The of these two siblings continued and made me wonder where it would lead them. The vibrant forest that they once walked slowly turned to a waist land, with its fertile ground becoming sand the deeper they got.
The trees stood as skeletal remains of their former glory, their bark peeling away like ancient scrolls forgotten by time. Once sturdy trunks now leaned precariously, riddled with gaping holes where insects had burrowed deep, feasting on the soft, rotting wood. A damp, earthy scent hung in the air, mingling with the pungent odor of decay. The leaves, long fallen, had turned to mulch at their roots, and only a few stubborn branches clung to brittle, crumbling remnants of foliage. The forest was a graveyard of wood and moss, where silence reigned, save for the occasional groan of a bough surrendering to gravity.
Zinia would stop at a certain point where the trees would look like the where cut perfectly to the stump. "number seven million and five." As she finished her sentence Mei's body would again move like its a puppet and he would start to chant, "lantern burn bright, show the way and burn what's in sight. Blue flame ignis: hell on earth." The dead ground would start to burn a blaze the sand turning into glass, before it trembles and sets ablaze.
Just at that moment the ground would turn green, then dark before a deafening roar followed by a sudden burst of thunder that would stop by a dead silence. Zinia would step into the dead ground and wait, but nothing happenes. "Looks like all the worms burned, but that roar was awfully suspicious." She thought to herself before starting to move again while Mei followed behind closely.
They would walk for hours in a straight line, the ground that was set ablaze a would still be as hot as it was before but didn't seem to bother them one bit. Mei would suddenly quicken his pace going in front of his sister who noticed this and stopped, her face was of confusion since she didn't give him any order to do so. The young woman would get to the sudden realization that he was about to fight, her irises turned green and pupils the shape of clock. Everything around her seemed to slow down before coming to a complete standstill, time had stopped and the images of the future would play out to her while I watched. She doesn't see an attack but then her body would fall in the ground lifeless with no trace, "hm? How could I just fall dead without a single attack coming close to me. It's an attack to separate the body and soul , but I don't see any monsters around.. weird." Zinia would snap her fingers a few times before she walks in front her future corpse, she flinched to the realization of the danger. "So it's like that huh… even though this little nuisance has felt the presence of the danger, i can't see it even in the future because it's immune to future sight." She would smirk. "Such magnificent thing for it to be to even kill me when I'm off guard and the kid is on high alert. Then let's play a bit."
She waives her hand and time starts flowing back to normal. She waited and waited and looked at Mei but nothing happened for a few minutes, but those few minutes extended into minutes until… Mei would change his position.
A small figure moves with an eerie purpose. From a distance, he resembles a child, but closer scrutiny reveals the unsettling truth—his skin is a dull, ashen hue, stretched taut over a skeletal frame, with hollow eyes that seem to drink in the light. His movements are slow and deliberate, like a marionette on broken strings, and his mouth, twisted into a grin far too wide, quivers with an unnatural hunger. Around him, a flock of blue sheep, their wool the color of a twilight sky, huddle nervously, as if tethered to his presence by some invisible, malevolent force. His bony fingers twitch, hoarding his living treasure with an almost obsessive, fevered care, and though the sun blazes above, the air around him remains unnervingly cold, like the breath of something long buried and best forgotten. It looked at me and I looked back at it.
"Mei let's deliver death to this grim hoarder." With a wide grin on her face Zinia lifted her hand and started to move her fingers, that same moment Mei's body began to move like a complete puppet as he took off the backpack and ran towards the horder.
As Mei's feet pounded against the scorched earth, his body moved with a mechanical precision, limbs snapping into place like clockwork as he closed the distance between himself and the grim hoarder. His eyes, vacant yet blazing with an inner fire, locked onto the creature, his lean frame poised like a drawn bow. With a sharp flick of his wrist, a shimmering staff materialized in his grip, pulsing with a dark blue energy that crackled and hissed against the dry desert air. The hoarder tilted its head, its hollow eyes narrowing with a flicker of malicious curiosity. Without a word, Mei spun the staff overhead, its tip igniting in a burst of blue flame that stretched like a serpent's tongue, and slammed it down with a force that sent shockwaves rippling through the sand-turned-glass ground. The boy's attack carved a molten arc towards the creature, but it moved, sidestepping with an unsettling grace, almost as if it was floating, leaving behind a trail of ghostly cold. The blue sheep scattered, their terrified bleats mingling with the hissing of sand turning to glass beneath the boy's relentless assault. Mei's expression remained blank, but his movements became faster, a blur of fiery strikes and sharp thrusts, each blow coming closer to the hoarder, whose twisted grin only widened with each narrowly avoided attack.