The Wastelander

by Tipsy Wanderer

  Cloudhawk crouched by himself at the edge of the cliff, like a wounded animal driven into a corner. He turned his head, only to see that all of the mercenaries had fallen. Slyfox was slumped over a boulder. He had taken at least ten shots and his eyes were open and staring fixedly at Cloudhawk. No life was in those eyes.

  Cloudhawk never would’ve imagined that Slyfox would’ve given the only chance at survival to him, a rookie who joined them just two months ago. He never would’ve imagined that this fat and selfish man and his brutal mercenary comrades would sacrifice their own lives for the sake of giving him a chance.

  Cloudhawk rose to his feet, raising his head towards the sky and letting out a primal scream. Wind howled past him, kicking up a storm of yellow sand. He was a tiny speck in the wilderness, an inconsequential pinprick… and yet his voice travelled very, very far, and was filled with stunning power!

  It was a primal cry of resistance, of stubbornness, of rage! He was cursing both the heavens and the earth. Most of all, he cursed the wastelands!

  He was nothing more than an ant, but he was an ant who dared scream into the face of the uncaring heavens. He was small and weak, not worthy of concern or fear, but even at the very end, he refused to bow his head in the face of destiny.

  Cloudhawk jumped into the air… and tumbled straight down the cliff.

  By the time the dozens of wastelander warriors arrived at the edge of the cliff, they saw nothing more than a few mutated black crows. The youth had long since disappeared.

  Had he fallen to his death? The cliff was hundreds of meters high; anybody who fell from such a great height would die!

  The only way Cloudhawk could’ve survived was if he grew wings like an actual hawk and soared into the sky. Otherwise, no number of miracles could’ve kept him alive!

  46 Another World

  Cloudhawk plunged down the tall cliff, certain he was going to die. There was no grasping at straws, no praying for some strange miracle. His body was completely relaxed, his mind completely free and at ease. He truly was like a hawk who was about to die, but was enjoying one final dive before doing so.

  This was a feeling of freedom, a moment in which his soul was completely empty and at peace.

  However… just as Cloudhawk was reveling in that feeling, the stone in front of his chest suddenly activates, releasing incredible amounts of heat and a large amount of invisible yet powerful energy that swept across the area, causing space to twist and distort as though it were water being brought to boil.

  It was happening! It was happening again! Cloudhawk seemed to have suddenly understood something, and he began to flail about madly like a drowning man who didn’t know how to swim. The space around him twisted into a whirlpool that looked much like the vortex that formed when someone stirred a pool of water.

  A heartbeat later… the entire world seemed to split apart.

  Cloudhawk suddenly felt as though he were seeing straight through to the very essence of all things. There was no light, no darkness, no matter, no energy. There were only those countless vibrating strings. Some were straight while others were looped, but all of them were vibrating and oscillating like the strings of a guitar, producing a strange melody as they did so.

  These things were the underpinnings of the very essence of all things. These countless vibrating strings came together to form matter. All types of matter were, on a fundamental level, the same. The only difference was the rate at which they vibrated, which caused them to manifest in different ways and which eventually produced the many different types of matter that made up this multi-varied world.

  It all happened so incredibly quickly. Space rippled around Cloudhawk and he disappeared while falling through the air. By the time the world reassembled itself, Cloudhawk had already crashed down into a pile of rubble.

  The fall wasn’t a light one, nor was it too heavy. All that could be said was that at least he didn’t splatter apart upon contact with the ground. There was no way he had just fallen a few hundred meters. Still, Cloudhawk felt woozy and weak, almost as though his body were about to fall apart. He had to summon all of the remaining energy in his body just to crawl to his feet.

  Where was he?

  The skies were dark and gloomy, filled with rolling dark clouds. When the sunlight shone down through them, it painted a scene of dreary and desolate beauty. The light looked like dark yellow dragons roving through the skies. The air in this place was filled with quite a bit of dust, giving it a dreamlike quality.

