The Dawn of the New World

When the plumes of smoke hit his skin it immediately began to tingle and heat up.

"There are so many different energies mixed in here. It would be tough even for me to stay outside for more than a day or two."

Hao Xuan activated the physique's ability to see if it would be beneficial for him in some way.

[Devour!]

A small portion of the miasma was absorbed in one go but immediately after an intense vision flashed past his eyes. It was a combination of blood curdling screams and countless acts of violence all superimposed on top of one another.

"Too many strong emotions. They have not dissipated even after hundreds of years so who knows how much longer would it take? But as it stands, it will do me more harm than good to absorb it," Hao Xuan mumbled while pulling his hand away.

It was no wonder no one else survived. This much radiation would have rendered all creatures infertile unless they continuously adapted to it. And if something could indeed live in this place then one should never want to meet it.

Hao Xuan looked in the direction he was supposed to go in but couldn't see anything beyond a few dozen meters. It was night out but the cover of darkness had never seemed so fiercely loyal to its purpose.

"It feels like the very fabric of reality is unweaving around this world. Is it to hide all the atrocities that took place here?"

'Is this also my fault?' an inner voice followed up in his mind, changing from singular to plural soon after, 'None of this would have happened if we were here. You might as well have struck the final blow yourself.'

The voice was blaming him or...was he blaming himself? Either way, he was indifferent to the odd nature of his inner diction.

Hao Xuan's pupils widened as the Lycan bloodline was activated in full effect while keeping all other physical transformations under control.

"A little over 60 meters I think, that's as much as I can get out of it. It should be good enough," he murmured but Baracus spoke up unexpectedly.

*beep*

"It would be better if host took one of the portable lights to light the way."

Hao Xuan frowned, "Why? I can see without it."

"For the moment, yes. But the records mention some odd instances where in the absence of a light source close to the user all other types of visions were permanently blocked. That was one of the reasons no research could be done on the disappearance of the entity."

Hao Xuan went silent for a moment pondering the reasons for such an event but nothing concrete came to mind.

"Fine..." he went back into the settlement and picked off one of the big floodlights from the wall.

"Do I need a battery or something?"

"Negative. The internal charge should be enough for at least 44 standard hours."

"Good."

With the floodlight in hand, Hao Xuan picked up the pace and ran straight towards the place Nidhora was last seen at.

The settlement door automatically closed behind him and for a while, everything seemed normal. But after a few minutes the puddles of toxic goo started bubbling intensely.

The area which was being illuminated by the floodlight which Hao Xuan took suddenly came alive in more ways than one.

One after another boney hands reached out from the puddles that should have been just a few inches deep. They grabbed a hold of anything and everything around them to pull themselves out one by one, revealing their true forms.

The smallest ones were just humanoid skeletons covered in a viscous tar-like material that appeared to be dripping down their skeletal forms but never actually falling off.

Some of the bigger skeletons belonged to what should have been Orcs and some of the others were beastly in form and nature.

Within the span of 5 minutes more than fifty such 'creatures' had crawled out from the various gooey puddles around. All of them avoided the direct light and lumbered towards the outer wall where they started banging their bodies against it.

Their movements were slow and disorganized. They had no weapons and could only punch the wall which was protected by the forcefield. Their boney arms, legs and heads were continuously broken down and ground into black dust by the power of the forcefield.

A few more minutes passed this way and one of the Orc skeletons that were standing in the back looking at the others suddenly moved. Its lumbering body sprinted forward pushing all the skeletons into the wall at once.

The wall-mounted floodlights flickered and the forcefield shook from the impact.

For a very brief moment a small hole was created in the middle of the forcefield. The Orc skeleton seemed to be prepared for it and immediately threw a punch with the weight of its entire body behind it.