Chương 36: Endless Wasteland

The rune-enchanted sword stabbed the skull of the Wretchborn orc. Its head exploded, and the demon fell to its knees and thumped onto the sand, black blood pouring out of it. This was unlike anything Liesel had faced so far. They were humanoid demons, but wouldn't classify as Ascendant demons, as they were a sort of mockery of human form. They were supposed to be weak, but these particular ones inside the dungeon were lean and fast.

Most of her teammates wouldn't even think of them as the Wretchborn, but as a superior form of golems. And it would seem, these were the ones that overwhelmed Kurvam's team and took Verka's hand. Her blade absorbed the blood from the dead demon. And immediately, she had to rush to take on another.

As one of the few people who had not sustained any serious injury on the frontline, she made an extra effort to intervene and kill as many demons as she could, and if there were too many or one too troublesome, the mages acted. Without the primary warder, the fights were harder, but not by much, because Verka had usually been absent and focused on Kurvam alone. She killed the seventh orc. Her hands were aching from using so much Materiality.

This particular group had a total of twenty-four, and they had managed to kill without leaving a survivor. It was a small group, and they had not been fun to fight. Liesel couldn't imagine how much worse a bigger group would be to fight. Yehia's assistance was unimaginably helpful. Her spear killed the last one before the stone club turned Charbil's chest into mush. Charbil climbed back to his feet.

"We are all going to die. A death by a thousand cuts."

"Every step forward is one step closer to our destination," Liesel said.

"Our feelings are immaterial. If the choice is death, why not struggle until our last breath?"

"We should take a break for tonight," Farki Jan suggested.

"We have Fenyin's Concentrated Sustenance to last us a day." They were inexperienced, but not so reckless as to not bring emergency food and supplies in case they'd be lost or trapped for some time. A day, however, was a very short time. It was not a wrong idea. They couldn't have expected to be trapped in such a way that they'd survive more than a day. Not to mention, the Concentrated Energy Bar that was their food was damaging to the body to a destructive degree.

"In a short while, if we do not have another eventful encounter... we should," Liesel patted Charbil's back.

"As much as we need a break, we can't do it so close to the dead bodies." And they would have to extract the Materiality Cores. They had some, but they couldn't afford to waste so many of them when they were stranded. The Wretchborn were easy to understand, and extracting the core was somewhat relaxing compared to everything else that had gone wrong. First, stab the blade into the chest and cleave it open. Then stab again, and twist the blade, creating a gap into its chest.

Turn the blade flat and push deeper, and press the sword to lift out the core from the body. Drop it onto the sand, roll it a few times to wash away the blood, and it was fine to pick and put it in their Materiality Satchel. After gathering the cores, they departed northwards again. After another hour, during which they didn't encounter anything, they rested against the wall. They had a minute to relax their bodies because Farki Jan could use his powers to their fullest extent without the Ash Storm's interference.

"Liesel," Fiya said, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" Liesel nodded. She pushed herself up to her feet again, and all the muscles in her body pulsed in anger. She followed the mage away from the rest of the group, which was somewhat odd.

"If we hadn't listened to Kurvam, we'd be in our room. Well, you'd be torturing yourself. So it's not that different for you, in that regard, I guess," Fiya said as she climbed up a dune, looking over the endless wasteland.

"Now we don't know where we are."

"We will be out very soon," Liesel said, perhaps a little too confidently.

"Do you trust a demon?" Fiya asked.

"It could've killed us. Our struggle is its pleasure, and abandonment of our duty might soothe its boredom more than our lifeless bodies. But even if it intends to kill us in the end, what other option do we have? Once we have a secure source of sustenance, we can reconsider our course." Liesel observed the stretching hill. The Giant Skull seemed so mockingly close. Yet, if they began walking towards it, it would remain there, just as big even after days.

"It will kill us when we try to escape, if only to extend its pleasure for a moment longer."

"I can see that," Liesel breathed.

"I don't know what else you expect me to suggest?"

"I was hoping you'd propose it, but fine. What if we take the fight to him?" Fiya asked. She lowered her voice.

"I have a spell that will definitely kill it, unless it's invincible just like the Door Guardian."

