Chapter 385: A Necessary Abandonment

Five minutes later.

The squad preparing to evacuate the building came to a stop.

Not far ahead lay the boundary of the mist, where the gray-white fog halted abruptly, as if cut clean by a blade.

About twenty minutes earlier, this was where they had first attempted to evacuate because of the Bonebeast Anomaly.

At the time, the squad leader had been cautious, stepping only a short distance beyond the mist to confirm whether the Bonebeast would track them.

That caution had proven necessary. Once they left the cover of the mist, the Bonebeast could sense their presence, and they had been forced to abandon the evacuation.

Now the Bonebeast was dead. The factor that had forced them to abandon the evacuation had disappeared. There was no reason to stop here.

And yet—

The three of them looked into a side room off the corridor and fell into a deathly silence.

It was a person.

Or rather, what had once been a person.

That person was the assistant squad leader.

Blood-red ribs had grown from his chest, forming a hideous cage of bone armor around him.

This had been the assistant squad leader’s final life-saving measure.

After nearly all his ribs had been pulled from his body and used for the cage, these were the last bits of bone he had wrung from within himself to fill the void in his chest and maintain the most basic protection.

The blood-red color showed just how hard he had pushed himself in the earlier battle, so much so that what had regrown was mostly flesh and blood rather than true bone, its defensive strength far inferior to his peak condition.

The surfaces of those ribs were not smooth; they were covered in a thin, dark-red membrane, beneath which writhing threads of blood were faintly visible.

Yet...

The cause of his death had not come from outside.

Although the blood-red bone armor was fragile, it was spotless, showed no obvious signs of battle, and its structure was clearly intact. No claw marks. No cracks. No signs of violent breach.

But the assistant squad leader protected by that armor was dead.

All that remained of him was a ghastly white skeleton.

Not even a trace of flesh or blood was left on the bones.

The bones were immaculate, as though carefully washed with some kind of solvent, each one gleaming with an unnatural, almost porcelain-like sheen.

It did not look as though something had been violently broken through from the outside, but rather as if something had devoured him from the inside out...

Peering through the gaps of the perfectly intact bone armor, there was only emptiness.

Nothing remained.

Fear quietly spread.

Something must have happened—something they did not know about.

Betty had inexplicably vanished in that room.

And the assistant squad leader appeared to have died just before the moment he could leave the mist.

What... exactly had happened here?

At that moment, Jack broke the silence.

“Squad leader... shouldn’t we... stop for a moment?”

The squad leader turned, his gaze settling on him. His eyes were still shot through with blood, and something unreadable trembled in the depths of his pupils, but the earlier confusion was gone. At least he looked lucid.

Jack took a deep breath and said everything on his mind in one go:

“Squad leader, the assistant squad leader is dead, and Betty is missing. We still haven’t figured out why.”

“If we rashly leave the mist now and try to evacuate, we might walk into even greater danger.”

“I think... we should stop first, figure out what’s happening, and wait for the Rank-3 masters to come handle it.”

As he spoke, he turned to another squad member and motioned for him to check the time.

“You just looked at your watch, right? How long did it take us to walk here from our previous position?”

The squad member glanced down, and his expression changed. His brows twitched, then his lips pressed together, and finally his pupils contracted.

“F... five minutes,” he said, his voice hollow.

“Five minutes.”

Jack turned back, his gaze fixed on the squad leader.

“But earlier, from that same spot to here and back again—including a test of the Bonebeast Anomaly’s sensory range—the whole round trip took us less than five minutes. How could just walking here take a full five minutes?”

“This is wrong. Something is very wrong. We shouldn’t keep moving. The Susurrus Mist is Lady Pandora’s work. At the very least, it won’t harm us. We should stay...”

But before he could finish, the squad leader cut him off coldly.

“Are you questioning me?”

The squad leader stared hard at Jack. His bloodshot eyes were terrifyingly cold.

The squad leader went on, his tone stubborn and resolute:

“Our objective right now is to evacuate as quickly as possible. The entire building has become extremely dangerous. We shouldn’t stay here any longer. If we do, we’ll die here just like him.”

He pointed at the skeleton.

The assistant squad leader’s remains lay curled inside the blood-red bone armor, his hollow chest cavity like an open mouth gaping silently at the ceiling.

The squad leader’s voice suddenly turned strange, carrying a paranoid tremor:

“He waited too long to leave. The mist completely devoured him before he could escape.”

“Now the mist has already caught up to us, but we’re only one step from making it out... just one step!”

“We can’t waste any more time!”

The squad leader’s words, combined with his current expression, sent a chill through everyone present.

He still seemed to be in his right mind. His sentences were coherent, his logic intact, his conclusion clear.

And yet it all felt so specious.

Like a mirror that appeared whole, but when viewed from a certain angle, was revealed to be covered in fine cracks.

“Everyone must move with me! We are evacuating right now!”

The squad leader ordered all members to move with him, but he failed to notice that after hearing his words, the way they looked at him had quietly changed.

He took the first step, walking toward the boundary of the mist. That step was long and resolute, as if he feared that even a moment’s hesitation would cost him the courage to leave.

But when he glanced back, not one of the three squad members had followed.

Jack remained silent, his expression complicated, his brow tightly furrowed. His lips moved as if to say something, but in the end, nothing came out.

The other two members stood beside Jack. Their expressions were guarded, and when they looked at the squad leader, there was even a trace of fear.

Unconsciously, they drew closer together, like three frightened sheep huddled at the edge of the mist.

One of them even mustered the courage to speak, trying to persuade the squad leader to change his mind:

“Squad leader, your condition... why don’t you rest a little first? Or maybe listen to Jack and figure out what actually happened before we do anything else...”

He was trying, in a roundabout way, to point out that the squad leader’s mental state had already become somewhat abnormal.

Or, even if he couldn’t get through to him, convincing the squad leader to stay with them would be enough.

But how could a man whose mind was already unhinged possibly realize he had lost it?