Chapter 509 - 502. “Rest”
The seventh shard, however, only came to their possession after almost a year.
To be exact, it was ten months and three weeks.
Right after obtaining the sixth shard, they were focused on building the third base more than anything. But this time, they planned to make the base bigger than the mountain one. After looking at the location, Radia agreed to turn it into a hub to prepare for the future eastern expansion, which meant they had to clean a large area around the Castle enough for an assembly.
Most of their forces were thus concentrated in that area; sterilizing the area from any beasts, checking for dungeon appearances, and leveling the field around the Castle. They did it while waiting for the construction materials from the outside. Since they wanted to make a higher and bigger watchtower, more materials than usual were needed, and the transport time was getting longer.
This time, they even came with a proper construction worker and magic engineer. Familiar faces for Zein, since some of them were the people who built his lakehouse.
Thanks to the workers, the espers could focus on the ’hunting’. While the shards were hunting for some signal from other shards, the espers were hunting for more fragments. Han Shin had come back from his vacation with a truckload of newly developed uniforms by SavAsh. They were armed with a defense mechanism against the Fragments’ poison, so even those without bio-shields like Bassena could face the Fragments.
Naturally, the uniforms were in limited quantity, so the only ones who got them were the official hunting team consisting of chosen Trinity members, House Ishtera’s Iron Shield, and the House Mallarc’s agents.
With them focusing on the third base and Fragment hunting, the finding of the seventh shards was pushed away for months. Especially because none of the shards could detect anything. The fact that the shards got more clever in hiding meant that the other shards and Zein also found it harder to locate them.
Funnily enough, the one who found a hint for the shard’s location was Zhan; simply because he was getting too playful in the wide plains and rode his bike too far and...lost.
He lost and got further and further away, out of the beacon’s range. Luck had it that the spearman had a cautious friend who put a tracker on the bike. Gus realized the man was in trouble when the tracker beeped out of the radar and immediately called Kei and Naoya to drag the spearman back.
After looking for a while, they found the spearman on the edge of a jungle, fighting a Specter. And well...Specter usually stayed near a shard’s location. Kei, who held one of the compasses, saw the needle pointing deeper into the jungle behind the Specter and the rest was history.