CHAPTER 5: “THE DEAD RISE AGAIN” “VIKINGS WAR IN VALHALLA”

By William Warner

Chapter 5: "The Dead Rise Again" "Vikings War In Valhalla"

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The frost on the glass fogged as the internal heaters of the cryo-pods slowly awakened their passengers. The hydraulic hiss of venting steam echoed across the muddy creek bed as blinking lights danced across the consoles like fading stars.

And then… movement.

The first pair of eyes to open were his—Taps.

I froze.

That face. That attitude I had buried in my memory.

At first, his features were slack with disorientation. His pupils dilated under the overhead canopy of twilight filtering through the rusted trees. But the second he locked eyes with me—his expression twisted in disbelief. He flinched. So did the others as they began to stir, gasping for air like newborns breaking the surface of a nightmare.

One by one, the people in the pods awakened—trembling, coughing, shielding their eyes from the pale light. They emerged like ghosts from a tomb. Their minds struggle to reconcile the present with the echoes of their last memory—before Earth fell.

But all their eyes eventually fell on me.

The towering figure before them. A seven-foot wolf-like creature with piercing red eyes, sinewy muscle beneath armor forged from alien alloys, and a monstrous sword strapped to his back that whispered vengeance in the wind. I could see it in their faces—terror, not just confusion.

Even Taps recoiled, stumbling back from the edge of the creek where he’d crawled out.

“What the hell are you?” someone muttered behind him.

Taps narrowed his eyes, shaking his head. “No. No fucking way.” He pointed, disbelief twisting his voice. “That’s not you. That can’t be you.”

“It’s me,” I said, my voice heavy and dry. “I know I don’t look like I used to. But it’s still me.”

The silence stretched into something brittle. The only sound was the creak of shifting metal and the faint buzz of Deathskull’s scanning device as it catalogued the pod data.

Taps looked me over—really looked. His gaze lingered on my claws, my snout, my eyes. Then it moved to the droid beside me, its small silver body blinking and chirping, completely oblivious to the tension in the air.

“You’re standing next to… a goddamn cartoon toaster with a sarcasm chip,” Taps said flatly. “And you expect me to believe you're William?”

“I didn’t come here to win a popularity contest,” I replied. “I came for answers.”

A long pause followed. Then I added, more quietly, “I came back home.”

Taps’s expression finally cracked. A tremble in his jaw. The bravado wavered.

“Home’s gone,” he said. His voice faltered like a frayed wire sparking in the dark. “They came from the sky. The Shark People. They didn’t just invade—they devoured everything. Towns disappeared. People were eating in their homes. On the streets. Then came the others—hostile mutations. Nightmares that shouldn’t exist.”

The others nodded grimly, their post-cryo stiffness giving way to rising panic. The memories were flooding back now—burning cities, screams beneath a black sky, oceans turned red.

I felt the weight of it press against my chest. That old part of me—the human—aching. And somewhere in the pain… forgiveness.

Taps had mocked me. But none of that mattered anymore.

Not now. Not after this.

We’d all been victims.

“I’ve fought those things,” I said, slowly unsheathing my blade.

The metal glinted like obsidian dipped in blood. “Up close. In the flesh. You think you know what they are? Try staring one in the eye while it grins with a mouth full of your friend’s bones.”

Taps stared at the weapon, then looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What the fuck, bruh. You people don’t use firearms anymore?”

I scoffed, returning the sword to its place across my back. “Guns are obsolete. Energy shields, nanoweave plating, reactive armor—every galactic empire has evolved beyond bullets. Blasters bounce off elite armor like water on glass. You want to kill something these days, you get personal. You carve into the soul.”

John, a lean guy with a shaved head and a NASA badge still clipped to his jumpsuit, blinked at me. “So… we’re back in medieval times? In space?”

Deathskull, who had been silently interfacing with the chamber’s core system, interjected with an unusually grim tone. “You may want to sit down, John.”

