Chapter 483
Chapter 483
It was definitely one of the toughest battles Jake had ever found himself in. The group of elite ravagespawn employed various abilities, and while some of them turned out to be useless against him, the others were quite troublesome, either inflicting debuffs on him or dealing damage. Even so, Jake kept fighting, throwing everything he had into the battle and refusing to let the monsters overwhelm him.
At one point, as he glanced toward Owen, he saw something intriguing. While his counterpart stood where he had been before, he was no longer alone. Hovering beside him at shoulder height was a round drone, not dissimilar to the one controlled by Mad Mick during Jake’s very first encounter with D.
The two of them were close, that much was clear, friends maybe. They obviously kept in constant touch with each other. From where he was fighting the ravagespawn, Jake couldn’t hear whether Mick was saying anything through the drone, but he assumed he was, because D suddenly waved it off, and a moment later, it flew away and disappeared from sight.
He continued to fight the ravagespawn D had assembled for him. He still wasn’t quite sure what this was all about, but he didn’t let himself get distracted by such musings. The fight was not an easy one. Even a single elite monster could be quite hard to bring down, and now he was fighting several of them at once.
So he focused fully on the fight, giving it his all both physically and mentally. The battle was brutal. He pushed himself to the limit, making use of nearly every ability at his disposal, while his mind worked in overdrive, always calculating, adapting, and searching for the best way to exploit every opening.
Whatever this test was, Jake knew he had to pass it. He was sure Owen hadn’t arranged all this for no reason. There had to be a purpose behind it, and Jake suspected that if he failed to defeat the ravagespawn and earn D’s approval, he wouldn’t receive his “prize,” whatever it might be.
For that reason, he refused to summon his wyrmcallers to deploy combat units to aid him in battle. He knew he had to defeat the ravagespawn completely by himself, had to win this one on his own, without help from either his creatures or Owen. So he kept fighting with everything he had.
It was a tough battle, but eventually, he defeated every last monster D had prepared for him.
Multiple Enemies Killed. +175,125 XP
XP: 195,350 / 255,600
At least he got a hefty chunk of XP for that battle. He then turned to face D. His counterpart began to walk toward him. When he closed the distance to just a few feet from the area strewn with dead monsters, he came to a stop. D lowered his gaze to the corpses, then looked back up and gave Jake a nod. Apparently, he had passed the test. Jake nodded in return and waited to see what came next.
D pointed at Jake with one finger, then opened his hand in a clear signal for him to stay where he was. A thought occurred to him: retrieve his electrolarynx and simply ask D what all of this meant. But then he remembered his very first fight with D.
Every time he had tried to talk to him, he had seemed to get angry. Sure, that didn’t necessarily mean it had anything to do with Jake talking or with the mechanical voice the device produced, especially considering that at the time, D had likely been controlled by his monster side. Still, Jake didn’t want to risk ruining the moment. So he decided to remain silent and let D do whatever was on his mind without interruption.
For another second, their gazes remained locked on each other. Then D turned and took a quick glance around. Next, he dashed toward the building on his left, seemingly having picked that particular structure at random. He ran up to it, coming to a stop a few paces from its front.
He then tilted his head back, apparently looking up toward the rooftop ten stories above. There was nothing of interest there, though. Sure enough, the building was entirely covered in organic matter, and numerous bulges swelled across the front surface, but other than that, there was nothing else of note about it.
D then glanced over his shoulder at Jake as if to make sure he was still watching. Jake was.
D returned his attention to the building before him. A second later, something unusual happened. A thin layer of energy suddenly formed around his feet up to his ankles, hovering just above his skin without touching it. Whatever those were, they really looked like boots, only they were semi-transparent, and each was emitting a faint blue glow.
Then D stepped toward the building’s wall, and something even more surprising happened.
