Chapter 42: Failed
The border of the city came into view by midmorning, the ruined skyline gradually giving way to the thinner environment. Strip malls, gas stations, the kind of half-abandoned suburban place that existed in every place they’d passed through.
They found the survivors before the survivors found them, a cluster of barely a handful of people gathered around a fortified gas station, makeshift barricades built from overturned vehicles and scavenged fencing.
A man stepped out to meet them as they approached, skinny and a machete strapped to his back. He had the wary, calculating look of someone who’d survived this long by trusting carefully and selectively.
"That’s far enough," he said, though without real hostility in it. "Name’s Mor. You two look like you’ve travelled a long way...."
"We have," Eleanor said. "Just passing through. Didn’t mean to intrude."
Mor studied them a moment longer, gaze flicking to Lucas as he observed their outfit, their posture and how generally clean they looked. "You’re not like the rest of us, are you?."
"We do," Lucas said. "Just came back from The Edge few days ago."
Something shifted in Mor’s expression. "Figured. You’ve got that look. The ones who went through it move different than the rest of us."
"What happened here?" Eleanor asked, gesturing at the barricaded station and the wary, thin faces watching from behind it.
Mor’s jaw tightened. "Hell happened, is what. One day everything’s normal, next day monsters are walking around like they own the place, and the people who got dragged off to fight them in whatever hellscape you two came back from... the rest of us just got left here to deal with the fallout. No abilities. Nothing. Just beasts, suddenly, everywhere, killing anyone who couldn’t run fast enough."
"You didn’t get pulled into the Edgewalk," Lucas said slowly, understanding dawning. "None of you did."
"Not one soul in this group." Mor’s voice carried the particular bitterness of a man who’d buried more people than he could count. "We had to figure out survival the hard way. Groups, barricades. Watching each other’s backs because nobody was coming to save us and nothing about us made us special enough to fight back properly."
He gestured toward the ragged, tired collection of survivors behind him. "This is what’s left of three separate groups that merged after we all lost too many people running solo. Started with almost sixty between us. We’re down to twenty two now."
"Thirty eight people," Eleanor repeated quietly, something. "In just a few weeks."
"Some ran. Some didn’t make it. Some—" Mor’s jaw clenched and he didn’t finish the thought. "Doesn’t matter now. What matters is the ones still standing, and keeping that number from dropping any further."
A woman further back in the group, arms crossed tight against her chest, spoke up without quite raising her voice. "Some of us watched our own kids get taken by things we couldn’t even fight back against. Bare hands against claws. You want to know what happened here? That’s what happened here."
The silence that followed sat heavy, and Eleanor’s expression softened with something close to guilt. "I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was this bad out here."
"Wouldn’t expect you to. You had your own hell to deal with, from what I’ve heard." Mor studied them both a moment longer. "What brings you out this far, anyway?"
"We’re looking for something," Eleanor said carefully. "A Relic. Supposed to create a barrier against beasts that cross over from The Edge. Our map’s pointing us somewhere close to here."
She pointed, northeast, past the edge of the settled blocks, toward a stretch of the city Mor’s people had apparently marked as off limits.
A murmur rippled through the small crowd of survivors gathered behind Mor, several of them exchanging uneasy glances at the mention of a barrier against beasts, hope and wariness showing visibly on more than one face.
Mor’s own expression went grim the instant he saw where she was pointing. "That’s the old cathedral."
"Never heard of it," Lucas admitted.
"Used to be a beautiful place, before all this. Big stone building, stained glass, the works. Now it’s infested."
Mor’s voice dropped, serious. "Beasts moved in there weeks ago. We lost four people trying to scout it early on, before we learned to just avoid the whole district entirely. Whatever’s drawing them there, it’s bad enough that we stopped even sending lookouts."
"We still need to go," Eleanor said.
"You don’t understand what’s in there—"
"We’ve fought worse," Lucas said quietly then said again with a somewhat tired smile. "Trust me on that."
Mor studied them both for a long moment, clearly weighing whether to argue further, before something in their expressions seemed to convince him it wasn’t worth the effort.
"Your funeral," he said finally, though without malice. "Rest here a while first, at least. Eat something... It’s not far, but you’ll want your strength before you go anywhere near that place."
They accepted the offer, spending an hour among Mor’s people, sharing what little food the group could spare and listening to fragmented accounts of the weeks since the sky had first cracked... stories of narrow escapes, of neighbors turned desperate, of the particular cruelty an apocalypse brought out in people who’d never asked for any of it.
A young girl, no older than seventeen, sat close enough during the meal to ask Lucas quiet, careful questions about what the Edgewalk had actually been like.