The droid’s ocular sensors flickered, and a holographic interface spun to life above the nearest console.

A date. Cryo-Sleep Duration: 4.5 Billion Years.

Everyone froze.

The number didn’t register right away. It

was too big, too surreal.

Then it hit.

Taps blinked. “Wait… no. That’s not possible.”

“It is,” Deathskull confirmed. “Earth fell into stasis. Cryo-suspension anchored to a micro-reality pocket within a geological fault line. Something—someone—ensured your survival through cosmic time. You weren’t just frozen. You were preserved.”

The survivors looked to one another in stunned horror, realization sinking in like lead.

The civilization they once knew, the world they lived in, the friends they loved—they were all dust. Buried beneath eons.

Crushed under tectonic silence.

They weren’t just survivors.

They were the last of the Old Earth.

The air around Money Creek was unnervingly quiet, like the world itself was holding its breath after eons of silence. Tall weeds had sprouted like twisted spires across the cracked concrete and corroded walkways. Rusted remnants of park benches and children’s bicycles sat half-submerged in dirt and moss, nature reclaiming the bones of what was once a community.

I stood at the edge of the creek, the rising sun of a dead planet casting long shadows across the awakening survivors. My claws flexed instinctively, the morning wind rippling across my armor like whispers of old memories.

“I need to know,” I said, my voice low and steady, “who put you in those pods?”

Taps turned away from the others, rubbing his arms as if the answer made the air colder. “Zach.”

The name struck my gut like a cold nail. Taps continued, his eyes narrowed.

“He said it was the only way. That the Earth was already gone… but he’d be back. Said he was gonna find a NASA evac ship, maybe bring help from Mars or wherever the hell was still standing. That was... before the sky caught fire.”

“And he never came back,” I muttered.

“No,” Taps said. “Not even a signal.”

I stared across the horizon, the bleak emptiness stretching far past the treeline. The Earth had become a graveyard of broken promises. I knew Zach well enough. He always played the hero—talked a big game, promised everything, then slipped away the second the weight of responsibility got too heavy.

I turned to Taps, the corners of my mouth tightening.

“Yeah,” I said. “Zach can be really unreliable. Never a good idea to trust him.”

Taps looked at me with more emotion than I expected—his eyes not defiant, but searching.

“So… you're still mad at me?” he asked.

His voice was brittle, like the question had been rotting in his throat for years, waiting for a time when it might finally be safe to ask.

I met his gaze, but my face remained unreadable.

“That’s irrelevant,” I replied. “We’ve got bigger things to deal with now.”

He nodded slowly, and for the first time in what felt like an eternity, there was something unspoken between us—not reconciliation, but an armistice. My anger was there, curled up in the shadows of my heart, but it didn’t matter. Not anymore. Emily had always told me, "Focus on what's in front of you."

I could feel her voice echo in the marrow of my bones.

Emily would’ve wanted this. For me to let go. For me to rise.

A low humming noise pulled our attention to the cryo chamber consoles. Deathskull was still interfacing with the systems, his skeletal hands working methodically. Sparks flared beneath his fingertips, and lines of ancient code unraveled across the holo-screen like silk made of fire.

“These pods,” he said, “weren't standard NASA design. There are subroutines and encryption levels that even I don’t recognize. Someone else tampered with this tech. Enhanced it. Preserved it.”

Taps frowned. “What do you mean ‘someone else’?”

Deathskull didn’t look up. “I mean there’s foreign technology embedded within the cryo frames—dimensional shielding, quantum stabilizers, encryption from a species I’ve only encountered once before.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The Greys,” Deathskull whispered.

The name chilled me. I had only heard of them in cryptic records—an ancient race believed to have shaped civilizations across galaxies, manipulating time, space, and biology with the finesse of gods. If they had a hand in preserving Earth’s last survivors, then this went deeper than a failed evacuation or a Shark People invasion. This was a chessboard. And we were pawns being moved across timelines we didn’t understand.

