Into The Wilds [1]

It had been a few weeks since Gio finished creating the poison bomb. 

The moment it was done, he secured the lab and rushed over to the Old Lady to show her. Once she'd also confirmed that the mechanism looked mostly okay, she told him to wait for a few days before heading out. 

He was fine with that, but a few days ended up turning into a few weeks. It was right around when he decided to finally speak up that the Old Lady told him everything was set. 

She sent him a message that Seb was waiting for him at the city entrance with a car, and he didn't ask for anything further. He equipped himself with his belt, swords, guns, and an additional bag that kept the bomb safe. Before rushing to meet his ride. 

He was able to exit the city without a problem, and pretty much the first thing he saw was a large white truck with tires that looked bigger than his whole body.

He walked up to the window, which rolled down to show him that this was indeed the car he was looking for. 

"You ready?" Seb said from the driver's seat, peering out the window. 

"I've been ready for a long time now," Gio responded, grinning as he opened the door and got in.

The truck was a two-seater with a bed large enough to carry anything one could need in the Wasteland. Some of those supplies existed now, strapped down by black metallic bindings.

When Gio was inside and secured, Seb took off, leaving Gastle behind much more quickly than Gio expected.

"How long is the drive?" Gio asked. 

Seb shrugged.

"You haven't given an exact location yet, have you? I don't know how long it'll be after we leave Haven, but it'll only take a couple hours to get out."

"Yeah…?"

Gio didn't give an exact location for obvious reasons, but he told the Old Lady that it was because he didn't map the coordinates at the time and would recognize it when they got close. 

Still, he thought the drive would take at least a few days. Gastle was relatively deep into Haven, which meant that on a bike like the one Gio usually used, it would take four or five days at the very least to make the trip out into the Wilds.

If Seb was saying it would take four or five hours instead…

"Can this truck hypertrain?"

They'd been driving normally because they were still surrounded by civilization, but Seb's grin was telling enough. 

He had just been waiting until they had a relatively straight path ahead. Once they got to that point, he didn't hesitate any longer. 

"Of course it can hypertrain. Why do you think it took a couple weeks to prepare?"

With that single statement, he flipped open a small compartment next to the steering wheel, revealing a small black scanner glowing with a red hue. 

Seb lowered his thumb onto it, causing the light to turn green. That was only the beginning of the changes in the truck. 

Firstly, it lowered itself as close to the ground as possible. The bed was covered by a metal track that was latched to its door, ensuring that nothing inside would fly away.

The windows surrounding Seb and Gio glowed with a subtle blue hue for a moment before the view through them became slightly more crystalline. The screens on the dash and in the center console completely changed, becoming more similar to the flight controls of a jet than the systems of a car. 

As Seb interacted with those systems, plotting a path to the edge of Haven, Gio suddenly felt like the floor gave out from beneath his feet.

That wasn't the case, naturally, but it could also be seen that way.

At that exact moment, the wheels of the truck detached from the ground and turned horizontally on their axes. The blue haze of Aether was released from where the rims usually were, keeping the truck hovering slightly above the ground. 

The sand around them was kicked up into a storm as if to confirm that they were indeed being propelled upward. Seb looked over with a wide grin on his face, checking Gio's condition. 

"You ready?"

Gio looked out at the desert in front of him. 

It wasn't his first time hypertraining. When he was talking to Ricky about it, he acted like it really wasn't anything special.

But that was a lie.

Whether it was in his past life or this one…

'...the first time always hits different.'

"I'm ready."

His words were the signal. The truck already knew where to go. Seb only needed to give it the word.

And with Gio's approval, he slammed down on the pedal. 

VOOOOM!

The wheels angled themselves with their afterburners facing backwards, and the truck shot off. It turned into a blur of blue light against the horizon as it charged through the desert at incredible speeds.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Subtly, one could hear the sound of the air itself cracking as they crossed the sound barrier. It sounded chaotic from within the car, but there was little to no impact outside.

'Hypertraining wouldn't be so useful if it caused a scene every time it was used. We can hear the impacts from inside, but that's only because most of the money goes into concealing the sound in the rest of the world.'

Inside the truck, the muffled booms were only mildly annoying. Outside, they would have been enough to send all of the beasts and monsters in Haven into a rampage. 

To ensure that such a situation didn't happen, or at least happened very rarely, the hypertrain system was researched until its engineers found a way to mask its presence and volume. 

It was impossible to stop the air from cracking when the sound barrier was crossed, but it was still possible to create an Aether field that contained the sound and impact within a radius of the vehicle. 

When the truck zoomed by, the residual force of those sonic booms would remain, but the initial boom was muffled enough to go unnoticed in a windy place.

The technology had been in development long enough to be near perfect.

Gio's experience was comfortable. The scene outside was nothing more than a blur, but the strange crystalline tint on the windows made it so he didn't feel sick when he looked at it. 

He didn't feel the speed or the force of gravity at all. There was a special Aetheric system within cars that could hypertrain which transformed their cabins into pressurized systems that entirely combatted the impacts of those worldly forces. For him, this was no different from a comfortable ride in any luxury car. 

The takeoff, however, was an unforgettable first experience.

Gio glanced at the main screen in the center console. 

'It really is just four hours.'

Hypertraining wasn't completely automatic. The driver still had to be mindful of any bumps or obstructions that the truck couldn't avoid on its own. 

Seb still had to focus until they were done hypertraining, but Gio didn't have such constraints. 

He looked into the blurry horizon and thought about the future…

…for about ten minutes before he started browsing the various media apps on his phone.

Really, was there a better way to spend the time?