  Where was the cliff? There was no cliff!

  It wasn’t just the sky that was as dark as dusk. The world for a thousand kilometers around him consisted of nothing more than strewn boulders and rolling plains. There were no hills to speak of, much less cliffs. However, ancient yet beautiful ruins stood there silently within the empty lands.

  These ruins appeared to be far more ancient than any of the wastelands ruins Cloudhawk had seen in the past, and they were completely stylistically different as well. The vast majority of the buildings looked like erect stone pillars, while the others looked like perfectly formed geometric shapes. There were pyramids, there were cubes, there were spheres, there were octahedrons, and more. Although they had been baptized by wind and dust for countless years, the vast majority of them continued to stand tall.

  Every single building was covered in decorative script that linked together in complex, abstruse diagrams that seemed to follow a certain cadence or rhythm. These things definitely didn’t come from any age or era on Earth. The area around them was littered with many bones from gigantic monsters, and judging by the size of the bones, these behemoths had to have each been at least a hundred meters long.

  Cloudhawk found all of this incredibly hard to believe. There was no way this was the world he lived in! Although he had no clue what was going on, it seemed likely that in the moment when his life hung in the balance, he had managed to somehow accidentally activate that strange stone. He had awakened it, causing it to release its energies and teleport Cloudhawk to this place.

  Something like this had already happened once before. Cloudhawk had experienced something similar a year or so ago, when he had been forced into those tunnels. He still clearly remembered how he was teleported to a place that had two suns… but the strange thing was, this time he was sent to a completely different place. Were the locations the stone sent him chosen at random? Then where was he now?

  Cloudhawk felt joy at having survived in the face of certain death, but he was also filled with confusion and fear of the unknown. What if he was the only person in this entire world? Would he be trapped here forever? What was he to do?

  Cloudhawk thought back to the mercenaries and their miserable deaths. They had all died for him! Now that the man in black had killed the mercenaries, his next target would definitely be the Bloodsoaked Queen.

  Cloudhawk had to take revenge for Tartarus! He had to go back and warn the Queen! And he had to kill that detestable “demon”!

  Cloudhawk clenched the stone around his neck and shouted, “Send me back! You hear me? Send me back now!”

  The stone was silent. No matter how Cloudhawk shook it, it didn’t react at all. Cloudhawk had no choice but to put it aside for now. At least he had managed to survive; so long as he was alive, he’d find a way to get back. He forced himself to calm down and began searching within the ruins.

  The ruins were enormous in size and scale; just the ordinary stone pillars were each over a hundred meters tall. Cloudhawk was like an ant in comparison, slowly winding his way through the strewn stones. Far off in the distance, there was an incredibly vast rectangular stone stele that had a statue on each side. The statues weren’t of humans; they were of some sort of strange creature that he had never seen before.

  Cloudhawk wasn’t interested in statues, nor was he interested in the buildings. He was, however, intrigued when he discovered an opening within the rectangular stone stele. He was wind-beaten and completely parched; he couldn’t just keep on wasting
his remaining energy just running around randomly. He decided to first go inside the building and rest for a time.

  The passageway into the building was extremely large and its walls were lined with clear, intricate paintings. Although Cloudhawk didn’t recognize the strange script, he could more or less understand that the images depicted the people of this world undergoing some sort of religious ritual. Cloudhawk was in no mood to examine things more closely, however, because he discovered to his amazement that the insides of the building were lit.

  The light seemed to come from the walls, the pillars, the ceiling, and even the floor itself. The strange material which this building was made of seemed to have absorbed light from the outside world and then released it on the inside. So long as there was light outside, the insides of the building would never fall dark. Cloudhawk didn’t understand which principles guided this phenomenon, nor did he care to.

  Suddenly, he froze. He could vaguely sense a strange ripple in the air, a ripple he was extremely familiar with. It had to be a divine relic generating this ripple.