The survivors—maybe a dozen or so—had gathered their wits. Some were crying softly, others staring up at the sky, clearly trying to process that billions of years had passed. That Earth was not what it was. That the sun had aged, the moon looked fractured, and their loved ones were dust in the wind.

“I… I left my kids…” one woman whispered.

“I had a fiancé,” another said, holding a picture that had long faded to shadows.

Deathskull turned toward me, a flicker of urgency in his lenses. “We should not stay here long. There’s electromagnetic feedback building beneath the surface. Could be a side effect of the dimensional shielding failing… or something trying to breach it.”

I nodded grimly and stepped forward, rallying the survivors with a commanding tone.

“We don’t have time to mourn the past,” I said. “But I promise you this—we will honor it. The world you knew is gone, but that doesn’t mean it ends here. You’ve been given a second chance—for a reason.”

I asked the group about Shungite—hoping for even the faintest lead. Most stared back at me with blank confusion. The word meant nothing to them.

All except one.

A man with shaggy hair and tired eyes stepped forward. Cameron. I vaguely remembered him from school—a quiet kid, always scribbling geology notes in his spiral notebooks while the rest of us daydreamed about girls and Friday nights.

“This is a bad place to look,” Cameron said. “Wrong bedrock. Illinois was never rich in Shungite. It’s found in Russia, mostly. Karelia, if I remember right. Or what used to be Russia…”

I filed that away, nodding in silent appreciation. At least we had one scientific mind with us.

“Any chance there are more of you?” I asked. “Other survivors… still under?”

Deathskull’s eyes flickered as he turned to his holo-scanner. “My systems just registered faint power signatures beneath old grid coordinates in the city’s core.”

We moved swiftly and quietly, traveling beneath the skeleton of Bloomington’s downtown. The old brick streets groaned under our weight as we pried open half-collapsed sewer tunnels and access hatches. Moss and time had sealed many of them shut, but the underlying hum of cryogenic stabilizers still pulsed faintly beneath the rot.

After digging through layers of debris, my claws scraped against the edge of a hardened alloy panel. We found them—another chamber, nestled beneath the brick walkway like a seed buried in petrified soil.

When the pods rose from their tomb, pale steam hissed into the open air. I stepped back as the chamber lights flickered on one by one.

Denton. Jackson. Brody.

They stirred slowly, eyes adjusting to the fractured daylight. For a moment, none of them spoke. They just stared—through me, at me—trying to reconcile the tall, armored, blue-furred being before them with the memory of the man they once knew.

“William?” Denton finally muttered, breath catching in his throat.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice gravel-deep. “It’s me.”

Brody rubbed his face with a shaking hand, the frost still clinging to his stubbled jaw. “What the hell happened to you?”

“It’s a long story,” I replied. “One with swords, empires, dead gods, and… shark people.”

They looked between one another, clearly not ready to process any of this.

I turned to Brody, his posture still taut with military discipline, even after eons in sleep.

“You were military,” I said. “Do you know why NASA would hide cryo-pods like this all over the planet?”

Brody shook his head slowly. “We weren’t told much. Only that some of us were ‘genetically viable.’ I figured it was to repopulate. If the Earth ever bounced back.”

“That’s a real cutthroat way to play God,” I muttered, glancing at the others as they huddled near the open pod.

He nodded grimly. “They expected extinction. They hoped for survival. These pods were never meant to be found… unless someone like you came back.”

I looked out over the scorched remnants of Bloomington. So much has changed—both in the world, and within me.

“What happened to the rest?” I asked. “The ones who made it onto the NASA fleet heading to Trappist-1e?”

Brody exhaled, sitting on a half-collapsed support beam. “I wish I knew. They were the best chance we had—generation ships. Slow, but secure. No FTL. It was gonna take thousands of years.”

I stepped forward, addressing the crowd of newly awakened souls.

