Plopping onto the earthen floor of the crater's center.
Rue began a casual stroll, during which he gathered and noted any particular sensations that affected his feet or perverse the body's regulation of homeostasis.
Venturing closer to the crater's epicenter, Rue—as expected—began to feel that same tingling sensation.
Wiggling his toes in the air, he faintly frowned.
"What the hell's up with this radiation?" he quizzed, dumbfounded by its imperturbability
In Nuclear theory, Radioactive decay was one of the most threatening liabilities to life.
After a nukes detonation, the most dangerous isotopes produced by the explosion have relatively short half-lives and as such they decay quickly.
Normally, about eighty percent of all residual radioactivity would be emitted within a day, and by a week the ionized radiation becomes nearly negligible.
That would be the conventional nomenclature, but the radioactivity here was frankly far too disastrous towards any biological life to make any logical sense.
From the looks of the exterior wall, the stagnant air, and gloomy interior, it would have been a lengthy amount of time since the nuclear assault against this place.
At minimum, it would have been a few hundred years since the last time any type of life had inhabited this territory.
Sharpening the circulation of Will throughout his body, the inquisitor's natural healing was being severely strained from the lethal doses of radioactivity within the air.
Rue by now head reached the finite bottom of the crater, his skin receding from its snow white into that same translucent gray from earlier.
His hair thinned, and from the strain of gravity it fell from his scalp, turning to dust as it made contact with the soil.
Yet, his expression always remained the same. It was as if the pain bore no effect across his bearings, and to an extent, this was true.
Pain was merely a sensation.
With enough mental fortitude, pain becomes nothing more than a slight hindrance.
You have to have a strong Will though.
Padding his feet across the bottom, Rue raised his gaze towards the sky.
Gray—gloom—depressing, it was so bland, light scarcely filtered through the dense fog giving this place a gothic closure.
It was so ghostly that it gave the feeling of somnolence a new meaning.
Passing across the bottom, Rue neared the pillared partition within the center.
Faced with the pillar, Rue sighed.
Pitted from the pillar's top, and hung by chains ragdolled, was the sunken, ectomorphic build of a nude woman.
Or at least the guessed silhouette of a woman. Even though the long passage since her death, even with the untrained eye one could easily tell just from the hourglass shape alone of her body that she was quite the man-killer in her prime.
Of course, that was then—when she was alive.
In the present, the woman resembled a mummy.
Forced into her sternum and down to her lower pelvis, was a large ornamental onyx-colored great sword the size of several men that entered from her front and exited from the back of the pillar.
Emblazoned on its surface were the illustrations of several cartoonish characters donning theatrical white masks and similarly schemed attire.
The first character's mask expressed an uncannily wide smile, and they clad a simple eloquent black-and-white summer gown.
While the other character's expression was crestfallen with bluish tears seeping from the corners of its eyes, they dressed in a formal black suit in a similar fashion that a salaryman would.
In the center of this little group was a smaller character. Unlike the other masks, this one detailed nothing, and its color was gray
Embroidered below the illustration in bold white letters was a simple string of words written in Revillian.
Words that, while simple, spoke volumes.
"Better luck next time friends!" Rue uttered, reading the words aloud. His pronunciation staggered due to the language not being his native tongue.
Clicking his tongue, Rue examined the sword for several seconds in thought.
"Why is the language of Revillian here?" caressing his chin, he continued. "I thought it was an abandoned language?"
The only reason why he even knew the language was merely due to lucky coincidence.
During his days toiling in academia within the academy, Rue had only taken Revillian to level 4 to satisfy the stringy graduation requirements.
"To think that class would actually come in handy," he mused with an added chuckle. "But, what the fuck?"
The illustration was unnerving to look at!
This given feeling was completely justified due to the fact that there was a sword lodged within a woman.
The woman was literally hung only in her birthday suit for the world to see, in the same essence as common butchery.
What sadistic bastard did this.
