The path to the Sunken City was not a straight line.
Jacob's maps, pieced together from scavenged fragments and old world survey charts, showed that the most direct route was impassable, a treacherous maze of collapsed highways and ground that had been rendered unstable by the cataclysm.
Their path would take them on a wide detour to the south, through a region marked on the map with a single, ominous word: "Vitrification."
The locals and traders of the wastes had a simpler, more descriptive name for it: the Glass Desert.
They reached its edge on the second day after leaving the outskirts of the dead metropolis. The transition was stark and unnatural. The rust colored sand gave way abruptly to a landscape of jagged, black glass. As far as the eye could see, the desert floor was a tortured sea of obsidian shards, rolling hills of fused silica, and razor sharp crystalline formations that jutted from the ground like broken teeth.
"What happened here?" Seren whispered, her voice filled with awe and horror.
The place felt profoundly wrong, a scar on the face of the planet.
"The cataclysm wasn't a uniform event," Jacob explained, his historian's mind analyzing the scene. "It seems to have been a wave of energy, emanating from the breach at Akhenaten's tomb. In most places, it baked the earth and boiled the seas. But here, the energy must have been focused, concentrated. Like a lens focusing the sun's rays. It was hot enough to melt the sand, to fuse the very bedrock into this."
He kicked at a shard of the black glass, which skittered away with a sharp, ringing sound.
"We're walking on the epicenter of a forgotten apocalypse."
Zarok was less interested in the history and more in the immediate tactical problem.
"This terrain will shred the brutes' feet. And ours, if we're not careful. It's also completely exposed. There's no cover, no place to hide."
He was right.
The Glass Desert was a new kind of hell.
The sun's glare, which had been oppressive on the sand, was now multiplied a hundredfold, reflecting off the countless facets of black glass in a blinding, disorienting kaleidoscope of light. The heat was intense, the dark glass absorbing the sun's rays and radiating it back, creating a convection oven effect that made the air shimmer and dance.
Their progress slowed to a crawl.
They were forced to wrap the pack brutes' feet in thick layers of canvas and leather, which had to be replaced every few hours as they were sliced to ribbons. The humans fared little better. Every step was a risk, a careful placement of the foot to avoid a razor sharp edge or a patch of unstable, brittle glass that could shatter under their weight.
The sound of their passage was a constant, nerve wracking crunching and tinkling, a symphony of breaking glass that announced their presence to anything that might be listening.
The environmental hazards were not the only threat. This twisted landscape had given birth to its own unique and terrifying ecosystem.
The first creature they encountered was a pack of Glass Hounds. They were canine in shape, but their hides were not fur, but a mosaic of fused, razor sharp glass shards.
They moved with a terrifying, silent speed, their glassy paws making almost no sound on the terrain they were so perfectly adapted to. They hunted by sight, their multiple eyes gleaming like chips of obsidian.
The hounds attacked at dusk, using the confusing, low light and the myriad reflections to their advantage. They were phantoms of black glass, darting in to slash with their sharp edged bodies before melting back into the landscape.
A normal spear or blade was all but useless, skittering off their armored hides.
It was Zarok's brutal pragmatism that saved them.
"Don't try to pierce them! Use blunt force! Shatter them!" he roared, switching from his blade to a heavy mace he carried for just such an eventuality.
He brought it down on the back of a lunging hound with a sickening crunch. The creature's glassy hide fractured, and it collapsed, a pile of broken shards and dying flesh.
Following his lead, X used the shaft of the spear, not the tip, swinging it like a quarterstaff. The combat style, the "guardian's style" as Zarok had called it, was perfect for this. A series of swift, powerful strikes, aimed at joints and the head, shattered the creatures' crystalline armor.
Jacob provided covering fire with his crossbow, his bolts aimed not to kill but to distract, to turn a hound's flank towards Zarok's mace or X's staff.
Seren, unable to fight directly, created diversions, throwing rocks to draw the attention of the pack and give the fighters a precious few seconds to regroup.
They fought back to back, a cohesive unit, their individual skills complementing each other perfectly.
The battle was short, brutal, and ended with the surviving hounds retreating back into the glassy wastes.
The victory left them breathless and bleeding from a dozen minor cuts, their nerves frayed. The Glass Desert was testing them in new ways, forcing them to adapt and rely on each other more than ever before.
As Seren tended to their wounds, using a coagulant powder to seal the cuts, X looked at his hands. They were scraped and bleeding, but they felt... alive.
The fight had been terrifying, but it had also been clarifying. The muscle memory, the combat instincts, had taken over, and for a few brief moments, the crushing weight of his past had been forgotten, replaced by the singular, sharp focus of survival.
"You did well," Zarok said, his voice a gruff acknowledgment.
It was high praise from him.
He was looking at X with a new expression in his eyes. The suspicion was still there, but it was now mixed with a soldier's respect for competence under fire.
X was not just a liability or a wild card. He was a capable fighter, an asset.
The journey through the Glass Desert continued for two more days.
They encountered other strange, dangerous creatures, including crystalline scorpions that could camouflage themselves perfectly against the black ground, and swarms of flying insects with wings like shards of obsidian that could inflict a thousand tiny cuts.
Each encounter was a test, a brutal lesson in the adaptive horrors of the cursed world.
Finally, on the third day, they saw it.
Rising from the heart of the black desert was a chaotic, towering structure, a mountain of rust and ruin.
It was a vast, sprawling city, but not one made of stone or brick. It was built entirely from the wreckage of the old world, the hulls of massive cargo ships, the fuselages of ancient aircraft, and the skeletal frames of collapsed skyscrapers, all piled haphazardly on top of each other.
Smoke plumed from a hundred different chimneys, and the distant sound of hammering and machinery echoed across the glass plains.
"Rusthaven," Jacob breathed, his voice a mixture of apprehension and excitement. "The scavenger capital of the wastes. If Katrina passed through this region, she would have had to come here for supplies. The information we need will be in there."
Zarok stared at the chaotic settlement, his hand resting on the hilt of his blade.
"And so will more trouble than we've seen yet. A place like that... it runs on greed and desperation. It will be more dangerous than any desert."