Chapter 625: The Trenches

Thoren was examining the boot with a leg when the situation around the massive skeletal jaw changed.

The ash tide appeared behind him.

It made no noise. It gave no warning.

There was no shift in the air, no change in the light, no distant rumble to herald its coming.

It was simply there.

As if it had stepped out of the void itself. As if it had been waiting for him to stop, to lower his guard, to believe for one foolish moment that he was safe.

It was right on his heel.

Thoren’s terror was absolute.

His heart slammed against his ribs. Every hair on his body stood on end.

A cold shock raced down his spine, and for a single, terrible moment, he could not move.

The ash tide loomed behind him, a wall of churning gray death, its tendrils reaching for him, its howl rising from a whisper to a roar.

He did not think.

He ran.

He raced toward his mount, the undead Sanguine Vulture, with all his might. His boots pounded against the ash-crusted ground. His lungs burned.

His legs screamed.

Behind him, the horrifying ash tide was ready to swallow him whole, only a few meters separating them. He could feel its cold breath on his neck. He could hear its hunger in his ears.

With every ounce of strength in his body, Thoren leaped onto the back of the undead Sanguine Vulture.

"Go!" he screamed.

The undead Sanguine Vulture unfolded its wings and flew forward, cutting through the tense and heavy atmosphere at breathtaking speed.

The ground fell away.

The wind screamed past him and the ash tide roared behind them.

But compared to the nerve-wracking speed of the ash tide, its speed was a tad bit slow.

Thoren looked back and immediately, his jaw dropped.

Horror filled his eyes.

The ash tide was catching up.

Slowly.

Gradually.

It was catching up.

The gray mass reached for the vulture’s tail, and where it touched, the undead flesh began to dissolve.

Feathers withered.

Bone crumbled.

The vulture’s body began to dissolve into ashes.

"...This..."

Thoren was terrified, watching as the ash tide dissolved the undead Sanguine Vulture into ashes.

Any living creature would have fallen to the ground, dooming its rider. But as an undead, the Sanguine Vulture kept flying even as its body dissolved.

As long as its head was intact, it could continue flying.

However, Thoren was not stupid enough to believe that was possible without its wings.

The ash tide crept up the vulture’s body. The tail was gone. The legs were gone. The lower torso was dissolving into gray nothing.

The wings, which had been beating steadily, began to falter as the ash reached their tips.

Terrified and scared, Thoren moved toward the neck of the undead Sanguine Vulture.

"Dammit! Dammit!" he cursed.

His eyes wandered around, his brain running at the highest speed. He could already sense the prickling of the ash tide against his skin. Cold. Hungry. Patient. If he did not act now.

Then...

Just then, from his undead space, another undead Sanguine Vulture appeared in the space before him.

Without thinking, Thoren leaped from the almost destroyed undead Sanguine Vulture to the new one.

Bang!

He landed on the undead Sanguine Vulture’s back. His legs were unstable, and he fell backward.

Instinctively, he reached out his hand and gripped the back of the undead vulture. The bony vertebrae dug into his palm.

The cold undead flesh pressed against his fingers.

Covered in sweat and panting heavily, he forced himself to the back of the undead vulture and commanded.

"FLY!"

The undead Sanguine Vulture obeyed.

Its wings snapped open, and it shot forward, leaving the dissolving remains of its predecessor behind.

The ash tide swallowed the old vulture whole, consuming it in a single, hungry gulp. Then it turned its attention to the new one.

Thoren clung to the vulture’s back and did not look behind him. Any second now, he would be devoured into ashes.

For the next couple of minutes, Thoren gripped the undead Sanguine Vulture’s back with all his might as he tried to evade the hot pursuit of the ash tide.

His knuckles were white and his arms trembled with the effort of holding on. The wind tore at his face, whipping his hair into his eyes, but he did not dare loosen his grip.

Not for a second and not for a heartbeat. The ash tide was behind him, always behind him, a hungry wall of gray that refused to give up the chase.

This was the longest minute of Thoren’s life.

He stared at the bleak wasteland ahead, searching for something.

Anything.

A sign that he was heading in the right direction. Unfortunately for him, there was nothing. Only gray sky. Only the endless, featureless wasteland that stretched to the horizon and beyond.

No hope in sight.

He was all alone... as usual.

Suddenly, he creased his brow as he noticed the landscape had changed.

The ground below was no longer flat. It had become something else.

Trenches.

Deep, winding trenches that looked like the seabed of some ancient, dried-up ocean. They carved through the wasteland in long, serpentine curves, their walls steep and jagged.

Rocks and stones were scattered everywhere, remnants of a time when this place had been something other than a wasteland.

Some of the trenches were long. Some were deep. Some vanished into the distance with no end in sight, their bottoms lost in shadow.

Merely flying over the trenches, Thoren could feel the oppressive atmosphere. It pressed down on him like a physical weight.

The air was heavier. It smells of something. Something not good.

He wanted to fly higher, to escape the oppressive feeling, to put distance between himself and whatever lurked in those dark depths.

But then he remembered the horror in the sky. The slumbering calamity that could wake at any moment and descend upon him.

He abandoned that thought immediately.

Holding his breath, he gripped the undead Sanguine Vulture tightly as it flew over the trenches.

His eyes darted from side to side, watching for movement, for danger, for anything that might leap from the darkness below.

Just then, something happened.