Chapter 111: Hunting The Number 1 Ranker?
Chapter 111: Hunting The Number 1 Ranker?
"Does he have some kind of speed-based class or what?" Antoine muttered to himself in pure shock.
Even considering the heavy stats and attributes a top ranker would possess, the speed at which Uhtred was currently moving on his panel was blisteringly fast. The red dot was literally tearing across the map.
But then again, considering the guy was the undisputed number one ranked human on the planet, perhaps this level of performance was to be expected.
Antoine swallowed his shock and forced his mind back to his own immediate survival. This was no time to gawk at someone else’s abnormality, his own life was on the line right now!
He urged his legs to move faster, carefully maintaining the low, gliding stride of the movement technique to throw off the Dune Strider serpents. His lungs burned as he regulated his breathing to the exact rhythm required to effectively disperse his essence leak.
Thankfully, his efforts paid off. Antoine reached the base of the massive sand dune in time and began the steep, grueling climb up the incline.
The movement technique became significantly harder to maintain the moment he had to push upward rather than glide across a flat surface. Every muscle in his calves screamed under the strain, but he kept his gaze locked firmly ahead, refusing to slow down or break the cadence of his steps.
Behind him, the panic finally caught up to the trailing edge of his party.
A sharp, terrifying crack echoed through the desert air as a massive sand serpent burst straight through the side of the dune.
The beast unhinged its jaws and cleanly snagged two of the trailing stragglers who had lost their focus under the pressure. The moment those individuals broke their footwork and lost their momentum, their leaking cosmic essence had instantly congregated into a dense, glowing hotspot on the sand.
The serpents struck those specific hotspots and nothing else, completely ignoring the people sliding just a few meters away who were still maintaining the proper rhythm.
The brutal execution further cemented the theory Antoine had been piecing together on his own. These Dune Strider serpents were completely blind.
They couldn’t see physical forms at all, but were entirely directed by an insane, highly specialized ability to track dense congregations of leaking cosmic essence.
The theory also aligned perfectly with the warning that had been unlocked as a bonus tip inside the bounty information cache. The brief text string that only manifested after an ascender officially accepted the bounty request to hunt Uhtred:
"Beware of the sand that remembers what walks above it, but waits for the heat to leave..."
The words played in Antoine’s mind, but he put them to the side and focused on his dash forward, ignoring the frantic death cries echoing from the slope behind him.
He didn’t turn around to check on the casualties. He and the remaining core members of his survival party crossed the crest of the dune in a synchronized rush, immediately maintaining their low strides as they began the rapid descent down the opposite face.
The moment they reached the bottom of the slope, Antoine raised his hand and delivered a sharp, low command.
"Spread out! Don’t let your essence cluster in one area!"
The survivors immediately fanned out along the base of the ridge, keeping a strict distance of several meters between one another. They continued to move in those specific, looping patterns, but Antoine let them drop their speed down to a much slower, sustainable pace.
It was the normal speed the technique was actually designed for, rather than the frantic sprint they had been forcing across the open plain.
They shifted in different directions, methodically dispersing their continuous cosmic essence leaks into the cold night air so the energy would dissolve into the atmosphere before it could form a traceable hotspot in the sand.
At the same time, they made sure not to stray too far from the protective shadow of the dune. They sat there in the dark, waiting patiently for the cloud of flesh-eating insects on the far side of the ridge to finish stripping the corpses of the fallen.
At this point, Antoine was literally crossing his fingers, praying that those demonic insects wouldn’t suddenly decide to drift over the crest of the hill.
If that swarm headed in this direction for whatever reason, everyone in his party would be completely dead. There was nowhere left to run, and their essence reserves were already dangerously low from the constant environmental leakage. All they could do now was maintain the footwork and hope for the best.
To take his mind off the suffocating tension, Antoine opened up the map tracking Uhtred’s position. But the moment his eyes hit the screen, his brow rose in bafflement.
The red dot representing Uhtred had completely altered its trajectory.
Instead of charging straight in their direction like before, he was now moving erratically across the dunes like he was entirely drunk.
At times, he was moving in concentric circles, then later he would be looping around, and then other times he was moving in zigzags across the map, as if he had lost his mind entirely.
Antoine stared at the screen, trying to apply some form of military logic to explain what Uhtred was doing, but he couldn’t think of a single combat scenario that aligned with these movement patterns.
Was he being chased by an entire army of variants? Or was he executing some kind of highly advanced movement technique? Just what exactly was happening out there?
Then there was also the issue of his speed. Even now, while moving in these bizarre patterns Uhtred’s speed was still crazy. In fact he had become even faster!
Antoine’s curiosity completely overrode his caution. He knew that if the insects dispersed without crossing the ridge and coming for him and his party, he was going to trail this guy immediately.
As he watched, Uhtred’s haphazard route began to take him away from their vicinity. The frantic, zigzagging lines were slowly drifting toward the deep northwest quadrant of the desert.
They waited in the freezing dark for what felt like hours, the silence broken only by the rhythmic scuffling of their shoes against the sand.
Then, gradually, the distant, low droning sound of the flesh-eating insects began to fade away into the horizon, before completely vanishing.
The damned insects were gone.
In an instant, the men and women surrounding Antoine released a collective deep sigh of relief, their shoulders visibly dropping as the immediate threat was now gone.
However, before Antoine could even begin to revel in the relief of their close call, he noticed a sudden, eager glint returning to the eyes of the survivors around him.
Uhtred.
It was a known fact at this point that every one of them had accepted the bounty request. Those fifteen thousand merits, which had even originally been ten thousand before, was too enticing a figure to not be curious.
Antoine took the initiative, stepping forward to voice the group’s exact thoughts before someone else could hijack the leadership.
"Well, thank fuck those damn things didn’t cross over here," Antoine said, his voice cutting through the dark. "But we have another pressing matter at hand."
He didn’t even need to say the name aloud. Every eye in the circle snapped directly to his face, their expressions filled with a hungry, desperate greed.
"I’m sure you’ve all noticed the massive prize that just entered our vicinity," Antoine continued, gesturing vaguely toward the northwest.
"Right now, the red marker representing Uhtred, the guy with the fifteen thousand merit bounty on his head, is traveling deep into the northwest dunes. For some reason, he’s been moving like a total madman, throwing loops across the desert. I don’t even think he knows exactly where he’s going. Either way, we need to close the distance and catch up to him before some other group claims the bounty reward."
His statement was met with a resounding chorus of eager jeers and nods of assent. The greed was very evident. Not a single person among them wanted to miss out on the opportunity to gain fifteen thousand merits, even if they were going to split it among themselves.
They had at first thought that Antoine would not be of the same opinion as them, but the fact that he had been the one to step out made them glad.
Internally, however, Antoine was simply lamenting their complete lack of foresight.
Uhtred was the number one ranked human on the entire planet, for crying out loud!
Even for a massive fortune like fifteen thousand merits, was it truly worth it to slaughter their own species’ forerunner just so a bunch of low-level stragglers like them could survive for a few more days inside this trial?