“They made it,” I said. “They didn’t just survive—they built civilizations. Vikingnar. Red Dragon. The entire galactic frontier was seeded by those ships. Earthlings are no longer lost. They became legends.”

There was a stillness, a sobering silence as the weight of my words settled in their chests. Their families, their friends, their old lives—gone. But their legacy… alive and thriving across the stars.

Some wept quietly. Others just stared, eyes wide and brimming with something beyond grief—purpose.

Finally, I turned back to Brody.

“One more thing,” I said. “Do you know of any NASA facility—any hidden base—that might’ve experimented with Shungite?”

Brody furrowed his brow, the name flickering something in his memory.

“There was talk once,” he said. “A classified lab. Arctic circle. Some project called ‘Black Core.’ Nobody knew what they were doing up there—just whispers. Shielding tech, radiation testing, maybe even

interdimensional experiments. The kind of stuff that made the higher-ups nervous.”

“Could they have had Shungite?” I asked.

“If anyone did,” Brody replied, “it’d be them.”

Deathskull nodded, already punching the coordinates into the nav system. “The Arctic vaults are buried under ancient ice—this is going to be tricky. But I can get us there.”

“Then that’s our next move,” I said.

I looked out over the small group—the last human seeds of a dead world—and saw something stirring within them. The fog of sleep was beginning to lift. Old instincts were waking up. The fire of survival reigniting in their blood.

Earth may have died. But its children would rise again.

We moved through the blizzard-lashed tundra like phantoms—our boots crunching against the frostbitten snow, flanked by jagged ice ridges and buried monoliths of rusted satellite towers. The wind howled like a voice from another world, shrieking through the skeletal remains of an old NASA Arctic facility known only by a single scarred nameplate barely visible under sheets of ice: BLACK CORE.

Twenty people followed in our wake, still dazed from their resurrection, but driven now by clarity and fear. I could see it in their eyes—they’d tasted extinction and now sought purpose. A new war was on the horizon, one they didn’t yet understand, but instinctively feared.

Inside the compound, everything was still. Dustless. Frozen in time.

I explained as we descended through the buried levels of the base what we were truly here for—not food, not shelter, but a mineral.

“Shungite,” I said, as flickering emergency lights lit our way through the tunnel network. “It’s not just some ancient carbon rock. It’s… a shield. Something about its molecular structure blocks the frequencies or vibrations these entities feed on. If we can replicate it, we can protect Vikingnar and every world we’ve helped seed.”

I didn’t call them demons. That word was soaked in too much baggage—religious hysteria, superstition. But the truth was harder. Ultra-terrestrials. Beings that weren’t just from another world, but from outside our dimensional understanding.

And they were bleeding through.

As the stairwell ended in a frost-rimed corridor, the dim light revealed more signs of past life—broken lab equipment, abandoned workstations sealed in ice, and diagrams etched onto the walls like occult blueprints. Deathskull moved ahead, scanning for carbon deposits, while the others stayed behind to warm up near a dead power core.

Brody trudged beside me, shotgun strapped across his chest even though he knew it would do little against the things we’d seen.

“I still can’t believe how barbaric those things were,” he muttered. “They didn’t act like soldiers… didn’t negotiate. Just tore through us. Clawed, bit, ripped their way through our lines. None of our tech mattered. Tanks. Drones. They wanted blood up close.”

He paused as we passed a wall lined with deep gouges—claw marks frozen mid-slash.

“What happens to them when they die?” he asked, glancing down warily.

I gestured to the scatter of jagged shark teeth on the icy floor.

“They dissolve,” I said flatly. “The cartilage dries, turns brittle. They’re bio-organic, built to consume and replicate. But they won’t strip a world unless there’s prey… unless the Hive Mind sees reason to feed. That’s the pattern we’ve seen.”

He bent down, picked up one of the broken fangs, its serrated edge still glistening like obsidian.

“Then the only way to stop them is to starve them,” he said, eyes darkening. “Cut off their food source.”

