We waited for a while. I have made many attempts to move and get our group going again, but each time I tried, Soul pushed me back onto the ground. After the seventh try, he sat on me and stayed there for at least the next hour. I never quite understood his physics. His body was nothing but smoke in a cloak, yet he felt so strong and heavy. We'd been waiting for at least an hour before they finally allowed me to get up. In the meantime, Chester and I have managed to go through two bottles of water. We still had our supplies, but the rate at which we were running out slightly worried me.

"How are you feeling?" White asked me.

I stretched a bit. Though my wounds were still hurting when I did, the worst pain has already subsided. "Good enough to keep going," I replied.

"Good, then we can set out again. The only problem is that we don't have anywhere to go. Every other building is too far or too damaged. I don't want to risk another casualty," Soul seemed to give himself a moment to think.

"Then how about we hit the roads? It seems that all the Burned are hiding somewhere. If we move quietly, going through the streets will be much quicker than building hopping like this," Beast presented his idea.

I carefully leaned out of the window. He was right. There wasn't a single living soul below us.

"Fine, but we need to move in a single group, okay? In case the Burned attack us, we must fend them off together and not get separated."

Just as Soul commanded, we organized ourselves into a tight formation. With barely any room to wave our arms, we started moving down the severely damaged, yet still functional stairs.

"Ask them," Shade spoke to me from inside my head again. His body, however, seemed to stay hidden from me.

"Leave me alone," I whispered to him.

"Ah, sorry. I'll take a step back," Beast reacted to my words as if they were directed at him.

"Come on, Eddie, you know you want to. Ask them already!" my dark twin shouted into my ears. I couldn't believe how loud he could be.

"So... how did you guys meet Anci?" My question was met with total silence. Each of the deaths suddenly stared at their feet, pretending to be paying more attention to the staircase, than they were to me. I wanted to let it be, but White started on her own a few minutes later.

"When we were looking for another Death to join us, we didn't really want someone like him."

"That's right. We thought he was too weak to help us. Both physically and mentally. His powers were never anything special and the blame he carried regarding his past would only hinder our operations," Beast continued.

"Then why did you take him into your team? What made you change your mind?" Chester joined our little exchange. Everyone took a moment to think, and when they finally spoke their minds, their answers varied quite a lot.

"We needed all the help we could get," said Soul.

"We didn't want to leave him on his own, now that he no longer had to be," White replied.

"We wanted to give him a chance to prove himself," answered Beast.

"And did he?" I threw another question onto the table.

"No, but he made us realize just how much we needed more than just raw strength. No matter what problem we had or what issues we faced, Anci would always be the first to offer his aid. He supported us when we were at our lowest or stood with us at our best moments. And though he carried a lot on his own plate, he never let it slow him down." Large pictures of teardrops appeared on Beast's mask. Though he couldn't cry physically, he still felt the same way as any human would. I wanted to say many things to them. How sorry I felt for what I caused. How much I regretted what happened. But neither of those things would leave my tongue.

"Look at you. And you've reminded them. So not only did you cause them suffering, but you're rubbing it in now? Wow... I am sure they love you very much right now." No matter how hard I tried, Shade's words were impossible to ignore. It was like living with a speaker attached to my head.

When we all finally made it to the streets, a certain feeling of refreshment washed over me. Those crumbling buildings were starting to feel rather claustrophobic. The silence of the roads was odd, but I didn't want to complain. The last heat wave washed over the land a few minutes ago, when we were still in the building, so we had plenty of time to enjoy the outside before the next one would come and we'd have to hide again.

"Look! We're getting closer!" Foof called out to us about an hour later and pointed to the nearby area with his tiny claws. We immediately gathered at the place he tried to bring our attention to. The sight was disturbing, to say the least. What we were looking at was hard for our minds to wrap around, so describing it is even harder. It was like a massive crater filled with magma. On top of it, there were several islands, floating around as if they were orbiting the chunk of land in the very centre of this "lake". Each of those islands held a piece of this city's past. Remnants of buildings, park fences, or statues. In a strange sense, it looked beautiful, if one was a fan of post-apocalypse.

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"That is where we have to go?! You've got to be kidding, right?" Chester could not believe that our destination could be hidden beyond anything worse than what we already experienced.

"Yes, this is the shortest way," Foof confirmed his worries. "We could walk around it, but that will be very risky. We are lucky there are no Burned here today."

"But those are islands floating on magma! That's crazy dangerous!" the plant wizard tried convincing us against the idea.

"It's not. It just looks bad. If we hop at the right time, we can get across just fine. Trust me, I've been through here before." The little dragon's optimism might've been misplaced, but we couldn't deny that it was contagious as well.

"Okay, let's get jumping then, I guess," said Soul and moved barely a meter towards the area, when all of a sudden, the whole ground shook. There was a brief flash of light. Judging by our unharmed vision and the shadows our bodies cast forward, it came from behind us.

