Of Ruined Cities and Blackened Skies

John laid on the ground for a moment, enjoying the lack of weight on his chest. [Gamer’s Body] had healed the injuries he’d sustained already, but the memory of pain and the soreness that followed remained.

With a groan, he twisted to place his hand on his side, where he’d been hit. Casting [Mend the Flesh], his palm began to glow faintly green, the warm healing spell taking the edge off his discomfort. Friendly red returned to slowly top off his health bar.

’Attempted heroics hurt,’ he thought, shifting his healing spell to the next sorest spot. ’I should have tried using the wall. I maybe could have wedged it between them or something. Stupid stupid stupid…’

As the Gamer chastised himself, his companion tore her axe from where it was embedded in steel, watching with curiosity as the enemies melted away into dust and light. Ela took a second to catch her breath, the light fading from her suit. She felt heavy again, as her muscles re-acclimated to the weight of her armor without enhancement.

Groaning, she rolled her shoulders, grabbing her wrist where she’d been bitten and channeling her own healing spell. The blonde frowned with worry as she turned from the scene of her final strike to find John still on the ground.

“Are you alright?” Ela called over, concern seeping into her voice.

The blonde ran over to join him, carefully holding her arm.

“I’m good... I think. [Gamer’s Body] has fixed everything already. Got hurt a lot worse in the last one,” he said, dryly. “Not a great plan there from me, jumping in to try and fight that thing.”

He sat up, scratching the back of his head. “I’m not exactly a warrior build.”

She smiled softly. “Well, I am glad you are OK. Thank you.”

“Heh. Kinda felt like I just got in the way,” he muttered. “You’re the one that did the saving there at the end.”

“The intent matters to me, more than the action,” she replied, warmly. “Being willing to fight for your comrades when outmatched is a noble thing.”

Ela extended a hand down to him. John looked up at her, taken aback somewhat by how genuine she was. Her eyes betrayed nothing but sincerity - none of the chastisement for failure he’d dreaded. The Gamer sighed, allowing a grin through. He took her hand, letting her help him to his feet.

“I would call us even,” she sang, returning his smile. “We can work on your strategy next time.”

John took a moment to dust himself off, switching back to his staff.

“What about you?” he worried. “That thing had your arm pretty good.”

She brought her gauntlet-clad arm up and wiggled her fingers. Her armor showed no signs of damage at all, as if it hadn’t just been trapped in the jaw of a hungry monster. Not the faintest scratch marred the smooth plates.

“The creature may have twisted my wrist, but I have already healed myself.”

The Gamer whistled. “You weren’t kidding about durability.”

“You were not joking about the monsters either… Those were very real,” Ela said, her voice trailing off.

“Didn’t believe me?” John chuckled.

“I… It is hard to imagine all this. I did not expect how much like the real thing they were.”

“Like the real thing? Those looked pretty real to me,” he retorted, hand returning to his side for a moment. “Felt pretty authentic, too.”

She smiled wryly at that. “Unfortunately, I must agree. I was right about them, though. Despite their unnatural strength, their bodies were weak, flesh and bone alike. More than I would have expected.”

The Gamer shrugged. “Maybe it’s a balance thing? Like they were way faster than the average enemy from last time, stronger too, so they’re fragile?”

“I suppose your powers are somewhat like a game. That may be the answer… It feels strange to think that this whole place may simply be a barrier’s illusion.”

The two stood in pleasant silence for a second after that, each mulling over their own questions. Ela wiped some of the gore from her blade, scraping it off onto a nearby car roof. John reset his own equipment, shivering as the wind began to pick up.

The rumbling of the storm began to get worse, the sky darkening. Flashes of lightning danced among the clouds, offering brief, bright moments of illumination over the bridge clearing. The temperature began to drop, a strange, unsettling pressure in the air.

“Let’s grab the loot and get moving,” John suggested, getting Ela’s attention. “I don’t wanna find out what this storm can do. Not while we’re out here.”

“Right, you said that these monsters leave real things behind.” The blonde furrowed her brows. “…We do not have time for me to try and explain how many rules that I have known all my life this whole place breaks.”

“...Sorry?” He shrugged, chuckling.

She giggled, in her soft, gentle way.

“Anyway,” he started, pointing behind her to where familiar colored sacks sat on the ground. “Those green ones should be cash drops, the others items or monster bits or whatever. We can split stuff later.”

The blonde nodded, and she followed John around as he walked from body to body, picking up sacks and showing off their contents. The money was significantly better than the previous dungeon, with each zombie dropping around forty dollars, though the drops besides that were all worthless body parts.

Ela did take a moment to examine each with care, seemingly still somewhat in disbelief.

“It’s easier if you give up trying to make sense of it. That’s what I did.”

That got a sly smile out of the knight. “I wish it were that easy for me.”

Once she’d taken another look over the last random ghoul arm that had dropped, the pair agreed to move on. Continuing across the bridge, they got back on their original track, making their way towards the city.

They tried to progress quickly, the darkening skies hurrying them along.

