Ex-Human Morphus [A Mutant Evolution Apocalypse LitRPG]

Chapter 475

“Answer me, dammit!” Silvia yelled at him again. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

“Why would I?” Jake replied. “I have no reason to be his enemy.”

“But you could’ve…”

“And what exactly happened here?” Jake cut in. “Why was he after you?”

“There’s no love between our group and him, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Silvia shot back. “He doesn’t need a reason to come after us. He simply wants every last one of us, the Spartans, killed.”

For a moment, Jake just silently stared at her. Her people kept their weapons trained on him. Catalina was the only one who didn’t have her gun aimed at him.

“Stop pointing your weapons at him!” she shouted. “Jake isn’t our enemy. He just saved all of us, for Christ’s sake!”

Sure enough, the Spartans ignored her, which was understandable. After all, she wasn’t their leader.

As for Jake, he didn’t care about the guns aimed at him. They didn’t bother him in the slightest.

His thoughts were still on D. Why had he attacked the humans? Silvia claimed he needed no reason to go after the Spartans, since he simply wanted them all dead. But if that were true, he would have found their underground base long ago and wiped them out already. Jake was sure that Silvia’s group had provoked him, causing his monster side to take control and drive him to chase her group.

“What was your objective?” he asked Silvia.

Her face hardened. “That’s none of your concern.”

“Answer me.”

“Or what? You’ll kill us all?”

“If I have to,” Jake said, his mind drifting briefly to some future point when he might have a reason to go against the Spartans. “Though I usually don’t kill humans without a good reason.”

Silvia said nothing. Catalina stepped in instead.

“Jake, the Commander only ordered us to recon a specific location,” she said. “Nothing else. After that, we were supposed to return to base. That’s all.”

Silvia shot her a furious look, clearly unhappy that Catalina had revealed even that much.

“Did the Commander give you any extra details?” Jake asked Silvia.

For a moment, she looked ready to stay stubborn. Then, perhaps realizing there was no point in keeping quiet now that Catalina had already spoken, she shrugged her shoulders.

“No,” she said. “The Commander called up my group, including Catalina, and he did it on very short notice. We all got the same briefing, and he simply didn’t have time to add any more details to any of us in private. So, just like Catalina said, our objective was to reach a specific location, recon it, and return. That’s all.”

“Did the Commander tell you what the point of surveying that particular location was, and why he was interested in it?”

“No. And before you ask, no, we didn’t ask why he was sending us there. When the Commander gives an order, we follow it without question. It’s as simple as that.”

“Was there anything of interest at your objective’s location that you were aware of? Had you cleared a nest there before? Done anything else in that area?”

“No. We’d never been there. That’s probably exactly why the Commander sent us there: to recon the area. We had never been there since the Ravage overtook the city, so the Commander likely just wanted to know if there was anything of interest.”

But Jake wasn’t so certain. He was sure the Commander had a specific reason for sending them there.

“So did you reach the location?” he asked.

“We almost did,” Silvia said. “We could already see it. From a distance, though, it didn’t look like there was anything important there, just the same organic matter covering everything. Still, we needed to get closer to be certain. But before we could, we saw D ahead of us. He was fighting a group of ravagespawn and hadn’t noticed us right away.” Silvia paused, sudden hesitation crossing her face. Then she seemed to make up her mind and continued, “I contacted the Commander and told him we couldn’t reach the location, because D was in our way. I thought he’d tell us to fall back, but he ordered us to attack D instead.”

“Is that so?” Jake said, surprised.

“Yes.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that provoking D was basically suicide?”

“We’re soldiers. We follow orders. I believe I’ve already made that clear.”

“Alright. So you opened fire, and D came after you?”

Silvia shook her head. “Not exactly. We did fire on him, but a swarm of ravagespawn moved between us, and most of our shots hit them instead. The monsters immediately started sprinting toward us. D just stood there, watching. He… he didn’t chase us right away. There were too many ravagespawn charging in, so I gave the order to retreat. We ran back the way we came, and the ravagespawn chased us. At some point, D joined the chase as well. That’s the whole story. The rest you already know.”

Jake was silent.

He could tell Silvia was being honest, and there were no apparent holes in her story. The Commander had sent them to that location simply to recon the unfamiliar area. At least, that was what Silvia believed. But was that really all there was to it? Or had the Commander had another motive, one he hadn’t even bothered to share with Silvia’s team?

Jake didn’t know. What he did know was that he didn’t trust the Commander. So he decided he would return to the Spartans’ base and interrogate their leader. He glanced at Catalina, and she gave him a nod, confirming that Silvia’s account checked out.

“Any more questions?” Silvia asked, her tone half mocking.

“No.”