“Or shield ourselves completely,” I added. “With Shungite—enough of it, layered around cities or starbases—we may be able to keep the Hive Mind blind to us. Like covering a flame so the moths stop coming.”

Brody’s brow furrowed. “And your armor? The ships? That metal… it’s alien, right?”

“Graphene,” I said. “Refined and folded on an atomic level by machines that predate even our oldest records. It can take a nuke to the chest and barely show a scratch. That’s why guns are obsolete. Projectiles bounce off. Energy weapons are absorbed. You need kinetic force, close-quarters precision, and bladework.”

Brody gave a low whistle. “So, what—you all turned into space knights?”

I glanced down at my blade, the silver glint of Justice humming faintly at my hip.

“Something like that.”

Finally, Deathskull raised a hand ahead of us, halting the group.

“We’ve found something.”

The corridor had ended in a sealed bulkhead. A palm scanner, long-dead, lay embedded in the wall beside it. I forced it open with clawed hands, peeling back layers of corroded steel until a hiss of ancient pressure escaped and the doors slowly parted.

What we saw beyond was not a storage room. Not a lab.

It was a chamber.

Circular. Wide. The floor is marked with ancient concentric rings. In the center was a raised platform of stone—or something resembling it—surrounded by glowing pillars etched with patterns that shimmered like circuits, but curved in patterns too organic to be made by any modern hand.

And on that platform… a frame.

A portal.

It stood roughly three meters tall, shaped like an archway sculpted from obsidian and copper veins. Faint strands of purple energy pulsed within its hollow center, like a heart on the edge of waking.

Deathskull stepped forward, scanning the arch with narrowed sensors. His voice cracked slightly, for the first time tinged with unease.

“This is not NASA tech,” he said. “It predates human civilization.”

The others crowded around, hushed. Some stared in wonder, others in fear.

“What is it?” Brody asked, voice low.

“Something ancient,” I replied. “Maybe even a doorway between dimensions. A tether point.”

Dormant.

I turned slowly, staring at the wide eyes of the men and women who had once been asleep in tombs of frost.

Deathskull looked up from the readouts, voice steady.

“This facility may have been built to contain this. Not to study it.”

And I realized… we hadn’t just unearthed a key.

We may have just opened a door.

The room buzzed with ambient hums and slow pulses of purple light, casting a dim glow on the frost-slick walls. The air had changed since the portal awoke—subtly heavier, electric with static energy, as if something ancient was breathing again after eons of silence.

Deathskull approached me, stepping away from the others. His mechanical limbs clicked softly as he leaned close, his eyes narrowing beneath his visor.

“This isn’t a regular dimensional breach,” he said in a low, metallic whisper. “This is a Wraith portal.”

I stared at him. The name alone sent a chill through my spine.

“You sure?” I asked.

His screen flickered with ancient glyphs and fractured metadata.

“No doubt. The architecture, the energy signature, the residual memory imprint on the stone—all of it matches the Wraith Gate I saw archived in the Red Dragon Empire’s forbidden vaults. This thing links to the Veiled Domain.”

“The Wraith dimension…” I muttered, my claws tightening around the palms of my hands. “The place where matter and memory bleed together.”

Deathskull’s tone shifted, light with sarcasm, but edged with grim clarity. “Yep. A real field trip destination. And guess what? That’s likely where they mined the most pure Shungite, before the Veil collapsed and most of those miners ended up either insane or liquified.”

I turned toward the softly pulsing archway, watching the inner chamber shimmer like rippling water.

“I’m going,” I said.

“No offense, Fuzz Commander,” he countered, stepping in front of me, “but you don’t even know what raw Shungite looks like in the Veil. And if the Wraiths are awake—or worse, aware—you’ll be torn apart before you take a step.”

“I don’t need to be a geologist,” I growled. “I need to lead. And these people—our people—need someone they can trust to stay.”

He tilted his head. “You’re not expendable. I am.”