  Cloudhawk nervously called out, “Who’s there?” But the only response was his voice echoing within the empty building.

  Cloudhawk pulled out his exorcist rod, slowly and casually advancing towards the source of the ripples. After moving past multiple pillars, he finally found the source. It was actually a man dressed in voluminous robes kneeling on the ground, his back facing Cloudhawk. There was no way to see his face from behind, but Cloudhawk could tell that an extremely thick layer of dust covered this man’s body, so thick that it seemed as though the man had become part of the building itself.

  Cloudhawk slowly turned his gaze higher. The black-robed man was facing what looked like an absolutely enormous idol. Due to the overall dimness of the lighting, Cloudhawk wasn’t able to tell what the idol looked like exactly. Cloudhawk walked over and used his tri-bladed exorcist rod to poke the kneeling man.

  As soon as Cloudhawk did this, the robes completely collapsed in an explosion of dust, revealing corroded bones underneath. Cloudhawk couldn’t help but start coughing. Ah, shit. It was someone who had died so long ago that even his bones had mostly disintegrated.

  Cloudhawk picked up the black robes and gave it a good shake, causing a large amount of bone dust to come flying out. Apparently, it was actually some sort of hooded cloak.

  “Wait, this is a relic!” The hooded cloak had endured the passage of a thousand winters without being destroyed. Cloudhawk had no idea what the thing was made of, but it felt completely weightless in his hands. Although it looked rather grimy and ugly, it felt extremely glossy and sleek to the touch. However, what truly intrigued Cloudhawk was the fact that it was emanating the ripples of a divine relic.

  Cloudhawk revealed a look of excitement. He then turned, reaching out and digging through the shards of bone on the ground. He had spent over a year studying dissection and anatomy under Mantis, and so he was very familiar with the human skeletal structure. Clearly, these bones did not belong to a human. However, that didn’t really matter; what mattered was the fact that Cloudhawk found yet another object that emanated relic ripples amongst the bones.

  This object looked like a gourd. It was palm-sized and fiery-red, but was covered in dark golden runes. Judging by the strength of the ripples, this “gourd” was probably a relic of quite some power. It was at least on par with the sacred crossblade of light the Bloodsoaked Queen used and was possibly even stronger.

  “So this is a demon hunter’s skeleton?” Cloudhawk stared at the bones littering the ground, puzzled. This place clearly was not any part of the world that Cloudhawk came from. Why, then, did it also have demon hunters? And the corpse had been kneeling towards this idol. Were these the so-called “gods”?

  Cloudhawk wiped the two divine relics clean before giving them a close look. He discovered to his great surprise that the hooded cloak and the gourd both had a strange insignia on them. He pulled out his exorcist rod to compare, only to discover that the insignias were virtually identical?

  But before he had a chance to thoroughly think through the implications of this discovery, a deep hiss could be heard coming from outside the hall.

  Cloudhawk’s entire body tensed up as a sense of tremendous danger filled his mind. By the time Cloudhawk turned to look towards the direction from which the sound came, an enormous shadow could be seen slowly crawling forward past the stone columns.

  What the hell is this?! A giant snake? But this is huge!

  The creature’s torso alone was four or five times thicker than Cloudhawk, and its body was indescribably long. It coiled its body around one of the stone columns, its ashen-white scales glittering with cold, metallic light.

  Hisses could be heard from the other direction as well. Cloudhawk discovered, to his horror, that there wasn’t just one of these creatures inside. Every single pillar had these creatures slowly coiling their way downwards. Each creature was indescribably vast and Cloudhawk was completely surrounded.

  One of the giant, ashen-white creatures descended to the ground from the pillar closest to Cloudhawk. It slowly extended its head, and when Cloudhawk was able to see it clearly, he felt his scalp go numb. It had the body of a giant serpent, but the head was that of a lion and its eyes glowed with cold green light.

  Suddenly, the beast charged straights towards Cloudhawk, moving as fast as a streak of lightning.

