There was little concern about what had just transpired.

To me, it was pretty clear cut and dry.

I saved the wolf.

I took a snapshot of the wolf.

I grew a few centimetres to make space for the wolf.

And then I killed the wolf, so that it could live in my body as a friendly, summonable symbiote.

And with that, the matter was settled.

Simples.

Over the course of the next couple of hours - it’s always a couple of hours...not that I can actually accurately tell the time anymore - we listened intently to Immo, as she explained how she reached the point in her relatively short life where she was ready to unshackle from her mortal coil and become a spirit.

Once upon a time, she was part of a tribe of her kind that had a rather similar awakening to Siya and her people’s first days. The white wolves woke up in the wild, confused, slightly scattered, with no tangible prior memories except basic instincts but with some snippets of complex wisdom such as ‘don’t try to eat fire or the yellow snow’. The basic survival stuff.

She was part of a larger group that lived near a large waterfall covered cave - or in her words, the 'den beyond the eternal rain curtains' - and they had managed to eke out a cooperative existence, and since most of the wildlife had far too many eyes and teeth to hunt by themselves, they tended to avoid unnecessary fights and scavenged in teams, looking out for one another.

Inevitably they were found and attacked by a horde of monsters, and since they were not an overly aggressive group, only hunting for food rather than sport or strength, they very quickly became overwhelmed by the monsters and they were brutally slaughtered, choosing to separate in a last mad dash to survive.

She returned a few days later only to find the mutilated corpses of her group, with no survivors and no trails to suggest otherwise..

As the last surviving member of her tribe she had little choice but to keep going north, surviving the best way she could as she sought out if another would take her in. That was until one day, she started seeing remnants of humans and their small groups, of which she initially kept her distance, only watching and learning how they survived and what they did but gradually she observed them to act cooperatively and with care, just like her own kind..

They led her to places of bountiful food and of huge smooth rock structures - buildings- as they travelled perilously through the dangerous paths, but, after a few days of following, she realises that the humans had been fully aware of her presence all this time and had been intentionally leaving scraps out for her.

The first time Immo warned the human group was by pure accident, they were resting around their hot fires during the night when lizards with no eyes and quadrant jaws raced towards their camp. She had howled and barked by instinct, but her actions had given the humans enough of a hint as to the danger incoming and they slayed the monsters. The humans left her a large pile of tasty grilled meat that night and since then she had taken it upon herself to act as a guard and make noise to alert them to anything trying to sneak up on them.

She had also begun to truly understand the concept of going on treasure hunts and it wasn't long before she would go off during the day, in search of some of the more coveted artefacts the humans were always overjoyed to find, especially for the younger humans, things such as chocolate, books and sometimes lucking out on some of the more rarer items, finding bottles of alcohol which would always bring her cheers and bonus food from her bipedal comrades.

For a few weeks this relationship worked like a charm, with the humans becoming increasingly more friendly and happy to see her, even to the point they tried to beckon her to come join them in close proximity around their nightfires..and yet Immo wanted to do things properly, through the right process. So even though she was confident they would welcome her into their pack by now, she wanted to present them with one final bundle of gifts to solidify their companionship.

But sadly, the universe had other more cruel and spiteful plans..

A week ago, whilst she went off to search for the final few items that would be of an acceptable grade to present to them, she came back, successful in her quest, only to find they had been ambushed by the gorgon monsters - or rattleblooms as she referred to them, named so due to the noise they made and how their heads opened up like rose petals in bloom when eating..delightful - and all the humans had been slaughtered.

She was heartbroken at this, as for her it felt like she had lost her second pack, her fondness for the bipedal, slow and small fanged humans had grown so intense, only to have them all torn to shreds and for her to be left behind.

Alone in the world once again.

But she was given no time to grieve or lament, the rattleblooms still lurked around the humans camp, leisurely feasting and laying their eggs. They sensed her and immediately began to hunt her down as she tried to evade. For they were long distance murderers with great endurance and keen senses. Day and night she tried non stop, using any instinct or tactic , desperately trying to shake them off her trail, even going so far as to try and fight them when the conditions allowed a fair fight.

But they were determined, cautious cowards, only attacking when the odds were completely in their favour.

So onwards she ran, growing exhausted and more desperate as time and distance piled muddy cold despair onto her spirit and body. She had been so close to giving up on life completely, too tired, heartbroken and lonely to keep going..when she suddenly saw us and was compelled to muster the last embers of fight she had left to follow us in a last desperate attempt at surviving.

It explains ‌why she was so willing to let her physical 'shell' die.

She never wants to be alone again.

..

Immo bid us farwell as she hadn’t slept for days and apparently still required to sleep even without an actual body, which is odd but fair enough, and, as we ate the distance, I watched the villages and towns beneath us steadily become increasingly deteriorated and damaged even worse so than some of the places around Rome.

