Chapter 150: They had arrived
After watching the ruined city bathe in the morning light, Alex and Nyxara decided to take their time exploring it. The beasts had long since abandoned the central zones, and the air, though filled with dust and decay, felt still, even peaceful. It was a haunting kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.
The two wandered from broken skyscrapers to shattered highways, from train stations now home to overgrown weeds, to what used to be shopping malls where mutated vines sprouted through escalators.
Now and then, Nyxara—still in her small, curled form—would make a sarcastic comment, lying lazily on Alex’s shoulder like a spoiled queen.
"Hey, Alex," she purred, sniffing the air exaggeratedly, "I think I just caught a whiff of a coffee shop. Want to go in and pretend society here hasn’t crumbled?"
Alex, hands in his coat pockets, gave her a flat look. "Unless that coffee comes with a side of mutated rats, I’m good."
Nyxara squinted at a shattered billboard nearby. "It says, ’Every Cup Starts With Hope.’" She tilted her head dramatically. "How poetic. Maybe they should’ve served bullets instead."
"They’d have lasted longer," Alex replied dryly, stepping over the remnants of a skeleton with a clawed mark embedded on its back. "Looks like Hope didn’t protect this guy."
Nyxara huffed. "Ugh, always so bleak. Can’t you pretend to be normal for once?"
"I am normal," Alex said. "It’s the world that’s gone nuts."
She leaned closer, her cold nose brushing his ear. "Normal people don’t smile when imagining a city burning."
"Normal people don’t have talking tigers lying on their shoulders either," he countered.