---

The rest of the bridge was clear of monsters as far as either of them could tell, and so they’d reached the far side unhindered. A faint, pale mist seemed to have fallen upon the city as the pair approached. It was just faint enough to add an air of mystery, obscuring the skyline.

John and Ela crossed the city line cautiously, looking all around for signs of attack.

The first buildings they encountered were worn almost to their barest shells, colors faded away into almost uniform gray-tinged shades. Windows were shattered, pillars were toppled, roofs had collapsed. John frowned, a strange melancholy upon him as he realized that the world wasn’t just absent of human life now, it had been so for quite a while.

John stopped, pausing to take in all he could see. There was something more real and painful to this up close. His breath caught in his throat.

In most apocalyptic cities he’d seen, there were at least plants or animals that offered some hope that nature was still around, but not here. Here, even the simplest traces of green that still existed by the lighthouse had been stomped out. Rivers of thick, grimy ooze ran down the streets, staining the broken remains of civilization. Not a single trace of light pierced the blackened heavens above.

Even the sky had not escaped the end of the world.

“John?” Ela turned to see why he’d stopped.

“I… sorry,” he mumbled. “This place is really unsettling.”

She offered a sympathetic smile. “It is.”

The wind continued to pick up, as if the churning tempest had decided to remind them of its presence. Sighing, The Gamer chose to believe that this was just some scenario designed for dungeons and quests. He didn’t want to imagine what the people who lived here would have had to go through otherwise.

John returned his focus to ground level and the journey ahead. “I’m good. Let’s get going.”

Ela looked him up and down for a moment before nodding, gesturing for him to follow her. The pair stepped within the city bounds, at a crossroads. One street continued parallel to the ocean, uninterrupted, the cliffside lined with a steel guardrail. The path in front should have led to the city center.

Unfortunately, the military destruction also continued in a straight column down the main street, where a tower had folded over itself a few blocks in, collapsing on top of the road. They wouldn’t be able to follow the defense line any farther, unless they were willing to climb through or over the crushed remains of the building.

The rumble of thunder grew even more constant, yet was muffled somewhat by the rise of buildings around them. John and Ela approached slowly, scanning the now more open area thoroughly before dashing from the mouth of the bridge across to a building on the far side of the street.

They paused for a moment under an overhang, and John pulled out his phone again, opening the map. The path that they’d identified earlier looped around the fallen buildings before reconnecting with the main street farther from the coast, presumably when travel was possible again.

“It looks like we need to snake around a bit here, a couple blocks over first,” he muttered as the two traced the next section of their route. “I think we can follow the coast over for a bit, then we need to head inland.”

“Look at this, by the next corner.” Ela pointed on the map, to the end of where John had traced. “There are old marks there.”

The Gamer followed her gesture on the map. At the next corner, past the turn in from the coast that John had indicated, was a series of smudges and eraser marks. There was a symbol on the map that he didn’t understand, and something had been scribbled around it before being scratched out.

“Huh. I didn’t notice those earlier. I guess they edited something,” he said, zooming in on the image. “Makes sense, I guess, if something changed after they started mapping.”

“Agreed. We should be careful as we travel around that area, until we are sure that there is no real threat there.”

The Gamer nodded, and they started down the coastline, following the mapped route. John chose to keep his phone out, to try and make some association between the map and terrain, while Ela continued to be the tip of their two person spear. Now that they were in the city, the crunch of their footsteps over debris seemed to echo even more than before, sounds bouncing between walls and wrecked vehicles.

’This is so strange. Even while traveling last time, there were occasionally scattered monsters - one or two, here or there,’ he thought, mind unconsciously wandering. ’Why does the city seem more empty than the coast did?

’What the hell is going on in this twisted place?’

“Not to mention that I’d only need a few more enemies to level up… come on…” The Gamer muttered under his breath.

Ela halted immediately. “Do you see something?”

“Oh, uh, I was talking to myself,” John admitted, slightly embarrassed at his own distraction. “I was wondering where all the enemies are. I never had an empty stretch like this in the last dungeon.

She put a finger to her chin. “Hmm…Your guess would be as good as mine.”

The Gamer nodded. “Just gives me a bad feeling.”

“You are not supposed to say that,” Ela chided. “Now something bad has to happen.”

John grinned at that. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s get moving before you’re proven right.”

---

The rest of the walk along the coast was tense, as the dungeon continued to grow darker and darker. There had probably been a beautiful view of a sterling blue ocean at one point here, with an expansive, open view over the cliffside, though it was gone now, replaced by nought but inky blackness.

’Wish I could have seen it before all this… any chance my travel agent has plans for the tropics sometime soon?’

Getting no response, The Gamer returned to his silent journey.

The mist was beginning to grow thicker, the edges of what the party could see slowly closing in on them. John wordlessly began walking closer and closer to Ela, making sure she was within arm’s reach at all times. He’d seen too many movies where one of the group disappeared while the other wasn’t looking.

Arriving at the turn they were expecting, the knight and the nerd pressed against the wall of a long abandoned corner store. Cold brick sent a shiver down The Gamer’s back, but he followed Ela’s lead, slowly shimmying up to the edge next to her.

“Let me look first, then we go together,” she said, pulling her axe up.

