Journey (1)

The Union's base, First floor.

The sun was currently setting, and Erika was getting quite anxious. These past few days, the machineries within the base were deteriorating for some unknown reasons. The engineers were trying to fix it, but no matter how much they wanted to, they couldn't work in the night.

Erika jolted back and forth, checking the conditions of pretty much everything in the base, from the defensive systems and artilleries to even the cleaning robots. They were all showing signs of breaking down.

She wasn't an engineer, so she didn't know how to actually fix these problems, except to write the problems down for the actual engineers to fix.

Now, she was checking the states of the accomodations. They were quite bad, most of them showing cracks and one room even had water leaking through the walls. Water!

During the construction of the base, they had made sure that there were no water in its vicinity. Yet somehow, there was water, full of iron which was likely from a Zirtue, and even some arsenic. This water was quickly taken care of, and now there was only one room left.

The door was simple, with a simple sign on top. Both being metal, Erika knew too well who this room belonged to.

'Jean.'

The door opened, revealing a dark room with everything painted black, even the bed was black. However, those were not what caught her eyes, because on the bed was a red notebook that seemed to contrast everything in the room.

'I remember asking that guy about this thing.'

She approached the bed, sat down on it and took the notebook. Opening the notebook, she forgot all about what she was doing as she read the words before her.

"This is..."

***

About two hours after we had started walking, we stopped for a bit to rest. We had covered quite a bit of distance, about 720 kilometers. Now the ground was more yellow-ish instead of black, as there weren't a lot of Zirtues around here.

"Sir Jean, don't you think we can just remove the elevator and just walk sideways down the base? Won't that be faster?"

Xander suddenly complained about the elevator, well yes, it was slow but it was under repairs, or in better words, in maintainance. It would become a lot faster after the repairs and upgrades were done.

"Well, you can do that if you want."

"Really?"

"The elevator wasn't built for people like us, who can cover a hundred meters in seconds, it was built for the more ordinary. If it was as fast as us, the normal people wouldn't be able to withstand its speed."

"Oh, I didn't know."

"We actually got complaints that the elevator was too fast, so we plan to build a slower one next to the main one."

Jean was also like Xander a few years ago, frustrated with the elevator, so he complained with Erika and got this same explaination.

And he couldn't dispute it, because it was right. Though all the surviving humans all have Zirtues augmented inside their bodies, their brains were still a big blob of fat, contrary to people like Jean who had their brains replaced with that of Zirtue's.

Soon the sun went down and the skies were filled with stars. It was a lot more dangerous to keep going at night because the Zirtues actually get 'angrier' during this time.

We ate our food - dried crab Zirtues and began preparing our beds. There weren't such things as tents anymore, as we all dug down and buried ourselves within the ground.

It was recommended that we dug our beds 20 meters deep. It helped hide from the Zirtues above ground and also underground too.

After we were done burying ourselves, we shut off our brains and went to sleep. How did we breathe?

We didn't.

***

Morning came and as expected, no Zirtues mauled them to death, after all, they picked the route with the least amount of Zirtues before hand. But that didn't mean they didn't encounter any Zirtues, they just made detours.

They all turned on their brains and dug out of the ground. Jean let out a groan as he approached the other two.

"We're a little behind schedule, let's accelerate, once we reach 1400 kilometers from base, we'll need to discuss our route through the plains."

Erika had given them a detailed plan of the journey. Though she said to avoid flat areas as much as possible, Jean thought otherwise. Yes, the Zirtues mainly appears in areas that were flat, but it was the fastest route.

Soon, they had already travelled 1400 kilometers and flat lands were in sight. Seeing this, Jean immediately shouted.

"Stop!"

The other two halted in their tracks as they looked at Jean.

"So, what's the plan now sir Jean?"

"I am guessing Erika had already told you guys to go through the mountains to avoid the Zirtues. But there aren't actually a lot of Zirtues here, you'd need to go all the way to Egypt for there to be swarms of Zirtues waiting for us."

"Egypt...you mean '1'?"

Jean's face twisted at her words. Aceso had been quite silent up until now. He knew that she was teasing him, for using such an outdated map but he just could not remember the new map.

"Okay, let's just stick to the Old map. Alright?"

"But sir Jean, why are you so confident that there would be not as many Zirtues as we thought?"

"You all remember the giant Tree-III that came from the Mariana trench. The one that Anastasia fell and left to rot in the Himalayas?"

Xander suddenly jumped up.

"The one that made the mountains look like ants?"

"Yeah, from my experiences, that corpse actually repels the Zirtues to a certain degree."

Aceso quickly raised an eyebrow as she looked at Jean, who noticed this and explained.

"By 'a certain degree', I meant that it repels the really strong Zirtues, so most of what we'll encounter will be a Crab-I at best."

"No wonder we've only been encountering the trees. Hey, why didn't you tell us this earlier? Wouldn't that have made the journey easier?"

Aceso had many questions but she had to believe him, after all this was Jean, in the flesh. However, she couldn't understand why they had wasted so much time yesterday making detours.

"I actually wanted to scout possible routes for when we return, so that's why I wanted to go slowly."

Xander's face suddenly brightened up. How could he not? He was currently hearing the thoughts of Jean, the actual Jean!

"Uhh so, let's get going everyone, full speed."

After he said that, the three of them left at incredible speeds. Approaching the flat grounds, many Zirtues greeted them, but most were Tree-II, the strongest ones only being a Tree-IV.

Jean had no problem taking out the trees as he dashed ahead, actually, he just rammed into them, making them explode. Occasionally, a Tree-IV would stand in his way, and he had to halt his steps a bit, from grade III upwards, the Zirtues begin to become a little bit more tricky.

Not only do they have a thing called 'core' somewhere random in their bodies, they also possessed unique abilities. And the Tree-IV in front of him seem to have an ability related to speed.

The Zirtue was fast, very fast, creating afterimages in its path. Circling Jean, it would sometimes dash forward to try to strike Jean.

However, it was useless. With an extremely quick movement of his hand, he destroyed all of its limbs making it tumble on the ground. Quickly thereafter, located the core and ripped it out of its body.

The core was quite useful. Well, not for Jean but for Erika, so he quickly pocketted it. Looking around, he noticed that the other two were already done with the Zirtues, without a scratch on their bodies.

Jean smirked as he looked at the two before him. Suddenly, a wave of nostalgia washed over Jean as he remembered doing these exact same things with Anastasia.

"Let's continue."

And with that, they took off. Now, even faster than before. They had just killed about 200 Zirtues, all within less than a minute. Most, were dead due to kinetic energy, while others had a more graceful death.

And it wouldn't be long before they found more of them.

"Hey, didn't you say we need to go to Egypt for such warm welcome?"

"Yeah, I did. Why?"

"Why are there even more Zirtues than before?"

"Well, I did say that the weaker Zirtues won't be repelled by the corpse, right?"

"Right..."

"So, as the stronger ones flee from the corpse, the weaker ones flee from those, and end up here. Adding to the fact that there were already weak Zirtues in the area, it compounds to this."

"..."

"..."

"Let's go."

Both Xander and Aceso were speechless, they had thought that Jean chose to go this path because there would be minimal Zirtues. But it was actually because there would be minimal STRONG Zirtues.

But, they couldn't complain. They were now moving faster than schedule and would arrive in about 5 hours.