Chapter 182 Volume IV - Chapter 27: A City in the Embrace of War
"This is the last time, and if this doesn't work... you don't have to come back here. Do you understand, Aiden?"
I nodded meekly, a little nervous to be honest.
I held my breath, closed my eyes, and then waited.
Seconds passed, yet I couldn't help feeling like minutes had passed because of the tension. Silence surrounded me. Then a tremor and finally a sound, the sound of a machine working. I felt something warm coming from the devices attached to my arm, injecting a liquid into my vein.
I gritted my teeth as the warm liquid slowly spread throughout my body.
It was actually relaxing, certainly not something a first-timer would grit their teeth about. At least… it was until the liquid coursing through my veins began to literally burn my body from the inside.
My eyes opened wide. I tried to struggle away, but nothing worked. I screamed as if it wasn't my body that was melting, but my mind itself.
It wasn't always like this, I thought to myself as tears came to my eyes.
This was much worse. It felt like they were taking out my brain, like all my skin was being flayed off. Even touching something caused intense pain.
It didn't always last this long, I thought again as I kept struggling.
Shouldn't it be over by now? Why is it still going on? Why doesn't my pain end?
No matter what I did, it was futile. As my vision blurred, the voices I heard blended together and I saw people in lab coats looking at me, their expressions not changing one bit. I could only think of one thing.
No, these were... not my thoughts. I had realized too late the situation I was in, and yet these thoughts were still penetrating me.
They were just four simple words, yet I clung to them with all my being. Maybe thinking these four words were the reason I was still sober.
I want to die.
*******
~Boom!
I heard a loud noise and my eyes flew open. I didn't jump out of my seat, but I almost did. I was covered in sweat, and I wasn't in my bed... I was on the floor.
I couldn't understand what was happening at first, but then something caught my attention, something different from the day before.
The sound of a siren.
My eyes widened and my mind was suddenly filled with meaningless thoughts.
"No... No!"
I didn't wait a second, I ran straight to the window and looked at the 'view' I saw when I first arrived here.
It was the city that looked like a technological paradise just before my wiera side knocked me out, and now it was a city with flying things everywhere, shadows everywhere, buildings collapsing, and something huge somewhere in the distance...
The invisible barrier protecting the city was now easily visible. It was broken, slowly turning to dust. The city, on the other hand...
"Destruction..."
That was all I could say about what was happening in the city. So much so that I involuntarily said it out loud and swallowed.
But it didn't matter. The important thing was... that the war had started before I could do anything I had planned.
I had to go to the center of the city, I had to meet someone. At least I needed to be with that person when the war started. And now... because of the asshole in me, I slept for two days, unable to do anything I had in mind.
I clenched my teeth, my fists, but before I even had time to vent my anger, something else caught my attention.
It was clearly far away from here, obviously there only for a show of force, but it was still an apparition that struck fear into hearts. It was a dark, ghostly monster, ready to attack at any moment, standing there like a child watching ants die.
It seemed to cover the whole sky, it seemed to control the whole city. It saw everything, I couldn't help feeling that I was being watched.
It was a huge, really huge flying ship. The Caleuche, as it was called, was the South Holar's trump card. It was a truly gigantic warship, one of the most dangerous and frightening things I have ever seen in this world and this world has ever seen.
I heard an explosion just below the hotel I was in and that's what brought me to my senses. I swallowed quickly and rushed to my room.
As the explosions echoed outside, I changed as fast as I could, put my shoes on, opened the window, and let the air in.
Of course, it wasn't fresh air that came in. It was ash, dust, the smell of burning, and much more. And this was on the twentieth floor of the building, it must have been much worse down there.
'Damn it, I shouldn't have let you convince me.'
Sith appeared beside me, his face showing a readily visible uneasiness.
"I... I never imagined the damn thing inside me would do something like this."
All my plans were turned upside down... Sith, realizing this, is worried.
This is one of the worst scenarios I can face... but there's nothing I can do about it, is there?
I poured mana into the Absolute Mind and calmed myself down. Because no matter how angry and desperate I was, I had to be fast.
"Let's go, I mustn't waste time. We need to find that dwarf urgently."
Sith sighed deeply and said nothing. I took one last look over the city, finally admitting to myself that there was really nothing I could do. Cursing my wiera side, I stretched and jumped out the window.
As the wind raged through my body, I took another deep breath as I fell toward the center of the destruction.
As I neared the ground, my mana kicked in and a strong gust of wind lifted me up. It slowed my fall, then helped me land on the ground, hard enough not to harm me, but hard enough to hurt.
With the wind supporting me, the dust lifted, and something suddenly passed by me. It was very fast, probably a bullet.
I don't know why, but... when I should normally be desperate... an involuntary smile appeared on my face. I felt my body warming up, and I quickly looked around.
I was on the street right in front of the hotel. When I first came here, this street was a place where I couldn't easily see the sky without looking up, it was also a place where it was difficult to take a step due to the crowd of dwarves.
Now, most of the buildings on this street had been demolished, grayed by Caleuche's presence, and the clouds, reflecting the war, were easily visible. The crowd of dwarves was actually still here. The only difference from yesterday was that... no one was alive.
There were countless corpses in the street. Bodies without limbs, bodies that had pissed themselves, bodies with exposed organs, a corpse with its head open...
Just then I heard a groan, and when I quickly turned my head in that direction, I saw someone under the rubble just across the street. Just like the bodies in the middle of the street, he was a dwarf. Sure, he was alive, but he was coughing up blood.
Right next to him.... was another man, literally flattened by the rocks that had fallen on him. His eyes were blown out, there was a huge gash in his head. Likewise, his lower body was missing. He looked like the man under the rubble, maybe a relative or family member.
The smile on my face suddenly fell. I remembered where I was, I remembered what my purpose was. More importantly, I remembered who I was and what I was doing.
Damn... I almost lost myself again without even realizing it.
I started running, ignoring the dwarf.
Not far from me, there was a huge explosion, and I saw countless dwarves thrown around with tears and severed limbs. Every one of them ran, and a robot chasing them mowed them down, refusing to let them escape.
I gritted my teeth, looked away, and searched for a place of safety, a place where there was no rubble around that could collapse, a place where I could survive the first phase of the battle.
This was the first challenge I faced. Fortunately, there wasn't much nearby that could be a danger to me. Even if there was, they were usually not very interested in me. At least for now, I seemed to be lucky.
The moment this thought crossed my mind was the moment I cursed my luck. As I turned a corner in a large alley, among the ruined buildings, something appeared in front of me, something I had to look up at this time, after two days of lowering my head to look at the dwarves. A robot, one that was almost two meters long. And inside was a dwarf.
Another explosion shook the ground, the light from it illuminated the surroundings and my huge shadow fell directly onto the building behind me.
So the dwarf and I met eyes. Just a second ago I was running away and the dwarf was shooting at someone, but in this strange space between us, we both turned to each other.
Nothing happened, at least for the first second. The next second, the robot's fist came down on me out of nowhere.
I charged my hands with mana, pushed them forward quickly, and the moment I did, I was thrown back by the wind I had created.
The robot's fist landed where I had just been, but it didn't stop there. Something rose up over its arm, a red laser appeared on my forehead and then began to spin slightly.
"Fuck... really?"
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