Chapter 80: The Phage Deeps
Stepping through the portal was like diving headfirst into a painting that was still wet and being actively smeared by a giant, angry toddler. The world on the other side didn’t make sense.
One moment, Ryan’s foot landed on what looked like solid, grey rock. The next moment, the rock dissolved into a swarm of purple butterflies that fluttered away and then turned back into rock a hundred feet in the air before crashing down.
The sky above them was a swirling mess of colors, shifting from a fiery orange to a deep, sickly green and back again. There was no sun, just a chaotic, pulsing light that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
The air itself felt thick and buzzed against their skin like a thousand tiny insects.
"Okay," Hale, the Crimson Banner medic, said, his voice impressively calm as he looked at a nearby mountain that was currently upside down. "This is... unusual."
Griz, the giant Iron Wolf, just grunted and tightened his grip on his shield. "Doesn’t matter what it looks like," he rumbled. "If it bleeds, we can kill it."
"That’s the problem, Griz," Scarlett said, her eyes wide as she scanned the shifting landscape. "I don’t think anything here bleeds."
She was right. The first "creature" they encountered wasn’t really a creature at all. It was a shifting, glitching mass of black and red pixels that floated towards them, looking like a piece of a corrupted video file.
It had no face, no mouth, no limbs. It was just a shape of pure wrongness.
This was a Reality Phage.
Ryan’s "Lore Scanner" went haywire trying to analyze it. The information flickered and changed every second.