As he waited for his companion to peek around the corner, John checked behind them again, absentmindedly running his hand over the worn brick they hid behind. He wondered how long it had been since living people had walked these streets. Months? Weeks? Years? Ela tapped his shoulder, and he turned from both the coast and his thoughts about it.

The side street that they turned down now had been much less packed when it was abandoned, leaving wide open stretches for them to traverse. Part of John hated the lack of cover, part of him felt good that nothing else could be hiding there.

As they continued to move, John began to notice small differences in the mess around them. The ooze was somewhat slicker, wetter, and it flowed more smoothly down the road. Streaks of red ran through it. Still, nothing accosted them.

“Does this goop look different to you?” John whispered. “I dunno… fresher?”

The blonde turned, scanning the stained street. “It may be… Be careful, we are almost to the next turn.”

After a few more minutes of travel through the ruined city, they reached the area of the map where the strange marks had been, and found a small square built around a park. It would have been a nice clearing in the middle of a concrete forest, if it wasn’t for the whole post-apocalyptic, covered in black goop aesthetic it had now.

The small island of nature that had once been the centerpiece of the area was dark brown, dead and rotting. There were a couple fallen trees, though they too were dried out, yet more **** to decorate the dungeon. A pagoda off to one side had started to crumble in on itself.

A dry shriek came from the mist, though it was faint, and weak. Confused at the pained wail, it took John a second to get into a combat stance. Ela had no such delay, and her weapon was at the ready long before their lone foe dragged itself from the foggy beyond.

A single, mangled corpse crawled towards them. This one was desiccated to an **** degree, seemingly down to all but bone. Its muddy brown skin was cracked and flaky. Something had brutally ripped it in half, and so it was limited to slowly pulling itself one arm’s length at a time, each heft leaving behind bits and pieces.

John didn’t even have to use [Observe] to know that it was on the brink of ****, though he did so anyway.

’What the hell? No way this is the same thing as before, right?’ John thought, confused.

The Gamer looked up at the creature again. It was almost sad, the way it struggled even to move. John wasn’t sure if it was pity or prudence that made him finish it off swiftly, a [Lesser Earth Spike] annihilating the dying horror. Nothing further assailed the two.

“Ela,” he whispered. “My [Observe] says that thing was the same type of creature that we fought on the bridge. Didn’t look like it to me though.”

The blonde turned, a quizzical look on her face. “That… what happened to it?”

“Beats me.”

Cautiously, the two walked forward to where the monster's body was fading away upon the stone spike. They had had no time to examine it as a single monster before it had turned into dust, though one of its arms had dropped. Signaling John to watch around them, Ela knelt down, studying it for clues.

“Nearly all the moisture is gone. Signs of malnutrition and dehydration,” she muttered, running a glowing hand up and down the looted limb. “It seems… drained…”

“Isn’t that what they’re all like? They’re dead, right?” He shrugged.

The blonde shook her head, discarding the arm. “Normally, necromancy should prevent this from occurring naturally, to preserve the body’s strength. Something happened to them.”

John sighed. “Just one thing after another in here…

“Do we still want to look around for that mark?” he asked, as Ela stood to check the area out herself. “The route we were following goes out the other end of the park over there, onto another side street.”

She offered him a teasing smile. “Do not tell me that ‘The Gamer’ does not want to stop and look for secrets. They would not mark nothing.”

John almost took offense to that.

“Of course not! I always go the wrong way first, that’s how you find the coolest stuff.

“Just can’t even see anything,” he commented, waving his hand around as if to push the mist away. “This freakin’ fog is getting thicker and thicker by the minute, I swe- Wait, I have an idea.”

The Gamer raised his staff. He reached inside himself, drawing upon his wellspring of mana, pulling forth what he needed for his most used offensive skill. Allowing a small [Lesser Air Burst] to build up, whirling around him, building up to its largest size, yet held firmly in place.

Radiant light washed over the square, banishing the oppressive mist, if only for a time.

“This better?” he asked, amber rays dancing around him.

She smiled. “Much. I would be careful using that for too long, lest we attract unwanted attention.”

John nodded, and the two scanned the square one more time. They quickly identified perhaps a dozen more desiccated corpses in various mangled states. The Gamer guessed that another ambush might have been set up here at one point or another, but someone - or something - had beaten them to it. The pair split up slightly, combing the edges of the area for whatever they’d missed.

“There!” Ela pointed past the bus stop, calling John from his thoughts.

She walked past him, tapping him on the shoulder; he fell in line as she strode with purpose to a far corner. There was a staircase downward there, which had once been marked by a sign, now fallen. Exchanging a glance with Ela, the two walked over, cautious of the dark tunnel below. The Gamer pointed his staff downwards, shining amber brilliance into the shadows.

John gazed down the steps, squinting. “Is this… a subway?”

“Yes, it seems so,” the blonde said, lifting the fallen sign. “Perhaps this was once a shortcut they used.”

“Why would they cut it out though? A subway should connect to most major places in a city, right? Seems simple enough if it didn’t just collapse.”

Before she could answer, a new window appeared in front of him.

Why not go find out?