Infinite Classes in the Apocalypse

Chapter 90: Staying Busy

The teleportation device sat in the middle of the small forest, half-hidden beneath a canopy that the battle had left mostly untouched.

Damon reached it within a few minutes, the sounds of the Citadel fading behind him with each step, replaced by the quiet rustle of leaves and the low creak of branches in the early morning wind.

He was about to step onto the platform when a voice called from behind him.

"Boss!"

He paused midstep before turning toward the familiar voice.

Nyla was moving quickly through the trees toward him, her expression carrying the focused energy of someone who had been busy and was yet to stop. She reached him slightly out of breath, not from the run, he suspected, but from whatever she had been managing before it.

"Everyone at the Citadel has been registered," she said. "They’re organising people to fetch the others from the Central Station..." Her eyes suddenly dropped to the teleportation platform, then back to Damon, and a faint frown settled on her face as she put it together. "...Were you going somewhere?"

"I’m going out for a bit." He turned back toward the platform. "I’ll be back soon. Ivy has things handled."

He stepped onto it before she could respond, his arm rising as he reached for the orb.

He felt the shift in weight on the platform half a second before the mana discharged, Nyla landing beside him in a single, clean leap. The world folded, and then unfolded, and the two of them were standing in the middle of a ruined city with the grey light of early morning sitting flat above the broken skyline.

Damon looked at her.

She looked back at him, chin level, expression offering nothing in the way of apology.

Then he simply turned and walked away, with her following shortly after.

They moved through the city for the better part of an hour.

No words passed between them, not an uncomfortable silence, simply an absent one, the kind that forms when neither person has anything to say and neither is really bothered by it.

Damon kept a steady pace, following the pull of something at the edge of his senses. A presence. Dense and foreign, unlike anything the city’s usual population of monsters produced. It was a strong presence that offered a challenge and right now... he was up for one.

The only thing that was strange was the lack of monsters.

The streets were empty in a way that felt less like absence and more like an evacuation. The streets were filled with twisted metal, broken concrete and cars thrown onto their sides, but nothing living, no humans or monsters. Even Undead Humans, which could be found almost anywhere in the ruined city since the apocalypse, were absent from this part of the city, as if unwilling or unwanting to be there.

Damon, however, only noted it for a second without giving it much thought.

The presence grew stronger.

The presence only grew stronger as they approached it. It pressed against them with slow and constant weight rather than the sharp pressure Damon had felt from the Dark Elf leader earlier.

By the time the rift came into view, Damon had slowed to a stop as he took a long look at the thing before him.

It was midnight-black. Not the dark shimmer of a standard rift, not the coloured distortion of a B-Rank rift, this was something else entirely.

Its edges were ragged and completely void of colour, as if the thing had torn itself into existence rather than opened. It twisted with a kind of violent energy that had nothing frantic about it, nothing rushed. It was enormous. At least five meters across and eight meters tall, hanging in the air above the fractured street like something the world had been forced to make room for.

Beside him, Damon heard Nyla’s breath shift.

He glanced at her. The golden light-brown colour of her skin had drained to something considerably paler.

She was staring at the rift with wide eyes, and even accounting for what he knew she had seen and handled since the apocalypse began, the difference between her reaction to this and her reaction to a B-Rank was like a difference between night and day.

’A-Rank rift.’

He had never seen one. He had walked this entire way following a presence in the air, and nothing about that presence had prepared him for the scale of what was producing it.

He looked at it for a long moment, the ragged black edges, the violent stillness of it, the way the space immediately around it seemed slightly wrong, like a picture taken slightly out of focus.

"You should head back," he finally said.

It was the first time he had spoken to her since the teleport.

He knew Nyla’s capabilities better than most.

She was currently among the strongest people in their coalition, and although that was not a small feat, he also knew her limits, and a B-Rank rift was already beyond her capabilities. Among all the humans, he was probably the only one who could close one.

But an A-Rank Rift? There was no certainty that even Damon could close one. There was no information about it, and with the only person he could ask for guidance, Ayame, gone, he was going in blindly.

Taking the girl with him was a risk he couldn’t afford. But of course, he also knew her personality, so what she was about to say did not surprise him one bit.

"If you’re going, I’m going."

He turned toward her. Her gaze met his without flinching, her posture straight and full of confidence. Whatever fear the rift had pulled out of her in that first moment, she had filed it away somewhere and put her expression back in order.

Seeing that there was no way of talking her out of it, he turned back toward the rift.

Its black edges twisted with a slow yet violent motion, twisting the air around it in an endless rhythm that made the time seem meaningless.

Damon observed it for a moment.

Then, he walked toward it until the darkness claimed him.