Chapitre 52: Fire, fire, fire

"Are you absolutely sure there's no one there?" Leo asked for the seventh time between the short moment it took the group to leave Camila's estate and go out all the way to the edge of the capital city. 

"There's no one there," Camila repeated her assurance for the seventh time in a row. "But now, there's no one to be found as far as five, six miles out in this direction," she pointed her hand out at the uninhabitable swamp ahead. 

'Figures.'

Leo didn't really need to ask the same question over and over again. 

From the very moment he first saw this empty scar on the otherwise healthy tissue of farms big and small littered over every last inch of the arable land, he could tell there was something wrong. 

And as it turned out, rather than a rich farmable land, it was an inhabitable swamp, choke full of poisonous insects and near-constantly filled with enough standing water to make any attempt at crossing it into a hell on earth.