"Okay, so, we should be exiting out of the wormhole..." Aria stated, lingering her words as she pressed a couple of buttons before the view outside of the window became clearer, "now."
Coming to a comfortable stop, the ship entirely silence as the group viewed the planets outside of the window in-depth to ensure that they arrived at the right place. After a couple of second of silence, the bridge erupted into cheer and happiness as they recognised the large gaseous planets surrounding them as Jupiter and Saturn.
"We're back!" Kennie exclaimed jumping out of his seat with a huge smile on his face, "we're finally back!"
Similarly, most of the crew leapt to their feet, ecstatic about finally returning to the Solar System. The only ones that were slightly hesitant about arriving at the Solar System were Marcus and Luciel, both fearing whether their theories on Earth's status is true. The ship gradually made it's way towards Earth, comfortably floating through the asteroid belt as it grows closer and closer to the silent blue and green planet. As they made their way closer, Darius began calculating how long they had been out in space for.
"Three and a half months," Darius stated, finishing his working out as he turned to Adrian, "we've been gone for three and a half months."
"Alright," Adrian replied as the ship slowly came closer to entering Earth's atmosphere.
As they grew closer to the atmosphere, an unsettling feeling grew in Marcus' stomach, a feeling he only felt one other time, when he was talking to Chronos. He glanced around, his eyes locking to Luciel small figure as the older man's face expressed the cautious fear he held.
"What's wrong?" Skylar asked, tapping Marcus on the shoulder, "you look a bit... scared?"
Taking in a deep breath, Marcus shook his head, replying, "just... preparing myself for Earth."
A small smile crossed Skylar face, knowing perfectly well that Marcus was partially lying to her, "just that?"
Sighing, Marcus shook his head, faintly saying, "I'm just worried about what Chronos said before. The truth about Earth."
She could tell that the words of their deceased friend still lingered heavily in Marcus' mind, knowing precisely that all he thought about recently was Earth and Chronos' reason for being in space. Deciding to leave the topic at that, she held back the words she wanted to say as the ship began it's descent down into Earth's atmosphere.
The descent down was rather smooth, much better than what they originally thought it would be like. Outside of the large window at the front, the group witnessed their first view of Earth after being stuck in space for so long. The planet looked diseased. The once bright blue lively sky now stuck in a constant state of grey clouds that shrouded the world as far as the ground. Limited animals that managed to survive slowly scoured the lands for even a trace of food as their body thinned so much that their skin traced their bones. Plants were hidden beneath the mountains of ash and dust that fell to the ground, too heavy to linger in the skies with the other chemically toxic gases. The group's eyes widened with fear and confusion. Unable to believe what they saw outside of their window that quickly got coated with ash and dust.
"What-what happened?" Ren whispered, too shocked to say much else.
"Where are all the people? The animals? The buildings?" Kennie exclaimed, rushing up to the window in hopes that only the vicinity he originally saw was all that was damaged on Earth.
"Did this all happen... in that short time we were in space?" Darius said, faintly that even Adrian could barely hear him, "in them three and a half months, Earth has been slowly decaying."
Marcus glanced over to Luciel, his face just as shocked as the rest of the group's as he stared blankly through the foggy glass. He should've known. He should've guessed that something on this scale was what Chronos was hiding. But he couldn't. He couldn't get the information out of him, let alone get him to even hint at all this destruction.
After a couple more minutes of the group being stunned at the damage before them, they gradually made their way out of the ship with their spacesuits on in case of dangerous toxic gases that may kill any of them. With Adrian and Ren leading the group out of the ship, they slowly stepped onto the dusty lifeless ground, leaves and plants crumbling at their touch.
"This must've been what Chronos meant with the flower metaphor," Marcus stated as he spun around, seeing all the decay on the planet with his own eyes. No inch of Earth seemed alive, from the sky to the core, it looked as if it was all dead or dying, "he knew this would happen; that Earth was going to get destroyed."
"The flowers were the people," Luciel whispered as he crouched down to see a small spider crawl away into the dirt, "and the people all died."
No-one knew what to say as they ventured across the weak land carefully, seeing some half-alive animals crawl across the ground in hopes to find food. The air was dusty and grey, they could barely see a mile in front of them as they gradually trekked through the decaying land.
"Where would we even be?" Aria asked, glancing around to see if there was anything that could suggest where they landed.
"My guess is that we landed around the border of Canada and the USA." Darius assumed, "on our way down, I recognised the shape of Alaska just to the left of the window."
They continued walking around for a bit longer before Adrian called everyone to stop. They had been wandering around the dusty land for about fifteen minutes and quickly realised that it was pointless going any further, seeing as nothing in the landscape changed.
"Firstly, I think we should try to somewhat figure out what happened here," Adrian suggested, "then maybe we can figure out what to do next."
Crossing his arms over his chest, Marcus stated, "we should be able to figure that out, especially from what Earth looks like now and that Chronos knew it was going to happen."
"That's true," Ren replied, "since he knew it was coming, that would narrow the possibilities by a lot. Like it must be caused by the people and not something natural."
"So we can cancel out natural disasters," Aria said, thinking about what other events could be ruled out, "and I would say all this was caused by physical damage, so like deadly viruses should be ruled out too."
"The state of Earth would suggest that whatever it was was a large scale thing," Kennie commented, indicating to the surrounding area, "something that many big countries contributed to."
"Could it have been a war then?" Skylar suggested, "like, everyone suspected there to be some sort of nuclear war occurring at some point and the theorised aftermath would turn out like this."
Luciel gasped, clapping his hands together as he exclaimed, "that's it! That's definitely it!"