Leonidas Achilles Romulus Paendrag crashed into reality with the force of a meteor, his senses reeling from the abrupt transition. Breath flooded into his lungs with a gasp, and he realized distantly that he had been unceremoniously dumped onto cracked and uneven ground, with the familiar coarseness of bitumen. He lay there for a moment, disoriented, and with his mind struggling to keep pace with the abrupt shift in existence.

The last remnants of the portal's energy fizzled out behind him, and the only reminder it had ever existed was the familiar tingle of energy on his skin—just like when he’d first transmigrated to Elatra.

Wait? Portal? What? I… didn’t I die in Requiem Ultima?

Leonidas groaned and forced his eyes open, blinking back bleariness and squinting against the harsh, unfamiliar light. The air was thick with the scent of salt and decay, and felt heavier in his lungs. It was a stark contrast to the crisp, clean breezes and revitalizing air of Elatra. The sound of waves crashing against the shore filled his ears, and was accompanied by a distant, haunting chorus of shrill howls and monstrous roars.

That, of course, was his first clue that something was very wrong.

“Well that doesn’t sound good…” he muttered.

Slowly, painfully, Leonidas pushed himself up to a sitting position and took in his surroundings.

He was in Miami, he knew immediately, or at least what remained of it.

The city was a shadow of its former self.

Its once gleaming skyscrapers had become jagged skeletons of steel and glass, and sights he once recognized were little more than macabre offerings to the long-ago rampage of what seemed like some horrific natural disaster. The first filtering rays of the dawning sun, shining through the bones of what had once been a marvel of human engineering, were ominous when they came; like bloodied bands of light seeking to expose him.

A monolithic obsidian obelisk, the size of which reminded him with heart-palpating clarity of the Abyssal Spires raised by Azrageth, pierced the skyline toward the heart of the city. Its surfaces crawled with strange, pulsating white and blue runes and sigils that he couldn’t discern—though unlike the Abyssal Spires; the passive aura of the structure didn’t fill him with instinctive dread.

Small miracles, I guess? What the hell is going on?

His eyes moved away from the obelisk to his surroundings.

The streets were cracked and destroyed in multiple places, once again as if a natural disaster had torn through the city, and craters both large and small pock-marked the wide roads at random and interspersed intervals. Abandoned and overturned cars, their frames twisted and charred, lined the streets or lay abandoned and crashed through the glass or into the solid wall of ominously empty buildings.

Everything from mopeds, to mobility scooters, to broken motorcycles or bicycles, and even bloodstains littered the landscape.

“Okay. Seriously. What the fuck is going on?” he demanded of the air.

The moment he did, a screen appeared in front of him as if summoned.