several places, and there were visible tears in her attire, but there were no injuries on her body.

Paimon slowly rose from the ground, coughing again as she tried to clear the smoke from her lungs.

She looked around in confusion.