Chapter 136. Hanford Site.
Chapter 136. Hanford Site.
'Ugh... My stomach's churning and it feels like my head's about to split open.'
I examined my own condition. I'd been severely weakened by the aftereffects of the dimensional shift.
I looked around. I was the only member of the unit who had regained consciousness. Fortunately, the others were still breathing, so it seemed they had simply passed out.
After a day or two, the unit members began waking up one by one. And after roughly a week, everyone had regained consciousness.
"Advisor, is this the dimension where the Commander is?"
"I have no information at present..."
When the dimensional rift had grown large enough to start swallowing things, the entire unit had waited silently in the headquarters, hoping it would swallow the building and deliver them to wherever the Commander was.
"Everyone, check your physical condition, just in case. I'll step outside to reconnoiter for a moment."
"Advisor, let us assign some men to accompany you."
"No. That'll be all."
"But..."
I made a gesture that brooked no further argument, then turned and stepped outside. I checked the Disaster building from the outside, but there was no trace of damage from the dimensional shift.
"The Pantheon did say it wouldn't remain unscathed, but this much..."
The streets were lined with undead and corpses. I took in every possible piece of information—the architectural styles of the surrounding buildings, the level of urban maintenance—no matter how trivial, and then returned to the headquarters building.
"Advisor, did you learn anything?"
"I can't be certain, but if this is indeed the dimension where the Commander resides, I estimate this to be a continent called Europe."
"Europe, you say...?"
I reminisced about past conversations I'd had with the Commander and shared the details with the other members.
- Old man, did I tell you I was surprised when I first got here?
- What surprised you, Commander?
- There's a place called Europe where I used to live, and the buildings here are remarkably similar to those.
- Hoh... It seems people's aesthetic sensibilities are similar wherever you go.
"Then this place is the Commander's...!"
"Don't jump to conclusions. I can't guarantee that there are only two dimensions in existence."
Recalling the stories of Earth the Commander had told me whenever he was bored, I remembered hearing that science had advanced to the point where people far apart could communicate with each other.
'But... in this kind of situation, the social infrastructure won't be intact...'
From my brief survey of the surroundings, it wasn't a major city but rather the type of rural town the Commander had described. The good news was that the undead were few, making life easier, but the downside was that there wouldn't be many survivors, making information gathering difficult.
'If it were only the unit members... and if there were no high-level undead, there'd be no issue...'
The unit members' families were also here now. The one saving grace was that, with the possibility of relocation in mind, they had been continuously stockpiling a considerable amount of supplies.
"All members, listen up!"
"Yes, sir!!!"
"We are in a dimension we know nothing about, with limited resources. We must find the Commander before those resources are exhausted."
"..."
"We must find the Commander and lend him our strength! Just as he once did for us!"
"Yes, sir!!!!!!"
A large crowd of people shouted as if pledging a vow, united by a single common goal.
* * * * * * * *
We decided to board a plane and head straight for Washington State. There was no time to dawdle—we had no idea when or what might blow up.
Just then, as the chartered plane landed, the speakers crackled to life and the pilot's voice came through.
"I'm sorry. If we go any further, the flight control systems will fail and we risk crashing."
"That's fine. Thank you for your hard work."
"No matter what happens, we will wait here."
The pilot, seemingly aware that he was helping his own homeland, spoke with a resolute expression, vowing to wait until the very end.
The charter plane's door opened, and the scene that greeted me when I stepped down.
"The weather's goddamn annoyingly sunny..."
Soon, I moved to a spot where they could no longer see us, and with no one else around, Kkamangi descended and climbed onto my shoulder.
"Come to think of it, what do I do about this guy with the radiation...?"
A creature that hatched from Ziz's egg probably wouldn't be affected by radiation, but as its owner, worrying about it was unavoidable.
I moved fast—at speeds ordinary people couldn't even conceive of. I could feel on my skin that a massive radiation burst had gone off here.
A thick, sticky, almost melting aura of malignancy kept trying to worm its way into my body.
"An ordinary person wouldn't last a second here..."
And this wasn't even the epicenter. The situation at the actual epicenter was obvious without even looking. I pulled out the document the American side had prepared estimating the blast radius.
My current location was at the edge of the city devastated by the nuclear explosion. It wasn't the point of direct impact, but it was said that any organism within this radius would sustain severe third-degree burns over its entire body.
Days had passed since the explosion, but the ashen sky was still smothered by thick clouds and settled dust. The buildings and vehicles were reduced to skeletal frames charred black by the immense heat, the iron frameworks groaning and creaking.
