The Closed Loop of Fate 1

The scene inside the city was vastly different from the outside.

The ground beneath their feet was no longer scorched black rock, but enormous slabs of rough, icy-cold stone that glimmered with a faint, ghostly green light.

The city's buildings loomed close before them, their twisted, non-Euclidean structures even more disorienting to the mind.

The angles at which the towers leaned defied gravity. Archways twisted into shapes like internal organs. The streets were not straight, but spiraled and folded in a dizzying fashion, as though the spatial structure of the entire city had gone terribly wrong.

Of course.

Compared to such an environment.

What was even more shocking were the traces Ian had left behind from his battle.

Huge craters lay everywhere, their edges smooth as though instantly melted by extreme heat, while others were filled with irregular cracks, as if torn apart by tremendous force.

Many twisted buildings bore clear signs of corrosion. Some areas were coated in a layer of grayish-white material that looked like bone ash.

Other places even retained viscous substances—black liquids that gave off a foul stench.

Of course—the one thing that could not be absent was corpses.

All across.

The city.

There were corpses of every kind, impossible to describe accurately with words.

Some seemed to have had every drop of moisture drained from them, becoming shriveled husks covered in scales, curled grotesquely in corners. Their forms vaguely resembled Deep Ones or even stranger hybrids.

Others looked as if they had been crushed by some invisible force, reduced to piles of flesh mixed with green slime and shattered bone armor, releasing a nauseatingly fishy stench. Still others appeared to have been detonated from within by some power, exploding into countless fragments that emitted a faint phosphorescence, like decaying jellyfish—

They were not human.

The