Softening his features, he clasped his hands into a prayer-like position.
The inquisitor muttered a small prayer of consolation—pity under his breath.
Finishing his small, otherwise meaningless act for the grievances of her soul, he smiled.
Quickly, that honor-worthy smile that would make a storybook knight nod in acknowledgement shifted into a greedy smirk.
"Well, now that I've given my condolences towards the dead…" Rue shortened the proximity between himself and the pillar.
"You seemed to have once been a formidable Adapted Miss, with that you have my sincere utmost respect, but," he eyed her chest with a shit eating smirk, "They say the dead have no need for a heart since they can't feel emotionl—and that ever so quaint pulse that signifies life falls into insignificance stunted to an eternity of motionless."
At his witty remark, Rue rested his palm against the pillar, leaning against it.
Rue frowned faintly. "Simply put, you're long dead and I'm alive, so please forgive what I'm about to do."
The inquisitor readied his off-hand for the heinous action he was about to commit.
Fixing his body off the wall, Rue walked towards the handle of the ornamented sword.
Cusping its hilt, he moved his wrist in an attempt to remove the great sword from its stubborn position though the pillar and the woman.
The sword shuffled an inch from its sheath, but other than that, it held firm.
With an indifferent expression, Rue began to increase the density and size of his muscles.
Exerting his body's full potential force, he utilized almost every useful mussel within his body to pull the sword in the stone.
Violently his body trembled, and his mussels screamed in protest from the overwhelming weight of the sword.
It wasn't shocking that the sword weighed so much. When you think about it, this sword was responsible for killing an Adapted human, so logically the weapon, at minimum, was designed for the usage of someone within the Sixth Destination to wield.
Gnashing his teeth into dust, Rue pulled with his body's complete might.
The Sword began to move slightly, and with Rue's combined strength, the sword moved from its idle procession.
…SCREEEEEECH!!
The sharp, body-chilling screech of metal scraping against stone echoed throughout the crater—the noise shuddered out into the ruined city.
Lifting the sword up, Rue grunted and buckled under the weight in a similar fashion as an Olympic powerlifter would.
The sword, seemingly having a mind of its own, wobbled and slithered like a snake seeking freedom from his iron-clutched grip.
Angling his knees, Rue lunged up, tossing the onyx blade aside.
CLANG!...
Paying the loud noise no heed, Rue, after several seconds of recovery, averted his gaze back towards the pillar.
With the final nuance removed—he could retrieve what he desperately needed.
Her brain. This was not in some arbitrary or metaphorical sense, but he literally needed the BRAIN.
Before stumbling upon this great find, Rue was otherwise going to naturally allow his crippled Initial to heal.
This would have been done after amassing a large kill count and harvesting the excrement residual Will within an organism's heart and brain.
With this, he would have forcibly spiked the capped density of Will within his body, essentially increasing the Initial's shattered monoclinic within his soul to rapidly regain its original form.
Rue was, in essence, drowning his body in a flood of Will while expecting its structure to stay intact.
Obviously, this would have been risky, and any minor error would either forcibly drop his Destination or just outright kill him.
But with luck, the inquisitor had stumbled upon the still intact corpse of an Adapted human.
Keep in mind Rue was still a practitioner, someone within the fourth Destination, and an Adapted was a Sixth Destination being.
An entire two Destinations above him.
Even though the woman had clearly died a long time ago, her body was in rather good condition, and due to the increase in presence in reality, the time it would take for the entirety of her body to return back to nature would take an immense amount of time.
As such, her body would still continue to hold Will, unless it was destroyed or completely decomposed.
Of course, since her body was almost split into, the majority of her Will had vanished a long time ago.
Steadying the bone blade's tip along her forehead, Rue pinned it in place with one hand while clenching the other into a fist.
Raising his fist along his chest, he aimed his knuckle towards the bone blade's hilt.
And as a mallet would with a chisel, Rue connected his fist with the hilt.