Chapter 1291: Story 1291: City of the Forsaken
Smoke curled behind them like a severed past.
The ruins of the bunker still sizzled, molten tal dripping into cracks that vanished beneath the ash-choked soil. Juno didn’t look back. Not once. Not even when the wind carried the echo of the screaming servers still trying to speak.
They followed the last known coordinates from Thorn’s shattered terminal—a forgotten city at the edge of Deadland Delta.
Locals once called it Valemire. On maps, it no longer existed.
As the group approached the city’s border, the silence struck first. No birds. No wind. Not even the buzz of flies. Just an empty, humming stillness that stretched over miles of skeletal skyscrapers and collapsed bridges.
A shattered sign greeted them:
“VALEMIRE: Hope Through Innovation”
—A VIREX City of Tomorrow.
Now, it was a city of ghosts.
“Radiation levels are low,” H-13 reported. “But bio-signature anomalies are everywhere. The dead never left.”
The streets were littered with remnants of hasty barricades—burned-out buses, welded storefronts, overturned dical trucks. But no bodies.
Shade scanned the buildings with dead eyes. “Where’d they all go?”
“They didn’t go,” Axen murmured. “They were taken.”
They pressed deeper into the ruins, through alleyways where blood had dried in patterns like vines. Overhead, flickering drones hovered in place—still trying to obey commands long since forgotten.
At the heart of the city stood The Core Spire, once the tallest building in the region. It had been VIREX’s command center, hospital, communications tower, and sanctuary.
Now, it leaned at a sickening angle, as if exhausted from holding too many secrets.
The mont they stepped into the shadow of the spire, the temperature dropped.
H-13’s sensors flickered. “Sothing’s active beneath us.”
“Beneath?” Juno asked.
The ground rumbled. Faintly.
Then, through the fog, they saw them.
The Forsaken.
Once-human figures, pale and veined with blackened arteries, erged from the alleys. But they didn’t move like the Turned. They moved like they rembered.
Their eyes were not dead.
They were watching.
Studying.
“They’re not attacking,” Shade whispered. “Why not?”
“Because,” said a voice from the shadows, “they know you.”
A woman stepped forward.
Clad in remnants of VIREX armor, but her flesh half-replaced by organic tech. Wires embedded in her skull. Her voice modulated.
“Welco, Juno,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Who are you?” Juno asked.
“I’m called REMAINS,” the woman replied. “I am what this city beca when the world gave up. And you… are what it left behind.”
Juno stepped forward. “We’re here to end this. Not beco it.”
REMAINS smiled, and behind her, thousands of Forsaken opened their eyes in unison.
“Then enter the spire. And prove it.”
As the doors of the Core opened with a long, final sigh, Juno tightened her grip.
They had reached the final breath of the journey.
And the city was still breathing.
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