Chương 49: Paddles

It didn't take long for the cohort of five to maneuver through the black pyramid.

Past the rotting corpses and the charred extremities, over the bent-backwards limbs and the shattered bones, Cain carefully stepped around the pools of blood that remained and did his best to avoid stepping directly onto a corpse.

They ascended the pyramid's stairs step by step. The floor above them was empty. So was the next and the next until they finally returned to the ground floor — luckily, the fire that razed the campsite to the ground stopped at the pyramid's entrance.

Blueprints and schematics still hung from the pyramid's walls, many of them stained by blood or mud, but preserved nonetheless.

Cain led them out of the pyramid and into the greater jungle. Ash and soot coated the ground. Dilapidated structures eerily broke through the rubble alongside bones that awkwardly stretched towards the sky reaching for salvation.

Beyond the perimeter of camp, however, the jungle remained untouched.

Its monstrous trees remained, piercing the clouds above and obscuring the horizon. Fruits and vines still rained down. Mushrooms colonized the bases of the trees while ants actively burrowed into them, returning from their pilgrimage of looting what remains of the place they temporarily called home.

If it weren't for the death and destruction that littered their immediate surroundings, the jungle would still be beautiful.

Cain allocated Church to the front — he had actually been to the Land of Frost before so he was naturally their best guide.

Like that, hours passed.

Cain and Church remained vigilant. The looming threat of Goblins always occupied their minds, Jun too made sure to keep a keen eye out at all times.   It was Fey and Mei who eventually relinquished themselves to sight seeing.

Fey had, of course, been in the jungle before. For many months at that, but she was not an adventurer-type. Although summoned to the Land of Trees, Fey spent most of her time within the walls of the camp.

She occasionally left to gather fruit or wood, but those excursions rarely touched upon the true depths of the jungle and so, by all accounts, this expedition was her first opportunity to see the jungle for what it really was.

In addition to Fey, on a much grander scale, this was Mei's first time outside of China. Jun and Mei, in fact, are nothing more than mundane people. For them, the jungle around was akin to a fairytale.

Various fruits of fantastical colors hung from the vines, iridescent mushrooms plagued the jungle floor, and new and exotic critters flooded the area from the depths beneath the soil to the leaves that rustled above the clouds.

For them, this was a fantasy world and Mei couldn't stop herself from falling into a state of complete adoration. Typically, Jun would snap her out of it.

The two Chinese young adults were trained together and Jun was more than accustomed to Mei's occasional moments of distraction, her air-headedness if you will.

Jun, by the way, is a trained tracker. Raised in the outskirts of China, his grandfather instilled traditional martial practices into the boy from a young age — he hunted his own food, made his own clothes, and spent his sixteenth birthday in isolation training.

When Jun turned seventeen his grandfather passed and he left the outskirts of China. From there he joined the military and has been with them ever since.

Mei, on the other hand, followed a different upbringing. The second daughter to a middle-class craftsman, her birth was in many ways an uneventful one. In their pursuit of a son, Mei's parents had five kids in total — the fifth of course being a boy.

Largely disregarded by her parents, Mei was never to amount to anything. She went to school like the rest, studied like the rest, learned an instrument, a foreign language, took up archery, but after so many years of vying for her parent's approval — Mei eventually quit.

The night before her high school graduation Mei left. She packed her mother's duffel bag with clothes and jewelry and escaped from the second floor window. Months later, she joined the military where her finesse with the bow finally came in handy.

Trained as a spotter, Mei is the person with binoculars sat next to a sniper. She interprets the wind flow, bullet trajectory, weather; it's her job to establish the perfect line of sight for the perfect shot.

That and she studied botany in the military — she's desperately trying to transfer to a behind-the-desk position as some sort of scientist or lab technician.

Eventually, Church succeeded in re-discovering the Land of Frost. Hidden behind a wall of embracing trees, there existed a single entrance into the clearing that housed the crater.

The cohort squeezed through the amalgamation of roots and wood and entered an open space filled with nothing but a small lawn of grass and a pit that tore into the center of the planet.

Cain descended first and with haste as the darkness couldn't obscure his vision. He lit the cauldron at the bottom and a row of torches ignited alongside it, illuminating the spiral staircase that once seemed to descend into the abyss itself.

With the five of them together again, they strode across the bloodied hall floor towards the mound of snow that barred the passageway into the Land of Frost. Without warning, Cain molded his extremities into large and flat paddles and began chipping away at the mound of snow.