"It could be the case. If we trust Yehia's story, he is the one who bestowed the armor upon the Door Guardian so that he might have one for himself."

"Then... what can we even do but pray he will not betray his words?" He most likely would. Liesel didn't need to say it out loud. Even finding that key was a distant reality. They were ill-equipped and barely had any hope of survival. It would take a miracle to survive until they reached the Primordial Vein. That's the least I have to achieve even if failure is all but inevitable.

"Are you sad about Sarkot's death?" Fiya asked after a moment of silence.

"No," Liesel replied.

"I always expected many of us to die. At least, his death was not long." Fiya frowned at her, genuinely alarmed by the coldness of Liesel's words.

"How can you say that... even if that's the expectation, we had known him for so long. We were living together. Fighting together. And he was probably the nicest one of us all. You can be honest. You must be sad." Liesel lowered herself to her knees and settled on the sand, or was it ash? Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"If I speak honestly, I feel relief," Liesel uttered. It had nothing to do with Sarkot and everything to do with her inner turmoil about her mother.

"I don't really feel the weight of death, you can say. It would eventually come to us all. It's the needless misery that befalls before it that I find harrowing. He died without suffering as much as he could've, afflicted with Ashening as he was. He would be relieved too if he knew what awaited him there."

"You are heartless," Fiya said. She didn't sound angry. Somewhat sad, actually.

"You define his life by a single pain that could've been. What about his reason for coming to this expedition, when he had known there was likely a chance he would die? He cared about a thing strongly enough that he risked his life, and he's gone now. Whatever that aspiration was, it's unfulfilled, and it might affect his family or his lover. We don't know how much pain his death would cause, and his family wouldn't even know he is dead for probably another week or more. It's all so cruel.

How can you not feel bad about it?" Liesel was silent again. She didn't want to give the bluntest answer. It would probably hurt Fiya.

"I have seen hundreds of people who would be considered my teammates die. Most of them were sacrificial pawns, and they signed their own death warrants, you can even say, out of desperation for the money that Soul Seekers get... I don't have the courage to imagine what their death means outside of that moment. And people move on, don't they? No matter how devastating someone's loss of life is, the people surrounding them will move on.

And in the end, the only thing that matters is the person who lost their life, and how, doesn't it? Is it not cruelty that we reframe the suffering of the dead to the ones who would mourn them?"

"I am not," Fiya shook her head.

"I just think I would be worried about the things that I have to do even on death's door, so I imagine Sarkot would be too. Wouldn't you? So isn't it natural to think about the pain of those affected as much as the one who passed away?"

"I guess that's where we diverge in our understanding of life. I can't imagine what happens after my death. Maybe because I lack the courage to worry about anything beyond my own life," Liesel didn't think she was necessarily attached to her life.

"I don't believe that's true," Fiya shook her head.

"Someone so short-sighted... so consumed in vanity, I imagine Kurvam is like that, and he could never have made any decision that would benefit us, especially in this situation. You are nothing like him. If anything, I think you don't care about your life even a tiny bit."

"Are you saying I am so hollow that I don't even care about my own life?" Liesel grinned. Fiya immediately shook her head, flustered.

"I am joking," Liesel shook her head.

"I am glad you have such a high evaluation of me. To answer your question honestly, I am just trained to not care about the deaths of my teammates, for it is a constant in every battle we will fight. To be affected by it is to leave your mind vulnerable to the magic of demons. But of course, our minds simply cannot desensitize things like there's a lever that I can pull down. It has to be rationalized, and that's where my fixation with suffering stems from.

Because there can't be a qualified suffering that's ever too much in the heat of a battle, I can always be relieved regardless of how many I lose." There's a part that my mother's last days played too. But that was not something Liesel would share with a stranger.

"That sounds awful... why would anyone learn something like that?"

"It's worrying if you haven't desensitized your mind, at least, partially."

"I see..." Fiya nodded. Yehia joined them to talk about her own worry regarding their survival, and then they all joined the rest at the wall. Because everyone was somewhat disturbed and off-axis at the moment. Talking might help, Yehia suggested. After a few hours of rest, they noticed Kurvam and Verka had caught up to them. And they were leading another horde of Wretchborn along with them.