He lifted one foot to waist level and pressed its sole against the wall. When he lifted his other foot, the first stayed in place as if magnetized. Right before Jake’s eyes, D stepped onto the wall and began jogging up as easily as if he were moving across the ground.
It looked as if the plane of gravity had shifted for D. He continued to run up the building as if normal gravity no longer applied to him, as if the wall had become the new ground beneath his feet.
Jake knew that D could use his scythe-blades to climb vertical surfaces, and pretty fast at that. But what he was seeing right now was a far more effective way of doing so. It was incredible. As Jake watched D climb higher and higher up the building, he couldn’t help but wonder when and where he had gotten an ability like that.
D came to a stop about halfway up the building. He just stood there as easily as Jake stood on the street below.
Suddenly, a blade-like appendage burst from the wall and slashed at him in a wide horizontal arc. D easily dodged the strike, and what happened next surprised Jake. D raised his hands, and his fingers elongated into long, curved talons.
Only those were not his regular claws. Instead, they were semi-transparent and glowing blue, just like his boots. Whatever powered the boots clearly powered the claws as well.
As the organic blade swung toward him again, he struck it with his power claws, and they sliced through it with surprising ease, as if cutting through nothing but air. A long tentacle sprang from another spot to his right, instantly lashing out at him. D ducked, the strike whipping over his head. When it attempted to strike again, D counterattacked, severing it as easily as he had the previous appendage.
For the next minute or so, D continued to confront the blade-like appendages and tentacles the nest hurled at him. He darted from spot to spot, dodging and ducking, dealing with every enemy with surprising ease. He never lost his balance, never lost his footing, never once got dragged back down to the ground. It truly looked as if gravity had shifted for him alone, anchoring him to the side of the building instead of the earth below.
At one point, after slicing another tentacle in half, D bent his knees and pushed off the wall. In the next instant, his power boots disappeared. Normal gravity seized him at once, dragging him down. He twisted in midair and landed lightly on his feet, not far from Jake.
The boots were gone, but the glowing claws remained. After a brief glance at Jake, he jogged right back to the nest he had just jumped from. Apparently, the show wasn’t quite over yet.
Upon reaching the wall, D unleashed a flurry of fierce swings at it. What Jake saw next stunned him. He knew the organic layer covering every nest was almost impossible to destroy. Sure, it could be damaged, but it usually regenerated almost immediately.
But what was happening right before his eyes was very different. Every gash D carved into the layer remained. If it was regenerating, it was happening at a very slow pace.
Jake couldn’t help but wonder what those two abilities of D’s were. They were incredibly powerful and useful. Had he always had them? If so, why hadn’t he used them before? Or had he acquired them only after his last fight with Jake? The latter seemed more likely.
Another question was where he had gotten them. Could it be that Mad Mick had developed them for him? Apparently, Mick had been inventing all sorts of things for the Spartans. But could it be that his skills also allowed him to develop new abilities for D to use?
Then Jake remembered the Commander telling him that Mad Mick had implanted some kind of brain chip into D’s head. So perhaps his power boots and power claws weren’t really abilities at all, but rather some tech Mick had developed for D.
His line of thought ended when D finally stopped dealing damage to the nest. A large opening had been carved into the outer wall, wide enough for a human-sized figure to pass through.
Jake simply stared, not quite believing his eyes. In a matter of seconds, D had managed to carve a huge hole through the nest’s outer wall. And what was even more surprising was the fact that the nest visibly struggled to regrow the damaged flesh around the wound. Jake could see it slowly knitting itself back together, but at that rate, it would take several minutes for the opening to close.
D glanced at Jake. For a moment, they just stared at each other. Then D pointed at the entrance he had just carved and waved Jake over, clearly inviting him to enter the nest. Jake had never been inside a nest and therefore had no idea what to expect and what waited within.
He hesitated for a second, then began to trot toward the building. Seeing him approach, D stepped through the opening and disappeared into the darkness beyond. A moment later, Jake reached the makeshift entrance as well.