"We're almost out of the forest," Gelman said, turning back to warn them. "Also, I smell something foul. Does this smell ring a bell?"
Shizuku's first reaction was to lower her head and sniff her black turtleneck. The other two, who were perfectly normal, sniffed the air.
"There's definitely a pungent smell," Wing said gravely. He always instinctively assumed the worst. "Should we put on gas masks?"
"Idiot," Biscuit scolded. "Take a proper sniff. It's sulfur. Even if we need masks, we should first confirm what's really going on. Don't get so worked up."
"Yes!" Wing straightened under his teacher's reprimand. As usual, he calmed down and sniffed the air. "It really is... sulfur."
Only then did Shizuku realize they hadn't been talking about her. She'd been wondering how she could smell when she'd already taken a bath.
She often handled corpses, residue, and other things that inevitably left peculiar odors on her. That was why she'd immediately assumed Gelman meant the smell on her.
But why did they smell sulfur here?
Soon, the four emerged from the lush forest into a flat, barren stretch of land. They looked up, realized the reason, and froze.
At the far end of the desolate expanse, the ground rose sharply into a range of mountains clad in clearly delineated, gray-white, cone-shaped slopes.
Billowing smoke poured from deep within the craters, relentlessly spewing into the sky and blackening a vast stretch of the horizon.
But what truly left them stunned wasn't the chain of active volcanoes standing guard across the land. It was the incomparable, towering tree rooted beyond them, above the magma and cracked earth.
Only the trunks of the trees were visible, each as massive as several volcanic craters. Above the trunks, they vanished into the boundless clouds, their branches and leaves