“No,” I snapped. “You’re annoying, obnoxious, and overly sarcastic—but also useful. You have the scans, the sensors, and the programming to survive dimensional physics. But I know combat. We both go.”

At that moment, a few voices echoed down the hallway. We both turned and saw a small cluster of the cryo-awakened—Taps, Brody, Jackson, and Cameron—gathered in the corridor’s edge, pretending not to eavesdrop. Their faces, weary but alert, gave it away.

“We heard enough,” said Taps, stepping forward, arms crossed. “You’re not leaving us in the dark again. Not after what Zach did. We all agreed—thirty minutes. No more.”

Brody nodded. “You two go. We’ll keep everyone calm, armed, and breathing. But if you’re not back in thirty… we’re coming in.”

I gave a short nod, then addressed them all directly.

“This portal is not a rescue tunnel. It’s not a shortcut. It leads to a place we barely understand. You step through untrained, unarmed, unprepared… you won’t come back. Stay here. Guard each other. Do not follow.”

The cold silence that followed was one of mutual understanding. They’d been betrayed before. Left in stasis to rot beneath the Earth. But now… now there was a mission, and the spark of purpose lit their eyes like embers reigniting.

I turned to Deathskull. “Gear check.”

He popped open a compartment in his chest, revealing two vials of quantum stabilizer and a disc-shaped relic with a hexagonal pattern etched across it.

“Temporal anchor’s ready,” he said. “Just in case the Veil doesn’t like your heartbeat.”

He tossed me one of the stabilizer vials. I injected it into the side of my neck—cold fire shot through my veins, and the air around me shimmered for a moment like light bending through glass.

Deathskull stepped to the portal’s edge and gave one last scan.

“Coordinates shifting… frequency spike stabilizing… okay. She’s holding open. Barely.”

We both stood before the swirling gate, its pulsing glow wrapping around us like living mist. I looked over my shoulder once—saw Taps loading a rifle, Cameron giving us a thumbs up, and Brody silently mouthing something like good luck.

And then we stepped through.

Crossing through the portal was like being pulled through liquid static—our bodies stretched and snapped like shadows across an oil-slick surface. Then suddenly, we were standing on black soil beneath a bruised orange sky.

The air was hot and bitter, filled with the scent of iron and burnt ozone.

A ruined city stretched before us—if you could even call it that. The architecture was jagged and alien, like obsidian teeth rising out of a cracked wasteland. The buildings leaned and twisted like frozen screams, and every shattered window looked like an eye staring back.

"This place looks like the inside of a migraine," I said.

“It’s a demon city,” Deathskull muttered, scanning the skyline. “Or what’s left of one.”

But what drew our eyes wasn’t the broken towers or the flickering torches that still burned on shattered balconies. It was the fallen titan slumped against a ruined cathedral on the horizon.

Even in this nightmare landscape, it stood out like a god fallen from grace.

It was a mech—Red Dragon design, unmistakable. Towering over 400 feet tall, the machine was humanoid, built like a knight from ancient mythos. It sat slumped forward, its great iron sword plunged into the earth like a gravestone. One hand gripped the blade’s hilt, the other dangled motionless over its plated knee.

“Impossible,” Deathskull said in awe. “I thought these things were just propaganda.”

I narrowed my eyes. “This is no prop. That’s a Gen-One Imperial Mech. One pilot, one death wish.”

He scanned it. “Still has a heat signature. Faint… but not dead. Huh.”

We stood there a moment in silence, staring up at the steel colossus against the swirling hellsky.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What kind of creature needs a weapon this absurd?”

I raised my binoculars and adjusted the scope. The armor plating of the mech’s chest was dented and torn, claw marks ripping deep into the titanium-alloy surface. Scorched black lines streaked down its front like battle tattoos, and a section of the shoulder was simply missing—bitten clean off by something far larger than it.

“Those aren’t explosions,” I said grimly. “That’s something with claws… maybe even teeth.”

