Keneric walked through the mud while keeping a safe distance from the fleeting Ravager up ahead. He had never done this kind of work before, but following the luminescent green blood trail would have been obvious even without his enhanced senses. The creature was not ready to give up yet, and instead it limped forward over broken reeds and overgrown grass. There it led him towards the edge of Melbourne campus, away from any Arts and Law buildings.
Keneric maintained his distance too because he wanted to scope out this area for a long time, and it was a perfect opportunity to do so now. Also, he needed to be smart about killing the Ravager because he was not only in unknown territory, but everywhere he walked there were those large footsteps on the ground, probably made by those mammoth golems.
Talking about the golems, Keneric had not seen one after coming to Arts campus, and his instincts told him there was a bad, bad reason behind it all. He finally was pulled out of his thoughts when the Ravager approached the outer walls of Melbourne University. The once pristine boundary bordering between the main city and student campus was now falling apart, and the creature decided to slump down on one of its broken concrete pieces laying on the ground.
Maybe because it was night already, or maybe there was an updraft, the Ravager never noticed his figure sneaking closer and closer to its labored and raspy green body. He finally summoned his axe as his flesh reshaped itself before crawling up his dominant arm and formed the deadly edge. But the Ravager must have sensed his movement at the last second and whirled around, running towards the opposite direction. Too bad there was a wall blocking its way.
"Too late," Keneric muttered, wrenching the weapon free, and by the time the Ravager scrambled back trying to change direction, the axe had planted itself between the single yellow eye of the creature. The fight, if it could even be called that, was over in a second, which is exactly what he wanted. A quick and easy kill without attracting anything towards them.
The creature's human-shaped body instantly fell down to the ground, and lime green blood sprayed out from the middle of its head where the axe had hit, but now the weapon disappeared into thin air like it was never present in the first place. Keneric stood over the twitching corpse and absorbed the essence trying to escape into the muddy area.
He could never describe how it felt. But if he had to explain, it felt like raw, primitive energy but in the form of nutrition that energized him thoroughly. He gave one last look towards the dried up, withering corpse of the Ravager and thought about how they had started to move in groups before he jumped on top of the broken wall. It might look superhuman for other people, but by now Keneric was almost used to his body.
Finally, he took a breath and surveyed Melbourne—or what remained of it. And it was bad. The great city was now gone. The skyscrapers that once defined the skyline were now laying in ruin. The once clean streets were now filled with concrete, metal, glass, and other kinds of debris. Water and vines had reclaimed any short structures that were still standing and had terraformed the landscape into looking like something left by an ancient civilization.
Keneric sighed; this was not Melbourne, this was pure alien destruction. He stayed there looking into the distance for a few more hours, absorbing the scale of things and thinking on what to do next. During this time, his glowing green eyes found movement throughout the city. But not human life. The city was flooded with monsters, and rightfully so. There were much more humans outside than inside the University, which in a way lessened the impact of the mutation on students living within.
He also saw towering golems standing or walking through the distant swampy landscape without caring for anything that came under their feet. But unlike the wooden golems inside the campus, Keneric also saw water golems, wind golems, and the worst of all, fire golems that caused the most destruction. At least they each claimed their own area and were spread out in all four directions far away from the campus grounds.
Just then, a particularly large fire golem towards the east smashed through the remains of what could have been an office building far off into the distance, but because of the big explosion, it was easier for him to see from this distance in the deep night.
"Just great," Keneric whispered in helplessness and turned around, not wanting to watch anymore. He jumped back down from the boundary wall and started walking back towards the way he came from. The world outside was too dangerous to just travel right now without proper planning and enough strength.