Stalking up the mountain, Thomel and the rest of his unit reached the monitoring station after a difficult few minutes.

Normally hiking up such a small mountain would hardly make him sweat but the combination of wearing such a stuffy suit and the incredibly humid and hot day meant his shirt was stuck fast to his back.

“Shouldn’t there be a nuclear winter, why’s it so hot?” He asked Volly.

“I don’t know.” She replied.

He didn’t know why he even bothered to ask her.

Looking upwards at the monitoring station, Thomel felt a mixture of relief. Everything was nearly over but those giant claw marks all over the station didn’t inspire confidence in this final trek going smoothly.

The monitoring station itself was built into the mountainside, only the entrance was exposed, it really drove home just how out of his depth he was. This was a bunker, a proper fortified bunker, not just some random monitoring station out in the open.

The fact that they’d killed an entire world was alarming but this just felt more real, a grand battle between gods and humanity was just too distant for him to properly internalise whereas this station was directly in front of his face and easy to understand.

It was like the difference between how one death was a tragedy and a million was a statistic.

Plenty of news articles generated revenue by talking about the sad story of a person getting trapped and dying while searching for gold but whenever they talked about the hundreds of kids who’d already died just to get a crate of diamonds out of a hole in the earth, no one batted an eye or shed a tear.

The lieutenant alongside the other four people in power armour was busy analysing the monitoring station's wide-open doors.

It was puzzling, there were very clear claw marks on the hard concrete walls but the heavy doors themselves were open without so much as a single scratch on them.

“A chimaera was here.” The lieutenant said, more to himself than anyone else.

“Move up!” He yelled out after a few quiet seconds.

Slowly and steadily, the cohort advanced, two of the company elites went ahead of the unit to scout while the remaining three waited until everyone passed them and in the station before forming up behind the large team.

Since he was in the centre of the formation, Thomel was able to keep his beamer down and focus more on what the monitoring station looked like rather than if there were any threats.

That wasn’t to say he wasn’t focused, he was as alert as he could be in his current state, he just didn’t have a lot to look at and cover since everyone else was doing that.

The interior of the station was, of course, coloured white, the bright lights were also white. It was incredibly grating on Thomel’s already stretched nerves.

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Even the occasional bits of furniture and equipment werewhite, the only source of colour here other than him and his team, was the dark splotches of brown fluid splashed everywhere.

It looked like faeces but Thomel felt like that would be just too simple. It had to be something far worse than that.

He was unbelievably glad that he was wearing a hazard suit, he didn’t want to imagine what it smelled like.

The only sounds he could hear was the thumping of armoured feet on the cold, concrete floor and the creaking sounds people made as they turned around to cover corners.

Originally, he was quite impressed by how large this place was but now he was beginning to feel more annoyed than anything.

They weren’t even spreading out to try and patrol this whole station, they were just heading towards the command centre and it was still taking them so long.

How many twists and turns did a monitoring station need before it was considered to be acceptably defensible?

And as he saw the corpse of one of this station's inhabitants, he couldn’t help but think all this effort had done them no good.

Maybe it’d kept out lesser threats but the end result was still the same, they were dead.

He noticed the corpse more so because of the reaction of one of the hunters who froze slightly, rather than thanks to his own observational skills.

The body had been savagely torn into, the former worker's throat ripped out and vital arteries severed.

Looking up, Thomel could even see that the blood had sprayed onto the ceiling, which unnerved him more than if the body had been utterly broken and ripped apart.

It reminded him of that sadistic meatball that had gotten him into this mess what felt like a lifetime ago.

Something had killed this man and then stood aside to watch as he died.

Following the other’s lead, he walked past the corpse without so much as a second glance.

Another few hallways and twists later and they encountered another body, this one was propped up against the wall and judging by the first aid kit and empty syringes, it looked like someone had tried to give her medical aid but failed.

What had actually killed her was beyond him though, there wasn’t blood anywhere on her and if anything she looked like she’d died peacefully.

Her death made him feel even more uneasy than the last one. Either magic was afoot, or she’d chosen to go out on her own terms rather than face whatever was coming.

After another two hallways and three corners, they arrived at the command centre and what greeted them was horrific.

A set of fans whirled softly around, generating a gentle flow of air to help cool everyone down, intestines hanging loosely from the blood-stained, dull blades.

He silently watched as a small chunk of meat fell off one of the fans and splattered onto the floor dryly.

The seats themselves were hardly any better, there was a stomach draped over one, a tear in it having let a tidal wave of half-digested noodles spew out onto the floor.

What made Thomel nearly puke though, was the red carpet made out of melted-together organs and skin.

Someone murmured. “Dear God.” Next to him but he didn’t pay attention to that, he was too busy forcing the vomit back down his throat

After focusing solely on looking at his feet for nearly half a minute, he regained the willpower needed to look back up.

He saw the lieutenant stride across the horrific imitation of a carpet and reach the podium. Stepping up onto it the lieutenant turned around and said. “This is why you get paid so well.”

With that simple sentence and confident stride he’d attracted everyone's attention with ease.

Continuing, the lieutenant roared out. “We split up into five teams, each one will be headed by an RF member and we’ll scour this station clean of any threats. Do you understand?”

A chorus of. “Sir yes sir!” answered the lieutenant and Thomel wondered just how being a low-level hunter had gotten him into this situation.