Reincarnated As A What?

Chapter 21 - The Demon

I had been gone a few days as I was approaching the city so it seemed reasonable that the guild would already be claiming my death and preventing any individuals from returning to the town. It seemed that maybe they didn't trust the lie I had told them about my aura completely. Or maybe they really just cared that little about me as an adventurer. Or maybe I was just overthinking it. As after all, I had selected that job myself, they probably didn't care if it was me or any other low-ranking adventurer who had taken it.

As I approached the city I noticed something was wrong. The streets seemed completely empty. Almost as if people had been evacuated or were in hiding. Every street was completely empty not a single persona or animal or anything, It was very strange. But there didn't seem to be any signs of the reason for them to have left, no blood that would imply an attack, no damage to anything... Perhaps they weren't hiding at all, it could be that there was simply an important event going on somewhere in the city that meant everyone had gathered in one place... No, if that was the case surely there would be at least animals in the city, the city was usually full of swallows and other small birds, but there weren't any to be seen. It was eerily quiet...

"What's going on?"

"UNKNOWN"

"what do you mean unknows?"

"THE TOWN APPEARS TO BE DESERTED"

"Yes I could tell that already, but why?"

"INSUFFICIENT DATA"

That in and of itself seemed very suspicious, the system hadn't been so clueless since it had evolved, but now it didn't have any idea of what could be happening. Perhaps the system was still damaged from the zombie incident??

No that seemed unlikely, it had worked perfectly fine when I came across the fire elemental. Out of curiosity, I continued heading further into the city, still without seeing a single person, the city was so large and had been bustling with people before I had left. 

But then something began to change. The once clean and well-kept roads began to become damaged. Each stone on the roads was cracked in some way as if somebody had hit every single one of them with a hammer individually, As I approached the centre of the city the damage became more and more intense. The building also started to seem to suffer from it with the walls being majorly damaged and making the city look like it had been involved in some kind of modern war with bombs being dropped left right and centre, but I knew that wasn't the case, after all, bombs didn't exist in this world, however, magic did, so magic must have been the cause of the damage.

I reached down in my human form to touch the road stones, but they simply turned to dust when I touched them and blew away in the wind.

"What happened to this rock"

"UNKNOWN"

I tried to read an aura on the rocks to see if magic had been used on them, but there was either no magic on them or I was somehow doing it wrong.

"Is there any magic in the area"

"NEGATIVE"

"None at all? Are you sure?"

"POSITIVE"

I was completely stumped as to what had happened. Would I be able to get my money? Or would I have to move on to another town to find work? I guessed that if nothing else at least the next time I turned up to a guild I wouldn't give off a monstrous aura. I walked further and further into the city until the point where the destruction was so extreme it was hard to call it even a ruin. All of the building and everything had been completely pulverised. That's when I saw it.