Whether surviving there was easier than surviving here, whether the beasts there were worse than what roamed the streets now.
Lucas answered as honestly as he could without dwelling too long on the parts that would frighten her further, and something in her expression, carried the particular ache of someone wishing desperately she’d been chosen for a fate that had, in truth, nearly killed everyone who lived it.
"At least you got a chance to fight back," she said quietly, at one point. "We just had to run."
Lucas didn’t have a good answer for that, and didn’t try to pretend otherwise.
By the time they set out again, the sun had climbed higher, and Mor watched them go from the barricade’s edge with the expression of a man who didn’t expect to see them return.
***
The cathedral rose ahead of them about an hour later, exactly as unsettling as Mor’s warning had promised.
It had clearly been beautiful once— gothic spires reaching toward a sky, elaborate stonework worn soft with time, an enormous window still miraculously intact except from a few cracks, its colored glass catching weak sunlight in fractured, jewel patterns across the overgrown courtyard below.
Vines had crept up the lower half of the building, climbing between cracked buttresses and around statues of saints whose faces had long since worn smooth.
The massive wooden doors hung slightly ajar, darkness pooling beyond them like something waiting, and a single bell tower rose above it all, its bronze bell long since gone silent, rust streaking down the stonework beneath it.
The courtyard itself had lost its beauty, grass grown knee high in places, a stone fountain at its center dry and cracked, choked with weeds that had forced their way up through the basin.
It should have felt peaceful, on any other circumstances, the kind of quiet, overgrown beauty people paid good money to photograph. Instead it gave an ominous aura that could make haunted houses look like child’s play.
The Relic’s pull grew stronger the closer they came, the system’s map narrowing its focus toward a single point somewhere deep within the cathedral’s interior.
"There," Eleanor murmured, studying the map. "Inside.... Has to be near the altar, if I’m reading this right."
Lucas studied the courtyard, the overgrown grass, the unnatural stillness hanging over the entire property. "It’s too quiet."
"Yeah," Eleanor agreed grimly. "It really is. Too quiet for a supposed den of beasts .."
They’d made it halfway across the courtyard when the ground beside them erupted.
’Here we go again,’ Lucas thought, some old, grim reflex settling over him even as adrenaline spiked through his body, the familiar shape of danger, the familiar readiness that came from having done this exact things more time and time again...
A Bora burst from beneath the tangled grass, armored and fast, and Lucas barely got [Ignition] working in time to meet its first strike, flame roaring around his fist as he drove it into the creature’s flank.
"More incoming!" Eleanor’s blade ignited, and she spun to meet a second Bora surging from the side at the courtyard’s edge, water lashing out from her other hand to give her space.
The fight went fast and chaotic across the churned grass, three, four then five Bora emerging from hiding spots neither of them had spotted in time, and Lucas fought with the ease of long practice, calling patterns even as he moved, memory of a dozen prior fights against this exact beast class bleeding into his reflexes.
The only issue was that he couldn’t hit as hard...
"Left side!" he called, and Eleanor’s blade found the opening exactly where he promised, water freezing the creature’s joint solid before her flame struck, sending it reeling.
"Behind you!" Eleanor’s warning came a moment before a third Bora lunged, and Lucas twisted clear, driving a burning fist into its exposed underside on pure reflex, the creature shrieking as flame caught along its armored hide.
They fought their way steadily toward the cathedral doors, beast after beast eating up the combination of Lucas’s foreknowledge and Eleanor’s raw elemental power, and for a moment it felt almost manageable, almost like every other fight they’d survived. Only this time, it was a lot harder...
"That’s four down," Eleanor called, breathless as water lashed the creature into submission. "How many more do you think—"
Lucas didn’t see the fifth Bora until it was already too late.
It had been coiled in the shadow of the cathedral’s threshold the entire time, patient and hidden, and it struck the instant his attention split toward helping Eleanor finish her own opponent, tail lashing out with impossible speed, driving straight through the side of his neck before he even registered the shape moving.
"Lucas!"
Eleanor’s scream came distant and muffled, the world tilting sideways as his legs gave out beneath him, warmth spreading fast, and the last thing he saw before the courtyard went dark was her face, twisted in horror, reaching for him a moment too late, her hand closing on empty air where he’d been standing a moment before.
[You have died.]
The words hung there, patient, familiar, exactly as they had every single time before. Lucas had seen this exact notification countless times by now— the promise of waking up somewhere just far enough back to fix whatever had gone wrong.
He waited for it. Braced for the familiar feeling of vertigo, the ceiling or sky of some earlier checkpoint coming back into focus.
[Activating Regression...]
[Failed.]
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