Chapter 560

Chapter 559

For a little while, Jake traversed the crystallized city, headed for the location of the loot box. The streets around him were smothered beneath the layer of aether crystals covering everything in sight. Buildings, roads, and wrecks of vehicles had been swallowed by the green formations.

He dealt with every group of crystallized mutants he came across. None of them posed much of a threat to him, and he dispatched them one after another without slowing down for long. Occasionally, he also destroyed clusters of crystals that blocked his path, shattering the formations into glittering fragments that scattered across the ground. All these actions rewarded him with experience.

Unfortunately, the chunks of XP he was getting weren’t all that large.

He had received quite a lot of XP for completing the mission to defend Mike’s group, and in comparison, the chunks of XP he was getting for dealing with groups of crystallized mutants left much to be desired. At the rate he was gaining experience now, leveling up would take considerably longer than he would have liked.

Jake wished the chip Mick had installed in his head had still been working. Unfortunately, it was out of juice, and he couldn’t charge it with mana from his inner reserves. If it had been operational, things would have been much easier.

He had recently evolved to Stage IV and finished the Dark Void dungeon, which gave him a total of ten new abilities to learn and upgrade. Just thinking about how many skill points he would need to acquire to max out all of them made him feel a little frustrated. To acquire and max out everything, he needed skill points. And to get skill points, he needed to level up.

Unfortunately, leveling up was getting increasingly harder. He needed to find a way to somehow level up faster. Simply killing random crystallized mutants and destroying crystals along the way clearly wasn’t going to cut it. He even found himself thinking that if the System offered him another mission to protect another group of humans, or something like that, he would gladly accept it. Considering how much experience he had received for completing the mission to defend Mike’s group, he wouldn’t even complain about having to deal with another troublesome group of survivors.

As he continued to make his way through the crystallized city toward the location of the loot box, Jake was also thinking about what he had learned when he viewed the memories of Mike’s team from the past month. Apparently, Mike’s group wasn’t the only group of humans trapped in Lastlight. There were others out there.

Mike’s team could navigate through Lastlight relatively freely thanks to the aether nullifier they had recently invented. With it, they could move through areas that would otherwise have been completely inaccessible to them, allowing them to travel between different parts of the city without being targeted by the massive clusters of aether crystals covering the streets.

As for the other groups, they didn’t have such a luxury. Each of them was trapped in various parts of the city, surrounded by clusters of aether crystals that confined them to a very limited area. In some cases, the crystals had completely blocked off entire streets and sections of the city, leaving the survivors with nowhere to go even if they wanted to venture farther.

Mike wanted to find those groups and bring them all together to increase their chances of survival in this crystal-infected city. There was strength in numbers, after all.

But there was also another reason. About a month ago, somebody had contacted Mike via radio. The person said her name was Samantha and that she was the leader of the Resistance.

Sure enough, that immediately made Jake wonder if it was the same Samantha who had sabotaged various machines in one of the Los Demonios secondary bases a long time ago, and whom her boyfriend Johnny had later asked Jake to get out of the bandit main base. As Jake had learned later, Samantha had formed a group of resistance fighters there, launching ambushes on the bandits from deep underground and making their lives considerably more difficult.

Jake still remembered the events surrounding her. Samantha had never been the kind of person to simply sit around and wait for someone else to solve her problems. Even when trapped inside the Los Demonios base, she had found a way to fight back, turning the underground tunnels into a battlefield and striking the bandits whenever she got the opportunity.

Now, months later after he emerged from the Dark Void, there was apparently another Samantha leading a Resistance somewhere in the world. That was one hell of a coincidence. And Jake didn’t really believe in such coincidences.

When Jake dealt with Skullface and his main base, Samantha and her people traveled to New Hope, where she became the leader of one of the three strongholds stationed within the city. Her followers were mostly people with whom she had fought alongside in the Los Demonios underground base.

So he couldn’t help but wonder if the Samantha who had contacted Mike and the Samantha he knew were the same person. The Resistance leader hadn’t given Mike any details about herself or her past. She hadn’t mentioned where she came from, who she had fought before, or what had happened to her people. For all Jake knew, she could have been an entirely different Samantha.

But if it was indeed her, it meant that at least some of the people from New Hope had survived whatever attack had been launched on the city. Again, Jake didn’t really believe in coincidence, and all things considered, it sure seemed like the Samantha who had contacted Mike and the Samantha he knew were the same person. The similarities were simply too great to ignore. Samantha had once been the leader of a resistance group fighting Los Demonios, and now she was apparently the leader of another Resistance operating somewhere out there.

So yeah, it definitely looked like Samantha was once again the leader of a resistance group. Only, who was she resisting this time?

