novelraw Chapter 116: Journey North
Chapter 116: Journey North
"I can read minds," Hana suddenly said, which earned her a raised brow from Damon.
"I know that already," he said, but the new girl shook her head. "I wasn’t talking to you..."
Damon looked down toward Nyla, whose face quickly grew flustered. He had no idea what she was thinking, but it certainly was something to render her quiet once she found out Hana had heard it.
The trio couldn’t leave for the next fifteen minutes as Nyla excused herself to fetch something important back inside her room.
The first stretch of the wait was quiet, until Hana broke the silence.
"You’re not what I expected," she said.
Damon didn’t look at her. "What did you expect?"
"I don’t know. Everyone talks about you like..." she stopped herself, catching the edge of something she hadn’t meant to share.
Damon turned toward her, raising a brow.
Hana’s gaze escaped his eyes.
"They made you seem like some mythical figure..." Her eyes trailed off even further away from his. She opened her lips to say something else, but at that moment, Nyla stepped out of her room.
"Let’s go," she said, and the three of them began their journey north.
***
The city changed the further north they moved.
It happened gradually, the streets growing quieter, the signs of scavenging thinning out, and the particular emptiness of territory that hadn’t been regularly touched settling over everything.
By the second hour, the silence had become its own kind of presence.
Nyla had recovered her usual composure somewhere around the first mile, the flustered expression from having her thoughts read disappeared rather quickly.
She walked on Damon’s left, golden hammer resting across her shoulders, eyes moving across the street level with the practised scan of someone who had stopped trusting the silence a long time ago.
Hana walked to his right, a step behind, trying her best not to read anyone’s mind, which she failed at numerous times.
They found nothing for most of the walk.
Abandoned buildings, cleared-up stores, and of course, the occasional signs of death, whether it was monsters or humans.
The northern district was emptier than anything Damon had seen since the early days, not dangerous empty, just absent, as though whatever had been up here had simply moved on or stopped existing.
And within that emptiness was the lack of any signs that could lead them toward the third citadel.
Soon enough, just as the hour struck midday, they ascended a roof of a collapsed parking lot, high enough to see a significant stretch of the northern district spreading out below them.
Damon took a good moment to scan ahead, but a faint frown settled over his features as he saw nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that looked even a little promising.
"Are you sure it’s north?" Nyla asked.
"Victor sounded certain," Damon said.
"He also had both his arms cut off."
Damon didn’t have a response to that.
Hana had gone quiet beside them in a different way than before, not the careful social quiet of someone managing their ability, but the focused stillness of someone on the brink of reaching something.
"There!" she said suddenly.
She wasn’t looking at the street level.
She was looking up.
Damon followed her gaze, which was looking up, far beyond the height of even their citadel and toward the clouds above.
At first, he saw nothing, just the grey sky, the cloud cover sitting low and heavy over the northern district, the way it had since they’d left the citadel.
Then the clouds shifted.
A small gap appeared between the clouds, which was moving with the wind for a handful of seconds before closing again.
But that brief opening was enough.
Something sat above the clouds. It was massive, distant beyond reason, catching the pale light in a way that a simple stone didn’t. It was gone before he could even fully process the shape of it.
"Was that—" Nyla started, noticing the exact same structure.
"Yes," Damon replied. "The third citadel.
The reason why they didn’t see it until now was because of how impossibly high it was. But as they lingered on their discovery, another question arose. Where was its teleportation device?
Their search lasted only around twenty minutes before they stumbled upon a battle.
They heard it before they saw it, a sound of controlled destruction, methodical rather than desperate, the rhythm of someone who wasn’t fighting for survival but simply dealing with an inconvenience.
Once they rounded the corner of a collapsed office building, they saw it.
The firehound was enormous.
At least three meters at the shoulder, its coat permanently alight with the deep orange burn of a creature that existed at the boundary of something natural and something the system had decided to make worse.
It lunged with the confidence of something that had never failed to outrun its prey.
And yet, she moved faster.
She wore white, a structured garment somewhere between armour and nothing, metal plates fitted across her arms, beneath her chest and down her boots, leaving her thighs, her abdomen, and her upper chest bare in a way that suggested the exposure was a choice rather than an oversight.
Her long black hair whipped through the air as she circled around the creature with an expression that made it seem like just another day at the office. The longsword in her hand was almost too large for her slender frame, and somehow, she handled it like it weighed absolutely nothing.
The firehound lunged again.
She sidestepped with a single, unhurried movement and brought the sword across in one clean arc.
The creature dropped almost immediately.
She stood over it for a moment, the sword held loose at her side as she watched the life of the monster beneath her beginning to dim.
Then, just as the creature drew its last breath, she turned.
Her eyes found the three of them in an instant, assessing and cataloguing everything about them with a single sweep of her gaze before her grip on the longsword suddenly tightened, and a faint frown settled on her pale face.