"You're finally awake.
Seriously, who the hell sleeps atop a pile of corpses?"
Looking around him, he could see he was not in that apocalyptic scenery in his mind but in a town that could have been said to have gone through its own form of apocalypse.
The once smooth network of roads that interconnected all the streets and districts of the town was torn to pieces by the elements. Grass filled the labyrinth of cracks and sand covered whatever was left. Gardens were bustling with insect life who had made their home in the now tall grasses and overgrown bushes.
Most doors were either completely gone or mere remnants of rotten wood and rusty metal. The open doorways looked eerie as only darkness showed within. There were signs of fires, while in some cases, it was merely a trail of soot and smoke above a window pane, in others, it was a pile of ash where once a building stood.
"I was not asleep, just going through some past memories."
"Really? Of all places to reminisce about the past!"
The boy, Leader of the New Generation Heroes, Evan (Bourne) Eris, chuckled lightly as he jumped down the hill of headless corpses he was sitting down on and adjusted his clothes.
He wore a pair of black trousers with a similarly coloured short-sleeved T-shirt on his upper body. Atop his shirt, was a grey cardigan that matched the colour of his shoes. On his right wrist was a plain black bracelet about 15 cm in length.
Running a hand through his short black hair, he looked to the side and saw pieces of broken body armour and helmets of various kinds gathered into a single pile.
His dark grey eyes narrowed slightly as he gazed at this pile of junk, the golden crest in his eyes lighting up with a golden glow.
"Good...they're all 'dead'."
He spoke to the blonde-haired girl beside him as he stretched his arm into the air and called out.
"Unforged."
*SWOOSHH!!
Within a few seconds, an obsidian black one-handed sword with an eighty-centimetre-long blade flew through the air and into his open palm.
Grasping the sword tightly, he turned to the blonde girl, Battle Priestess Eliza, and voiced out a question.
"Where's our resident invader?"
"She went ahead to the main city, saying that we should meet her there when you wake up from your beauty sleep."
Hearing the girl's reply, he nodded in understanding before sheathing his sword and walking towards the wide fallen temple in the middle of the city square as he continued.
"Let's go then.
There are a lot of knights that we have to relieve of the burden of carrying their heads in their hands."
The girl nodded in affirmation as she picked up her magic catalyst, a look of remembrance appearing on her face as she asked.
"When are you going to start looking for the rest?"
"Soon...very soon."
The boy replied as he looked beyond the entrance of the fallen temple with glowing eyes.
However, a strange expression appeared on his face as he suddenly realised something about what Eliza told him.
"Hey, Liz."
"What?"
"You said Pride was going over to the main city, right?"
"Yeah, what about it?"
"Is she aware that there's still another town before we get to the actual Bultom Dungeon City?"
"…"
The two stared at each other in silence before a third voice rang out and broke said silence.
"You must have misheard. Elder sister went back to the previous town to pick up a book series she ordered."
The younger brother of the 'resident' invader Evan spoke of, emerged from one of the abandoned buildings around them while tossing something into the spatial pouch on his waist as he spoke.
"It's the fact that she's actually making a journey of dozens of kilometres just for some books that baffles me.
Oh well, I'm not a bookworm like her so I can't relate."
Evan shrugged his shoulders as he spoke, turning his attention back towards the fallen temple in front of him and continuing.
"She can catch up with us later.
p1ease visi(t) n0ve1b(in).ne)t
For now, we have to focus on stopping whatever is going on down there that would result in the creation of a very disgusting creature with the potential to become a grandmaster-level existence in just a few days."
Eliza's expression turned strange as she remembered the description of the thing that Evan gave her, holding her mouth as if to prevent herself from throwing up as she spoke.
"I'd rather fight a bunch of Dullahans like we just did rather than lay my eyes on that."
"Don't worry too much, it only gets more disgusting when it becomes a grandmaster."
"…. that's not any consolation."
An explanation is in order for one to understand just where the 'Anomalies' were currently situated.
After leaving the Yelcyne County, the group journeyed for two days, arriving at this abandoned town that was not so far from Bultom Dungeon City.
The town was situated in between two of the smaller towns that surrounded Bultom Dungeon city in a semi-circle, having been abandoned decades ago for reasons Evan neither knew nor cared about.
What Evan did know, is that it was this abandoned town where the flesh golem that wreaked havoc across Cheverton in the game, spawned.
Arriving here, they were met with the scene of hundreds of Dullahans patrolling the abandoned town, as if guarding it, confirming the presence of the Demonic Hand in this place.
The group then proceeded to wipe out all the Dullahans, while Evan and Eliza had a discussion concerning the other seven heroes, with Evan zoning out reminiscing? about something afterwards and snapping back to reality only to discover that Pride had returned to the previous town.
"Now, the group decided to descend to the artificial dungeon at the bottom of the fallen Temple, in a quest to stop the evil Demonic hand Senior member from succeeding in the flesh golem creation that she was tasked with by the 'Eighth Finger'."
The boy received strange gazes from his companions, with the lightning spirit Kayla facepalming as he went on to stick his nose into the narrator's job.
[Master, stop it.]
"Fine, I'd stick to my character role."