Inside the tent, Brigadier General Rocko set his eyes on one of the tech workers.
"Connect me to my soldiers." He said in a deep, stern voice.
After hearing his words, the tech worker frantically moved his hands, activating the internal com links and connecting all the soldiers to the Brigadier General.
The Brigadier General once again sat cross-legged as he spoke into a tiny microphone placed upon his wide wooden desk by a blood-covered tech worker.
"The unidentified black mist that you see beneath your feet has completely covered the entirety of the battlefield."
"Our scientists are analyzing its contents as we speak. Do not fear, my soldiers, for the flaming spire has been closed by none other than Colonel Ivan. Chase away the remnants of this war. Chase them to the graves that await them in the pits of hell."
Hearing his words, the troops seemed to gain a stronger will to fight, but they had no idea that Brigadier General Rocko was playing with their lives.
Brigadier General Rocko saw all people who didn't belong to a god family as inferior beings whose lives served only as a tool to be sacrificed for the glory of the strong. He didn't know what the black smoke was, nor did he know if it would be a lethal variable against the remaining soldiers that fought in this skirmish.
What he did know was that it was the perfect opportunity to test out the lethality of Lady Veronica.
The Veronica warhead was said to cause slow agonizing death to all who felt its corruptive energy. Based on the rumors alone, Brigadier General Rocko couldn't wait to try it out in a real war. He was looking forward to an opportunity like this one, where he could offer the Major General excuses, explaining that he had no choice but to use the warheads when the chimeras pushed back their forces.
They were winning the war, but no officer higher than him knew that. So Brigadier General Rocko planned to get rid of any survivors after he launched the warhead, ensuring that word of him abusing military power never reached the higher-ups.
As for the reason why he felt the need to use such a weapon, he simply wanted to see every survivor die in agony. Very few things in the world gave him as much pleasure as watching those of inferior blood suffer like wingless flies.
His obsession with this pleasure was so strong that he was willing to risk his job just to see Lady Veronica blow up a few hundred monsters and humans.
On the battlefield, the black smoke had reached the very edges of the land. Unexpectedly, the soldiers didn't stop the war efforts when they saw the smoke, but rather continued to rush to their deaths, fully following Brigadier General Rocko's orders.
Although the soldiers assumed that the smoke was some kind of attack from the umberlumen, they did not retreat because Brigadier General Rocko had ordered them to stay and fight to their last breaths.
That was, of course, until the smoke began trembling, shaking the ground like a furious earthquake and stopping the soldiers in their tracks. Soon after the shakes began, the smoke started absorbing all the dead bodies it had covered into its depths.
…
Within the urn, two points of light drifted within the spacious void, both lights indistinguishable from the surrounding emptiness at first, yet fixed in their trajectory as they drew closer.
Soon, the lights started coming closer; the closer they got, the more they grew in intensity. At the moment, the lights started moving as they came closer, like the belonged to a sprinter with white glowing eyes.
As they further approached, their outline sharpened into the shape of a figure advancing at unnatural speed. Its body was completely dark, resembling the figure of a man clad in the blackness of the void and outlined with pure white that showed its body's details and eyes.
Its eyes burned with an unwavering white light that cut through the darkness and fixed itself on Lloyd. Suddenly, the man who looked like a drawing and had eyes that burned with white fire let out a grotesque shriek that rattled Lloyd's soul.
The scream was unlike anything Lloyd had ever heard in all his twenty years of life. Within its voice were emotions of rage, sorrow, and envy, all twisted together into the voice of a hungry beast, carrying only pain in its purest form.
In that same moment, Lloyd heard more otherworldly shrieks right behind the first man who ran towards him. More lights gathered, their numbers multiplying with unsettling speed until the darkness itself seemed to be filled with them.
Shapes formed around those lights, bodies emerging in various sizes and proportions, all sharing the same featureless darkness, white outline, and white burning eyes.
These strange entities ran in unison, their voices merging into a restless cacophony of overlapping whales and cries.
Lloyd could not only see these creatures, but he could also feel them, as if their cries were calling out to him. He could feel that this call wasn't a cry for help, but rather a roar of envy, like their discordant forms craved his human body.
Following this understanding, Lloyd ran as fast as he could into the darkness. He could not know where he was heading, but he was determined to flee from those entities.
Seeing this, the men and women's eyes burned with even hotter white light as they increased in speed, hightailing it to Lloyd with inhuman velocity, quickly catching up to him.
The first one that he saw at the beginning was the first to reach Lloyd. When it got close enough, it leaped into the air and dived at Lloyd, pushing him downward into the darkness, causing him to fall into a hole that shouldn't have existed.
There was no ground, nor was there a sky. There wasn't any formal understanding of up or down. Yet Lloyd was previously able to run on nothingness as if it were solid. He didn't know how this realm operated.
As he fell, he once again tried running, and to his surprise, it worked, and he was moving forward once more.
Above him, the dark men and women fell into the darkness until they reached his level and gave chase once again. It seemed like the realm created stable footing based entirely on one's perception of what down is, hence, as long as Lloyd perceived his level to be the ground, he would not fall again.
His understanding of this realm wasn't helping him though as the dark humans once again caught up to him, urgently trying to grab at his feet, their bodies toppling over one another like they were all being pushed out of a pressurized pipe. Lloyds capture seemed inevitable.
After just avoiding these creatures of darkness for at most a minute, one of them caught his left leg, pulling him down, multiple fingers grazing his skin as the creatures let out unbearable groans of agony.
The creatures suddenly started ripping at Lloyd's skin with their fingers, scraping the skin on his legs, causing blood to drip off his feet. Resist as he may, Lloyd could not manage to break himself free of their tight grips.
Lloyd groaned in pain. He had experienced pain much more intense than this, but that didn't mean he was immune to it. More hands held onto Lloyd's left leg as he desperately tried to power his way through it. But his efforts were meaningless as more hands reached for and grabbed his right leg, dragging his figure to the ground, and slowly pulling his body into their pile of bodies.
Lloyd hit their hands over and over again with his, but every time he did, their grips increased in strength and dug deeper into his flesh, causing him to groan even louder. No matter how much Lloyd resisted, he couldn't shake their clutches off him.
In a matter of moments, Lloyd found himself surrounded by dark humans, each one piling over him and gripping his flesh like he was a mountain and they were climbers about to fall off, each hanging on for dear life.
He had no way to know what was happening to him, but he didn't despair. Compared to the pain the owl monster inflicted on him and the ache of the Golden mercury, this was more or less child's play. He was sure that he could endure it long enough to figure a way out of this mess.
The instant he thought this, Lloyd could feel a sharp pain come from his lower abdomen. He couldn't see what was happening because his vision was blocked by the dark humans, but he could tell just from the feeling alone.
One of them was biting him, not only biting, but genuinely trying to tear out his flesh in large chunks.
After the first bite, Lloyd could feel more and more teeth munching onto his body without hesitation, biting into his flesh with frenzied desperation. All the dark humans closed in as quickly as the biting began, their bodies colliding and forcing themselves forward in their need to get a taste of his flesh.
Nails and teeth dragged across Lloyd, tearing into him again and again, drowning his screams in the empathy of their hunger.