Chapter 490
Chapter 490
When activated, the teleporter Mick had built for the Spartans didn’t open a portal that led to his main base. Instead, it generated a Dark Void, the same kind of anomaly that turned Jake into a morphus.
The teleporter was located in a separate, vast room, occupying its center, while Mick sat behind the computer in the control room, watching the events unfold via the live feed from the surveillance camera installed in the teleporter room. That was why he wasn’t harmed when he activated the portal. But the same couldn’t be said for the several Spartans who were in the teleporter room.
When Mick pressed the button to activate the teleporter, which looked like an arch about ten feet long and six feet wide, the device turned on. Only instead of a harmless portal, a Dark Void anomaly filled the inside of the teleporter. Sure enough, everyone inside the room was pulled into the anomaly, never to be heard from again.
At first, the Commander was so furious that he beat Mick half to death. After the Commander calmed down, he made Mick study the Dark Void. From the description of the anomaly, they learned how it worked. It pulled in every living creature within its effective range. Once inside, every living being it swallowed underwent a mana-infused transformation into a more powerful creature.
The chances of success weren’t too high, though. If a living being survived the transformation, it was then ejected from the anomaly. If not, it died, and its remains stayed trapped within the anomaly forever. While a mutant had about a fifty-percent chance of being successfully turned into a more powerful version, the chances of a regular human surviving the anomaly were slim to none.
So Mick studied the Dark Void for a while and eventually was able to invent some tech that could provide him with useful data and even control some of its functionality. After that, the Commander decided it was time to put the anomaly to the test.
By that time, they had several ravagespawn captured and held in some of the other rooms in the tech lab. Some of the mutants had been successfully fused with weapons thanks to another piece of tech Mick had invented. The rest of the mutants were still in their original form.
So the Commander made his people bring one of the weaker, unmodified ravagespawn to the teleporter room so the anomaly could swallow it. After the mutant was locked in the room, Mick activated the anomaly from the control room, and the mutant got sucked into the anomaly.
Mick studied the readings displayed on his monitor. The tech he had invented worked perfectly, allowing the computer to predict the outcome and provide him with the exact success percentage. According to the data, the transformation was going to be a failure. And it was.
After a few more test subjects, one of the mutants successfully transformed into a much more powerful version of itself. The Commander was quite pleased by that. He wanted to continue experimenting. His next goal was to learn what the Dark Anomaly could do with a human subject.
He wasn’t willing to experiment on any of his men, though. He needed somebody he didn’t care about at all, someone expendable. It didn’t take him long to find somebody like that. Before throwing Owen into the Dark Void, however, the Commander made Mick upgrade his tech so that it could not only analyze the anomaly and predict outcomes but also control it.
After all, the Commander knew that since the chances of a human transforming into a mutant were next to none, if Owen failed to transform, he would be killed and the Commander would be left with no test subject. So Mick needed to find a way to control the anomaly somehow.
It was a nearly impossible task to accomplish, though. He kept working tirelessly and eventually was able to upgrade his tech to some degree. Now it allowed him to pull the subject out of the anomaly if needed. So if the computer showed him that the chances of Owen’s transformation were too low, he could pull him out of the Dark Void.
And so began the long process of transforming Owen into a mutant. The Spartans would lock him in the teleporter room, and Mick would activate the Dark Void. Owen would be pulled into the anomaly, where it would attempt to transform him. And as Jake knew from personal experience, the process was quite painful. Mick would watch the readouts, and whenever he saw that Owen’s chances of transformation were too low, he would pull him out of the anomaly.
Unfortunately, every time Owen was ejected from the anomaly, he sustained injuries. The Spartans patched him up as best they could, only to send him straight back in. It was a long, brutal process. At least for Owen. Every time he emerged from the Dark Void, his body looked worse than before. Eventually, he became so broken and mangled that it was astonishing he remained alive at all.
The Commander felt no pity toward the one who had once attempted to remove his power, though. He was eager to continue to the very end, either achieving the result he wanted or eventually bringing Owen’s life to an end. Mick wasn’t happy about what the Spartans made him do to the poor guy, but sure enough, nobody was interested in his opinion.
