Mother Earth.

Chapter 4: The Monster.

Lydia Armageddon.

The Basel Decimation,

The year 2167.

Vast, and alone. Those are the words that Switzerland could be described as now. Entire cities with towering skyscrapers, and houses, once filled to the brim with human life all left abandoned. Windows shattered, towers toppled by the extreme weather that plagued the world outside the false safe haven The Bastions had given. The last semblance of life was found in the dead littering the ground like trash. As well, as a picture she had never, and seemingly will never experience. This dry, sweltering, unforgiving world that she had wandered through for the past two days. War scarred the land in missiles dropped, machines thundering through the streets, and bullets blanketing and buried in metal corpses of the soldiers piled up on mountains of the petrified dead. Metal grafted onto flesh, the burnt flags of the French on uniforms designed all the different, forgetting they all bled the same blood. Doors broken to pieces, windows shattered with the shrapnel of bombshells from decimated homes across the winding paths of Switzerland, charred, same as the corpses of the masses piled up against the walls of apartment buildings with their children in their arms; no different than the soldiers' bodies, cradling their assault rifles.

This sight wasn't unique to Switzerland, not even privy to Europe; this War for The World engulfed the entire globe.

Her skin began to burn under the harsh, brutal sunlight, turning red, blistering and peeling. Limping down the paved black road, she saw the fissures expanding far out, splitting it into jagged cracks along the pale pink walls. Dried vines crawled out of shattered windows, whistling as the winds picked up all around her. Rusted, broken cars crashed, crushed under gargantuan legs off a mechanical monstrosity, and nailed into the ground. Eight spikes drill into the ground, skittering around in lightning-fast fashion to disrupt the walls of cities. It was designed to disrupt the bystanders.

Massive enough to hold a small crew in its haul of hallowed steel, mounted with machine guns to mow down the innocents in droves as they forced them from their homes. Lydia stepped over a bony hand sticking out from the pile, and the skull fragments of the skeleton impaled by the deactivated terror. HME-Disruptors were found everywhere the French had invaded. Gun barrels sticking out from its head, bullet-proof glass windows in a large bar where the pilots would've sat. They were nothing but bodies now.

They were lucky their nukes were disarmed in time before France became a pure wasteland instead of another relic of the eternal plight of war. Entire cities were lost to invasions, clearing them out like they were cattle to be slaughtered.

A glass door opened as the gusts of wind blew, swinging open and shattering. The building had a sign saying the word 'Supermarkt Basel Spalemärt.' The rest was lost to the flames of warfare, and bullet holes embedded in the brick walls. Through the large windows inside, something was dangling from the ceiling. A flaking, peeling hand on the brink of detachment from his rotting corpse. His grey flesh folded around the coarse rope around his neck. On the ground beneath him, there was a crude depiction of the earth, with a massive crack down the center. A lone piece of paper flapped where it was pinned up on a wooden shelf as the winds blew the shattered windows. It read: 'Praise thy child.'

Lydia's stomach growled again intensely as her abdomen ached.

"I need food."

Lydia limped inside, the glass crunching underneath her boots, passing the shrivelled-up corpse dangling from a noose. His necklace with a cross was still entangled in his dead hand.

The inside of the run-down Grocery store was like every building she had found over the last two days, barren and empty. Metal shelves were covered in dust and dirt, and not a single food item was to be found.