The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family Chapter 358: On the other side of the portal (3)

The wind up here was hot, to the point that it coated the back of Reidar's throat. He sat low on the back of one of his ravens from the Apex nagerie.

"I hate this."

Despite all his attempts to stop the heat and the HP drainage, nothing seed to work. The environntal damage continued to tick away at his health pool without pause.

Reidar looked down. The area wasn't just unwelcoming—it was built to kill. The obsidian shelf they'd landed on eventually crumbled into fractured badlands where jagged spires of rock jutted at angles that defied logic, and fissures split the ground deep enough that he couldn't see their bottoms.

Reidar gazed across terrain shaped by destruction, where every sharp ridge and river of molten rock made Earth's volcanic zones look harmless in comparison.

As he followed Mara's trail, he noticed the glow of the magma beginning to recede. It was replaced by a dark grey that stained the sky, which made Reidar feel as though the sun had never existed here at all.

In the distance, he could see a shift in the terrain. The jagged, blackened rock smoothed out into sothing resembling plains or plateaus. There were shapes that might have been petrified forests or ruins of so colossal architecture. The worst-case scenario would be monsters.

Even a world that went through the apocalypse still had to be a complete planet, which ant there had to be regions beyond the volcanic wastelands.

Reidar couldn't shake the feeling that any mont of quiet in a place like this was just a trap. On Earth, he knew the wilderness ant monsters, but as he looked around at a world that had seemingly finished its apocalypse long ago, he realized the very definition of a "monster" would be pushed to a terrifying extre here.

He looked toward the horizon, thinking that if any life actually existed down there, it had survived the fire and the poison that was currently eating at his hit points.

To Reidar, this ant the creatures here weren't rely powerful—they were survivors forged by an environnt that constantly threatened their existence.

Reidar wasn't just looking for Mara; he was also trying to find a way to survive himself.

The complete lack of vegetation in the area made him uneasy. He looked down at the barren rock and realized the problem: no plants ant no herbivores.

If anything moved in this wasteland, it was a predator looking for a al or sothing fueled by energy sources he couldn't even fathom.

Back on Earth, his level of 395 made him a titan—a force capable of reshaping regional politics and crushing armies with a single command. But as he looked out over the alien horizon, that number felt aningless, a digit stripped of all context.

He had no idea what the average level here was, let alone the damage types or resistance thresholds. He was flying blind in a death zone, and the bitterest part was knowing his only safety was the very woman he had to kill and who wanted to kill him.

He felt a lurch in his stomach as the raven banked left, responding to his ntal nudge to avoid a plu of toxic gas belching from a nearby fissure.

He watched the smoke drift past.

Every second he spent in the air exposed him, but he was doing it to not get too far from Mara.

He looked out over the area, as he knew he couldn't stay in the open.