Although maybe I just didn’t appreciate the scale of destruction since I wasn’t flying in the skies back then?

But the pattern, and expectedly so, was that the closer to large populations we got, the more widespread and heavy the damage.

Genuinely can't imagine how horrifying it would have been living in a densely populated area when all this kicked off..

We did a brief stop near a battered cathedral and found a local map showing we were in Troyes, Never thought a post apocolypse life hack would be to go to tourist locations for maps, but it has worked like a charm so far! The place had roaming bands of fighting corrupted so we kept well out of the way and out of sight and, once Siya was ready we moved on.

..

Another probable couple of hours blurred past, and it started to become like a tik tok on repeat - god I do NOT miss that mind rot crap..Well, the memes I kinda do - flying over rubble, monsters, corrupted and flattened buildings; corpses were extremely rare to see, but the signs that they had been were still generously brush stroked onto roads, pavements and sometimes hanging off broken walls.

Bloodstains, torn clothes and ransacked abandoned supply sacks..The gruesome story is always the same.

It would have been immensely depressing and disturbing on an existential level for any normal, rational human being, but I wasn’t normal anymore thanks to my delicate introduction to this new way of life, and truthfully I was bitterly grateful for that.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

It shielded me from the permanent damage of the horrors at least.

..

We arrived at another city with yet another large cathedral that stood out; its surroundings absolutely crawling with monsters, fighting each other or doing other weird shit and I even happend to spot in the distance a group of people running into a supermarket that was heavily barricaded with Majik constructed walls and a honeycomb shield that held strong against the surge of monsters that chased wishfully after them.

The nightmares gave the wall a lazy attempt to bring down, but surprisingly got bored and left after a few minutes. As if they’d played out this scenario many times already in the last and had learnt that they simply couldn’t get in, no matter how many claws they chipped and how many voice boxes they sacrificed.

Another anchor point for another time. I’ll come back with help very soon if I can..

The place actually seemed to be reasonably safe so I didn’t feel too guilty, and once Grave and Vyolyn cleared their cube mission, then I’d facilitate a rescue with their help. But for now I was selfishly focusing on myself and only myself. Immo was just a rare exception because..Fluffy. But that's it! Absolutely NO more risky stops..

After all, it had only been a couple of days of freedom and quite justifiably I was still a bit jaded about the whole slave fighter prisoner bullshit..Plus I was getting so close to home that I couldn't help but feel a volcanic excitement bubbling inside.

In theory, the next time we rested, it would be in Calais. The final stop in europe before home.

Whilst we waited I didn’t bother to look around for a map as it was too risky, so I just watched and contemplated things from up on top of the tower whilst Siya took a light nap. Some interesting observations I’d put together so far were that overall, there seemed to be two types of monsters, one being the horror, dead space, eldritch mutation variant that were just plain batshit crazy and violent, and then you had the old wildlife that may have more heads, eyes or limbs, but just kinda wanted to survive and try to raise their young; Immo was a classic example of the latter.

The people didn't reappear by the time Siya woke up and after a quick snack, it was go time.

…

..

.

What. The hell. Is that.

Standing in Calais, my heart was pounding in my chest, and it was not for the positive reasons I had been hoping for..

In the distance off the coast blanketing the sea, there existed a truly gargantuan wall of fog with multicoloured lightning storms boiling around random locations inside; like some kind of silent laser, fireworks concert show.

As far as the eye could see, the opaque fog wall stretched for dozens of kilometres in all directions, which was terrifying in itself due to the overwhelming size, but what scared me the most were the murky, VERY big shapes casting terrible shadows from the inside of the fog.

Forget the fog, what in the actual fuck are the colossals doing in there?? And why are there so many!

#Siya# We..cannot..fly..through that.

Siya was reaching her limits, struggling to communicate her words, but we wouldn’t be travelling through that shit anyways, and going over it was no Bueno, that much was a given simply by looking up and seeing how far the fog just kept going and going, halting all visibility into the stratosphere.

Yeah nope. There is no way in hell we are going through this fog of war bullshit.

#Godu# Yeah I’m with you on that one Siya, let’s jump down, go find the eurotunnel and start walking.

I guess the eurotunnel it is..and worst case we have to travel down the coast until we find a gap in the fog..surely there must be one..right?

It hadn’t been too hard to keep on track to find Calais thanks to the multitude of road signs - still haven't forgiven you Italy! - compass and useful map of France that we picked up from a relatively unabused petrol station, even whilst the devastation to the majority of roads, buildings and pretty much everything was at peak levels. Whether that had something to do with the foggy titan rave happenings over the channel, or because people flocked here in the hopes that this was just a 'European thing' and not something that was most certainly happening all over the world, it was impossible to say.

