Chapter 263: Hometown

The grey light of dawn seeped through the cracked shutters of the roadside diner.

The morning air smelled wet, full of sulfur, and stale dust. By the time the faint glow touched the counter, Hide was already standing by the doorway. He couldn’t sleep at all. His face unremarkable.

Beside him, Kiko tightened the straps of her boots. Her grey hair concealed beneath her dark hood, her own face smoothed into the rounded, forgettable features sculpted by the slime the previous afternoon.

“How far is the city center from here?” She asked quietly, adjusting the collar of her vest.

“Fifteen kilometers down the secondary artery,” Hide replied, his voice slightly muffled beneath the disguise. “Keep your hood low. If there are automated scanners at the provincial toll gates, let me walk first.”

They stepped out of the depot, leaving the empty plastic cake wrapper on the booth table.

They were currently at the very edge of Varisus, not even inside the country yet. And from this side, they would enter Area 10 or 11. Then they would have to take the air bus to Area 5. But that is, if the air bus services still worked.

The highway heading north into Varisus was a graveyard of civilian transit. As they crossed the outer perimeter, the quiet desolation of the countryside gave way to the horrific reality of a continent under constant destruction.

Varisus had not been spared.

Overhead, the sky remained choked with dense, bruised-purple clouds. The towering buildings that once glittered against the sky were broken. Smoke rose in thick, greasy pillars from dozens of industrial districts. Along the roadsides, makeshift barricades of rusted iron rebar and sandbags were manned by terrified local militia fighters wearing dirty, mismatched gear, their eyes hollow.

They reached the border of Area 10 by late morning.

Once hailed as the bustling trade hub of the region, the district had become a choked bottleneck of concrete fortifications and barbed wire. But as Hide and Kiko approached the gate, they heard the screeches of calamity beasts and the deafening clatter of automatic gunfire.

There was no one to guard the gate so they stepped inside the border.

Close by, a gate breach had ruptured open across the commercial plaza.

A pack of nearly forty Calamity beasts were tearing through a makeshift barrier of metallic debris and overturned transit cars. A desperate squad of local exterminators and militia fighters was being pushed back into the alleys, their shields buckling under the feral assault, screaming for support that wasn’t coming.

“Wait here,” Hide murmured to Kiko.

Before she could answer, Hide blurred.

He stepped into the center of the intersection, his eyes narrowing as he released a microscopic fraction of his Abyssal Will.

HUMMM—!

A silent, concussive pressure slammed down upon the plaza.

In less than a single second, forty razor-thin spikes of black frost erupted simultaneously from the concrete beneath every single charging beast.

SHATTER!

Spines were snapped, throats were impaled, and the entire pack was instantly frozen solid before their corpses disintegrated into brittle, crystalline cubes of black ice. Not a single beast reached the barricade.

The entire massacre took less than a heartbeat.

The militia captain lowered his smoking rifle, his jaw hanging slack as he stared at the empty street littered with black frost. “Who… who are you?! Are you the reinforcement from the capital?!”

Hide didn’t answer or even look back. He shoved his hands into his jacket and walked past the barricades without uttering a single word, leaving the stunned defenders staring at his back.

Inside Area 10’s central terminal, the massive glass departure boards were dead.

The high-altitude Airbus lines connecting the provinces were completely shut down—the skies were swarming with uncontrolled flocks of calamity beasts, making civilian air travel a suicide run.

The only transport operating were ground-based civilian rescue buses—heavily armored diesel vehicles shuttling terrified refugees away from active containment zones toward temporary shelters.

In the crowded, chaotic staging yard, Hide stood before a row of rumbling transports.

To his left, a large bus was loading displaced citizens heading toward Area 5, the capital of Varisus. Hide stared at the destination sign for a brief moment. His best bet to find as many people as he wanted was to go to Area 5. It would be the most safe place in the entire country right now. But…

He turned on his heel and walked toward a battered, dented bus idling in the southern bay.

The placard above the windshield read: AREA 17 — LOCAL REFUGEE TRANSIT.

“Hide?” Kiko called out, hurrying after him as he stepped onto the metal boarding stairs. “Wait… why Area Seventeen? Didn’t you say the capital was Area Five?”

“Yes it is. We will go to Area Five later,” Hide answered quietly, finding two empty seats near the rattling back window. “Area 17 is where we go first.”

Kiko took the seat beside him, pulling her dark hood lower over her disguised features. “Why there? What’s in Area 17?”

Hide rested his forehead against the vibration of the cool glass.

“Everything,” he muttered.

—

The bus dropped them off at the outer industrial gate of Area 17, and the vehicle quickly sped away, kicking up a cloud of ash.

Hide realized, not surprisingly, that his hometown was unrecognizable.

Area 17 had always been grimy, filled with smog and crumbling apartment tenements, but now it was a hollowed-out carcass. Massive bomb craters pitted the main boulevards. The local transit rails had collapsed onto the roadways, their twisted steel tracks resembling giant ribcages. The scent of burning plastics, stale blood, and an acidic tang hung thick in the air.

Hide navigated the ruined streets with familiarity, guiding Kiko past collapsed storefronts.

He stopped across the coffee shop run by the old lady, the building was closed now, but unharmed. Then he passed his apartment, but the building had collapsed onto another. The school where he and Risa and Kai used to study was no more than rubble now.

His eyes were surprisingly calm as he took in all the destruction. Then he left the main city behind and They encountered many feral beasts running free on their way toward the affluent hill where the Sihue Clan’s estate resided.