Chapter 135: Ch133. New and improved
Miles stepped forward, and the moment his foot left the jagged ground of the Horizon, he felt a shift in the fabric of reality itself.
The very air around him twisted, reality bending and folding like a story being rewritten mid-sentence. A white-hot sensation surged through his body, and before he could even breathe, the world around him cracked apart.
And then, he was there.
Wonderland.
Yes, it was Wonderland like he knew it. With its sickly green sky, churning like a liquid nightmare, its light staining the ruins below in an eerie glow.
The land itself pulsed. Dark, jagged structures stretched toward the heavens like twisted bones, and the ground under his feet felt alive. Not in the way a thriving forest would be, but as if it were something wounded, something writhing in slow agony, waiting for someone to give it a merciful blow.
The air carried a scent of decay, coagulated blood and old iron, and the silence was oppressive, heavy.
Wonderland had always been a kingdom of stories, a land of madness and impossibility, but now? It was a corpse of what it had once been.
Even more now that Miles knew how the place looked before the war, firsthand.
He exhaled, steadying himself, and before he did anything else, he summoned the system window before him.
The HUD unfolded before him, the glowing text illuminating the dim world around him with the familiar, and yet strangely new dark light framing the soberly flourished letters.