“Alright, then.” She tapped her earpiece and contacted the Commander. After briefly reporting what had happened, she listened to his response and ended the call. Then she turned to her people. “The Commander wants us back at base. We’ve already spent too much time outside. Move out.”

Jake went with them.

A quarter of an hour later, they were back in the subway, heading deeper underground toward their base. As soon as they arrived, Silvia went straight to the Commander to explain in greater detail what had happened and why they had failed to complete their objective.

Jake wanted to approach the Commander right away too, but Catalina stopped him. Glancing around to make sure none of the Spartans were close enough to overhear, she said quietly to him, “Jake, I need to tell you something.”

“Want to find a secure spot?” he asked.

“No. We should stay here so we don’t attract suspicion. If the two of us disappear somewhere out of sight, the Spartans will start thinking we’re plotting something. They already don’t trust me, and they trust you even less.”

After that, Catalina quietly recounted what she had discovered. She told him that at one point during the past several days, when he was absent, she had slipped away from the cavern and explored parts of the underground maze on her own. At one point, she found what appeared to be a freight elevator leading farther underground. It was in working order, and she wanted to know where it led, but it was guarded by one of the Spartans, and she was told she was not allowed to use it.

When she returned to the base, she asked the Commander about it, but he told her there was nothing of interest below. He said it was dangerous deeper underground, so for her own safety, she wasn’t allowed to take the elevator down. So basically, it meant the Commander was hiding something. He had even seemed irritated that she’d managed to find the elevator at all.

Over the next few days, she snuck back to the elevator a few times, but it was always guarded by someone.

“Good,” Jake said, pleased by what Catalina had found. “The Commander’s hiding something down there, and I’m going to find out what it is right now.”

He then told her that he would make a show of leaving the base, then stealthily circle back, slip to the elevator, and investigate where it led. When Catalina asked what she should tell the Commander if he asked where Jake had gone, Jake told her to say he had something to take care of and would be back in a couple of hours.

After that, Jake left the Spartans’ base, making sure he was seen. He wasn’t sure whether the Commander himself noticed him leaving, but it didn’t matter.

Using all his stealth skills and Cloak, Jake returned. He paused long enough to eavesdrop on the Commander’s conversation with Silvia but didn’t learn anything new. Then he set out to find the freight elevator Catalina had told him about. It didn’t take him long to locate it. The elevator was guarded by not one, but two humans, one male and one female, but it took Jake little effort to slip past them unnoticed.

The elevator was little more than a creaky metal platform, and the gaps between its edges and the walls of the rock shaft gave Jake just enough room to crawl through. Before long, he reached the bottom level, where the shaft came to an end. The area was dimly lit, but that posed no real challenge for him. Crawling along the walls, he began to explore.

He quickly learned that unlike the main area of the base, which was located in a natural cavern, this level was man-made. From the elevator shaft stretched a concrete corridor with doors on both sides leading to various rooms. Jake crawled along the ceiling, looking into every room on his way.

The corridor was bathed in dim emergency lighting, but every room was plunged into darkness. Still, he was able to make out all the details. The rooms varied in size, and most were filled with machinery. All of it, however, was in ruins, and not a single machine was functional. Each was a twisted mess of broken, torn, and crushed metal.

Some kind of battle had clearly taken place on this level. Here and there, large holes gaped in the walls, and scorched marks from energy shots marred them. But this place wasn’t completely abandoned, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a reason to keep the emergency lighting on.

At one point, Jake came across a vast room that stood out from the others. Unlike them, it was clean, more or less at least, and at the center sat a large piece of broken machinery, but unlike everything else on this level, it had clearly been repaired for some time now. Whatever its purpose, the Spartans were obviously determined to restore it to working order.

Currently, there were no humans in the room, though. Jake stayed there for a moment, looking at the half-repaired machine and wondering what its purpose was and why the Spartans were trying to fix it.

However, he didn’t have enough information to make an educated guess, so he left the room and continued to crawl along the ceiling. In the rest of the rooms, he was only met with the sight of total destruction.

Finally, he reached the end of the corridor, where only one room remained unexplored. The door stood open. He crawled inside. The room was small, and there was a human inside. The overhead light was off, but the room was still well lit by the glow of a monitor on a desk against the wall opposite the door.

The human sat at the desk, looking at what was shown on the screen. Judging by the half-bored expression on the human’s face, he wasn’t particularly interested in what was happening on the screen.

Jake went still on the ceiling, his Cloak up, shifting his attention to the screen.

For a brief moment, he wasn’t sure what was happening on the screen or why there was a need for a Spartan to watch it.

Then, a second later, the pieces clicked into place.

You lying sonofabitch, Jake thought as he finally realized what was happening on the screen and what it meant.

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