The possible answer that immediately came to mind was whoever had obliterated New Hope. And that raised another question. Who exactly had destroyed it? Again, a possible answer immediately came to his mind: the half-machines, also known as the Borgs.

They were the group that had attacked Lastlight, and from what Jake had learned while viewing the memories of Mike’s people earlier, the Borgs were an extremely dangerous, military-like organization. They possessed advanced technology, powerful weapons, and enough forces to make even the survivors of Lastlight afraid of them.

They were likely powerful enough to erase an entire city from existence. If it wasn’t them who had destroyed New Hope, Jake had no idea who else it could be.

But at the same time, it raised even more questions. If it had been them who had destroyed New Hope, why had they done that? After all, they hadn’t destroyed Lastlight.

Maybe New Hope had simply put up too much of a fight, and as a result, the Borgs had been forced to employ their most powerful weapons to completely flatten the city. Perhaps the defenders had inflicted enough losses on the half-machines that the Borgs had decided there was no point in trying to take the city intact.

It was certainly possible. But there was another question that bothered Jake even more. Why hadn’t they crushed what remained of the defenders of Lastlight? Why had the Borgs left before finishing the job? From what Jake had seen in Mike’s memories, the Borgs had possessed more than enough power to wipe out the remaining survivors. They had already demonstrated just how overwhelming their military might was. Yet for some reason, they had simply left.

In light of what he had just learned after viewing the last month’s worth of Mike’s people’s memories, maybe one of the Borgs’ bases itself had come under attack from Samantha’s resistance group. Perhaps the attack had been serious enough to force the half-machines to pull all their forces back and return to defend their base.

If that was the case, then it meant Samantha’s Resistance had grown powerful enough to become a genuine problem even for the incredibly powerful Borgs.

Only it didn’t really add up. The reason for that was that while Samantha hadn’t given Mike much information about the Resistance, she had said that her group was in a conflict with an opponent that was much stronger than her group was. An opponent so powerful that Samantha apparently didn’t believe the Resistance could defeat it on its own.

For that reason, she needed to recruit as many people as she could. So she had asked Mike to find and gather up all the other human groups in Lastlight in one location so that when she came for them, she could pick them all up in one go. She wanted as many survivors as possible, and judging by the way she had worded her request, every person mattered.

She had also asked Mike to either gather the survivors in a place where there weren’t many clusters of aether crystals or to clear the area of them. The crystals, luckily, didn’t respawn, and the System didn’t create new ones. Those that were destroyed stayed destroyed, meaning that, given enough time and effort, the city could actually be completely cleared of them.

Samantha had given Mike two weeks to find the other survivor groups. She told him she would get in contact with him again once those two weeks were up.

However, she was already past due. It had been two weeks since the date she had promised to get in touch with Mike, but she still hadn’t contacted him. Something had obviously happened. Something had prevented her from getting in contact with Mike. Perhaps her enemies had finally gotten to her.

As for Mike, he still hadn’t found any other survivor groups in Lastlight. Despite having the aether nullifier that allowed him to travel through areas that were inaccessible to the other survivors, finding them had proven to be far more difficult than expected. Lastlight was a massive city, and much of it was blocked by clusters of aether crystals.

Jake couldn’t wait to deal with this situation. He wanted to find the leader of the Resistance and see if it was the same Samantha he knew. If it really was her, then he had a feeling she would have a few answers for him.

He and Samantha had a rough past, filled with ups and downs. He’d helped her eliminate Los Demonios and helped her people get out of the bandit base. At the time, they had worked together surprisingly well, despite their differences.

But then things between them had eventually taken a turn for the worse. Jake had later destroyed her base after learning that she planned to make a move against him. Then, later on, he had put a good scare into her, making her admit it was much better to have him as an ally than an enemy.

Their relationship had certainly been complicated. Still, if the leader of the Resistance was the same Samantha he knew, she would be able to fill in some of the blanks for him. Jake had been trapped in the Dark Void for a long time, and while he had learned quite a bit about what had happened in the world since his disappearance, there were still plenty of things he didn’t know.

Samantha might be able to tell him what had happened in the world and how it had changed while he was trapped in the anomaly. More importantly, she could tell him what had happened to New Hope, who had attacked it, and how she and her people had managed to survive.

There was also the matter of the Borgs. Jake couldn’t wait to return to the Leviathan and fly it to the Borgs’ secondary base that the Lastlighters had located some time ago, the discovery that had ultimately caused the half-machines to come after them. He still had plenty of questions about the Borgs, and visiting one of their bases would undoubtedly give him an opportunity to find some answers.

But before getting to all that, he first needed to get to the loot box and see what it had to offer. One thing at a time. So with that thought in mind, Jake continued moving through the crystal-infected city toward the location of the loot box, his attention once again shifting to the path ahead of him.