As soon as I left home, I went as fast as possible (always keeping a close eye on things) towards the outpost where our parents were.
A little mental exercise: if I woke up around 11:20 AM (according to Mari), I spent almost 2 hours meditating to recover my mana and the ability to move freely. Finally, it took me a little over an hour to gather everything I needed (items, making my spear, understanding Pomo's new ability to produce fruit whenever she wants*, etc.).
*(Author: I'll explain this part better in a short interlude I'll put on Discord; if you want, I can even post it here later.)
So, putting it all together, it must be around 3:00 PM, almost 4:00 PM, not that the time makes much difference. The sky remained cloudy with only partial lighting regardless of the time of day, except when night falls. At that time, everything becomes pitch black without anyone noticing.
The time it would normally take to walk from our house to the gas station where Mom and Dad are would be 30 minutes on foot, walking normally. If I jogged, maybe it would take 15 to 20 minutes. I'm doing a mix of both, and in just over 5 minutes since I left, I've already reached the halfway point.
I got here so fast because: I have a new and strong body, enhanced senses of hearing, sight, and smell (which allowed me to hear if someone or something was following me or in front of me), and I'm using the [cloak of shadows] spell to help protect/detect me.
Despite my apprehension, I didn't encounter any monsters along the way, in fact, I didn't find anything. No monsters, no altered animals, no people, not even corpses or bloodstains on the street. Just destruction caused by plants that grew excessively out of nowhere.
The second-to-last part seemed strange to complain about, but the thing is, even on the street in front of my house there were bloodstains, claw marks on the walls, broken gates, etc. But in the 5 minutes I've been "walking," I barely saw any trace that would indicate there had been any kind of activity (for better or worse) around here.
Even the houses seemed to still have people inside, but I couldn't hear anyone, or anything besides the wind. Literally.
I could only hear the wind, the grunt of some zombie, the annoying "gigigi" of goblins, the howls of shadow wolves or Bargests, even the sound of insects (that hadn't been affected by the mana) wasn't heard. It was all an almost total and completely uncomfortable silence.
At least this uncomfortable silence only lasted until I reached the wholesale store area 5 blocks up from my house. Right next to a condominium where I always thought it would be easy to make a movie about the Backrooms.
With the complete lack of noise, this impression became even stronger, but that didn't matter now.
Next to the entrance of the wholesale store, I finally managed to hear the sound of something other than the wind, and I could also smell a very pungent odor in the air. An extremely unpleasant smell, in fact. The smell and my memory told me the direction I should follow, but then I realized there might be a problem.
Theoretically, I should still have more than a kilometer to go to get close to the gas station, and yet I could already smell a pungent, unpleasant, and rancid odor, but still with a slight sweet touch, in the air. Which, according to my memory, meant one thing: putrefaction.
The only way to smell the stench of decay from over a kilometer away was if a huge mass of decomposing flesh was nearby. And I'll repeat myself just to make it clear, even though I have a highly developed sense of smell, being able to smell something from over a kilometer away meant that a very LARGE concentration of rotten flesh was somewhere.
To get a better idea of the size of the problem I was going to face, I decided to climb the water tower at the entrance of the wholesale store (don't ask me why they put it there, I have no idea).
Once up there, at a height of about 20 meters (the equivalent of a 5-story building), I could "clearly" see my target in the distance. At that moment I remembered that when you hear a story about a person from a third person multiple times, the original story is considerably different from what you heard.
And why did I think of that... weeeeelllll...
'...Mari had said that our parents had seen the number of monsters decrease, right?. Now might be the best time to go help them, right?'
I wondered, looking at the disaster in front of me.
"Then why? Why?. WHY CAN I STILL SEE TWO ENTIRE CITY CLOSERS OVERRUN BY ZOMBIES AND OTHER CREATURES???????"
A small addendum to make my outrage even more meaningful: there are TWO ENTIRE BLOCKS AROUND the gas station and the hardware store, so... Yeah, there are A LOT of zombies, slimes and swarms of flies on top of some zombies.
That's without mentioning the numerous vultures circling above this horde, along with some considerably larger-than-normal gray-headed hawks that occasionally swooped down to take a piece or two from the zombies that barely reacted. All the undead monsters were concentrated on trying to get into the building materials store.
That was one of the only "good" things; the zombies were more concentrated on the humans inside the store than on my parents inside the gas station. But that didn't change the fact that there were simply too many zombies and slimes.
The entire street between the gas station and the store was overrun with zombies, and many of them also piled up inside the gas pump area, until they thinned out a bit further down the street behind.
While their numbers may have decreased, this doesn't mean the zombies suddenly disappeared after passing the gas station.
It just means they became more spaced out, and it was "easier" (if I squinted) to see one or two leaving the horde and wandering along the edges, until they were drawn back by the sound of the other zombies. Or they would just stand there, swaying slightly in the wind.
Even with my enhanced vision, I couldn't clearly see everything that was happening there; after all, everything was still more than a kilometer away. But I imagine that, however "concentrated" the zombies were on getting into the hardware store, some could still hear my parents inside the gas station manager's office.
'Another good thing that the office is "suspended" in the air, with only one physical entrance that they blocked. But they slightly complicate things.'
I thought, looking at the biggest variable I wasn't expecting.
The zombies and slimes on the ground aren't a problem I need to worry about, especially now that my level is almost 20. I was (more or less) expecting them and had already planned to avoid them, jumping across the rooftops of houses and smaller buildings until I got close to the gas station, and then finding a way in (probably through the window).
The problem was the vultures and hawks.
They were too busy picking up pieces (and sometimes whole smaller zombies), to worry about me. But who knows how mana influenced these scavenging predators?. I prefer not to tempt fate with them; their claws and beaks aren't just for show.
But how could I get past them and be ignored without relying on the [cloak of shadows] that keeps draining my mana?
...
...
...
I can't think of anything, literally no option that doesn't consume mana, and among them is using the cloak and the excellent cost-benefit ratio I have.
'Aaaahhhhh I can already see how this rescue is going to go.'
But if it were simple, it wouldn't be a rescue in the first place, would it?