For quite a few minutes nothing happened. It was peaceful but the peace was soon shattered.
A group of beasts erged from beneath the broken terrain without warning, their bodies fused with the land itself as if they had been born from the very ruins of war.
Their forms were twisted, their limbs uneven, and their eyes glowed with a faint, unnatural light. The mont they surfaced, they attacked without hesitation.
Rose reacted instantly.
"Prepare for battle!," she ordered.
The group moved as one, forming a loose defensive formation as the beasts charged toward them.
The clash was brief but intense.
The beasts were not weak, but they were not beyond what the group could handle. Their strength lay in their unpredictability, in the way they erged without warning and attacked with reckless ferocity.
However, the two groups were not weak either. They fought relentlessly against these beasts and started killing them.
Within monts, the beasts were gone.
Not slain in the traditional sense, but broken apart into fragnts of energy that dissipated into the air.
"These are zombies or what?," Max thought, his eyes narrowing slightly.
Rose glanced at him briefly, as if she knew what he had realized, but she said nothing. Instead, she simply motioned for the group to move on.
As they continued, the encounters beca stranger.
There were areas they passed where the ground seed to breathe, rising and falling ever so slightly as if sothing massive slumbered beneath it.
Rose instructed them to walk along a specific path, warning them not to deviate even a single step. No one questioned her.
At another point, they ca across a field filled with faintly glowing fragnts suspended in the air. They looked harmless, almost beautiful, drifting slowly like fireflies.
One of the mbers from the other group instinctively reached out, but Rose stopped him imdiately, her voice sharp and commanding.
"Do not touch anything!"
She told them not to touch anything, and the firmness in her tone made it clear that this was not a suggestion but a command that had to be followed without question.
There was no room for doubt in her voice, and even those who did not understand the danger instinctively withdrew their hands.
Max could feel it as well. The fragnts floating in the air were not simple energy constructs. There was sothing deeply wrong about them. They carried a faint distortion, sothing unstable that bent the surrounding space in subtle and unnatural ways.
Even standing near them caused a discomfort that seeped into his senses, as if reality itself was slightly misaligned in that area.
'I can feel very unstable concept of space from these fragnts.' Max thought as he examined them in his mind.
Without wasting ti, the group moved past that region quickly, careful not to make contact with anything.
Not long after, the situation changed again.
Rose did not slow down or explain anything this ti. Instead, she gave a single command.
"Everyone, run!"
Her voice was low but carried urgency that none of them could ignore. There was no explanation, no visible threat, and no ti to question her. Yet every single one of them understood that whatever had triggered that command was far beyond sothing they could casually face.
The group did not hesitate.
They ran.
Their movents beca swift and focused as they followed Rose without deviation. The air behind them seed to shift, though none of them turned to look. But Max with his Dinsional Sovereign Body saw nothing.
He only just felt a presence.
It was massive, ancient, and overwhelmingly oppressive, unlike anything they had encountered so far. It did not feel like a beast or a cultivator. It felt like sothing far older, sothing that had existed long before them and would continue to exist long after.
However, just when they were considerable distance from their original location where they started running was when Max saw sothing that sent a chill down his spine.
He saw that ground beneath that area where they had been previously standing disappeared all of a sudden. Through his Dinsional Sovereign Body, he clearly saw a big black hole appeared in that region.
But that black hole disappeared as soon as it ca and the situation returned to normal.
'What the hell was that?!' Max frowned.
The two groups kept running. Nobody slowed down even a little and kept a close distance to Rose.
They ran until that presence gradually faded from their senses, until the oppressive feeling loosened its grip on them and the tremors beneath their feet ceased.
Only then did Rose finally slow her pace.
"What was that?" Lucia asked this ti.
Rose shook his head. "Nothing. Let's continue."
Since Rose didn't tell them, the two groups didn't ask anymore as they continued their journey.
But only Max knew what they were running for. Though he couldn't understand why Rose didn't tell them what they been running away from.
As the journey continued, they were heading closer to their destination.
They fought when they had no choice but to fight, cutting down creatures that stood in their path. They ignored things that seed strange yet not imdiately threatening, trusting Rose's judgnt without question.
And when faced with sothing beyond their ability to confront, they ran without hesitation.
Step by step, they moved deeper into Orion.
The world around them felt increasingly unstable, as if it did not follow the sa rules they were used to. Ti itself seed uncertain, monts stretching or compressing in ways that were difficult to grasp.
Distances beca unreliable, with locations appearing closer or farther than they should have been. Without Rose guiding them, it would have been impossible to tell whether they were advancing toward their destination or simply wandering aimlessly through a broken world.
After what felt like hours of careful movent, the atmosphere began to change once again.
This ti, it was different.
The air did not grow heavier or suffocating.
It beca unstable.
There was a subtle fracture in it, as if the very fabric of space had been disturbed.
Max felt it imdiately.
His senses picked up on the distortions, faint at first but growing more noticeable with each step they took. The ground beneath them bore new kinds of scars, not the result of battles or destruction, but sothing far more unnatural. These were marks left by sothing that had torn through reality itself.
Rose slowed down as she sensed it as well.
"We are close," she said.
Ahead of them, the land opened into a vast and uneven terrain. The space itself seed to flicker faintly, as if it could not fully maintain its structure. It was not a visible tear yet, but the signs were undeniable.
Max's eyes sharpened as he looked ahead.
The crack.
They had reached its vicinity.
User Comments
0 comments from readers