Taken Horizon Origin, volume 2, Descension

Episode 22 : return of the shadow

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Red leaves crunched under my protective hazmat boots with each step made. After walking a league through the foggy forest, I crouched down, picking up one of these strange signs of life, holding another red leaf in a black rubber-gloved hand. "Could a kralscell really make all of this?"

Surrounded by a silver mist i looked around through my gas-mask's visor being filled with amazement at the golden tree trunks and the crimson colored leaves in the foliage of its crown.

Stepping out from the fog behind me a man that blended into the fog with his white hair spoke up, "Adventure is busy with the warfront against Corruption with the others and the pet he stole from Evolution. Only evolution should be capable of this but that would require plant life to already exist."

"What do you make of it then, Pettel, as a kralscell?" Pulling out a glass tube from a pouch in my utility belt I pushed in the leaf sample into the tube, sealing it with a rubber cork before hiding the tube back into one of my belts many small bags

Inhaling a deep breath through his nose in the air, the man faced a direction. "Whoever did this left some survivors. Wether they wish they did though is a mystery."

Pushing up from the floor with my knee I gestured for Pettel to direct me, "Lead on if you will."

Walking for maybe another hundred meters through the silver fog of the golden forest, muffled wails began to enter earshot and once we followed them to the source I was disturbed by what I saw.

Breathing heavily through the filters of my gas-mask I looked up at a woman suspended in the air by golden roots and branches piercing through her abdomen, eye, and limbs dripping a continuous dribble of blood and blue bricks from her bloodied foot. making a shallow puddle of blood right beneath her.

"That's cruel." Pettel sounded disgusted by what we had just witnessed, making it visible on his face through the fog as he furrowed his brows. For someone like himself who kills without preference ensuring a painless passing, seeing this was bound to anger him.

Pulling a knife from a sheath on my shoulder I got to work cutting the golden branches one after another. No visible reaction came from the haunting forest around me, letting me work with quick ease until the woman dropped the the floor falling in a puddle of her own blood

Dragging the girl out of the red puddle and onto the dry earth I pulled out the roots grown inside her body. Once they were all out, blue bricks began to build up the flesh until the girls eye and the holes within her body all healed up. With a gasp she awakened to see my and Pettel's figure above her. "wh-what happened? The meteor! What-"

"Have patience..." glancing at her badge atop her right breast I tried to assure the soldier, "lieutenant Quief. Me and this fellow here arrived not long ago to find Ignis compound in this state." Waving around my hand I gestured to the entirety of the golden and red forest bathed in fog making it incapable of seeing further than 30 feet

"What the fuck?.." lieutenant Quirth was dumbfounded by this revelation. "Do you know where anyone else is? If this is the state of the base then we need to regroup and inform high command at Auron outpost."

"I'm 'fraid not." Pettel knocked against the golden bark of a tree with his knuckles as he answered only getting a faint reverb from the tree's dense insides . "I can only sense three aether signatures in the area, we were on our way to one of them when we found you in our path. Your the first living thing we've found since entering this horrifying place."

Punching the ground with her fist lieutenant Quief didn't know what appropriate course of action she would need to take to safely help her cohorts or stay by us and repay her debt. "Thank you for freeing me, but I need to find the other five-hundred-and-ninety-nine reserves that were left in Ignis."