99 Shadow of Despair (2/2)

”Are you SURE about this? This too over the top, even for a grim joke. What you speak of is a threat to all of Mulia, son. Do you understand? I cannot stress enough that if you are ly—”

Reed said, ”Fine. If you want proof, I'll give you all the proof you'll ever need. He tore open a spatial tear and said, ”Come and see for yourself, if you won't believe me…”

When they stepped out of the void on the other side, Reed said, ”Here's your proof. I had initially planned to cremate them all but Lu'um stopped me. Told me that we should keep them here in order to prove ourselves should you have not believed us…”

Velvund gazed at the towering mountain of corpses with a severe expression and said then uttered something in the Old Tongue that Reed could not understand.

Perplexed, Reed said, ”What did you just say?”

”A prayer for them. An old tradition from my homeworld. We pray that the deceased return back home to nature and rest easy under the shade of the Everbloom — the ancestral tree that our race lived around when we first came to be in our world.”

That's not going to happen and we both know that, Gramps…

Reed opened a spatial tear and said, ”I'm going to the North to alert them about the attack. It's very likely that they don't even know yet. I'll contact you when I'm at the Reef with the North's forces, Gramps.”

Velvund nodded and said, ”I'll start working on getting the forces in order while you're gone and inform the South and the East about the situation. Even the King of Flowers will likely be forced to act in light of this crisis…”

And so, they departed separately to take care of their own tasks, promising to meet at the battlefield. It'd begun to turn — the terrible wheel of war.

In a matter of hours, blood would be spilled across the continent once again. The millennia-long era of peace that the Four Empires had would come to an abrupt end on this fateful day, out of the blue.

The skies would run red with the wrath, and the earth would tremble in despair like in the days of yore. Such was the destiny of the continent.

It would be a day to be remembered. One that would change the course of the North's history in such an immense way that it'd shake the foundations of the empire…

When Reed returned back to his room in the Shining Nexus he said, ”How's he doing? No sign of him waking up?”

Lu'um shook her head and said, ”No. I've checked him for anything out of the ordinary, but it seems that he hasn't been messed with. It's just fatigue. His lifeforce is extremely weak, presumably due to harsh conditions he's suffered while he was imprisoned.”

Reed took a good look at Sebastian and noticed that he did indeed thinner than when he last saw him. He'd gained deep bags under his eyes, too.

Must've been starving the poor guy, keeping him awake all the while. If he's like that, then it's highly likely that Astrid's probably in the same condition, too. Goddamn savages, the lot of them.

”We'll leave him here, then. Let him recover here while we go out and take care of business. It's time to go alert the North,” said Reed.

He opened a spatial tear and they disappeared together into a void…

But unbeknownst even to Reed, it was already too late.

Inside of the Reef, a multitude of screams resounded across Raku, the City of the Sun. There was nowhere to run, nor hide. The contenders and conquerors who'd been in the Reef at the time had put up a valiant struggle but even they, too, had fallen.

There were simply too many of them, even for them. It was hopeless.

By the time Infested Pupa's swarm had reached the Reef, it had already assimilated another four cities into Infested. The monstrosity had already harvested over a million souls since it had left Xibalba.

A million souls had been given new, grotesque bodies formed out of the Infested Pupa's eldritch flesh itself. They had been turned into unwilling slaves and had been set forth on the Reef like a scourge of locusts, killing everyone they could find — adding to Pupa's collection…

There would be no salvation for the citizens of the Reef. They drown in the shadow of despair and would become Infested.

And then, they would destroy as their master commanded... until nothing was left.