Chapter 98: External Aid?
Chapter 98: External Aid?
"Tch!" Uhtred let out a hiss of frustration. "As if things weren’t bad enough already..."
There was the constant cosmic essence drain that he had not figured out how to stop up till now. Then he just found out that there was a bounty placed on his head, where anyone who saw him could literally be after his life. Now again, there was this ominous warning about the very desert itself...
"The System literally doesn’t give a shit about us," Uhtred muttered under his breath and tore his gaze away from the pack of jackals sitting silently on the desert sand in the distance.
With a low, exasperated growl, he beckoned Zara to follow after him as they began to walk away from Bradley and his team, heading towards the crevices of the rocky formations and tall stony structures.
"E—Essence cores..." Bradley suddenly said with a strained, shaky breath before Uhtred could leave. "P—Please do you have any essence core on you?"
"Did you seriously just ask me that?" Uhtred paused and turned with a heavy scowl on his face. "You should be thankful you’re even alive. I don’t usually let people who come after my life go scot-free."
"C—Come on man, my reserves are almost dried up. My body is using essence to heal and mend my bones. I won’t even have anything left to protect myself by nightfall," Bradley pleaded with every fiber of his being. His eyes held a deep fear at the inevitable situation he knew he was heading towards.
If those jackals weren’t enough to make one wary from how they stood in the distance, watching Uhtred and the others patiently like they were waiting for something — probably nightfall — there was also the ominous message, the insider tip from the bounty request he had taken.
Beyond the jackals, it seemed something else was going to happen at night, and Bradley didn’t want to be so vulnerable, lacking any cosmic essence in his core to even protect himself.
"Not my business," Uhtred waved a hand dismissively and turned. "I’m already allowing you to stay on this higher ground and not down there with those jackals. Figure out the rest on your own."
Bradley could only squirm and swallow his words. He knew saying anything more could provoke Uhtred to throw him and his team out to the sands below. So, he held his tongue as he watched Uhtred’s retreating back disappear into the crevices of the tall rocky formations, along with Zara.
"Again, you are way too merciful," Zara commented off-handedly after they had walked several steps.
"Well, he is human... a Level 10 human, to be exact. Despite making such a stupid move by accepting the bounty of the opposing faction, our numbers are so small that we currently need as many powerhouses as we can get," Uhtred responded just as he ducked into a hollow depression in one of the rock faces.
The depression opened up into a vast cavern, a cave with high ceilings and decent enough space within.
Diya and Dennis were already settled in the cave, with Diya lightly using healing magic to mend the worst of Dennis’s wounds. She was cautious with her cosmic essence use, careful only to heal what was necessary and allow his body to do the rest.
She had just wrapped up healing all the major injuries the man had when Uhtred and Zara entered.
"I’d be hard-pressed to call that weakling a powerhouse," Zara muttered sardonically in response to Uhtred’s prior statement.
"Among regular humans, he is indeed a powerhouse. Our numbers are increasing, but there still aren’t that many of us who have reached Level 10," Uhtred responded. "And anyway, I can’t simply kill every single person I come across that wrongs me. I’m not some kind of murder freak."
Zara rolled her eyes. "Says the one who has all our dungeon titles for the most kills..."
Uhtred paused, looking at Zara with a surprised tilt of his brow.
"Are you being sarcastic right now, or are you just salty that you didn’t get any titles despite solo running the dungeon twice in a row?"
Zara only snorted and said nothing, walking to the corner to make herself comfortable on one of the natural stone structures in the cave.
Diya watched their whole exchange with a light smile on her face. "I’m glad Zara’s at least speaking more now, unlike when we first found her."
"She’s even learned sarcasm too..." Dennis added a light jab with a chuckle from where he lay on the ground.
A slight twitch crossed Zara’s face as she suppressed a smile, putting on a wry, unimpressed look before turning serious as Uhtred cleared his throat and looked at Dennis.
"Bad injury to get on the first day of the trial," Uhtred said, squatting down and observing the cut on Dennis’s tendon, which Diya had healed to a significant extent, save for the minor bit that could heal naturally in a short time.
Dennis chuckled and let out a response letting Uhtred know he was fine. Uhtred nodded and immediately began to explain what he and Zara had just found out: the new details of the trial’s geographical boundaries, the bounty on his head, the watching desert jackals, and the ominous warning.
By the time he was done, Dennis had sat up, resting against the cave wall with a thoughtful expression on his face.
"There must be a way to bypass the System’s lock on inside information about trials," he said after a while, raising his head to look at Uhtred.
"Even though the System favors the ancient variants, so far it has tried to be fair in dealing out quests or anything that affects everyone. For high rankers among the ancient variants to know so much about the trials, to the point where they are this far ahead of us just forty minutes into the trial, they must have gotten their information from somewhere, somehow, and it was acknowledged by the System..."
Uhtred frowned, a look of disbelieving realization dawning in his eyes. "The multiversal streaming channel?"
"Yes," Dennis nodded. "I believe the ancient variants are making use of Sponsors and gaining some peculiar benefits we don’t have access to... One of which is inside information."
Uhtred rubbed his chin in thought. The idea wasn’t too far-fetched. Although the Ascendant Favored One had mentioned that Sponsors weren’t permitted to pass across information that would give an unfair advantage to individuals in a fledgling world, perhaps there were cases where it was possible through loopholes.
Aside from that, it made no sense how the ancient variants were this far ahead of humans every single time, even considering the fact that they had had more time to adapt to cosmic essence way before humans returned from the integration space.
"It’s nothing new," Zara grunted from the corner. "We are the underdogs here, the ones the System deems least suitable to represent planet Earth on the grand scale of the multiverse. No matter what is thrown at us, it’s just part of it," she shrugged.
"Zara’s right," Uhtred nodded after a while. There was no use wondering just how much of an advantage the ancient variants had over them. No matter what, the fact still remained that the odds were severely skewed against them.