  Cloudhawk had never seen a terrifying monster like this before. Most likely, even if the entire Tartarus Company came back to life, the only result would be them being wiped out a second time… and there were dozens of the things!

  But just as the monster opened its great maw and bit down, the strange stone around Cloudhawk’s neck suddenly woke up once more, releasing a stream of light that caused him to disappear just as the jaws closed around him.

  Cloudhawk was back in the wastelands.

  What was going on, exactly!? Cloudhawk stared in silent shock as the strange stone slowly dimmed once more. This time, it seemed to have fallen into an even deeper state of slumber.

  The hooded cloak and small gourd in Cloudhawk’s hands were proof that it hadn’t all been just a dream. He really had visited an unimaginably strange world and returned with divine relics that did not belong in the wastelands. Cloudhawk was vaguely beginning to understand the nature of the abilities of this strange stone.

  Why did it have these kinds of abilities? How were all of these worlds connected? These were mysteries for Cloudhawk to work through later. Right now, the most pressing thing at hand was for him to immediately return to Blackflag Outpost. It was possible that the battle had already begun and that the Bloodsoaked Queen was in grave danger!

  Cloudhawk scanned the area around him. He was lucky enough to recognize it as a place they had passed earlier, and was able to find the vehicles the Tartarus mercenaries had parked out in the wastelands. He pulled out a canteen of water, gulping it down and enjoying the sensation of cool moisture flooding into his body.

  Cloudhawk then clambered onto the “iron lizard” and revved up the engine. He had done plenty of maintenance work on the vehicles during the past few weeks. Although he hadn’t actually driven them, he knew how they worked. As for the actual driving? He’d learn it on the go.

  The “iron lizard” slowly began working its way across the wastelands, accelerating to greater and greater speeds. It was his first time driving and Cloudhawk was every bit as crazy a driver as the mercenaries had been.

  Right now, Cloudhawk had only one thing in mind… he was going to get back as soon as he could and run some of those bastards over!

  47 The Fallen Outpost

  The setting sun continued to bake the wastelands with its scorching, parching, and blazing light.

  The gates to Blackflag Outpost were tightly shut. Men hefted weapons in their hands, arranged in tight ranks as they waited patiently. Thousands of bloodshot eyes scanned the wilderness. It had been two days and two nights since any of them had slept.


  Facing them was an army of more than a thousand sweepers arrayed in a dense formation.

  Where did these sweepers come from? What did these sweepers want? No one knew! Two days ago, the mutants suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They surrounded the outpost but didn’t attack it, just staring at it from afar. The warriors of Blackflag Outpost were kept in a constant state of tension. They didn’t dare fall asleep and their nerves were shot. They were close to the point of mental collapse.

  The sweepers were led by two commanders. The first was a beak-faced youth who had wings and could fly in the air. The second was a muscular man with two curved ox-like horns and skin that seemed to be made out of some sort of black metal.

  The winged youth looked rather impatient as he irritably scraped his twin scimitars against each other. “Why is our big brother taking so much time to deal with a few miserable mercenaries? Blackflag Outpost is no big deal anyhow. The two of us are more than enough to wipe it out. Let’s just start.”

  “Did you forget how our little brother died?” The horned man was seated on a rock and spoke in a deep and patient voice that was completely at odds with his brutish appearance: “Wait a bit longer. Don’t get impatient.”

  The winged man couldn’t fathom what his brother was worried about. “Surely you don’t think that bitch is stronger than our master?”

  “We can’t rule out that there may be traps. The master must be vigilant – he protects from the shadows and doesn’t fight at the front.” The horned fellow swung his eyes toward his companion. “In the grand scheme of things, our lives don’t mean shit. Our job is to make sure not even the smallest danger threatens the master.”

  The winged man was silent. He knew second brother was right. There were forces at play in the wastelands they paled in comparison to. The wastelands needed a master.