Chapter 18 – Memories in Ruins
The journey back was the same as before—long and bloody.
The path he had carved earlier was already crawling with beasts again, as if the land itself refused to stay empty. By now Seth had slain nearly twice as many creatures as during his entire night hunt. Most of them were low-ranked, the kind of prey that hardly made a difference to his growth, yet he met plenty of stronger ones too. Whenever he could, he avoided them. Whenever he couldn't—steel sang, and another corpse was added to the ruins.
Still, he knew: the sheer number of kills he had stacked up today was enough to push him another step further in leveling up again.
But water came first. His throat was still dry, his lips cracked, and each breath felt heavy. Survival demanded choices.
He thought through his options.
The first was the vines. If he could find a container not completely rusted through, he could collect the dew that seeped from the thick, parasitic growths and boil it over a fire. Crude, but should be drinkable.
The second was beast blood. Some creatures bled in ways that felt too poisonous to risk, but if he found one with clean, healthy red blood… perhaps he could take just enough to keep himself alive until he was strong enough to venture into the forest.
Because once he reached the forest, things would change. He remembered a certain place—a stream that used to run along the outskirts of town before the forest swallowed it whole. If it still existed, then water would no longer be a problem.
With that thought, Seth sighed and moved on.
Then he stopped.
Before him stood a ruin he knew too well—the crumbling shell of his old high school.
For a moment, he simply stared. Dusty walls streaked with cracks. Hollow doorframes where doors had long since rotted away. A silence so heavy that even the faint breeze seemed muted.
Nostalgia hit him like a punch. Memories that had been buried under the rush of survival clawed their way back.
He stepped inside. His boots crunched on shattered glass and fragments of wood. Behind him came the wet thud of a lizard split in two—his blade had flashed almost absently, severing it before it could pounce. He didn't even bother collecting its core. A level two beast like that was nothing to him now.
More came. More died. He moved forward regardless, the halls of his childhood becoming graveyards for them.
Though he did collect the cores from the stronger beasts.
It felt like yesterday that he had walked these corridors, head bowed, trying to avoid notice. Every shadow had seemed a threat then. Every snicker or shove in the hallway had sent his stomach twisting. Now those same halls were fractured and empty, claimed only by monsters that were far less terrifying than the humans he had once called classmates.
He entered a classroom.
Rust had eaten through the metal chairs until they were nothing but twisted skeletons. His old seat, the one tucked near the back, was nothing more than a corroded frame barely holding itself together. Behind him lay two lizard corpses—he had cut them down moments ago, their bodies twitching in their last spasms.
For a moment, he just stood there.
The weight of memory pressed down. The reason he came here—to this town in the first place.
His family's faces surfaced in his mind: his father, weary but smiling; his stepmother, who always tried to make a single meal stretch further than it should; his stepsister, laughing even when things were hard. They hadn't had much, but they'd been enough. They'd been home.
He had left them to come here. A small, cheap town with affordable tuition, just so they wouldn't have to carry his burden.
And now he was trapped here, in ruins, not knowing if they were alive or dead.
For days, with only hunting to distract him, he had turned the questions over in his head. What happened here? What changed the world? Aliens? Some government experiment gone wrong? Every possibility sounded worse than the last. None gave him hope.
Because if it was the aliens why did they leave him behind and took everyone else?
Same thing if it was a government experiment, at least that would explain the mutated beast.
He thought of many scenarios each just as bad. And worse would be the fact that he had somehow slept through it all. The thought was not a pleasant one
His fingers brushed the rusted headrest of his old chair. With a long squeal of metal, the back leg gave way, and the chair collapsed in a heap.
Seth sighed and turned away. As he left, the trail of lizard corpses marked his passing, scattered like shadows of the past.
Outside, hunger clawed at him, but thirst gnawed deeper. He needed something to drink. He hunted quickly, eventually dragging down a beast large enough to bleed plenty.
Moments later, he stepped into the light, a slab of meat dangling from one hand, his lips stained crimson.
He hadn't found a container, so he'd pressed his mouth to the wound and drunk straight from the beast.
The taste lingered, metallic and heavy.
One thought kept circling in his mind as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Am I a vampire now? Chuckle.