Nick had been avoiding walking along the crumbling roadway ever since he had first laid eyes upon it, an instinctual caution that Sophia shared. Not only was there scant cover amongst the shattered cobblestones, some beasts were smart enough to realize that people would be tempted to walk along it. Not to mention predators of the human variety, like the men Nick had run into before Sophia had rescued him.

It made the road a perfect site to lay an ambush, which turned out to be exactly what had happened.

At first, he didn’t realize what he was looking at, since the dark mounds lying atop the cold stones were completely covered by insects. A buzzing blanket of flies writhing atop a squirming mass below. The sound was awful, and the smell was worse, making bile rise hot in his throat even before he understood what he’d come across.

Sophia stopped him with a hand on his shoulder before Nick walked close enough to make out the traumatizing, revolting details. It was clear from the expression on her face that she had come across something like this before.

It hit him harder than he expected when she told him that the mounds were bodies. That the stinking remains had been people just like himself only a few days ago, before their hopes and dreams had been shattered between a beast’s powerful jaws. The same end that he had almost met himself on more occasions than he cared to count.

Now that Nick knew what he was smelling, if he got any closer, he would likely lose his lunch. They debated picking through the remains for any usable equipment, but neither of them wanted to peel the gear off rotting bodies. Besides, there were signs that someone else had already examined the corpses up close before continuing toward the tower, collecting any intact items in the process.

After a long moment of silence, they stopped to survey the area, looking for evidence of any survivors before moving on. Finding nothing of the sort, they continued in the direction that the people who had arrived before them had gone. Unfortunately, the footprints disappeared less than a mile later, leaving the fate of whoever had left them an unsolved mystery.

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Along the way, Nick spotted a bag lying near the side of the road, which appeared to have been abandoned for days, judging by the layer of dirt that had gathered on top. When he looked inside, he discovered some rotting food along with several objects that he decided to keep.

After washing them clean, he added a small metal cookpot, a ladle, and a pair of plastic plates to his inventory, which would make cooking and eating meals a bit easier. He felt glum when considering the fate that had befallen their former owners, but they were items that he had been hoping to acquire for some time now and there was no point letting them go to waste.

Coming across the bodies and the bag drove home the grim reality that people were dying out here, fighting with their lives on the line for the future of the human race. He had known it all along, but seeing it with his own eyes hit him like a blow to the face.

Although Nick had obtained his first taste of death in the arena, leaving the fallen to rot, far from the world of their birth, made him profoundly sad, as well as furious that Taltos and the System had forced this situation upon them. He had wanted to honor the dead, but his obligation to the living was even more important.

It would have taken the better part of the day to dig a mass grave and bury the bodies. Time they simply didn’t have with the fate of the Earth hanging in the balance and another global event inevitably headed their way.

Sophia said little as they left the road behind them, letting Nick process what he’d seen. Her smile was kind, and he could tell that she was trying to cheer him up, occasionally telling small jokes or sharing stories of her life on Earth.

For the rest of that day and into the next, the darkness they had witnessed hung heavy in the air. The duo walked side-by-side in silence, each struggling to process the tragic series of events. By the time that the sun was high in the sky, their spirits were lower than an ant’s toes.

Nick knew that he needed to do something to snap them out of it. Before their sorrow congealed into a sickness in their souls, poisoning their morale and sapping their will to carry on. As morning transitioned into noon, he wracked his brain, searching for something pleasant that could serve as a distraction, drawing them out of the past and into the present.

A golden opportunity presented itself a few hours later, when Nick caught sight of a broken bridge. The remaining portion stretched halfway across one of the larger rivers running through the region.