But what was evident, was that the entire area had seen hundreds of thousands of vicious battles. Pockmarks scarred every surface, melted hardened slurries of concrete was sneezed over buildings and roads, slag and previously molten metals were super glued to the barely recognisable husks of the few vehicles that had been spared the initial automotive rapture, creating rather sloppy, rusty works of geometric art.

There were some absurdly strong monsters roaming the streets here too. The first one we spotted was an 8 metre tall demon looking thing, that had jagged blades for arms and feet and a mouthless grey skull for a head with spiral horns. It was stomping through the rubbled streets nonchalantly, impaling a few bizarrely confident trash monsters that gave it their best, but it was mag level 99 and was labelled as an elite, so the calculations were as short as their attempts.

Shit. The first and last elite I saw was that fucking Cager demon. And can someone remind me WHY the FUCK did I think it was an OK idea to jump down its throat anyway?..Because I was drunk off my newly obtained Slipfold powers and I thought it made me invincible. That’s why.

Note to self: NO MORE THROAT JUMPING.

..

Ha. Catara would love that one..

The screeches and cries of the corrupted scattered around the buildings, echoing from what should have been a safe distance and yet still it was deeply unnerving and hindbrain triggering to know that they were within earshot.

Me and Siya were experienced enough to know how to travel through the streets, the secret technique being to keep off them as much as possible, sticking to rooftops or alleyways, a luxury that probably only me and her could afford with our skills but the tactic remained relevant nonetheless.

..

After an hour of searching, we found a sign that directed us to what we were looking for and after another hour of weaving through beaten up buildings and hopping from industrial rooftop to rooftop, we finally had our eyes on the Eurotunnel terminal. It was essentially a large train station, with multiple rows of rails with relatively big trains that pulled very long car shuttles back and forth from Dover to Calais and vice versa. The trains themselves were naturally gone and all that remained were skeletons and husks of shredded metal. People had tried to live here, the typical signs were clear. The same old, same old, such as dried bloodstains, shredded tents, clothes, rubbish and signs of fighting in more forms of scarred landscapes and solidified, previously molten..stuff. But now it was a wind whistling locomotive graveyard; only whispers and the dull grey blanket of melancholic misery was all that remained.

#Siya# The big metal worms, they could move?

The wha-oh.

#Godu# Ah, they were called trains. Some were powered by engines that burned fuel to turn wheels. These ones I believe all used electricity.

#Siya# Amazing..What fuel did the engines use? Majik? Blood? It must have used an exorbitant amount for such heavy things. Where did electricity come from?

#Godu# Oh nothing fancy like that..Remember I told you Majik didn’t exist before? Engines used something I think was called ‘hydrocarbons’ - I didn’t do very well in chemistry - but in summary, it was a liquid that was refined from oil, and oil came from pockets of dead organic stuff that was buried a long time ago. Electricity could be made from all sorts of methods, but solar and wind were quite popular. Solar uses the sun and wind power was harnessed using huge fan structures which should be still around, actually, some where..Fusion was supposed to be the holy grail of energy production, it’s how the sun generates all its heat and light. And again, I’m not a scientist but I believe it essentially involved pushing tiny atoms together, using lasers until they fused and released energy.

#Siya# Wow. That hydrocarbon stuff sounds dirty and disturbing..using the dead to power machines..Electricity sounds nice. Using power that is all around us. Fusion sounds..Very complicated. Like Majik.

#Godu# Haha, yes to all your points there, I'll find you a book one day, but for now let's focus. This tunnel should lead us under the water and the fog, and then right on out onto good ol'blighty.

..

We approached the mouth of the large tunnel which was more than big enough for the massive freight trains and shuttles that boasted of being something crazy like 800m long.

#Siya# I hate tunnels..as Mya would say, ‘They can go and suck a bag of genitalia’.

I snorted at Siya’s continued cultural regression, and placed a few fold points around me, just in case anything went tits up but I just hoped and prayed that I wouldn’t get some bollocks about interference if I needed to get out.

I should probably do some test folds along the way..yeah. Don't want to get buried alive or some horrible shit.

We pressed forward, reluctantly, creeping into the pitch black gloom and my eyes started to adjust as my low light ability [TEFv] kicked in. Yet I couldn't stop the nightmare flashbacks from the hell-forsaken Slik tunnels in Italy.

And my poor little EXP orb was sacrificed to lure that big angry bitch away..and she was definitely one huge, ugly, angry bitch.

I shuddered at the snapshot flashback of the giant Eel-Snake’s face bearing down on us hungrily as we ran for our miserable lives through the pitch black-

"TRRRRRRRRRRP.."

A fucked up trumpeting sound echoed in the distance from inside the tunnel, banishing any hope that this was going to be a simple walk.

I sighed.

"Yeah..tunnels fucking suck.."

…

..

.