I believe it had not been two minutes after we had just hiked up the inclined path, when I began to feel an immense increase of heat all over my skin. Even the temperature back when we had gathered for our last briefing was far cooler than what I was feeling at that time. If I were to describe it, it felt like I put myself under a shower with maximum output of hot water but I only get the heat and no water at all. I knew right away that once we arrived at the peak later on we would most likely have ourselves get exhausted due to the extreme heat.
Just then, I heard a clear noise of tree branches rustling from right in front of us. I was leading the line and therefore was also the one closest towards the source of the noise, but apparently Billy who was the last person on the line had also heard it since he also aimed his submachine gun towards the source. It seemed that the noise was loud enough to be heard by all three of us. The noise was then heard again for the second time before all of a sudden a familiar figure came out right from behind the tree.
It was none other than the very same flying alien that we had been encountering for many times then, with its camouflage turned off and also had itself equipped with its beam spear. However, something was definitely wrong – it did not seem like it was going to attack us at all, even though I clearly saw that it apparently noticed our presence by turning its head towards us. Instead, it even proceeded to do few other unusual things that it made me terrified.
At first, it walked slowly and staggering towards us like it was heavily drunk of something. Then, it surprised me a little by lifting its beam spear on its right hand, giving the impression like it was about to stab one of us when almost instantly after that it lose its grip on the spear before it fell to the ground, turning the beam blade off in the process.
As if it was not strange and creepy enough, it proceeded to suddenly kneeled down with both its hand holding its own body against the ground before it quickly vomited out some sort of a black liquid from its mouth, while also giving out a deranged sound. The most disturbing part however, was that it lasted for nearly five minutes before the alien looked like it suddenly threw itself backward and fell hard to the ground face up. I slowly approached the then dead alien, with both of my feet dragging towards the corpse as I tried my best to hold both my hands from shaking.
I could not believe eyes as I looked upon its face once I was close enough to it. Both its eyes had turned to pale white pearl whereas they were initially deep red. Then, from its nose and wide-opened mouth, black liquid poured out with less viscosity than before. Also, its fin-ears seemed to have become wrinkled, which was a very strange and unusual sight for me since I had never seen anything like that before.
It was indeed creepy to look at, and thus I signaled both Billy and Jessica to just continue on while I was also hoping that I would not have to come across such similar disturbing sight again. Unfortunately for us however, we ended up seeing a corpse of an alien again shortly after we headed closer to the mountain top with the exact same condition of the one before. What made it worse, was that it was not just one alien. We then found another, and then more of them as we kept on going up to the mountain top.
"Travis…?" Billy said through my mask radio.
"I… I do not know anything about these…" I responded to him, completely in loss for words on what to say. "I have never seen anything like these before…"
"What is it?" Commodore Quentin asked.
"We…" Billy answered him as he apparently was also not sure on what to say, "We came across something unusual, Sir. A great numbers of aliens lying lifelessly as we kept on continuing our way to the mountain top…"
I then continued what Billy said to Commodore Quentin by telling him what had happened earlier. As I had expected, he too responded with a disbelief shock. Even though Commander General Girsang then responded by saying that it would at least make our journey to the mountain top easier, I still cannot ignore the fact that it might actually be also dangerous for the three of us to stay there any longer.
"Let us… just hope that these aliens are just extremely sensitive towards these volcano ashes compared to us humans for now…" I replied to both Commodore Quentin and Commander General Girsang.
"All of you must go back straight to us once you have reached the peak and found out the cause, Caiman!" Commodore Quentin said and ended the conversation.
"Yes sir. Will do." I answered short.
By then, I realized that it would definitely be best for us if we were to just rush towards the mountain top since the chances were that the majority of the numbers of the aliens we had found thus far had been dead. Even if there was still some possibilities that we might suddenly ran into an alien in the process, they would also most likely face a serious difficulty in determining where we were since they were all technically blinded by the volcanic ashes. Last but not least, we also needed to descend from the mountain as soon as possible if we did not want ourselves to pass out due to heat exhaustion.
"Let us just rush towards the mountain top, then!" I shouted through my mask without using its radio.
"Well, it is about time you said it!" Billy responded to me by shouting too.
Just like I had thought earlier, the only thing that we saw as we were getting closer to the top was only more dead alien bodies and a few more cone geyser holes. There was not even a single alien that was still alive by the time we had been rushing for roughly ten minutes, and as the ground surface had begun to get a little less inclined, Billy warned us that we were nearly reaching the mountain peak.
"We better slow down now, the ground is already less steep than before!" Billy said without using his mask radio.
We slowed down our pace, and carefully looked around as my visibility had then become seriously reduced due to the intensity of the volcanic ashes there that I could no longer see anything more than five feet away from me. However, not too long after that I noticed that the ground right in front of me seemed to be leading down towards somewhere and no longer rising up like before, indicating that we had indeed reached the peak of the volcano.
"I think that we have reached the top of the mountain now!" I said.
"Good! Then now we look for whatever that thing is!" Billy responded.
We kept ourselves close against each other and began to carefully search for any kinds of possible hints but to no avail. All that we could see there was just a pebbled ground leading directly down towards the mouth of the volcano. We might have gone and walked around the peak completely before I then asked both Billy and Jessica if we might have missed something.
"Have any of you both seen anything yet?!" I asked.
"Negative!" Billy responded.
"Nothing!" Jessica also answered.
'Then where is that thing hiding?!' I quickly thought to myself as I began to get desperate and feel exhausted at the same time…