⋮ No. 187689 [Reply] ►
[-h+2-] Press forward and find them. It's all she
can do.
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"Get… Get a hold of yourself, Rika." The girl continues to pant to before forcing a step forward. "Just… I have to find them. I have to… They'll be fine. Nothing happened to them. They took care of it and they'll… they'll be
just fine…"
Eventually, Rika manages to look back up through the forest before beginning to skulk back through the trees. She continues to look back and forth, her hair whipping back and forth in its ruined state. There's nothing that she can see; there's nothing lingering but for the trees.
"…Where… where would they have gone? They couldn't have been taken. Marisa was better than that. Wasn't she? She was, wasn't she?" The question goes unanswered; she dearly hopes that she has the answer, but the weight at the bottom of her stomach continues to call her assurances into question. Though unable to cast those aside, he continues to amble along through the silent, still, stale forest. She continues to walk until, at last, she finds a mark of life.
Or, at least, the remains of it. The tree line is charred with the faint outline of a hole. Various other burn marks litter the ground, pock marking the dirt and turning over the sod. One tree has been toppled over with the trunk being savagely cracked by impact. Of the jagged shards that still stick up from the trunk, she sees stray, tattered feathers along with fresh blood caking the outer edges of the wood. The ground beneath it is disturbed, but there is no trail from which a body would have been dragged.
Rika gulps silently and look around, her eyes searching for more. She sees more pitted earth along with another tree that seems to be half uprooted. A rock is extruded from underneath, lifting it up and tilting it over. Near the roots of that tree, however, are two strips of familiar black cloth pinned into thin gashes within the wood. "…Marisa? You're sti
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