The group of four walked forward on their own.
Naturally, Nick kept himself hidden.
After a bit, the Late or Peak Veteran noticed the group and looked at them.
The four people waved at him to come over, but the man only narrowed his eyes before running away.
The four survivors were a bit confused by that reaction.
Obviously, they lost sight of the lone human, but Nick didn't.
Nick quickly saw the man running towards the east for a while.
Nick followed after him.
After all, this was exactly what he wanted.
Nick wanted to know where the next city was so that he could find out where he was.
A couple of seconds later, the man jumped behind a seemingly random rock.
Thanks to his powerful senses, Nick could essentially perceive everything behind the rock perfectly without having to look past it.
There was a single woman behind the rock, and the man was reporting to her.
'Early or Mid Expert,' Nick thought.
After quickly reporting, the two of them ran back towards the surviving humans whom Nick had freed.
Nick watched from a distance as the two humans interrogated the four survivors and performed several tests on them.
When they determined that the survivors were human, they led them away.
Nick had the urge to sigh in relief, but that was difficult since he technically didn't really have lungs.
They looked like lungs, but that was it.
He had been ready to get involved and to "persuade" the people from the city to not kill the survivors.
Nick didn't want these people, whom he had just saved, to be killed immediately after.
Naturally, thanks to his advanced senses, Nick was also able to overhear the conversations between them.
'Not surprising that they are warning them about me,' Nick thought.
As soon as they had met each other, the survivors had immediately told the humans that there was a powerful Specter around.
Initially, the humans from the nearest city didn't believe them since they thought that the survivors were Specters themselves, but as soon as it turned out that the survivors were humans, the Extractors from the closest city started to become nervous.
'It's strange,' Nick thought as he watched them run towards the northeast. 'I saved their lives. I escorted them to the closest city. I even protected them from the shadows.'
'And yet, they fear me and would immediately kill me if given the opportunity.'
Nick looked at them with a complicated expression.
'But can I blame them?'
'I would act the same way.'
'Specters can't have feelings, and Specters would never help humans without significant personal gain.'
Nick looked down.
'But it still feels unfair.'
Nick could understand why they were acting this way, but in his case, it was not justified.
He did nothing but help them.
Nevertheless, Nick had expected that something like that would happen, and he quickly followed them.
The group of humans knew that a Specter was most likely following them, but what were they supposed to do?
They were most likely not powerful enough to resist the Specter, and the only safe place for them was their city.
Of course, the survivors said that the Specter was unusually interested in the closest city, but they didn't have any power to do something about that.
If the Specter was strong enough to deal with the city, it would have found the city anyway, and if it wasn't strong enough to deal with the city, why should they be afraid?
After running for a couple of minutes, more people showed up in the surroundings.
A while later, Nick saw the group meeting up with another group of Extractors.
The group was talking respectfully to the new group, and Nick could hear where they were coming from.
'Abyss City?' Nick repeated in his mind. 'Quite an ominous name.'
The group the survivors had met belonged to the guards of Abyss City.
Nick knew the names of around 200 different cities, but all of them were in the Great Triangle.
After all, he had gone on missions to many different cities over the span of eight years.
When it came to the Great Triangle, Nick probably knew almost every city.
Sadly, the name Abyss City was not familiar to Nick.
'Most likely means that I'm not in the Great Triangle.'
'The number of Extractors probably also means that I'm not in the Desolate Continent.'
'I think this is a continent, which means I can only be in the Grand Continent, the War Continent, or the Long Continent. As far as I know, the Southern Continent doesn't have any cities.'
Naturally, Nick had learned a lot about the continents during his time as a trainee.
The Grand Continent was the biggest continent in the world. It was essentially a big circle with a long outcropping near the west.
The War Continent was southwest of the Grand Continent. It was called as such because not many fortifications were found. Yet, many weapon shells and destroyed weapons could be found.
This showed that this land had most likely been the victim of many, many wars.
The Long Continent was connected to the Great Triangle and was south of it.
The Southern Continent was pretty small and was south of the Long Continent.
The Southern Continent barely had any ruins from past humans.
It seemed like most of the humans didn't much care about it, which was strange.
All the other continents had many ruins, but this one barely had any.
Yet, it didn't seem any different from the others.
Just like the others, it was made of wastelands and mountains.
After Nick had followed them for a while, he saw the first couple of buildings in the city.
Although, was this truly a city?
The first buildings Nick could see many kilometers away were made of stuff that could only be called scrap.
It was like the old Dregs.
Rusty metal plates were stacked on top of each other to make rusty and dirty huts.
Even more, there was no wall protecting them.
It was like the rusty huts were built in the outside world without any protection, which was crazy to Nick.
This essentially put these people in severe danger.
Almost no cities that Nick had seen in the Great Triangle were built like this.
In the Great Triangle, it was policy that no civilian building was allowed to be built outside of a fortification.
The reason was that it was simply too dangerous.
If the city allowed normal people to live outside, the enormous casualties would severely compromise the city's economy.
Sure, a city's economy was mostly based on Specters and Manufacturers, but they needed normal people to get new Extractors, and normal people also needed a certain economy.
But here, apparently, this policy was not in effect.
After Nick saw the first buildings, he split off from the group.
He didn't need to rely on them anymore and looked around on his own.
As Nick closed in on the city, he realized how they managed to offset the enormous loss of revenue due to the high level of casualties.
'So many!'
The sheer number of rusty huts was abnormal!
There were rusty huts as far as the eye could see!
And that was not the only surprising part.
'So many children!'
When Nick looked at the different households, he saw that over 50% of all the people were children!
Every pair of adults had, on average, three to four children!
And those were only the ones that were alive at this moment!
Then, Nick noticed something else as well.
'There are also a lot of elderly,' he thought.
In Crimson City, people mostly died of old age when they hit their 50s or 60s, and people who were 45 years old or older were considered elderly.
The people here looked far older on average, but Nick could also tell that they were actually not as old as they seemed.
'Are people aging quicker here?' Nick thought.
Someone that looked like they were 50 was actually 40 in this city.
Nick could tell that due to the many conversations he was able to overhear.
'Even more, the elderly are no longer working.'
This entire situation perplexed Nick.
This seemingly made no sense.
Children and the elderly were both burdens on the economy.
After all, they consumed without contributing.
The fact that the city had that many of both of them would mean that one adult needed to support around four people who couldn't work.
This was crazy!
After looking at everything for a while, Nick finally found out how this was possible.
Near the middle of the city, Nick saw a huge queue made up of children.
All of them were queuing up in front of a building with several Containment Units.
Obviously, this was a Manufacturer.
'That explains things,' Nick thought as his eyes narrowed.
'The children are also contributing.'
'And by the looks of things, the children are the only ones that can do whatever it is they need to do in that Manufacturer.'
'The parents are supporting the grandparents, and the children are supporting the parents.'
'That's why there are so many of them!'
'But there are barely any adults. There are basically more elderly than adults.'
'Does that mean that something happened recently?'
'Or is this a cyclical thing where the age distribution shifts around based on the previous generation?'
Nick looked at the huge queue of children.
'Nevertheless, the lack of adults compared to the high number of children means that there is a high child mortality rate.'
'Seems like the child labor here is quite dangerous.'