Chapter 505
Chapter 505
He had never dropped from this altitude before. Would he be fine? Dropping from a ten-story building hardly inflicted any damage on him, so falling from a living ship probably shouldn’t be much different. At least he hoped so. Anyway, he knew he needed to reach the ground as fast as possible, so he employed one of the upgrades for Gravity Leap that allowed him to significantly accelerate his descent.
The ground rushed toward him, getting closer and closer. Just before he was about to hit it, he employed Ground Strike. Thanks to that ability, he not only avoided taking any fall damage but inflicted some damage to the landing zone himself. His powerful punch converted the lethal kinetic energy into an outward shockwave and carved a massive crater into the terrain.
He jumped to his feet at once and bolted from the impact zone. As he did so, he employed Cloak. He ran for a dozen or so feet before coming to a complete halt. As he lowered himself into a crouch, he looked up at the living vessel that drifted through the sky high above.
He didn’t have to wait long. The airship’s cavernous maw parted, deploying a pair of synth phantoms. They immediately began to descend to the ground. Jake was well aware that maxing out his Cloak made him completely invisible to the naked eye, as well as to various magical and technological means. While the ability was active, he was completely undetectable.
So he remained where he was, watching the two phantoms fly downward. They leveled out a few dozen yards above the ground, circling the terrain in tight circles, obviously looking for him. At some point, they reached the crater he had created upon his landing. They examined it for a moment, then resumed their search.
One of the phantoms flew right over him, but as expected, it failed to spot him. After a few minutes of fruitless searching, the two phantoms finally gave up. They flew back up to the living vessel and disappeared inside through its maw moments later. Jake remained where he was, watching the living airship and waiting to see what it would do next.
It kept drifting away in the same direction.
Jake knew that even if he had the means to get back to the airship, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to help Owen. He definitely wasn’t ready for a second round with the synths.
He considered tracking the airship from the ground to see where it went. However, while it moved rather slowly at that moment, it likely could move much faster than that. Whether he would be able to keep up with it when it accelerated while bypassing all the wide chasms that marred the Scarlands was a big question.
Summoning one of his wingclaws or riftmaws was out of the question as well. The former were in New Hope and the latter in Dead City. Both cities were far away from his current position, so it would take them many hours to get to him.
Also, since he had wasted the tumor when trying to escape from his cell in the living ship, he couldn’t just teleport any of his units to his location. Unfortunately, he had a limited amount of space in his inventory. There was just enough space to carry only a single tumor at any given time.
His line of thought stopped when something began to happen up in the sky. Just ahead of the living ship, what looked like a black dot appeared. It continued to grow until it was as wide as the living vessel itself. It looked like a black hole.
The airship continued to drift toward the black hole, its bow slipping into the void, followed section by section by its massive bulk until it vanished entirely. The black hole was clearly some kind of portal. After that, the black hole began to shrink until it collapsed back into nothingness a second later.
The living vessel was gone, but for a moment, Jake remained where he was.
He knew that the reason he had to escape from the airship wasn’t because his enemies were way too strong for him to defeat. No, while those synth stalkers, phantoms, and mantids were dozens of levels above him, he didn’t have any real trouble killing them. So, the real reason he and Owen struggled to defeat the enemy was not because his offensive abilities were too weak, but rather because his defensive capabilities weren’t high enough.
He knew if he were to fight the same enemy immediately, the result would be the same. His Mind Control and Chaos resistances sat at only 25%, which wasn’t nearly high enough to shrug off the synth phantoms’ and the Mantid Goliath’s abilities. He knew before getting into another fight with the synths, he first needed to grind out these particular resistances, and ideally, others as well because he had a feeling that the three types of enemies he had encountered so far weren’t nearly all the types of enemies the creators of the living airship had at their disposal.
Jake also couldn’t stop thinking about Owen. He knew that the goal of whoever commanded the living vessel and all the combat units it housed was clearly not to kill him and Owen but to capture them alive. And the reason for that seemed clear. The mastermind behind it all wanted to study them and use them to their advantage. They likely hoped to either control the two of them like they controlled the stalkers, phantoms, and mantids, or at least perform a vivisection on them so that they could create similar specimens.
In any case, Jake knew before facing the synths once again, he first needed to grow stronger. He had to make sure that in his next encounter, it would be him who would emerge victorious, it would be his enemy who would be running scared from him. But to accomplish that, he needed to grow stronger.
Sure enough, he could do that on his own. But to save Owen, he first needed to learn where the living vessel had gone, and that he couldn’t learn on his own. He needed help in finding it, and there was only one person who could help him with that.