At some point, when Owen’s broken form was thrown into the anomaly again, Mick checked the readouts, not expecting them to be any different from all the previous times. He wished Owen would just finally die so his suffering could end. However, when he checked the computer’s outcome prediction, he saw it was 94% sure that this time the transformation would finally be successful.
Just as the computer predicted, when Owen emerged from the Dark Void, he was no longer human. His broken human body was gone, replaced by something much more powerful.
Before attempting to transform Owen into a mutant, the Commander made Mick invent something that could instantly kill Owen if needed. The Commander wasn’t stupid. He was aware that if the transformation was successful, Owen would immediately attempt to take revenge on him.
So Mick was forced to invent a brain chip that, when triggered, could kill its host. It was implanted into Owen’s head. Sure enough, he tried to resist, but the Spartans greatly outnumbered him, so he was easily subdued.
If the transformation was successful, the Commander also wanted to be able to control Owen. But that task was nearly impossible to complete. The best result Mick was able to achieve was linking the brain chip to the computer in the control room, allowing them to receive a live feed from Owen’s eyes as if from a surveillance camera.
So when Owen emerged from the Dark Anomaly as a morphus, he couldn’t take revenge on the Commander and the Spartans. He was well aware that even though he had been transformed into a mutant, the brain chip was still lodged in his head, and if triggered, it would make his head explode, killing him instantly. So he had no choice but to obey the Commander.
After that, the Commander allowed Owen to leave the base, hunt, level up, and gain new abilities. But he instructed him to return to the Spartans’ base every time he leveled up so Mick could study him. For some time, Owen hunted ravagespawn, leveled up, and evolved.
The Spartans monitored his every movement at all times. The brain chip could not only allow them to receive the feed from his eyes but also inform them about any changes in his stats. Every time he received XP, leveled up, or learned a new ability, they were informed.
Mick found the research fascinating, especially because it advanced his Fabrication skill. However, he hated that both he and Owen were basically prisoners. Over time, the two of them grew close, almost like friends.
Mick wanted to return to his own base, where he could keep working with Owen under better conditions. Studying him had already unlocked new blueprint types in the Infinite Forge, giving Mick access to tech designed specifically for Owen.
At some point, Mick grew so frustrated by his position as a prisoner that he impulsively attempted to escape. He barely planned it at all. Unsurprisingly, it failed at once.
The Commander was so angry that he shattered both of Mick’s legs so badly they had to be amputated. That made Mick realize he could never have been able to escape on his own. He needed Owen’s help. Especially now.
But Owen himself was also a kind of prisoner. If he attempted to escape, the Spartans could kill him by triggering the self-destruct function of the brain chip implanted in his head. So Mick secretly began to search for a way to remove the brain chip’s self-destruct function. He had to disable it.
Eventually, he succeeded. Kind of. He wasn’t able to remove the self-destruct mechanism entirely, but he was able to alter it. Instead of detonating instantly, the chip would now need time to build up power before exploding.
The brain chip used mana stored inside Owen’s body. Because of that, the brain chip initially wasn’t too powerful. If its self-destruct function had been activated when Owen was in the very first stages of evolution, the resulting explosion would only have burst his head without dealing damage to anything around him.
Owen was far beyond that point now. Now that he could hold much more mana inside his body than before, the effective area of the resulting explosion was much larger. Anything within about a hundred yards of him could be destroyed, or at the very least badly damaged.
The Spartans were well aware of that, so they knew that if they ever needed to trigger the brain chip, they would have to do so when Owen was far away from their base.
So thanks to Mick’s tinkering with Owen’s brain chip, instead of exploding immediately, it would charge up for at least fifteen minutes before reaching the point where it would detonate.
When Jake reached this point in Mick’s memories, he stopped using Mind Reader on Mick. He now knew why the Commander thought Owen hated him. Considering what the Commander had put Owen through, Owen had every reason to hate him and the rest of the Spartans. So it was no wonder they lived in fear that one day he would return and slaughter them.
But that wasn’t what Jake was thinking at the moment. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder and saw Owen standing behind him, motionless as a statue. There was a bomb inside his head, and it was powerful enough to destroy Mick’s entire base. Or at least devastate most of it, given how small it was. And because the Spartans were always watching through Owen’s eyes, they always knew where he was and what he was doing.
So if they could trigger the self-destruct function whenever they wanted, had bringing Owen all the way to Mick’s base really been such a good idea?