I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 38: Gray Dawn

Dawn in the Dead Zone didn’t arrive so much as seep in.

There was no sunrise — just a slow, grudging shift from black to charcoal to the same featureless gray that passed for daylight in a land stripped of everything worth looking at.

Revan hadn’t slept. He’d spent the last two hours sitting in his corner, watching the glow in the southeast fade as the sky lightened.

By the time the gray was bright enough to see faces, the glow had disappeared entirely — swallowed by the ambient light, or hidden by whatever was producing it.

Dain was the first to move. The Marshal stood with the slow, grinding effort of a man whose body had spent the night turning every injury into a cement cast. His wounded shoulder had stiffened overnight — the arm hung at his side like dead weight, and he didn’t even attempt to lift it.

"Everyone up," Dain said. Not loud. He didn’t need to be.

"We’re moving."

The camp stirred. The guards rose in silence. One of the stretcher cases — the abdominal wound — hadn’t made it through the night. The other was conscious but couldn’t walk.

Dain stood over the body for three seconds. Didn’t speak. Didn’t close the eyes. Just looked, the way soldiers look at things they’ve seen too many times to mourn but not enough times to stop counting. Then he turned away.

Nobody said anything else about the dead man. There wasn’t time to bury him and nothing to dig with.

Then the VIP carriage door opened, and Sylvia stepped out.

She was wearing the coat.

The mercenary coat Revan had folded and left on the floor.

It was too large for her.

The shoulders hung past her frame, the sleeves were rolled twice at the cuffs.

Over her own traveling clothes, it made her look less like the daughter of a Duke and more like a refugee. Which, Revan supposed, was exactly what she was.

The guards grabbed the rope harnesses on the modified cart.

A narrow-gauge utility wagon they’d spent last night gutting and rebuilding. Side panels hacked off. Frame stripped to the bare flatbed. Wheels filed down so the flanged rims could roll on flat ground.

Everything they’d salvaged was already loaded: CT containers on the bottom, strapped tight. Rations, medical kits, weapons, and ammunition packed around them. The stretcher case secured on top.

Dain took point with one functioning arm. Lyra fell in beside the cart without being told. Two guards pulled from the front, leaning into the harnesses like draft animals.

Revan watched them work. He didn’t help.

Not by choice.

Because he was in one of the worst conditions—suffering not just physically, but internally.

So he sat against a section of twisted hull and watched people who were hiding things carry things that could start wars, and said nothing.

His eyes kept drifting to the creature chained on the back of the cart.

’It had taken six of them the better part of an hour to drag the dormant creature from the crushed cargo wagon onto the flatbed.’

Last night, he’d argued against bringing it.

Carrying that thing is pure suicide.

That was what he thought, but Sylvia had other plans.

Whoever sent that assault team will send another. When they do, we will be exhausted, outnumbered, and in no condition to fight.

The creature doesn’t distinguish between targets. It kills whatever moves. If it wakes up while we’re being attacked — it becomes their problem as much as ours.

That’s what he said.

Fifty-fifty. Either the monster killed them, or it killed the people trying to kill them.

Revan had not agreed.

of course

especially since the monster from earlier seemed inexplicably drawn to him.

But he hadn’t had a better plan, and Sylvia didn’t need agreement. She needed compliance. As usual.

’This is going to be one interesting trip’ he thought bitterly.

***

Before the group moved, Revan climbed.

The nearest elevation was a collapsed ridge two hundred meters north—not much of a hill, just a buckled shelf of dead rock pushed up by whatever geological trauma had created the Dead Zone. It took him ten minutes to reach the top.

From the ridge, the Dead Zone spread in every direction like a gray ocean frozen mid-wave. Flat. Featureless. Endless.

No movement on the northern horizon where the assault team had staged. No figures on the eastern slope. No dust trails, no campfire smoke, no glint of metal.

The scouts from last night were gone. Either pulled back to report, or dead in a ditch somewhere. Either way—clear.

He signaled down. One arm.

Sylvia didn’t wait. By the time Revan half-limped back to the group, the column was already in motion.

She walked the line as they departed, her eyes retracing his path to double-check the straps and chains. The relentless hell of the past few weeks had shattered his ability to take safety for granted.

"Southeast," Sylvia ordered.

The decision had been made the night before, during the planning session in the gutted dining carriage.

