All through the night, Logan navigated through the dense forest grounds, sneaking past even the smallest beasts - all because of the vulnerable latter who clung to him.
The lad, Acer Pierce with an irking figure of exhaustion could only walk a few more steps, round black spots placing a blemish on his eyes.
Only within an hour, the darkness of the sky bloomed into a sky filled with lush red and orange tint.
The morning sun rose like a giant awakening from slumber, quickly encroaching the land into a cluster of color and eye appetite.
Simultaneously, Acer and Logan now saw themselves walking towards a road - if it could be described as tarred, owning its busyness only to humble vehicles that sped across it.
Acer stood silent staring at the flashing vehicles before his eyes.
For a moment, living his life in a remote center such as Moorloch Grand Academy, he almost forgot what the world was.
He'd spent thirteen years wandering in these very streets, yet, they looked unfamiliar in his eyes.
The road was laundered with potholes and its horrible condition spoke only of horror.
"You look surprised?"
Logan had a smile leeched upon his face. He kept looking at Acer's figure and regal attire - although stained in blood.
"You can't appear in Moorloch like this!" He declared.
Acer meanwhile, didn't bother to respond to the latter.
He was in a cloth stained with blood and guts, and for somewhere as civilized as Moorloch, he would immediately stand out as a Moorloch student...who wasn't with his mates.
" What do we do about it? We're almost out of the forest." Acer said.
Logan stretched his palms forward, leaving them directly in front of Acer's eyes.
"[Spatial Retrieve]"
With a chant, reality seemed to have glitched at the space surrounding his hands, and a bandana had puffed into his palms.
The item depicted as a personality latched with anomaly and dread, scary in its color of pale blackness was without any physical depth.
But yet, it managed to wheeze the space around it with its aura.
"Tie it at your nose level... And try squinting your eyes."
Acer furrowed his brows as he tied the bandana across his nose, easily using it to cover his other facial features.
Logan walked closer to him looking impressed by his new facial looks.
Humbly, he laid his palms on the boy's hair, ruffling them above his forehand.
"How about the clothes."
"It wouldn't matter much in Moorloch... Plus we don't have time to shop in any clothing store."
Finally, they walked out of the forest that trailed bounds of miles beside the road, standing beside the road with absolute silence until a car stopped in front of them.
Without a flashy radiance as expected of any futuristic machinery, it was pretty much basic and even almost unappealing.
"What province?" The driver, gazing straight at the street didn't exude any armor or real sense of life.
Acer would have guessed the man was a robot, but humanity technology couldn't exhibit such feats in Moorloch.
His eerie nature brimming without any spark of being or human expression tattered the man's being.
"Buxtin Park! Sector 1."
Logan replied fluently while opening the car door, revealing the pale lackluster seat at the back.
He obviously wasn't startled by the driver's indecent mannerisms as he was accustomed to the comfort of the backseat along with Acer.
"That's right! What do I call you... Except Acer."
Logan sparked a dazzling question at that lad sitting beside him.
"Why?"
"Because you can't parade Moorloch's street with that name of yours."
Even after the explanation, Logan still saw the confusion written over Acer's face.
"The name I use in Moorloch for example, is Chad-63B4!"
Acer was left with an unbelievable smile spread on his cheeks.
Logan having a name specifically for Moorloch seemed suspicious and unnatural.
For a fact, he knew Moorloch, although a modern State for humanity was tough, he didn't know why it advanced into renaming.
And the depicted name seemed like a code... What the hell was a number doing in a name?
Snapping from his load of thoughts, Acer couldn't try to contain how confused he was.
Had Moorloch become some type of robot town?
Logan continued after a time, "You've lived almost all of your life in the academy..."
"Four years -"
Acer as well was interrupted by Logan's brute vocal clamor, "Four years is enough to change lots of things, kid... By the way, this has been the way of life ever as I knew it!"
Logan briefly turned his gaze to a screen that was fixated on a metal case behind the driver's seat.
The screen seemed to complement the sunlight that protruded through the black-stained window of the car, setting a lightened arcade in the car.
"Moorloch isn't just predated by the Luxol or other races..."
"Other race!" Acer must have screamed in the car.
All his life, he'd ever been taught of two existing races - humanity and Luxols. Any other idea of a different race was either completely dismissed or interpreted as beasts.
Logan proceeded with his explanation, fingers still typing at the screen, "Humans ain't making things easy for themselves kid,"
"If you'd grown up in the street, I promise you, you would have already sworn allegiance to the Luxols... The pale bloods are even better options."
Acer wanted to get his head away from the stack of information for a moment, quickly unrolling the window pane and stretching his head out of the car.
Only with those simple moves, Acer's gaze met with the distorting composition of Moorloch's streets.
The car currently moved along a traffic of other cars on the road.
Tall structures and glass buildings stood as a flood of eye view, parred closely with small buildings, market kiosks, and small apartments.
And upon all of this, Acer desperately wanted to feel immersed in what he gazed at, but in the end, his head had filtered the little to no perfect condition of the structures, only figuring how muddled the area was.
From farther buildings - being Factories in a settlement such as Moorloch, Acer first realized the sky was clogged with black smoke that rose from their massive chimney pot, and the air too heavy to breathe.
A mass crowd of the population made their way through the street pavement, all looking like beggars without a destination, and the last few looking basic.
'Is this a slum area or what?'
The buildings were broken and thwarted, a perfect semblance of dehumanization.
"Don't be shocked kid. Moorloch isn't just a battleground... It's also a depiction of humanity's worst-case scenario."
Now Acer understood what his teachers meant by living in the ruggedness of Moorloch.
For some reason, they taught the students that Moorloch's only problem stemmed from the Luxols when meanwhile, the government was also a major contributor.
The Moorloch he viewed wasn't caused by a concept of strength and magic, though, he still hadn't figured out what the problem was.
The lifeless emotion scorching the face of each human, even the children - homeless or parented, revealed a more in-depth darkness.
Something that stirred a sense of warning in Acer's brain.
'Look what the world is when I finally have another glimpse of it! This wasn't the Moorloch I grew up in.'