A splash of red paint, scraps of entrails, and much more now adorned the hut's interior. But remarkably, this did not affect the bones. The old man's skeleton remained intact and, along with hanging pieces of red flesh, stuck straight out of his waist with his legs. A terrible sight... and yes, now it should no longer be called an old man, but just a pair of legs with a spine.
*Step…* He moved forward, almost collapsing.
He wanted to shout at the corpse, but all that came out was...
"Idiot..." he muttered, barely getting the word out.
It was very difficult to speak, but there was something more important.
His thoughts were thick, heavy, and cold.
"3... No, less." According to his calculations, there were fewer than three seconds left before those two returned and tore him to pieces.
2...
Not wanting to waste time walking, He threw himself toward the corpse.
His hands grabbed the man's belt and began digging through the bloody mess.
1...
There was no time left. He didn't have time to examine what he had found, but he hoped he wasn't mistaken.
In a split second, he tried to press all the buttons he could and at the same time touch the old man's skin with the object.
0...
A man appeared in the doorway, wielding a huge sword glowing blue.
"What the...?" However, he did not have time to finish his sentence.
The left hand of the recent captive threw a round object, and it hit the sharp edge of the sword.
*Beep, beep, bee...* The dark object beeped, flashing red.
In that frozen moment, the man stared in shock at the grenade hanging in the air, while his recent captive curled up into a ball and hid behind what was left of the old man's body.
Right behind the man, the stunned expression on the woman's face appeared...
*Skrrreee!!!* This sound was unlike the usual explosion of a grenade.
However, the destruction was far more terrible than that of a simple explosion.
The sound resembled the twisting and unraveling of space at extreme speed. Simply put, it resembled a black hole.
"...?!" Before he was thrown back at a monstrous speed, he saw a dark-purple sphere of annihilation.
And right at the epicenter of the explosion, he saw a man with a sword being literally torn into hundreds of pieces in real time.
And yet, the old man's words had come true in a way. Right now, a simple man had stood up against cruel supernatural beings.
A weak, broken man had become the most terrifying herald of their doom.
…
"…" The shrieking, spiraling echo of the explosion still screamed in his ears, and his eyes couldn't focus.
clutching the broad, slick skeleton of the old man. All that remained of his once thick, muscular legs was a bubbling mass of shredded flesh and splintered bone.
It was a miracle that such pathetic protection had saved him from death.
The dark hut on the outskirts had been destroyed. Part of the cliff had collapsed from the explosion, and now everything was covered in debris and dust.
"…" He glanced to the side and realized that there was a cliff half a meter away from him.
A sheer cliff with a couple of unobtrusive ledges, the azure sea, into which it would be very dangerous to fall from a hundred meters... No, now it was not a hundred meters below him, but about seventy. It seemed strange, but now his thoughts were clearly focused on something else.
It seemed that the consequences, like the explosion itself, were not quite normal. He was not thrown straight back, but spun around and carried away in the opposite direction.
He ended up in roughly the same place where the blue-eyed man had been torn to pieces. The very epicenter of the explosion.
Looking closer, he could see the remains of his flesh stuck to the ground, but that wasn't the most obvious evidence.
"..." He tried to get up on his knees and picked up something cold.
It was part of that very long sword. However, now the blade was about four times smaller.
In his hands was a hilt with a fragment of the sword and a broken end. In size, the structure is now like a dagger driven into Ryskar's eye.
"Ugh...!" He spat out blood and looked at his right palm.
The revolver was still there, caught on one of his broken fingers. It had suffered almost no damage from his own terrifying shot or the explosion.
Only now did he notice a strange power dial on the barrel. Without thinking twice, he moved it to the middle position.
Losing his second hand would be very foolish.
He spent a couple more seconds searching the old man's remains and found only two black cartridges. He reloaded the revolver one-handed without hesitation
Less than 20 seconds had passed since he woke up in the arms of the skeleton.
His heart was not struck by the wonderful feeling of ecstasy from survival. His exhausted mind tried to be as collected, focused, and cold as it had been in the seconds before the shot.
His heart was devoid of emotions and meaning, but it was in moments like these that he took the most decisive actions.
Perhaps it was because he did not fully realize the miracle of his survival, or perhaps...
'Someone is going to kill you...' the realization flashed through his mind, and then...
"Hey... You filthy spawn!" a vicious shout rang out.
He turned and stared toward the forest.