Dispatching them wasn't as hard, now that they understood the creatures' fighting style, but even so, no one was happy seeing Kurvam because of that.

"Why are you following us?!" Yehia seemed to have lost all her patience with him.

"I can go wherever I want!" Kurvam fought back with equal rage.

"I also need to find food and water and shit."

"Oh?" Yehia raised a brow, "There's some shit," she waved her spear at the dune, "Behind that. Eat it if you want." Kurvam's face glowed so red it might have exploded.

"It's fresh, just as you will like it," Yehia sniggered.

"You fucking bitch..." Kurvam's materiality burned in his vein.

"We don't have the energy to spare among ourselves," Liesel said, opening the chest of the last Wretchborn and picking out the Materiality Core.

"Please just calm down." Liesel shifted her attention from Yehia to Kurvam.

"If you want to be part of the team, you can, but you will not antagonize anyone and play your role. We need to preserve our strength to fight whatever awaits at the Primordial Vein."

"I am not joining your team. They are my underlings." Kurvam seemed proud of his quip, "And I will not take shit from you, my second."

"You can take anyone who wants to follow you. The Primordial Vein is that way," Liesel gestured northwards. She dropped the Materiality Core onto the sand and rolled it to dry the blood on it. Kurvam glared at her for a moment and then shifted his gaze to the tired expedition members. They were all already huddling back against the wall, regulating their Materiality, and paying no attention to Kurvam and Yehia's argument.

"Come with me, and you all will have a title of your own, bestowed by the Chancellor personally." The Chancellor was the highest authority of the realm, so it would basically raise everyone's status to lower nobility. Under normal circumstances, Liesel would be somewhat tempted. Of course, that was not enough at this moment. Kurvam huffed and stomped past them, crushing a demon's body, destroying the Materiality Core in the process.

"You can stay," Liesel told Verka, only because he was useful. At this point, she was sure Verka would follow Kurvam into hell rather than reconsider his loyalty. She found it dumb, but it was not her duty to judge a man's choices. Verka tried to convince Kurvam to stay there, and naturally, he was thrown onto the ground like a weightless doll.

"Bastard!" Yehia hissed under her breath. Verka followed him again and convinced him on the second attempt. They didn't return to the expedition team, but rested a dozen meters away. Unfortunately, now that the sand was soaked in blood, Liesel didn't feel comfortable resting there and decided they were better off making a little more progress. Kurvam and Verka trailed them from a distance, and somehow Kurvam didn't even initiate any confrontation when Yehia taunted him.

Liesel was quick to butt in because no matter what, Kurvam was not a kind man. And if he felt cornered, she didn't doubt he would decide to destroy as much of the expedition's hopes of survival as possible, which would mean he'd either try to kill the Observer or the healer. And the mages after that. Leave probably Yehia and Liesel to suffer through the wasteland without anyone's assistance. There was no sun in the sky, no stars moved, and the moon followed with a constant brightness.

Being aware of how many hours had passed did little to convince the body it was time to rest. And as the first day tolled by, Liesel considered the team to be in a worse state than it should be. They had clearly travelled more than ten miles by now, but there was no sign of the end of the Necropolis. It shouldn't have been the case, but it was.

"We are stuck, right?" Fiya uttered. She had called Liesel away from the rest of the team to talk again. Her expression was a mix of worry and apprehension.

"There's no end in this place, and there is no Primordial Vein."

"If this is a Necropolis, there should be a Primordial Vein that sustains the Soulheart, as well as gives life to all the demons in this realm."

"What if it is not?" Fiya asked.

"What if this is a dungeon created by the tomb's power, and the Ash Lord is the one controlling it?"

"Then it would be even less likely to stretch so far," Liesel said.

"Only the veins at the source of all power can create such a place. No Demon General's power should be able to create such a vast land. But yes, I do not know where it is or how far it might be. The north will lead us to the vein someday... if we can survive that long." In the vast expanse of the wasteland, she didn't see any sign of the vein even now. It could be an illusion for all she knew. It might just be five steps from here, and until someone walked into it, they couldn't know.

"So I was wondering," Fiya hesitated for a moment, "Why won't you ask your spirit friend for help?"