Falling from nearly thirty feet, Kyle twisted mid-air, spreading his limbs to slow his descent before tucking at the last moment.
He struck the sand shoulder-first, rolling with the impact to bleed off the force instead of shattering against it.
With a groan, he pushed himself upright and cast his eyes about the barren stretch.
If he had still been at Stage One, barely brushing human peak performance, such a fall would have left him broken or dead outright.
He lifted his gaze to the height he had fallen from, shielding his eyes against the blinding yellow glare overhead, a light too harshly reminiscent of the sun.
However, there was no such oblate sphere hanging in the air, and the sky was only endlessly bright, which brought out a strange atmosphere.
Not only that, it was scorching hot, and he even had to cut away the long sleeves of his sweatshirt to free his arms.
When his gaze dropped again to study the surroundings, what he saw was a vast stretch of yellow sand, some of it rising so high it was almost like a mountain.
He had, of course, heard of people describing such places before, and most of them called it the Sand Sea.
But the proper word for it was far simpler.
"A desert? I'm in a desert…" Kyle muttered as he turned around, and what he saw behind him was the same sight.
He was the only one there, and nobody else could be seen, at least from his point of view, which reached far beyond the limits of ordinary human eyes after his breakthrough.
His face instantly darkened. Naturally, he was about to lose it.
First, the Trial Zone breakout had happened far quicker than expected, and secondly, although he had somehow managed to survive the transmission, many others had not.
And now he had been dropped into a desert with no means of survival, with nothing on him to fight with should a beast emerge.
Kyle felt the urge to scream like a child, but then remembered Na-Ri, Orion, and Adela.
A part of him wondered whether they had also survived the transmission.
As far as he knew, the handsome youth had vanished on the spot like a dispersing shadow.
He could not tell whether the boy had fled or been erased outright, while Na-Ri and he had been separated when a rift opened beneath them.
Then his mind drifted back to Adela, especially.
As he had feared, the grey-haired beauty had remained unconscious right up until the Breakout, notably because of the problem with her core.
If that was the case, then there was no way someone still asleep could have survived the transmission.
But dwelling on that would not help him. His own survival mattered now, and it was clear he had been cast into another version of the world, one that was nothing but an endless spread of ruins, stripped of any trace of human creation or leftover civilisation, a realm of ruin ruled only by the strongest of beasts and the most fearsome of entities.
He understood little about how a Trial Zone truly worked, but he knew one thing: there was no escaping it by "clearing" it.
That was a near impossibility.
So it was either a permanent hell, or he would have to carve his own way out into the vast world beyond.
"I really can't keep hanging around here… oh, shit," Kyle remarked, cutting off the heavy thoughts and shutting down the emotions that threatened to stir.
Those brief days of safety, when he was not being hunted or forced to run, had already worn off, only for him to be cast into a hell far worse than anything he had endured before.
Kyle forced himself to start moving, fully aware that hunger and thirst would strike sooner rather than later.
He was no stranger to going days without food, but here the risk would be far greater.
Without water or supplies, his chances of lasting long in this wasteland were close to nothing.
***
Moments later, as he trudged on, it struck him that the desert had no end in sight.
His face twisted with frustration as he yelled into the emptiness, curses spilling out across the dunes:
"What the fuck is wrong with this sea of sand! Don't you have an end? You motherfucker!"
If not for his heightened stamina and vitality, he would have collapsed long ago in this godforsaken wasteland.
Still, he pushed forward, the horizon mocking him with the same barren view no matter how far he walked.
Then, after a long stretch, something pale flickered in the distance.
Kyle slowed, tilting his head as his eyes locked onto the faint glint of white resting far ahead.
Half-buried in the dune lay the massive bone of some long-dead beast.
Its curve and length reminded him of the Direwolf he had once fought, though this one was dry, sun-bleached, and monstrously larger.
Kyle moved closer, hoping to find something of value, when the sand shifted beneath his feet.
It seized him at once, dragging him down in a slow and deceptive pull.
"What is this? The sand is swallowing me?"
He cursed and fought to wrench his legs free, but the harder he struggled, the tighter the desert gripped him.
Then, when he stopped resisting, the pull ceased.
He hung there, half-sunken, suspended in the sand's clutch.
He quickly realised the sand tightened only when he moved.
With care, he reached towards the exposed bone, hoping to use it as leverage to drag himself out.
Without warning, the ground gave a violent shudder, the kind that felt like an earthquake rolling beneath him.
His eyes widened and he turned slowly towards the source of the tremor.
A low ripple surged across the desert, racing like a buried wave beneath the dunes.
The sand split apart, and from below burst two enormous Cimmerian Sandworms.
Their ridged bodies writhed as they tore free, gaping maws opening with a grinding roar that shook the ground around him.
"Oh, fuck hell... what do we have here? I seem to have trespassed into some hostile neighbours' flat," Kyle drawled, staring at their massive sizes.
It struck him at once. The sinking sand was no natural hazard but the incredulous work of these two Cursed rank creatures, both of them Venom-type. The remains told the rest of the story.
The unidentified beast, a Titan Type, had fallen to them.
And with that knowledge came the inevitable conclusion.
His own death was already being written into the desert, waiting only for them to finish the work they had begun with others before him...
What a terrific piece of timing!