Chapter 14: On His Own (1)
'Ah what the hell...'
Hope at the moment was leaning against a bloody carcass he climbed out of a little while ago.
Even as Hope drew in a lungful of fresh air, the stench that clung to him reeked heavily of rancid milk and spoiled meat.
Hope was staring tiredly off at the blooming horizon. Then he glanced behind where the carcass rested at the bottom of a cliff.
The carcass was actually an awakened beast he fell into off the trackway down the small cliff. Some sort of hybrid between a spider and a snake? He supposed he was lucky that he wasn't vulnerable enough to be sighted by other monsters, although he wished for a different scenario than this.
But now that dawn was approaching and the fog from the night before had lifted, he could finally see his surroundings.
He was in a rocky gray terrain with bumpy hills and steep cliffs. Sprinkled here and there were bones and corpses of Nightmare Creatures and soldiers. None of whom Hope recognized from his team or unit.
But amid the bodies and formations, there was the main trackway that winded around the slopes trailing up and down towards the western horizon. The direction he and the convoy were headed to.
The trackway he and the convoy should've taken on. Not whatever this unstable route that they traveled on instead.
As he recalled, the encounter with the Category-Two Gate cost almost all of their convoy's lives.
Hopefully, the rest have reached to safety in time.