Chapter 180 - The Slums

"How are you holding up?"

Rynold and Neana had been walking around for quite some time. He was sure they were somewhere close to the city by now. Perhaps, they only needed to walk a few steps further.

"I'm fine," Neana answered, clearly lying. Her face was dripping with sweat as the sun beamed over them.

It was currently a few minutes after sunrise, so the heat wasn't all that problematic. The determining factor of Neana's fatigue was the torturous terrain. It was something Neana wasn't used to navigate through.

"You sure?" Rynold verified, "I can carry you if you're having trouble."

Starting from their arrival up to this point, Rynold wasn't feeling tired at all. In fact, he felt well-rested, maybe even eager to get moving. Naturally, he wasn't about to go bragging about something as unimportant as this.

Or was he?

"Again, don't strain yourself. I can carry you no problem. Hell, I won't even break a sweat. Are you sure you don't want to?"

The tone and sentiment were sincere. But the message, on the other hand, seemed entirely arrogant. And, hearing Rynold talk like this certainly irked Neana, so much so that she raised her mage staff in retaliation.

Suddenly, the ground beneath Rynold's feet started to tremble slightly. It was due to the Mana that Neana had channeled to her mage staff.

A magic circle appeared on the ground where Neana's staff was pointing. Then, a stone golem appeared twice as tall as Rynold was. The stone golem's arrival made quite a commotion around them as Rynold's eyes narrowed in utter surprise.

"What are you doing?" Rynold asked while forcing his voice down. He didn't want to seem angry at Neana, so he kept calm. Well, he tried to anyway.

"I've got a golem who can carry me much better than you ever could. Besides, this way, we both get what we want," Neana answered with a smug look on her face.

Perplexed as to whether he should feel proud or confused, Rynold did a doubletake. He looked at the golem, then back at Neana, and he did that twice. Eventually, Rynold recovered as he turned to Neana.

"Get rid of it," Rynold said with a blank expression. He had enough of the confusing turn of events and focused solely on the golem's appearance. Such that its very appearance might have alerted enemies to their presence.

"Why?" Neana asked politely.

She feigned innocence to annoy Rynold. To which, Rynold calmly explained with slightly exaggerated details.

"Oh, I dunno. I guess, in the best-case scenario, nothing would happen. But, on the off chance that something does happen, monsters could start attacking us out of nowhere. Bullets would come raining in. Who knows? Maybe, they'll even nuke us. But, hey, no chance that would happen, right? But, then again, what's stopping that from happening?"

Under normal circumstances, Neana was sensible enough to ignore Rynold's ramblings. But, this time, it felt somewhat different.

The blank stare paired with the overly casual tone sent chills down her spine. Rynold had conveyed his message properly as Neana unsummoned her golem. But, even he had to admit he overplayed the threat.

Moving past the strange episode, Rynold and Neana continued their trek. The two of them moved further into the terrain and, soon enough, Rynold spotted some buildings in the distance.

"You see that?" Rynold asked Neana, who was sweating bullets.

"What? A bunch of run-down buildings?" Neana answered as she squinted her eyes.

The direction that Rynold pointed at landed on a bunch of run-down and old-fashioned buildings. So, Neana's remark was more than fair.

"Yeah," Rynold nodded in confirmation, "That's the slums of the city. I'm surprised it's still up and running. Come on, let's get closer."

With that said, Rynold was the first to get moving, with Neana following suit. Luckily, the path ahead of them was a lot less treacherous compared to before. Thus, it made for an easier time.

"There are still slums in Ark City? I thought it was one of the prosperous city-states in the modern world. Are you sure you know what you're talking about?"

"It's kind of hard to believe, I know," Rynold nodded in agreement. "But, that place is still considered the only slum left in the entire city. The government can't find a way to get rid of poverty no matter how hard they try. So, they just threw all the poor people into one place."

"Really? Wow. Talk about a solution worthy of rich people," Neana answered in a slightly disappointed tone. "Is there any reason they'd make crap buildings from them too? Honestly, with the money they make a year, they shouldn't have trouble putting up some decent housing for them."

"Oh," Rynold acknowledged. "It's actually a heritage site."

The response surprised Neana as they continued walking towards their destination. Naturally, Rynold explained why it was so.

"Yeah. The run-down look of the place isn't by design. It's a heritage site built a long time ago. At one point, some businesses tried to tear it down. But, some protestors showed up and stopped anything from happening. Then, the government showed up and became this whole mess."

Rynold suddenly paused halfway through and let out a deep sigh. Then, he continued.

"Anyway, uh- Eventually, things settled down. To avoid any future conflict, the government declared the place a heritage site. They also banned any future repairs or alterations, making it the run-down place you see now."

"Shouldn't they at least maintain it, then?" Neana asked with growing concern.

