Chapter 93: Ch91. Pain as a teacher (15) - Lost
The moment Miles stepped through the portal, he knew something was wrong.
This wasn’t Wonderland.
Instead of the dreamlike, chaotic realm he had prepared himself for, he found himself standing in the middle of a vast wasteland filled with twisted metal, crumbling stone, and machinery that looked too advanced to belong to his world – this world, even.
The air reeked of scorched wires and something acrid, something almost... Organic.
A thick, unnatural fog clung to the ground, curling around rusted wreckage and discarded artifacts like grasping fingers. It was never still, shifting in ways that suggested something was moving within it. Watching.
Waiting.
Miles took a cautious step forward, his boots scraping against what felt like polished bone beneath the dust under his soles. His fingers tightened around the [Harbinger’s Scythe], which had just materialized from a storm of black sparks, his breath steady despite the unnatural tension pressing against his ribs.
’What the hell is this place?’
He had no answers. The Archivist said Wonderland was where he needed to go to grow stronger, but what even was this place? It felt wrong.
Then the sound came.
A groan of shifting metal, deep and guttural, echoed from somewhere within the wreckage. It wasn’t the sound of a machine struggling against rust. It was something alive.