Born in apocalypse

Looking at Alaric bowing, Dhruv said with a calm tone, "Stand up."

Alaric stood up and looked in front of him without saying a word.

There was an awkward silence for a moment before Dhruv told Alaric to follow him.

Alaric did as he was told and began to follow Dhruv. Dhruv was walking toward the tent to have the conversation in private, as this was a very serious topic.

After entering the tent, they didn’t start the conversation immediately. Dhruv told Alaric to create a shield around themselves so nobody could hear their conversation.

Dhruv created two chairs while Alaric proceeded to create a shield around themselves. When the shield was ready, Dhruv signaled Alaric to sit on it and start his report.

"..After an hour of your command, I managed to reach the mainland. Following the orders, I bought the skill map maker and began to create a map of the city.

During my inspection, I was looking for any abnormalities like moving vehicles, clusters of monsters, human presence, and the aftermath of bomb blasts. Apart from a few interesting things during the night, everything proceeded normally,"

Alaric was about to continue his report but stopped when he noticed that Dhruv was about to ask something.

"What interesting things did you find?" Dhruv asked.

"Ohh! I found a few human groups wandering in the city area, their group consisted of at most 20 people each. There are far more groups of monsters than humans, that’s for sure. As you instructed me to keep an eye out for the aftermath of burn areas, I did that, and I quickly found one such area. There was something very interesting there," Alaric paused for a moment.

’What?’ Dhruv was about to ask once again but controlled himself and let Alaric explain.

"Around that burnt area, there were loads, I mean loads of monster corpses. I’m sure there would have been even more if someone hadn’t been trying to eat the corpses.

Yes, there were marks of eating on the corpses, but there were so many that whoever was eating couldn’t finish the corpses. Ahhh! The monsters were of different species as well. Should I explain their appearance..." Alaric asked.

’Loads of loads... does that mean there were multiple cracks... no dungeon around that area. Hmmm! Could it be that bombs were used to kill most of the monsters in one fell swoop?’ Dhruv thought about this but he quickly found a problem.

’But to do this, someone has to do something or they have to find a way to make the monsters gather in a particular area. And even then the main question is why would monsters gather around an area instead of wandering and finding prey? It’s not like they were on an island where there wasn’t anything else to hunt, so they were forced to hunt in a particular area." Dhruv thought as he couldn’t find an answer.

He was pondering for a reason when he suddenly got a very bad feeling and realized something.

’D-Don’t tell me, don’t tell me they used a large number of humans to lure the monsters and then finished everything in one go. They hadn’t done this just once either; there were multiple bombings. Wait that won’t do anything crazy like this right..’ Dhruv quickly removed this thought and turned around and asked Alric,

"Alaric, were there any human corpses as well?" Dhruv asked.

Before Alaric could reply, Dhruv himself understood.

’What a stupid question. How could human corpses be spared when monsters were roaming in the surroundings?’

"There were corpses of humans as well, but it wasn’t in that numbers..." Alaric answered. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Nodding, Dhruv urges Alaric to continue.

"Master, the monster appearances?" Alaric asked once again, as this had been ignored the last time.

"Ohhh! Tell me."

Alaric began to explain to Dhruv about the appearance of the monsters. After a few minutes of explanation, Dhruv figured out four types of monsters.

’So, there were grasshoppers, wolves, lizards or maybe crocodiles, and some type of massive chicken-like creatures. Weird but acceptable at the same time.’

After letting Dhruv digest everything, Alaric continued his report.

"Afterward, nothing happened in the night, and I was once again busy mapping and keeping an eye out for abnormalities. When it was about 7 or 8 in the morning, I heard a loud sound coming from a particular area. The sound was coming from the same area we had visited, the gang’s hideout so, the moment I heard that, I began to walk in that direction.," Alaric explained.

"Sorry for my incapabilities, but I was a bit late, and when I had reached the area, the group had already begun to move out from the prison. The group consisted of five members, and there was a sixth member in that vehicle. The vehicle was probably the reason for that loud sound."

After thinking for a while, Alaric began to describe the groups appearance, "The group members looked like this...."

"...And the last one was the weirdest of them all. He wore a black cloth all over his body, with only his eyes visible, and he used a bow as a weapon. There was a dagger with him as well."

After listing for a while Dhruv connected the dots,

’Yes, Alaric had mentioned one time that the boss had talked with someone on the phone about exchanging coins for weapons. They probably have come to collect the coins. So, a six-member group had come to check the matter.’

Alaric continued his report.

"As though I didn’t manage to catch what they did in the station, I sure stuck to them to check whether they would go to another of these coin-generating locations or not. After all, the best way to find these locations was to follow their leader’s footprints," Alaric said with a proud face.

’Damm! That’s genius...’ Dhruv thought and signaled Alaric to continue.

"B-But what happened next, I-I couldn’t have even imagined..."

"Wait, what happened? Did they catch you? But that’s impossible," Dhruv said with a concerned expression on his face.

"No, master, they didn’t catch me. They did worse than that. They began to follow the exact route we had taken to get out from the station. After following the route, they even reached the place where we had docked the boat. After thinking for a while I was even about to attack them and kill them, but before I could do that, they turned the vehicle and began to return," Alaric explained.

"WAIT WHAT!!?" Dhruv exclaimed in shock.