The very moment we stepped out of the shadowed region, I almost cried happy tears. Almost.
Light touched my face for the first time in days.
…Okay, well, 'light' was a generous word. More like less darkness.
The sky above still wasn't whole. It was still broken, shattered pieces of reality suspended in the troposphere, reflecting the bleeding moonlight like shards of glass.
And the moon itself continued to spill its crimson glow like a waterfall of blood cascading down somewhere on the distant horizon.
But hey, at least the trees were thinner here.
At least we could move without worrying about something in the shadows lunging at us.
And, as Michael's clone had told us, there were far fewer monsters the closer we got to the caldera.
It took exactly five minutes for us to understand why.
Because the moment we neared the next escarpment — another enormous step down the endless terraces of this cursed jungle — we all collectively felt a suffocating pressure descend upon us.