We made the decision to investigate. Getting up there wasn’t easy—jagged scaffolding lined its shoulder, probably built during maintenance centuries ago. The climb felt endless. Each step echoed hollowly against ancient metal.

When we finally reached the cockpit hatch near the back of the mech’s crown, Deathskull lit a charge.

“Hold onto your ears,” he said.

A flash of white heat and a deafening crack later, the blast door buckled, smoke curling upward into the blood-orange sky.

Inside, the air was stale with rot.

Wires hung like veins, and the walls pulsed slightly with residual power. Everything about the cockpit was more organic than I expected, like the machine itself had adapted to its pilot over time.

But then we saw him.

A body sprawled at the base of the controls, half-curled in a fetal position. The pilot’s flight suit was in tatters, his skin pale and bruised. But what caught our attention immediately was the horror carved into his flesh.

Parts of his face were flayed—sections of skin peeled away in a deliberate pattern. A heart-shaped carving was cut into his forehead, skin and muscle gone, exposing polished bone beneath. His lips were torn at the edges as if stretched into a forced grin… and worse still, his uniform was open.

At first I assumed looters had mutilated him, but something was… off.

“Check his pulse,” Deathskull said.

I knelt, fingers against his neck. Nothing. No miracle. No spark of breath. Just waxen coldness.

His pelvis was torn open, genitals missing—not severed clean, but ripped out, violently, and from within.

Deathskull stood, grimacing. “He tore it off himself,” He said, his voice cold with disbelief. “Look at the blood pattern. It sprayed inward, not outward.”

Then he slapped me across the gut when I muttered, “Guess the guy was flapping off to death.”

“Not the time for jokes,” he said sharply. “This could be Maladrie’s work. You don’t know her like I do.”

He leaned against the wall and tapped his head.

“She’s the Queen of Malice. Demonette hag of corrupted desire. The lore says she infects the mind through lust—makes you crave suffering, even your own. Men have clawed their own eyes out just to imagine her. She feeds on shame like it’s wine.”

I stared down at the carved body, the heart-shaped wound a grotesque brand.

“He wasn’t killed,” Deathskull said. “He was seduced… driven mad by the whispers.”

I nodded grimly. “And then she left him here to rot—probably used his suffering to power herself or something else.”

We both fell silent.

Even in death, the pilot’s twisted corpse seemed to stare at us, like he was warning us to turn back. But that wasn’t an option. We were here for Shungite—and there was still a chance this location might lead us to it.

I glanced around the cockpit.

Deathskull began scanning the core systems while I checked the auxiliary nodes. Somewhere in this cursed husk of metal, answers were buried—and if this mech survived the Veil, maybe there was a reason it died here, guarding something far worse.

Somewhere in the shadows of the ruined Demon City… something had clawed this mechanical monster apart.

And we were next.

Deathskull and I didn’t speak as we lifted the man’s lifeless body from the cockpit.

He was limp now, heavy in our arms, and the silence around us made every step feel more like a funeral march. We climbed down the long side of the mech, boots scraping against scorched plating and exposed wires. The massive machine still hummed faintly with dormant power, but whatever fight it had once seen was long over.

When we finally reached solid ground again, I felt the heat of the hellish landscape rise up through my boots. The orange sky still churned above us like thick smoke suspended in a storm. All around, the abandoned demon city loomed—its twisted towers and crumbling structures watching from a distance like faded memories that refused to die.

We found a clear space behind the mech, a small patch of hardened ash between two fractured support beams. Without a word, Deathskull started digging.

I joined him. The soil was brittle and dry, more like compacted dust than dirt. Still, it gave way under our hands and tools. It wasn’t much, but it would do.

When the hole was deep enough, we lowered the man in—wrapped in a cloak we’d salvaged from the mech’s storage rack. He looked oddly at peace down there, even with that gruesome wound cut into his skull. Whatever had happened to him, it was over now.