This feat of peculiarity immediately caught the attention of Jun and Mei.

"Whoa!" Mei commented with infectious glee.

The young girl in her early twenties, probably the same age as Olive, burst towards Cain with bated breaths. Iradient hazel eyes, velvety black hair that caressed her collarbone, and a cute nose to bat — Mei was modelesque.

"How'd you do that?" Mei's eyes widened.

Surprised at her antics, Cain paused to respond.

"Um… Well it just sort of happens." Cain said while staring at his black palm.

"Mei! Don't be rude!" Jun lectured.

"It's not rude!" Mei snapped, "You're rude!"

"You know, I actually forgot about that Ability all together." Church commented from the floor beside them.

"What?" Cain mumbled, "You mean the shapeshifting?"

"Yeah," Church nodded, "how many Abilities do you have anyway?"

"Demons just work differently." Cain shrugged, his attention returning to the mound of snow.

"Actually, would you mind telling us more about that?" Fey interrupted.

Cain halted once again, his makeshift hand-shovel inches away from making real progress.

Cain looked towards Fey, a middle-aged woman with a librarian aesthetic, deep blue eyes, tan skin and a face full of freckles.

"Huh?" Cain asked.

"You know, about Hell and all." Fey put her finger to her chin.

"I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Well, I suppose we all have been, but these powers and this world, the fact that a Gate that leads to a totally different planet now exists on Earth — everything is about to change and we're at the forefront of it, since you're from somewhere else entirely, don't you know what's happening?"

Cain shook his head.

"I don't know what's happening." He sighed.

"Hell is just another place like Earth. Although demons are able to be summoned in general, I've never seen this type of mass summoning before — let alone between multiple worlds." Cain reasoned.

'Yeah, that makes sense!!' He triumphed internally.

"What about the Status?" Fey continued.

'Shit!' Cain cursed.

'Okay this is easy. What do I know, what do they know?'

"Everyone has a Status —" Cain lied on the spot, "it's nothing more than a universal appraisal tool."

'Thank you, Teacher Baku!'

"Okay. What can you tell us about Hell?" Fey would not stop.

'It's hot?' Cain said in his head.

"It's pretty warm." Cain said aloud.

"What do you know?!" Fey barked.

"I know this snow is in the way… so." Cain's eyes darted around.

Fey rolled her eyes and stepped away from the cohort. Meanwhile, Mei's eyes continued to glisten while staring at Cain's paddle-arms. Jun paid attention to their surroundings and Church snickered at the group's antics.

***

To most, the past few days melded together like a fever dream. Transported to another world, bestowed extraordinary gifts, and given a mission to return home. To many, their lives took an unexpected turn.

To a distinct pair, however, the past few days proved to possess more tribulations than Gate one seemingly did all together.

Unlike in the previous world, Gate Two summoned tenfold the amount of people right from the start. From six, the number jumped to sixty-four!

And beside the group of sixty-four, two people stood witness to their treachery.

Olive hadn't expected it, to say the least. When she accepted the Status's offer for teleportation, she expected an opportunity for growth. A battle! An opportunity to let loose after the month of mundane living — her body craved the hunt.

Ever since the sixty and some idiots, however, Olive has been placed on babysitting duty.

From the moment the crowd of men was summoned, however, Isaac was prepared.

He began with tradition and launched an energy slash into the sky, its light blue aura perfectly coalescing with the sky above.

Isaac's slash cut the wind and gathered the attention of the newly summoned.

Then, as could be expected, he delivered his by-now-practiced-over-a-hundred-times speech.

Which rocked the newly summoned's world, apparently.

At least, that was the reaction Olive interpreted when she heard the choir of cheers and applause come together to celebrate whatever Isaac had said.

Presumably, Olive gandered, the UN's announcement worked and reached the ears and eyes of billions of people across the globe. To add onto that, considering that the Status primarily summoned younger people, whether that be due to their age or level of fitness — the UN's target demographic is in fact the people who are most likely to be on the internet.

Due to that, Olive surmised that the vast majority of the people summoned definitely saw or at least heard about the UN's announcement i.e. Awakened, transporting to another world, yada yada.

Olive scanned the crowd to confirm her hunch and lo and behold, the vast majority of people summoned appeared to be below the age of thirty.

Especially their eyes, Olive noticed, appeared to be filled with stars over sorrows.

///LostNoteFound///

Thank you WalkingBush for the stones!!!!