Global Mutation: The Hunger System-Chapter 52: The Blackwater Span
The eighty-foot vertical descent from the rusted observation cabin was a silent, grim return to the slaughterhouse.
The pale, anemic morning sun bled through the heavy overcast clouds, casting long, bruised shadows across the frozen timberland. The fierce wind of the previous night had died down to a low, creeping draft, leaving the air brittle and tasting sharply of frozen pine sap and raw, exposed intestines.
Ren reached the bottom landing of the fire watchtower first. His heavy combat boots hit the frozen mud, crushing a massive, splintered rib bone into white powder.
The forest floor was completely unrecognizable.
The dense, thorny thickets that had choked the base of the tower the previous evening were entirely obliterated. Massive, hundred-foot-tall mutated pine trees had been violently uprooted, their thick trunks snapped in half like dry kindling and tossed carelessly aside. The frozen ground was heavily cratered, gouged by massive claws and pooling with localized lakes of dark, freezing blood. Massive chunks of unidentifiable, mangled grey flesh and shattered carapace littered the mud, the meager scraps left behind by the victorious leviathans.
The ecosystem below is a chaotic meat-grinder, Ren thought, his glowing violet eyes sweeping the absolute destruction. The Gluttony skill in his chest remained entirely dormant, disgusted by the frozen, scavenged scraps. I will let them thin their own numbers. The ambient mana they hoard will eventually consolidate into a single, massive apex predator, and I will return to harvest it.
Chloe climbed down the rusted grating two minutes later.
Her unmutated human biology was protesting every single movement. Her quadriceps burned with deep, agonizing lactic acid buildup. Her hands were raw and blistered from gripping the freezing iron rails. She kept the two thick military thermal blankets bundled tightly beneath her dark green Level III-A plate carrier, forming a bulky, insulated shell against the sub-zero morning.
She stepped off the bottom stair and immediately covered her mouth with her heavy glove, gagging violently. The sheer volume of butchered meat scattered across the uprooted clearing carried a putrid, suffocating stench that the freezing temperature completely failed to mask.
"Do not look at the ground," Ren ordered, his voice a low, flat rumble. He did not offer her a moment to rest. He turned his broad, iron-hardened shoulders directly north. "We have forty-seven miles remaining. The march continues."
The next six hours were an exercise in brutal, unyielding endurance.
Ren acted as a relentless, biological snowplow. He carved a direct path through the dense, frozen underbrush, completely ignoring the jagged branches and thorny vines scraping against the impenetrable, cast-iron density of his Iron Skin. His Level 17 Agility and Strength allowed him to navigate the treacherous, root-choked terrain without breaking a single drop of sweat. The pulsing sapphire veins crawling up his forearms glowed with a steady, unbothered rhythm in the dim forest light.
Chloe simply focused on placing her boots exactly inside the deep, crushed footprints he left behind in the frozen mud.
By noon, the blister on her right heel had popped, soaking her thick wool sock in warm blood. She didn’t complain. Complaining burned oxygen. She reached into the heavy tactical webbing across her chest and pulled out a vacuum-sealed MRE. Her fingers were completely numb, so she tore the thick brown plastic open with her teeth. She forced herself to chew the dry, chalky, high-calorie compressed biscuit while she walked, entirely reliant on the artificial fuel to keep her heart beating.
They covered exactly twelve miles through the hostile, mutated timberland without encountering a single living threat. The nocturnal predators were buried deep underground, and the diurnal scavengers caught Ren’s towering, heavily mutated scent and immediately fled in the opposite direction.
At exactly one-thirty in the afternoon, the dense tree line abruptly ended.
The claustrophobic, twisted trunks of the pine trees gave way to a massive, sweeping expanse of grey sky. The ground sloped upward sharply, terminating at a jagged, rocky cliff face.
Ren crested the ridge, his heavy boots crushing the frozen gravel.
A massive, staggering geological scar cut completely across the landscape. The Blackwater Gorge was nearly two miles wide, a plunging, vertical drop of four hundred feet down to a roaring, violently churning river. The sheer cliffs on either side were composed of dark, jagged shale, completely devoid of vegetation.
At the bottom of the gorge, the Blackwater River lived up to its name. The water was a thick, sludgy, terrifyingly dark expanse, raging with immense kinetic force. Massive chunks of jagged white ice crashed against the rocky shores, but the center of the current moved entirely too fast to freeze. The ambient mana rising from the churning water was incredibly dense, indicating that the river was a massive, flowing artery for high-tier aquatic anomalies.