"No..." Foof whispered and quickly climbed out of White's arms and onto her shoulder to have a better view. His eyes kept staring in one direction. The tremors didn't stop coming each second, one after another. It seemed like an endless earthquake.

"What is it, Foof?" White asked and pat him on the head, hoping to calm him down a bit.

"We are dead... Absolutely dead." Hearing that come out of his mouth made us all a bit uneasy. We gazed in the same direction as our little friend, not sure what to expect. What came out was not something we could foresee.

A massive red-hot hand came from behind one of the buildings and sank its claws into it, melting the wall. The sheer size of the appendage paralyzed us. It covered windows on three floors. It was enormous. And then, as if we weren't already scared enough, the rest of the creature's body appeared. It looked like a twisted mix between an angel and a demon. Its torso was bulky and it seemed to be slouching, yet even then its head reached at least the fifteenth floor of the nearby building. The face of that creature looked like a giant human skull with a jaw hanging wide open. It had two slightly folded wings, giving it a remotely divine look, which was enhanced even more by a bright halo floating above its head.

"What the FUCK is that?!" Chester's eyes seemed to be about to fall out of his head.

"The... The Divine Mark. It's all over. If it has come for us, then there is nothing that can save us anymore." Foof slid down from White's shoulder back into her arms.

"That can't be real. That can't be Burned, right? It's impossible!" Even our good old Soul was starting to freak out.

"Well... technically, I never specified in my stories how big they can get..." I mumbled to myself. Fortunately, nobody seemed to hear me. That was a relief. I was afraid of being blamed for the existence of such a creature. Then again, the blame would be justified. After all, everything here existed because of me, even the dangers.

"It is Burned. The biggest one I have ever seen. Some time ago, I saw it from a roof high above the ground. It arrived in a bright flash, just like now. And although it was so far, it still managed to attack me. Somehow, it knew I was watching and shot a beam of fire my way. I nearly died that day," Foof quickly explained as the creature seemed to be eying us, waiting for something. Several seconds later, a loud deep tone resonated throughout the area like a fog horn.

"Scatter!" the little dragon screamed out and jumped down from White's embrace. All of us quickly ran towards the nearest cover, but because we were in the middle of a street, there was nothing to hide behind. Before I could even think of all the terrible outcomes that might await us, an explosion deafened me and I flew through the air, stopping against the ground several meters away. While I certainly survived, this was the closest feeling to death I've felt in this world so far. My eyes quickly flew across the area, but even my vision was blurry now. There were many smeared dots running around or rising from the ground, but I couldn't say who was who. In my attempt to locate my friends, I tried screaming, only to realize that I can't hear their response anyway. The only noise that filled my world was a loud ringing.

As I slowly managed to gain my footing, though still quite unstable, somebody grabbed me by the waist and lifted me off the ground. Since their presence wasn't burning me, I figured that it was most likely not a hostile creature. A few seconds later, I could hear some other smear mumbling something my way. I tried telling them that I can't hear, but there is no way to know if my words actually left my mouth in the way I intended, and not as some sort of gibberish. Then, before any other warning, the smear tossed me over their shoulder and started running. It was all so confusing. There were explosions in the distance, getting louder and louder the more I recovered. The friend carrying me eventually turned out to be Soul.

"Lose some weight!" he shouted at me as soon as he saw that I was back to my senses.

"Gain some strength," I replied to him, lacking all of it myself at that moment. "What is happening?" I asked him, not really being able to see much, since all the noise was coming from behind me.

"Beast is fighting it and buying us some time. We have to run and fast!" That was his answer. It was hard to imagine one of the Deaths actually taking down something like that, but I didn't want to doubt his abilities.

"Over there! We will hide in that building!" I heard Foof shout not too far from me. After that, Soul immediately turned left and started running towards the ruins of what was most likely a convenience store, a long long time ago. Finally, my sight returned to its full potential, but at that point, I wished it wouldn't. Just as I realized what was going on, my carrier jumped across a large gap between two of the islands floating in the magma crater. I opened my mouth and screamed, to which Soul reacted by slapping me so fast I didn't even realise it happened at first.

"Quiet! And stop squirming or you'll do the jumping yourself!" That was enough to shut me up. I waited for the Death to carry me to our destination. There, he finally put me down in a small room to the side. I could only guess that when this place was operational, this was their cleaning supplies closet.

"Now what?" I asked and instinctively turned to Foof, he seemed to be the most experienced of us all when it came to dealing with the Burned.

"Nothing. We must wait for him to die," he responded.

"Are you sure Beast can kill it?" I continued with another question. A confirmation from his side would probably calm my nerves the most.

"Beast? Kill it? What are you talking about? We are waiting for Beast to die. Once the Mark kills him and won't notice us, we'll be able to keep going."