He looked around and soon spotted the wreckage of the crashed helicopter. There was no point in keeping his Cloak active anymore, so he disabled it, becoming visible again. After that, he rose to his feet and headed for the helicopter, hoping the comms still worked. If not, he would have to get back to Mick’s base before he could talk to him.
Luckily, while the helicopter was completely out of commission, the comms miraculously still worked, as he learned after getting close enough to the wreckage to hear Mick’s voice.
“Jake,” he called out in desperation. “Jake, do you copy? I don’t have visuals, as all the cameras have been destroyed in the crash, but I know you managed to bail out of the ship.” A pause. “Jake? Are you there? Please answer if you are there.” Another brief pause. “Jake? Talk to me, man! Are you there? Can you hear me? Jake? Jake?”
Mick was clearly very and very agitated.
“I can hear you,” Jake said as he approached the wreckage, stepping over a shattered rotor blade.
“Oh, thank God,” Mick exclaimed, clearly relieved. “I’m so happy to know you are fine.”
“But Owen got captured again,” Jake said. “He’s still on that ship.”
“I know, Jake.”
”And the ship just jumped through a portal to who knows where.”
“I know, Jake.”
“We have to save him. Do you know where the airship has gone?”
“Yes… I mean, no, not exactly. But I know where it will be at some point. Look, we need to talk, Jake. Can you get back to my base?”
“What for? We’re talking right now, aren’t we?”
“Well, yes, but… Look, what are you planning to do now? You probably want to return to New Hope or Dead City, right?”
“You are not wrong.”
“You’re in the deep Scarlands, Jake. It’ll take you a full day of dodging chasms just to hit the outskirts of Dead City. Double back to my bunker. By the time you get here, I’ll have a lightweight, single-seat chopper rolled out of the assembly bay. You can use it to quickly return to Dead City.”
“Alright,” Jake said. “I’m coming to you.”
“Copy that. I’ll be waiting.”
Jake turned to leave, then decided to ask one more question. “The enemy we encountered. Were they them? The enemy the Whisperers told you about?”
“I don’t know, Jake. The Whisperers didn’t tell me. As I told you before, they hardly tell me anything to keep our conversations very short. But judging by their previous warnings, this feels different. Whoever engineered that bio-ship isn’t part of their war. It’s a third party.”
Jake decided not to ask any more questions for now. For some time, he retraced his steps to Mick’s base. Since the Scarlands were marred with lots of sheer vertical drops he needed to bypass, it took him much longer to return.
When he finally reached the chasm that led to Mick’s hidden facility, Jake saw the promised helicopter parked not far from it. Unlike the powerful helicopter from before, this one looked like a homemade, makeshift workaround. It was a skeletal, bare-metal frame with a single exposed pilot’s seat, a rotor assembly, and a massive engine block bolted to the spine. This helicopter was obviously meant for a single occupant.
Jake settled into the chair. As he was about to turn on the engine, Mick’s voice emanated from the comms.
“Jake, why don’t you come down to my place?” he asked.
“No time. I’m taking the bird.”
“Jake, listen to me for one second! Just after you escaped the bio-ship, the Whisperers contacted me again. They told me a bit about the enemy you faced. They simply call them the Grafters. Whoever they are, they search for any living organisms they can turn into synthetic combat units, fusing them with weaponry, armor, and various types of tech. That’s why they tried to capture you and Owen. They want to study you and see if they can control you. Their plan was to rewrite your minds to turn you into mindless, cybernetic thralls like those stalkers you fought.”
“Figured as much, Mick.”
“And that’s why they will be back for you. Wherever you are, they will be able to find you. That’s why you need to be one-hundred percent ready for the next fight with them.”
Jake already knew where this was going. “Let me guess. This is the part where you’re trying to convince me to let you implant that chip into my head again.”
“Jake, I know how you feel about that, but…”
“My answer is still no. I don’t need your chip to level up and evolve. And from what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t exactly provide any game-breaking abilities anyway.”
“Jake, I’m constantly working on improving the chip. With time, it’ll give you so many advantages.”
“Like I said before, Mick, I’ll think about that.”
Mick continued to argue, but Jake wasn’t in the mood for it. He threw the ignition switch. The engine roared to life with a deafening, mechanical scream, drowning out Mick’s protests. He then launched the makeshift chopper into the sky, banking hard toward New Hope.
It took him several hours to get to the city. Once there, he didn’t waste a second. He quickly made it to his ten-story lair, stepping into the organic matrix of the Fleshport and teleporting to the Apex Hollow.
It was time to finally release the Kaiju he had developed.