Chapter 467
Marcus watched his people labor around him, hauling heavy boxes of resources and loading them into the two pickup trucks they had arrived in. He himself didn’t think of lending his people a hand. He was in charge of that small team, and his role was to supervise, not do manual labor.
Besides, he’d already handled the hardest part, which was negotiating with Catalina’s people. And he’d successfully talked them into lending Samantha’s group a supply of rare resources. Dealing with people was far more difficult than lifting and carrying heavy boxes.
So yeah, he’d earned the right to stand back while his team loaded the supplies he’d secured into the trucks.
And they needed those resources badly. It had been several days since the morphus had demolished their base, and while they had already restored most of it, so crucial machines and devices still needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Those, unfortunately, required rare materials.
But thanks to the shipnt they had just received from Catalina’s group, they would finally be able to restore the base to the state it had been in before Jake flattened it.
The thought of the morphus filled him with rage all over again. He hated that smug bastard so much! Though calling him smug wasn’t really accurate. The voice his device produced was always chanical, flat, and utterly emotionless. Marcus had a feeling Jake wasn’t even capable of feeling anything. He always seed cold and detached. Even if he’d actually been human once, he was no more.
Humans and he couldn’t coexist. It was just a matter of ti before he decided to turn against them. Marcus had no idea why the other survivors failed to see it. Samantha had once been determined to hunt Jake down and purge his lairs, but she was no longer intent on that. She’d done a complete one-eighty on the matter.
She was now convinced Jake was no threat to humans and that, as long as they left him alone, he would return the favor. And of course, everyone in her base backed her every decision and every plan without question.
As for Catalina’s and lissa’s groups, they had long since started treating Jake like an ally, which Marcus found unbelievably stupid. As far as he was concerned, he was the only sane person left, the only one who saw Jake for what he truly was: a mindless, bloodthirsty monster who cared for no one but himself, driven only by his own desires and ambitions.
While he fud inwardly, his people kept toiling around him, loading heavy boxes into the trucks. Marcus watched them for a mont, still thinking about Jake. He knew the morphus had to be dealt with, but he had no idea how to make that happen. He was completely alone in that. Nobody supported him. Even if so people silently admitted that Jake had to be put down, they were too scared to cross him.
While Marcus hated Jake with all his heart, he wasn’t stupid enough to go against such a powerful opponent on his own and without anything that could give him an edge. So, even though Marcus knew that, one way or another, Jake had to be dealt with, he wasn’t going to do anything just yet. Despite all his hatred toward the morphus and his desire to deal with him, he was able to keep his emotions in check. He wasn’t going to do anything against the morphus or his lairs just yet. Instead, he was going to wait until he was ready.
Suddenly, his PDA chid with a new incoming ssage. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen. As it turned out, it was just another mission suggestion from the System. The mission’s main objective was to locate Jake’s main lair and clear it out. A secondary objective was to locate and destroy any other lairs Jake had.
The rewards for completing the mission were nothing short of spectacular: top-notch legendary weapons and equipnt. However, Marcus didn’t even bother checking the stats of the rewards, imdiately pressing the Reject button instead.
He knew that, now that he had turned it down, the mission would simply be offered to another high-level survivor. The System had been pushing this mission on various survivors for the past several days, but none were stupid enough to accept it.
Everybody knew the location of Jake’s main lair. It was in a ten-story building in the downtown area of the city. It was no secret. However, nobody was stupid enough to accept the mission and raid Jake’s lair.
It was interesting that the System kept trying to assign survivors various missions related to Jake. When Los Demonios had still been around, Skullface had a mission to hunt down Jake. Everyone knew how well that had gone. Now the System was constantly trying to give anybody a mission to destroy his lairs. It almost felt as if the System had a personal dislike for the mutant.
Which was a ridiculous thought, of course. The System wasn’t a living being, was it? Still, it was interesting that the System kept trying to get Jake eliminated. Was it rely an odd coincidence? Or was there sothing more than just that behind those repeated attempts to get rid of him?
Most likely, the System kept trying to give such missions to anybody because it was incomplete. After all, there weren’t many types of missions. There were just several types, and the System always gave you one of them instead of coming up with an entirely new one.
That was obviously how the System had been programd. It couldn’t just invent a new type of mission on its own. Only those who had created the System itself were capable of that. At least, that was how Marcus believed it worked.
This line of thought sparked another in his mind. He wondered who had created the System to begin with. It couldn’t have just appeared on its own, could it? Things like that simply couldn’t happen, right? So sobody must have created it. And what if whoever created it was watching the events taking place right now?
At first, the idea seed far too absurd to be real. But at the sa ti, he couldn’t find a single reason why it couldn’t be the case. And it led to another question: what if the creator was actually watching the events unfolding in New Hope and was intentionally giving survivors various missions related to the morphus? What if the mysterious creator was deliberately trying to get rid of him?
But ultimately, Marcus dismissed the notion. It did sound too absurd. Sure, sobody must have created the System, but anyone capable of building sothing on that scale had to be long gone by now. And there was no point in wasting ti on thoughts like that.
Suddenly, he caught a glimpse of movent out of the corner of his eye. He spun in that direction just in ti to see sothing hurtling through the air before it landed in the middle of the base. A second later, he realized it was the morphus!
Jake had dropped to a knee to absorb the impact, then rose to his feet. Without so much as a glance around, the obsidian-black mutant jogged off in his usual predatory way toward the section of the base filled with machinery.
Marcus turned livid at the sight of his worst enemy. What the hell was he doing at Catalina’s base? He definitely hadn’t expected to run into his mortal enemy here.
He watched Jake approach one of the survivors near a fabricator and pantomi writing. When the person handed over their PDA, Jake quickly typed a short ssage and held it up for them to read. The survivor’s expression turned confused. Marcus found himself wondering what Jake had written. And why wasn’t he using his speaking device? Maybe he had lost it? That would certainly explain it.
Suddenly, the door to the HQ swung open, and Catalina’s second-in-command, a man nad Thomas, burst outside. He imdiately made his way over to the fabricator and began saying sothing to Jake in an urgent manner.
Marcus was dying to know what was going on.
He knew Catalina wasn’t currently at the base, though Thomas refused to reveal any details about where she was or why she was absent. And now, seeing Thomas so agitated only made Marcus even more desperate to know what was going on.
He was about to make his way over there when one of his people called out to him, “Boss, we’re all done here.” When Marcus looked over, he saw that the beds of the two pickup trucks were now fully loaded. “We’re ready to depart.”
However, Marcus wasn’t about to leave before finding out what was going on. He figured that Jake had co only to ask his human allies at Base Catalina to manufacture another electrolarynx for him, since he’d obviously lost the previous one.
But what did Thomas want to talk to Jake about, and so urgently at that?
When Marcus looked over again, Thomas was already leading Jake toward HQ. He turned to his people and said, “Wait here. We’re not quite ready to go yet.”
“What are you talking about? We’ve loaded everything we’ve been given. I don’t think there’s anything else left.”
“Just wait here,” Marcus ordered as he started toward HQ, where Thomas and Jake had just disappeared.
“Where are you going?” one of his people called after him. “What are you…”
“Shut up and do as I say, dammit,” Marcus snapped before hurrying on.
What were Jake and Catalina’s people plotting? He didn’t like it at all. The two sides seed to have gotten awfully friendly, and he didn’t like that one bit. He had to know what was going on behind his back!
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