Meanwhile, a few kilometers away from Jelo, Mira stepped out of the portal.

The transition was jarring, disorienting in the way all portal travel was, but it wasn't as violent as what Jelo had experienced. Mira stumbled slightly as she emerged, catching herself before she fell. Her hand instinctively went to her head, checking for the telltale signs of portal sickness—the nausea, the dizziness, the splitting headache that sometimes followed.

But there was nothing. She didn't have a headache, so she was clearer-headed than Jelo. Her mind was sharp, focused, already processing her surroundings and trying to make sense of where she'd ended up.

Unknowingly, she was in one of the safer zones of the place they were in.

The area around her was still ruined, there was no mistaking that, but it wasn't as desolate as where Jelo had emerged. The buildings here, while damaged, weren't completely destroyed.

Some of them still had intact walls, roofs that hadn't entirely collapsed. The streets were cracked and overgrown with strange, pale vegetation that looked almost ghostly in the dim light, but they were still recognizable as streets.

There were even remnants of what might have once been parks or public spaces, now reclaimed by nature in its own twisted way.

The sky above was the same sickly red that hung over the entire region, swirling with dark clouds that never seemed to break. The air was heavy, oppressive, carrying with it a faint metallic tang that made Mira's nose wrinkle.

But what struck her most was the silence. It wasn't the complete, oppressive silence that Jelo was experiencing. Here, there were sounds, small ones.

The distant creak of metal settling, the whisper of wind through broken windows, the occasional skitter of something small moving through the rubble. It was still eerie, still unsettling, but it felt less… hostile.

Mira took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart. She turned around, expecting to see Jelo emerging from the portal behind her. But when she looked back, there was nothing. No portal. No Jelo. Just empty space and ruins.

Her stomach dropped.

Mira's mind immediately started working through the possibilities. They'd entered the portal together, she was certain of that. So why hadn't they come out together?

Had the portal malfunctioned? Had they been sent to different locations? Or was he here somewhere, just in a different part of the exit zone?

She looked around more carefully, scanning the area for any sign of recent disturbance, any indication that someone else had come through. But the ruins around her looked undisturbed, like they'd been this way for years, decades, even.

Mira bit her lip, anxiety gnawing at her. This wasn't good. Being separated in an unknown location was bad enough, but being separated? That was potentially catastrophic.

She needed to figure out where they were. Fast.

Mira started walking, her eyes taking in every detail of her surroundings. The architecture of the buildings, the style of the streets, the remnants of technology she could see scattered among the debris.

There was something familiar about it all, something that tugged at the edges of her memory.

She passed what looked like it had once been a statue, now toppled and broken, half-buried in rubble. She passed the skeletal remains of vehicles, their frames rusted and twisted beyond recognition.

She passed buildings with faded signs still clinging to their facades, the text barely legible but written in a script she recognized.

And then it hit her. All at once, the pieces fell into place.

The place was called the Forgotten City.

Mira stopped dead in her tracks, her blood running cold. The Forgotten City. She'd read about this place in history class, studied it during lessons on the ihe war.

It was a city that used to be teeming with life, proper civilization, culture, advanced technology. It had been one of the leading cities in the world, perhaps the leading city. A beacon of human achievement and progress.

Its prominence had made it a target for the ihes, and the humans had fought hard to defend it. The battle for the Forgotten City had been one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts of the entire war. For months, the city's defenders had held the line, refusing to let the ihes take what they'd built.

But when the ihes brought a new kind of weapon, something devastating, everything had changed. The weapon melted anything it touched, turning solid matter into slag in seconds. The city's walls, which had stood strong for so long, were easily broken down. The defenses crumbled. And what followed was a massacre.

The weapon hadn't just destroyed the city. It had poisoned it. The nuclear energy that powered the ihe weapon had saturated the entire area, turning it into a dead zone.

Most of the population had been killed in the initial attack. Those who survived the assault hadn't lasted long, the radiation saw to that.

And the Dabbas… the Dabbas that had been in the area had been mutated by the nuclear energy. Twisted into something far worse than their normal forms. Larger, more aggressive, more dangerous.

The Forgotten City had become a breeding ground for some of the most lethal mutated Dabbas in existence.

Mira immediately recognized the place and realized they were in one of the most dangerous areas in the entire region, infested with mutated Dabbas due to the nuclear energy that had powered the ihe weapons during the attack.

Panic rose in her like a tide, threatening to overwhelm her completely. Her hands started to shake, and she had to force herself to take a deep breath, to think clearly despite the fear that was screaming at her to run, to hide, to get out of here by any means necessary.

But she couldn't run. Not without Jelo.

She needed to find Jelo as soon as possible. That thought cut through the panic like a knife, giving her something concrete to focus on.

First, because she didn't want him to get into danger. Jelo was already dealing with that terrible headache, she'd seen how much pain he was in before they'd even entered the portal.

If he was here, in this place, in that condition, he was vulnerable. More vulnerable than he should be. And if he ran into one of the mutated Dabbas while he was weakened…

Mira didn't want to think about what might happen.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, although Jelo was only a lowly rank F, technically one of the weakest ability users in their entire academy,!she felt he was much stronger than he seemed. She'd seen glimpses of it before, moments where he'd moved with a speed and precision that shouldn't have been possible for someone of his rank.

The way he'd handled himself in previous encounters with Dabbas, the way he'd survived situations that should have killed him.

There was something about Jelo that didn't add up. Something he was hiding, or maybe something he didn't even fully understand himself.

But whatever it was, Mira knew one thing for certain: if anyone could protect her in this place, it was him.

If they were going to survive the Forgotten City, they needed to be together.

Mira set off to look for Jelo, moving as quickly as she dared through the ruined streets. Her eyes scanned every shadow, every darkened doorway, every pile of rubble that might hide something dangerous.

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