Chapter 110: Most Wanted Encounter [200 PS Bonus - ]
Chapter 110: Most Wanted Encounter [200 PS Bonus Chapter]
He stood up from the corpse he had just harvested, and without waiting for the stragglers to finish, he turned on his heel and began to jog rapidly into the distance, followed closely by the smarter members of his group.
Some of them began to call back to their companions, urging them to abandon the remaining bodies, even the ones that still bore essence cores within.
Yet, it was as though their urgings simply went through one ear and passed out the other. Those few individuals still remained behind at the ambush site, stubbornly trying to harvest as many extra cores as they could scrape from the pile of dead bodies.
On one hand, their actions looked foolish, but on the other they simply didn’t have a choice. These stragglers were exactly the Level 5s, 6s, 7s, and even 8s who had entered into this trial ground without knowing the full depth of how dangerous it was going to be.
They simply couldn’t cope with the essence loss. They needed to constantly top up their reserves, else they would become like pure, base humans without any means to protect themselves at all. It was this desperation that made them this reckless.
"Come on, you guys, let’s go!" another man yelled, looking back at the dark figures still lingering over the dead. "You’ve got enough! Get a move on now!"
Some of them finally heeded their calls and began to move, while some others remained greedy. They had moved on from harvesting cores to harvesting meat from some of the beasts they had killed.
Aside from the hunger of cosmic essence in this trial, there was also raw physical hunger. There was no food within this arid desert, so stacking up on free meat seemed like a good idea...
However, just as the few smarter ones among the stragglers began to move, it turned out it was already too late.
A chilling, low droning noise began to emanate from the dark horizon, followed immediately by a series of rapid tremors vibrating beneath the red sand.
The greedy individuals lingering over the corpses stiffened in an instant, their eyes going wide with sudden terror as the noise amplified.
Antoine and those who had moved ahead with him didn’t even bother to look back. Even the man who had just shouted the warning faced forward immediately, locking his focus entirely onto his own stride.
He concentrated intensely on his footwork, doing his best to mimic Antoine’s low, gliding steps exactly while timing his deep breaths to a specific rhythm.
His own survival was now directly on the line, and he couldn’t care less about the fools who had stayed behind.
At the very front of the line, Antoine led the pack, his eyes scanning the terrain ahead. He could hear everything that was happening in the rear.
He could hear the distinct, heavy droning noise of those damned insects — the flesh-eating parasites that made this entire trial ten times worse than it already was.
The trembling noise coming from beneath the ground wasn’t his primary concern. The serpent beasts that roamed these deep deserts could be completely deceived if you maintained a specific, rhythmic footwork and breathing pattern.
This was a technique he had extracted from a Neanderthal warrior earlier in the afternoon, after torturing the ancient man for several hours for information.
The technique’s aim was to disperse your leaking cosmic essence and prevent it from congregating in one spot for too long.
As long as you stepped in those specific patterns and regulated your breathing, you could deceive the burrowing serpent titans, and they would pass right under you.
Antoine continued to move as fast as he could while imitating the technique. His main fear was those incoming insects.
Those things honed onto dead beasts and dead humans. Anything dead at all, even from miles away. It was as if they had some sort of radar that activated the exact second a living thing died.
They moved in massive, dark herds, descending on wherever dead things were like a cloud of flesh-eating locusts.
These parasites could strip a dead beast to the bone within literal seconds, but the real nightmare was what happened immediately after they were done with it.
Once they finished devouring the available corpses, they would instantly turn their collective attention to any living organism remaining within their immediate vicinity.
They weren’t strictly corpse-eaters... that was the trap. They simply preferred to consume dead flesh first before turning their hunger onto the living.
The only saving grace was that their honing senses didn’t lock on to living targets in the same way it did for dead things.
Once they descended on the corpses behind and started devouring the dead flesh, Antoine and those who had followed after him would have enough time to leave the vicinity before the insects’ attention would turn on them.
"Bloody fools," one of the men running behind Antoine muttered under his breath.
Behind them, the fearful screams of the men and women who had chosen to stay back began to resound through the cold night air.
The close proximity of the droning insects had broken their mental composure. They panicked, and because their focus shattered, they instantly messed up the delicate footwork and breathing rhythms required to fool the serpents swimming beneath the desert floor.
Huge cracks split the sand. The burrowing serpents burst out of the ground in a spray of red earth, their massive jaws snapping shut to devour the screaming stragglers whole before the locust cloud could even descend.
Antoine and those who had followed after him said nothing at all, simply continuing to move forward. Antoine had his gaze on a specific dune not far from them. They just needed to reach that dune and climb to the other side of it. So long as they were not within the visual range of the insects once they had finished their meals, then they would be safe.
However, just as Antoine was thinking of this, his system panel suddenly popped up in his view, flashing with a red dot that entered into close proximity to his location.
A confused frown immediately colored his face, and his eyes widened drastically.
"That wanted guy?! Uhtred?!" he muttered in shock.
Practically everyone had taken that bounty by now, despite the fact that it was given by someone on the side of the ancient variants.
Not only him, but he was sure that many of the men and women following after him right now already knew the name Uhtred. The bounty figure was enough to tempt anyone to be curious at the very least.
At first, it had been 10,000 merits. Now that number had increased to 15,000 merits. That was an impossibly crazy amount!
Just who exactly was the guy?
Antoine’s eyes narrowed. He already had a name in mind, and while he knew he might be wrong, he felt fairly certain he was correct.
"Red."
That was the only person who this Uhtred guy could be. It would make sense that the ancient variants were trying to hunt him down.
Despite Antoine not having a pleasant view of the guy for choosing not to come to United New Eden for a meeting, he still couldn’t deny the fact that losing Uhtred would be a very big blow to humanity as a whole.
A person who had climbed all the way to Level 23 in only two weeks was not someone normal, and that was why the ancient variants went as far as to put up a 15,000 merit bounty on his head just so he would be killed in this trial.
"Damn, what do I do?"
Antoine looked between the dunes they were currently closing in on and the flashing red dot that represented Uhtred on his map.
He was heavily debating whether to leave these guys and head towards Uhtred. Partnering up with him would be way more beneficial, and perhaps he could even learn a few secrets as to why Uhtred was so significantly ahead of everyone else. He couldn’t deny the fact that he was deeply curious.
However, just as he was beginning to consider what he would say to the others so he could break away from them, his eyes suddenly widened as he noticed a surprising detail about the flashing red dot.
"Wait, that’s moving too fast... Way too fast!"