N. E. N. [ H U N T E R X H U N T E R ]

Chapter 29 - エンディング

Then everything just had to go to shit.
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Screams suddenly erupted around us. People, children and adults alike, all ran away from the village we were in before. Cries of fear, despair and sadness mixed into a haunting melody. The melody announcing the end of the world.

I looked around, searching for the source of the sudden uprise, only to hear the sound of something —or someone— falling. I quickly came to their aid. A young lady, no older than myself, looked at me with tears streaming down her cheeks as if her own parents had died before her eyes.

"What happened? What's going on?" I asked seriously, eyes, searching for a clue hat would answer all of my questions.

"People," she said in between hiccups, "people are transforming into... monsters!"

I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion, my eyes then glazing over to Gon and Killua. To my dismay, they looked just as clueless as I did about the whole situation. All of us nodded at each other.

We were going to find out what was happening and prevent people from getting hurt or transforming into monsters (or whatever that whole thing is about).

Dashing towards the town we were in before, my eyes widened in realization. It wasn't a village anymore. It was a cemetery full of undead creatures. My eye twitched.

"Zombies? Really? How did that happen?" I asked without searching for an answer.

The creatures, most of them wounded in some way, slowly stalked closer. Their eyes were grey, empty, devoid of anything that made them... Alive.

But that wasn't what bugged me about the horrendous creatures. They weren't only lacking life. They lacked nen.

Nen, the very thing that allowed Life in this universe, the thing I had been familiar with my entire existence... it was gone. It was as if someone had sucked it out of their very beings, kind of like what I had done to the first man I have ever encountered, yet... those things...

They were moving. That was impossible!

"Nori, lookout!" Gon's voice reached my ears and I barely had the time to dodge the swing one of the undead creatures had swung at me. Gon and Killua were fighting, although they seemed to be holding back.

"Guys, those... things..." I started, dodging them. Since I couldn't feel the zombies, my eyes were peeled for incoming attacks. "Don't bother trying to keep them alive. Anything that could relate them to the human world is gone." My breath hitched in my throat as I ducked down from an avid mouth. "You feel it too, don't you? Their nen is gone."

"But they were people!" Gon cried, still refusing to admit the truth.

"And now they are corpses. I don't know how it's even possible. At first, I thought someone was making all of this happen with their nen ability... but that's impossible. We would feel something, wouldn't we?"

"Then you say we just destroy them?" Killua asked. He didn't sound sad or angry about it like Gon did, but he still seemed a bit hesitant.

"If we don't stop them soon they'll reach neighbouring towns, and then chaos will unleash over the world." My eyes suddenly widened with realization as I pushed one of the corpses back. "Wait! I think I can try something!"