A faint smell of burning still lingered, and not a single zombie was in sight. Not just zombies—the corpses had already burned to ash. The only way to tell that something had once been a person was by the human-shaped scorch marks on the ground.
Finally, I arrived at the location where the Hanford Site once stood. An enormous crater had formed.
"Incredible..."
— Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
I had attached a radiation-blocking device for the task Galrand had requested, and now it was emitting a strange alarm.
Initially, it had seemed to function properly, maintaining stable readings. The deeper I ventured into the heart of the ash-covered city, however, the shorter and more frequent the ominous beeping became.
The more the unpleasant, sticky sensation intensified, the faster the device vibrated and the louder its warning tone grew. By the time I reached a point deep enough to overlook the Hanford Site, the device's noise ceased, its mana barrier vanished, and it malfunctioned. In an instant, searing heat radiated from the device, smoke began to billow out, and the device attached near my solar plexus dropped to the ground with a thud.
"It's busted."
I'd expected the radiation levels to be high already. Still, I was fortunate the device held out considerably longer than we'd originally anticipated.
Upon closer inspection of the Hanford Site, the first thing I noticed was that it wasn't simply debris. There were traces of something having dug through and passed this way. And these marks weren't from a simple accident—they were gnawed and eaten by something.
Something had broken through the thick protective barriers double- and triple-layered for safety and devoured the piles of accumulated nuclear waste.
"Bite marks... What the hell...?"
The ground was strewn with squelching footprints and some unidentifiable sticky liquid. A trail of that liquid continued across the floor, heading off somewhere.
Irritated by the horrible squelching sensation on my shoe soles with every step, I scattered mana and erased it all. Just then, sensing a strange presence in the distance, I turned and stared.
It was pure intuition, but I knew something had sensed me. And I felt that the bastard had perceived me too. Then a tremor shot through the ground. The earth shuddered subtly before a fierce vibration, like an earthquake, rocked the ground under my feet.
The calm wind suddenly rushed toward the distance, then stopped.
— Fwoooosh!!!
Without even the sound of a launch, something flew at me at a speed far exceeding the speed of sound. Only a split second passed between dodging the projectile and its explosion.
I sped toward where the thing was. The creature that had devoured the nuclear waste was no ordinary animal. The path it had taken was a twisted, distorted mess. Melted metal warped by high heat, irregular patterns of destruction—the unidentified thing that had swallowed all this defied any definition.
"If I had to classify it, it's a slime, but..."
A dark, viscous something, a chaotic jumble of buildings and vehicles, oozing slime.
"If that thing's a slime, people would've been dead long ago."
I didn't know why, but it wasn't merely contaminated by radiation—it seemed to have absorbed that power and grown stronger.
I approached close enough to visually identify it, but the creature showed no reaction. I drew my sword to take a rough measure of it, and in that very instant...
A dazzling radiance shone from the creature's core as the surrounding air rippled and exhaled heat. An immense energy condensed and expanded from its outer surface before erupting outward in an explosive wave.
— BOOOOOM!!!
A nuclear explosion went off, accompanied by a blinding flash. The shockwave instantly spread in all directions, swallowing everything, ground and sky alike. The energy the creature unleashed was unlike the original nuclear blast. Even the skeletal remnants of buildings scattered like dust in an instant, and everything around was engulfed in high-temperature flame.
"Huh. If this thing's a slime, calling a breath-spewing dragon a 'lizard' would be overpraising it."
— Shhhuck!
I made one great slash across the tangled mass, and from the two severed cross-sections, mucous tentacles gushed forth and began to entangle themselves. Then, as if it had never been cut at all, it returned to its original form.
"Let's see just how much you can regenerate."
— Riiiippp!
With a sound like tearing and ripping apart clay by force, I shredded the creature into multiple pieces. It wasn't entirely without effect, as it couldn't regenerate immediately like before. The sticky substance began to writhe slowly, starting to pull itself together bit by bit. The pieces sliced apart by the sword moved sluggishly and soon reconnected with each other.
When its body was torn apart, I briefly glimpsed the core inside. The creature had deftly avoided the slashes, even shifting the core's position.
I watched the process with intrigued eyes. The monster's regeneration was fast and tenacious. No, to be precise, it wasn't regeneration. Looking closely, one piece was becoming two and steadily multiplying.
"Interesting."
As if recognizing me as a definite enemy, the creature let out a strange, unpleasant screech, like nails dragging across a chalkboard.
— SKREEEEEEE!!!
Tentacles erupted from its body and began writhing viciously toward me.
"Let's see if you can regenerate after being ground to dust."