Northwest was out—that was where the assault team had come from, where the escaped scout had fled, where whatever reinforcements were being assembled would be staging. Walking into the enemy’s corridor with wounded, a loaded cart, and a chained monster was suicide by any calculation.

Southeast was the gamble.

Revan’s route assessment from twelve-year-old geological surveys put the edge of the suppression field at eighteen to twenty kilometers in that direction—the topographical gradient dropped, which meant the Dead Zone thinned. Sixty percent certainty.

Not great odds, but better than zero.

If the data was right, they’d hit partial mana recovery within a day’s march. Enough for Mirael to stabilize the wounded. Enough for the fighters to function at something above pure muscle and desperation.

The original mission.

deliver the CT containers to Outpost Halgrim via the Ashenmoor express line—was dead.

The rail was destroyed, the escort gutted, the forty-eight-hour delivery window blown. Sylvia had pivoted without sentiment: bypass Halgrim entirely, march southeast to a secondary contact point she hadn’t named, and nobody had asked about. Asking Sylvia for information she hadn’t volunteered was an exercise in wasted breath.

With nothing left to say, they moved out.

The Dead Zone swallowed them within the first kilometer.

It wasn’t a landscape. It was an absence. The ground stretched flat to every horizon—hard-packed earth the color of ash, mixed with powdered calcium that had once been living soil before the mana drained out and left it dead.

Nothing grew. Nothing moved. The sky was the same gray as the ground, merging at the edges until the horizon ceased to exist and the world became a single featureless sheet of nothing.

No wind. No sound except boots on dead earth and the grinding rattle of iron wheels.

The cart’s axles screamed with every rotation—a thin metallic shriek that carried too far in the dead air and came back as its own echo, as if the Dead Zone was throwing their noise back at them out of spite.

The cold was the worst part.

Not sharp cold.

dead cold.

The kind that didn’t announce itself but seeped through layers and settled into joints like wet cement.

Within an hour, Revan’s fingers had gone numb. Within two, the numbness spread to his wrists. He flexed his hands periodically, forcing blood into the digits, and watched the guards do the same.

As far as he could see in every direction—nothing. No ruins. No vegetation. No sign that anything had ever lived or been built in this wasteland.

Except the rail.

It appeared three hours into the march. A single line of rusted metal emerging from the packed earth, half-buried, running southeast until it disappeared into the gray horizon.

And it was the only evidence of human presence in three hours of walking through absolute nothing.

The cart’s iron wheels caught the rail and locked into the gauge with a heavy clunk.

The grinding shriek of metal on dirt stopped—replaced by the lower, smoother rumble of iron on iron. The guards felt the difference immediately. The cart rolled easier, the load lighter, and the group picked up pace for the first time all day.

Revan hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. The light he’d watched from his corner before dawn—faint, steady, wrong. Something in the southeast was producing energy in a place where energy shouldn’t exist. And now they were walking straight toward it on a rail that someone had built for exactly that purpose.

It scared him. Not the kind of fear that made you run—the kind that sat in your stomach and stayed quiet, because running wasn’t an option.

Destiny always drags him into harm’s way.

Behind them, the chained creature shifted with each bump. Dead weight riding dead rails into dead land.

And then—at the edge of visibility, where the rail line curved slightly before disappearing into the haze—Revan saw something that made him stop walking.

Shapes. Low. Scattered along both sides of the track.

Not rocks. The Dead Zone didn’t have rocks like that—three hours of walking had proven the ground was flat and featureless down to the last centimeter.

These were different. Clusters of shapes, some upright, some collapsed sideways, arranged in what might have been rows before whatever happened to them happened.

A few had straight lines jutting out at angles—too uniform to be natural, too corroded to identify from this distance. Others were low mounds with pieces sticking up like broken fingers reaching out of the earth.

The closer ones started to resolve. Edges that could have been shoulder plates. Curves that might have been ribcages. A long shape that looked very much like a rifle stock, half-buried in calcium dust.

"Dain," Revan said quietly.

The Marshal had already seen it. He’d stopped ten paces ahead, his good hand on the hilt of his broadsword. His face had gone still.

"Yeah," Dain said. "I see them."

The cart ground to a halt on the rusted rail. The group fell silent. Ahead, the shapes waited in the gray—motionless, scattered along the track like offerings left for something that had already come and gone.