Spanning the massive, two-mile abyss was a colossal Old World suspension bridge.
It was an incredible monument to human engineering, featuring two towering, three-hundred-foot-tall steel pillars anchoring thick, braided cables the size of tree trunks. The wide, four-lane asphalt deck was suspended directly over the roaring river, completely exposed to the fierce, howling winds tearing through the open gorge.
However, the entrance to the bridge was a literal graveyard.
The Coalition had not intended to leave a clear path to the Citadel. At the exact threshold where the cracked asphalt met the rocky cliff edge, a massive pileup of military vehicles completely blocked the road. Three heavy MRAPs and two massive, armored troop transports had been parked horizontally across the lanes.
They hadn’t just been parked; they had been aggressively, intentionally detonated.
The vehicles were blackened, scorched husks of melted steel and shattered ballistic glass. Thick layers of soot and ash coated the frozen asphalt. The Coalition engineers had used thermite to fuse the axles directly to the bridge deck, turning the heavy transports into an immovable, thirty-ton barricade.
"They burned their own transports," Chloe whispered, her voice a raw, exhausted rasp as she crested the ridge and stood beside Ren. The freezing wind whipping across the open gorge immediately tore through her thermal blankets, biting straight into her bones. She stared at the scorched barricade. "Why would they destroy their own vehicles?"
"They were completely terrified of whatever is in the river," Ren stated, his glowing violet eyes tracking the raging, dark water four hundred feet below.
He analyzed the massive, thick steel support cables anchoring the bridge to the cliff face. Several of the secondary cables had been violently snapped, the frayed, thick metal wires hanging loosely in the howling wind. It wasn’t the result of weather decay or the thermite explosion. The massive cables had been sheared cleanly in half by something possessing incredible, localized raw strength.
"The military crossed the span, funneled their assets to the northern side, and then deliberately destroyed their rear guard to create an impenetrable choke point," Ren concluded, his heavily calloused, blood-stained fingers resting casually on the hilt of his dormant Crimson vibro-sword. "They believed the sheer drop and the burned barricade would stop the wasteland from following them."
Ren didn’t view the thirty-ton barricade as an obstacle. He viewed it as a minor inconvenience.
He walked down the rocky slope, his boots hitting the cracked, icy asphalt of the bridge entrance. He approached the scorched, fused remains of the lead MRAP. The heavy steel hull was warped and bubbled from the extreme heat of the Old World thermite.
He didn’t bother using his Corrosive Saliva to melt the fused axles.
He approached the narrow, two-foot gap between the front bumper of the MRAP and the heavy, thick concrete guardrail of the bridge. It was too tight for a human wearing heavy tactical gear to squeeze through without getting completely wedged against the scorched metal.
Ren reached out, grabbing the blackened, ruined steel bumper of the thirty-ton transport with his bare left hand.
[Passive Activated: Iron Skin]
He dropped his center of gravity, his dense, hyper-mutated muscle fibers coiling tightly. He channeled the raw, unnatural kinetic torque of his Level 17 Strength directly into his broad back. He didn’t try to lift the entire vehicle. He just pulled backward with brutal, explosive force.
The fused steel shrieked in absolute agony.
The massive, thirty-ton chassis groaned loudly, the heavy tires scraping violently against the ice-covered asphalt. Ren physically dragged the front end of the destroyed transport three feet to the right, ripping the fused axles completely free from the blacktop with a deafening, metallic snap. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂
He created a clear, five-foot-wide path between the barricade and the concrete guardrail.
"Through the gap," Ren ordered, stepping back from the scorched metal.
Chloe swallowed hard, her eyes wide as she stared at the massive block of steel he had just casually rearranged. She gripped her P90 tight, turning sideways, and slipped through the narrow opening, entirely avoiding the sharp, jagged edges of the melted armor.
Ren followed her, his broad shoulders easily clearing the gap.
They stood on the massive, exposed deck of the suspension bridge. The wind out over the open gorge was significantly more aggressive than the forest, howling fiercely through the thick vertical support cables. The entire two-mile-long steel structure groaned and swayed slightly under the atmospheric pressure, a terrifying, deep metallic vibration that translated directly through the thick rubber soles of their combat boots.
Ren steps firmly onto the rusted, ice-slicked steel grating of the pedestrian walkway, his unblinking violet eyes entirely focused on the distant, fog-choked northern cliff face exactly two miles away, driving his massive, armored frame directly into the howling wind to cross the abyss.
