Infinite Classes in the Apocalypse

Chapter 100: Broken Moon

The first thing that hit them before their eyes had even adjusted to the sudden change of environment was the smell. It was thick and wrong, the kind of smell that didn’t belong to any single thing but to everything at once. Burnt salt mixed with ruptured flesh, rot and something earthy, something broken.

Damon and Nyla appeared at the edge of what used to be the edge of the upside-down tree.

Except that it wasn’t there anymore.

The upside-down tree was gone. And long with it, the dark sea had also vanished. It wasn’t simply drained or dried, it was displaced, shoved outward from the point of impact in a ring of destruction so wide that it went far beyond what their eyes could trace.

Where deep, dark water had once been, now the sea bottom lay exposed. Enormous rocks, if they even were rocks, jutted from the bottom at broken and unnatural angles. Chunks of silver-purple rock that seemed to dim with each moment also lay scattered, fading into a pale white colour as they lost their hue.

And between it all were the corpses.

A few hundred, if not more, of dead sea monsters lay scattered across the rocky ground. It was impossible to count them, not just because of the scale of the ruin, but because of the state they were in.

Some remained whole, enormous beyond reason, the size of a few buildings stacked together. Others were small, barely recognisable as creatures at all. But the most common sight was simply mass, mangled flesh and shattered carapace blending into the landscape itself, indistinguishable from the broken rock beneath it, as if the destruction had unmade them so thoroughly they were becoming part of the ground.

None of them had any business being outside the dark sea, and yet they all met the same end.

A very few were still trying to move, dying slowly to their injuries as the safety of the dark sea had adbonded them all.

The sky above was no longer the midnight black colour that it once had been. It now had a dark, violet hue to it, one that looked like a wound in reality rather than the shade of a night sky. Dust and steam from vaporised water still hung suspended at impossible heights, making it hard to breathe and see past a couple of hundred meters.

’Fucking hell... It’s worse than I expected,’ Damon thought.

Beside him, Nyla stood completely silent. Her brown eyes moved across the scene as if she had just seen the end of the world... perhaps because she just did.

Damon’s gaze moved beyond the near horizon, searching for the one thing every rift had in common, their only hope of escaping, the rift core.

He found it quicker than he thought he would.

The sight caught him off guard for a moment. He blinked, trying to test his own cognition, only to confirm it was there.

It sat at the far edge of what his eyes could reach, past the field of corpses and broken rock and slowly fading silver-purple light. There was a crack. Not in the ground, not in the sky, but in everything, as if whatever force had made this place had left a seam behind, a place where the world had simply failed to close back up after being torn open.

It was completely black. Not a hint of light managed to pierce its darkness, exactly like the rift core, except it was bigger. No, bigger was an understatement. A normal-sized rift core wouldn’t even be noticeable from that distance, unlike the massive object at the far end of Damon’s vision.

He didn’t have to say a word for Nyla to follow his gaze and gasp quietly under he breath.

Nyla’s quiet gasp lasted exactly no more than a second before she composed herself.

"Is... Is that...?"

"...Yeah."

She was quiet for a moment, eyes tracing the impossible distance between them and the rift core, or whatever it was, at the horizon.

Then she spoke, almost to herself. "Figures. Things are never easy with you."

"You just noticed?"

"No. I just keep hoping you’ll surprise me." She glanced at him sideways, just for a moment. "In a good way, for once."

"Give it time, who knows..."

Her lips curved up to a faint smile at the reply.

As Damon moved toward Nyla, her brown eyes were already trailing toward the journey ahead of them.

The drop from the edge wasn’t impossible. It looked awkward, but manageable. Getting down wasn’t what was going to kill them.

His eyes moved slowly across the exposed seabed.

He looked past the broken rocks, the shattered remains of the fallen moon and beyond the corpses. Between all of it, he caught a glimpse of a few things that were still moving. Not fish-like monsters but those resembling more crab-like creatures, their exoskeleton looked thick even from a distance, moving quickly toward the corpses and scavenging what they could.

But past even those monsters that were still alive, he saw their objective. The rift core, their only chance of escaping, lingered at the corner of his vision.

"We have to cross it," Nyla said before he could get a chance to.

It wasn’t a question, nor a statement. It was more like saying something out loud to hear how ridiculous it sounded.

And it sounded bad.

Nyla let out a slow exhale. Rolled her shoulders once. Then glanced at Damon again with that same sideways look, lighter than the moment deserved.

"You owe me a really nice meal after this."

"Sure, let’s survive this first."

"See, that’s the kind of confidence a girl loves to hear." She stepped closer to the edge and looked down, assessing it with a calm and careful look in her eyes. "Alright. So, how do we get down?"

Damon moved up beside her and looked over.

"I have an idea," he said.

Nyla’s brow raised. "Oh?"

"It’s only a little dangerous..."