I stood over the shallow grave and stared down, letting the moment settle in. My eyes moved from the man’s ruined forehead to the stillness of his hands, then to the scorched land stretching endlessly behind him.

“I wonder where his soul goes,” I said quietly. “He didn’t die on Earth… he didn’t die in space, or even in some holy place. He died here.”

Deathskull looked over at me, saying nothing at first. His face was unreadable beneath the faded plates of his helmet.

“In a place like this,” I continued, “you start to wonder if there’s anywhere left for a soul to go.”

He finally spoke, low and steady. “Maybe it goes where it needs to.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure if that answer brought comfort or just more questions.

We covered the grave with the dusty soil, pressing it down until the cloak was buried and only a mound remained. I reached for the pilot’s cracked helmet and planted it at the head of the grave as a marker.

Then I stepped back.

“I didn’t know his name,” I said, more to myself than anyone. “But he fought. He stayed in that mech long after anyone else would’ve run. That counts for something.”

Deathskull nodded. “He didn’t abandon his post. That’s rare these days.”

We stood there for a moment longer, the heat rising around us, the wind still dead. There was no service, no flag, no final words from the family. Just us, and the grave, and the silence of a forgotten place.

There wasn’t time to linger.

“We still need to find that Shungite,” I said, turning away. “Let’s get moving.”

Deathskull said nothing, but he followed. The grave behind us faded into the orange haze as we moved on through the ruins—just two survivors in a broken world, carrying one less burden than we did before.

The soil was dry and cracked, gray with a subtle sheen like scorched obsidian. Deathskull stood beside me, our boots pressing into the ash-laden dirt. The atmosphere was heavy—thick like oil, though there was no wind, no sound, no visible life. Only the towering ruins of the abandoned Demon city loomed in the distance like the skeletal remains of gods.

“We don’t need to venture too far,” Deathskull said, his voice more serious now. “Let’s just start digging here. This realm is old… very old. Shungite could be embedded deep beneath the surface. Older than this city. Older than any Demon kingdom.”

He didn’t wait for my nod—just knelt and jabbed a collapsible mining rod into the ground. The scanner lit up with a faint pulse. I followed suit, and for the next twenty minutes, we dug—scooping layers of hardened earth, chipping away at the strange glass-like stone beneath the ash. We worked in rhythm, methodical and quiet, save for the clang of tools and the occasional grumble from Deathskull about the heat.

I remember pausing for just a second to wipe sweat from my brow. I turned to ask him something—and he wasn’t there.

The moment hit like a sharp crack of thunder.

I heard a loud thud behind me. Dirt scattered in the air as something heavy struck the ground. I spun around—and saw Deathskull crumpled in the dirt, a dent forming on the back of his metal skull. Before I could move, wings exploded into view.

A Wraith Dragon—the demonic beast was sinewy, pale like stretched bone, and nearly invisible against the sky’s orange haze. Its form shimmered as though reality struggled to contain it. And clinging to the saddle was a Demon—gaunt, armored in plates of blackened bronze, its skin charred red and eyes glowing like furnace coals. It had snatched Deathskull like a trophy and was already taking off.

“No!” I bellowed.

I lunged forward but it was too late. The beast soared upward, flapping leathery wings that kicked dust and ash into my eyes. I saw Deathskull’s limp form hanging off the side of the saddle, his head bobbing slightly—thankfully, he was still alive.

Every second the creature gained altitude, the farther they got from reach. I knew I couldn’t let this happen. I couldn’t let Deathskull vanish into this cursed realm, into whatever fate these Demons had in store for him. He was too valuable… too much of a friend.

I tightened my grip on my sword, and locked eyes with the direction they were flying—toward the spires of the ruined Demon city in the distance. No time to second-guess. No time to call for help. Just me, this blade, and a burning need to get him back.

Without hesitation, I sprinted after them across the craggy terrain, dust trailing behind me like a comet’s tail.

---

Chapter 5: "The Dead Rise Again" "Vikings War In Valhalla"