"They tried to," Rynold answered defeatedly. "There were sponsors, and people made an effort too. But, as the years passed and the place kept going into shit, people started losing interest. When the government moved all those below the poverty line into that place, things got way more hectic. So, from barely maintaining the place eventually became a steep decline that led to nobody wanting to go near it."

Admittedly, Rynold wasn't all that bothered by it. He wasn't feeling sympathy or down about it at all. What bothered him was the fact that he could see the inevitability of it all.

Being a realist, Rynold could often see both sides of the same problem. And, he often concluded that it was all pointless. From the struggle to the success, Rynold would almost always justify its uselessness to a person. Or, more importantly, to him.

Take the slums, for example.

Rynold understood the side of the people. Preservation of history was a good thing. It reminds the people of where they've been. It reminds them of past mistakes that people should learn from and never repeat.

But then again, Rynold also understood the other side. It was only natural for people to move on from the past. And, considering the structural state of the slums, it only made sense to get rid of it. Infrastructure was always necessary for a civilization to advance.

Seeing both sides of the same coin, Rynold would often think it was futile to fight over it. There was more than one solution to a single problem. The key factor as to why people fought was always something stupid like pride.

Suffice it to say, Rynold was never a big fan of pride.

His personal thoughts aside, Rynold and Neana soon made it to the slums. As the sight of run-down and old buildings came into view, Rynold stood in awe as they saw what happened to the place.

"Is this how it normally looks like?" Neana asked as she stared into the area.

"Definitely not."

Answering almost immediately, Rynold was surprised to see the slums at this state. From afar, the slums seemed the same as he last saw it. Now that they had a closer look, however, it wasn't what Rynold expected.

The place seemed more run-down than ever before. At this point, the place wouldn't be considered as the slums anymore. The place turned from barely livable to outright toxic and disgusting.

Nobody should live here anymore. Rynold didn't have to be some genius-level engineer to see that.

"Let's get a closer look, shall we?"

Eager to get closer, Rynold didn't seem as bothered as Neana was. The reason for Neana's disgruntled look was the fact that the surroundings seemed dead.

The buildings, which should have appeared rustic and vintage, were wrecked beyond recognition.

There were holes in almost every building. Some of the buildings didn't even have walls. There was even one where the entire building was torn apart, leaving only the foundation. But that didn't seem to be all.

As the two continued walking, an odd odor suddenly came to be. Rynold hadn't noticed it at first. But as they went deeper into the area, the more prominent the smell became.

'What the hell is that smell?'

Turning to Neana, Rynold saw that she was pinching her nose. Smirking ever so slightly, Rynold then proceeded to walk deeper into the slums.

The stench becoming more and more prominent, Rynold was now struggling to find air to breathe. His curious expression had long disappeared from his face. Now unbearable, Rynold was now forced to retreat to a much safer space.

However, just when he was about to do such a thing, he spotted something out the corner of his eye.

'Is that..?'

Rynold hesitated as he thought that he might have been hallucinating. But, once rubbing his eyes off whatever nonexistent confusion, Rynold then became sure of the thing's existence. And, once he was sure of it, it became an even more compelling reason for him to leave.

So, without even saying a word, Rynold turned to Neana and lifted her up. Then, Rynold sprung himself up to a higher location. Neana, who had been in a daze because of the rough odor, didn't realize what had happened.

Neana only seemed to recover once they both got cleared of the smell. There was still some lingering odor, but it was nowhere near as bad as before.

"Why are we up here?" she asked with a blank expression on her face.

"You see that?" Rynold pointed at a pool of suspicious liquid.

"What is it?"

"No idea," Rynold answered honestly, "Whatever it is, it's probably the reason why there's nobody here. It's a ghost town, and that seems to be the cause. And, honestly, it kind of looks like shit."

Rynold wished he was kidding. But, unfortunately, he wasn't.

For some bizarre reason, the pool was colored brown. It wasn't anything suspicious if you look at it from a distance. It would've been easily mistaken as just some dirty pool of water.

But, having experienced that rancid odor, Rynold knew otherwise. Whether the smell came from the pool or from another thing altogether, Rynold was smart enough to stay away from that thing. That being said, he had no idea what caused a pool of such content to appear in the slums.

"What are you thinking?" Neana asked as she saw Rynold contemplating.

"Nothing much," Rynold answered as he shrugged his shoulders. "It's just weird that something like that would show up. It hasn't really been there before."

"You've been to this place before?"

"It was some bullshit exposure trip by the Academy," Rynold raised his hand up to his chin. "It's like a way for some of the rich kids to be humbled by meeting the people living here. I mean, it was a few years back, but I could've sworn that thing wasn't there before."

"Right," Neana didn't know how to respond and only nodded to make Rynold continue.

"Well, I think we should find some of the people living here first. They shouldn't have gotten far. These people were usually all stubborn and didn't want to move at all."

With that, Rynold and Neana navigated through the rooftops and tree branches to search the area. It didn't take very long for them to have circulated the entire place.

Unfortunately, their efforts were for naught.