Previously On:
– Radiation readings grew worse. A year left at most.
– The closed section proposed genocide as a survival plan.
– The alternative: one desperate mission into the outside world.
– The mission team gathered at dawn — tired, fractured, determined.
– The elevator descended… the gate began to rise.
Volume Start: A World That Once WasTime to meet the world again.For the first time since Day Zero, we step outside — into the mission, the landscape, the ruins that endured… and the things that shouldn't have.
[WARNING — DISTURBING IMAGERY]
[WARNING — DISTURBING IMAGERY]
quiet
This is the mission — the last hope for humanity. One final endeavor to save what remained without losing what made them human. Time is running out. Each week, the radiation climbs higher, narrowing the window until the world beyond becomes untouchable. This is their last chance. And now, at last, it begins.
The gate began to rise. metal groaned as thin bars of light spilled into the dim truck bay.
Egon's voice came over the comms, instructing them to secure their gas masks by pressing the middle button near the jaw to activate the atmosphere isolation system.
The light through the widening gap looked muted, almost gray-ish, as if filtered through dust or smoke. Inch by inch, it brightened, shifting toward something closer to natural daylight. By the time the gate fully opened, the warm sunlight became clear, yet it retained a hint of the same grayish tone.
The trucks' sensors were already reporting a mild spike in radiation—enough to make them sick, but not lethal.
The outside world emerged, a landscape draped in dark grays and black. Without life. The sunlight gave them a warmth they hadn't felt in a long time, but the desolate view outside reminded them what waits beyond the shelter's protection.
They set the trucks in motion. Egon's vehicle took the lead. With the shelter left behind, the world beyond began to open like the unveiling of some dark, doomsdayish painting. Half-dissolved remnants of bodies scattered to the right of the gate, sunken into the dust as if the earth itself had been feeding on them.
Two stood out from the rest. The upper half of a man lay twisted on its side. Eyes Stuck out against the pale cage of his skull, with deep dark cracks emerging from their sockets. One of them had been devoured. The skin around it was ravaged and torn by unseen creatures. His bald head, decorated with wisps of dried hair clinging to the sides, exposed a detached flap of skin at the back that had peeled loose long ago. The cracks continued along his head, fading into his torso.
Beside him, lay the head of a woman. Her long orange hair now mirrored dried roots of a dead trees. The same dark cracks covered her skull, yet, deeper. It almost broke into pieces. Spider webs tightly wrapped around her face, holding together what was left. A heavy golden earring had torn the lower half of her ear away. The golden earring still dangled from the torn remnant of her ear. It had a dirtied red gem in its center that reflected the sunlight, the only color she has left.
Not far away, two vulture corpses lay crumpled in the ashes. They were fresher than the humans, with feathers still clinging to their wings, but they were just as dead. The cracks on them were faint, mere colors on their skin.
This wasn't the rot of ordinary death. No softening flesh. No crawling worms. No blooming fungi. Out here, nothing rotted. Bodies dried into husks. Skin pulled tight over bone. As if time itself had mummified them in silence.
For a moment, The stillness held them. The vultures' quiet decay. The dried pieces of what used to be people. The unsettling calm. It all pressed in, freezing them in this moment.
Then, as their eyes adjusted, the land revealed itself: A world that once was.
A barren desert of ashes, stretched to the horizon, dotted with rocks of deep violet that verged on blackness. Among them, dead trees stood like skeletal sentinels. Their stripped branches, intensely dark and bare, ended with knife-sharp tips that shone in the sunlight. Each tree seemed to rise directly from a black rock below.
They drove forward.