Chapter 400: Strange Phenomena

The existence of two Anomalies was enough to explain the vast majority of the incidents involving ordinary people that the support squad had recorded so far—and the situation the cleanup squad now faced.

But...

There were still a few mysteries that couldn’t be explained.

For instance—why had the ant queen suddenly gone mad?

How had the ant king’s egg been shattered from the outside?

The queen had clearly been protecting that egg with her life, refusing to abandon it even as fire consumed her body. What manner of force could have crushed the egg right under her guard?

And then there were the strange phenomena the support squad had experienced before...

The events surrounding this building were clearly not so simple.

“What a headache.”

Pandora gently rubbed her temples, pressing the tangle of thoughts down for the time being.

There was no use straining over questions she couldn’t answer.

She patted the potion pouch at her waist, and the Palmfiend promptly came wriggling out.

Its pale little body settled obediently into Pandora’s palm.

Its luminous skin glowed faintly, casting a small halo of soft light through the gloom of the floor.

Gazing at that patch of glowing skin, something flickered in Pandora’s eyes.

Poppy—and even Ophelia...

Neither had responded, even now.

She had tried to establish contact through the Palmfiend earlier, but the other end had remained utterly silent.

Not a faint connection. No response at all.

“It seems... something really has happened on their end, too.”

With that thought, Pandora set aside the Anomalous phenomena in the building for now.

The oddities weren’t urgent. There would be time enough to investigate them later.

The ant queen was dead, after all, the colony had collapsed, and the Anomalous threats inside the building had essentially been cleared away.

Those lingering questions were unsettling, but the danger they posed at present was not great.

As for right now—what mattered more was confirming the state Poppy and the others were in...

The odds of something having happened to them were slim. But...

What if?

With that thought, Pandora hesitated no longer.

She turned and headed downstairs at once.

………………

In the pitch-black, abandoned subway tunnel, footsteps echoed between the walls—muffled and long-drawn.

After settling Elsa and Phoebe’s arrangements, Pandora had made straight for the building’s underground levels.

She moved fast.

There, she quickly found the “breached spot” the support squad members had spoken of.

It was a massive, twisted, deformed hole, its concrete edges torn open as if by some raw and violent force.

From there, Pandora slipped easily into the passage Poppy had identified as a subway tunnel.

In truth, Poppy’s judgment hadn’t been wrong. This really was an abandoned subway tunnel.

Its cross-section was a rounded arch, wide enough for several people to walk abreast, with the remnants of cable brackets and ventilation ducts still visible overhead.

Long since abandoned, the tunnel was exceptionally dim. Apart from a thread of exceedingly faint light bleeding in from the entrance far behind her, everything was swallowed in gloom.

That light was like a candle on the verge of guttering out, reaching no more than a few steps past her feet. Farther on lay pure darkness.

And yet, contrary to expectation, the place was not absolutely silent.

Quite the opposite—the tunnel brimmed with all manner of sounds.

The whistling of wind. The drip of seeping water.

The rustle of small creatures scurrying through the dark—sharp claws scraping across the concrete before vanishing into deeper blackness.

Even in surroundings this dark, Pandora’s perception was barely affected.

One sweep of her formidable wizard’s mental power, and the surrounding environment was fed back into her consciousness in perfect clarity.

It didn’t take her long to find the traces left behind by the fierce battle between Poppy and the Anomaly she had named the “Remnant Sovereign.”

Just ahead, a dozen-odd meters away, the ground was cracked, the walls dented, and the air still carried the faint aftermath of tremendous forces colliding.

But.

The tracking smoke Poppy had said she would leave behind—Pandora could not find it anywhere.

Which meant something might truly have befallen Poppy, so much so that she hadn’t even had the strength to spare to sustain those markers...

“What on earth happened?”

Pandora murmured. The sound echoed through the tunnel for a moment before the darkness swallowed it whole.

No answer came. Nor had she expected one.

Her footsteps never stopped.

Without hesitation, she followed the trail the battle had left behind.

Before long, her figure sank into that darkness that seemed to devour everything...

………………

Following the trail through the tunnel didn’t take Pandora long.

Poppy’s pursuit of the Remnant Sovereign Anomaly—fighting even as she chased—had likely consumed considerable time.

The battle traces stretched intermittently across a great distance, with sizable gaps between each stretch. Clearly, Poppy had been driving her prey deeper and deeper the whole way.

But Pandora simply pressed forward along the traces, never once stopping.

She had no need to work out directions, no need to hesitate at forks. All she had to do was keep following the path that violence had torn open.

And so she soon closed in on an exit.

Emerging from the abandoned subway station would, under ordinary circumstances, have been no small ordeal.

Its maze of passages and collapsed structures could easily trap a person inside for good.

In places, the ceiling had caved in entirely, rubble and twisted rebar piled together and sealing the way forward.

In others, the passage split into three or four branches, each leading in a different direction—without any signage, one wrong choice could end in a dead end.

Fortunately, Poppy had long since forced a route through.

Between rubble and rebar, a road hewn open by sheer force was plainly visible.

The collapsed debris that had once sealed the passage had either been shoved to the sides or blasted to pieces outright.

Following this route made Pandora’s progress far easier.

Once out of the subway station, she stepped into a city block.

As far as the eye could see, the block looked somewhat weathered—caught somewhere between a true old quarter and a new one.

Most of the buildings seemed in reasonably good condition, but there were essentially no tall structures—mostly low buildings of three or four stories.

The walls were mottled, their paint peeling away in patches to expose the grayish-white beneath, but structurally there was nothing obviously wrong.

The roof tiles were largely intact as well; an occasional chipped corner was hardly enough to make the place look derelict.

The streets themselves were passable enough.

The strange part was... there wasn’t a soul on them.

And it wasn’t just the streets. There was no one anywhere else, either.

The shops were closed, their rolling shutters streaked with rust. Some had rusted fast altogether, jammed half-open—unable to close, unable to rise—leaving only a crooked sliver of a gap that gaped, pitch-black, at the street.

The doors of public buildings were locked. The windows of residences were shut tight.

Window after window looked out like so many silent eyes—neither peering at the world beyond, nor answering her gaze.