It was a scene similar to the first ti. All of a sudden, Amaya’s steps started to slow. She stopped in the middle of the jungle and let Gio off her back.
"The village is directly ahead."
Gio nodded.
"We can’t kill the sacrifices. Even if they were corrupted by the cult’s ideologies, they aren’t criminals. They’re just misguided."
It didn’t an they had to be forgiven or understood, but they didn’t deserve death.
Amaya accepted easily. She wasn’t bloodthirsty enough to care if they lived.
"I’m going to do it myself this ti. If you want to pick one off for yourself, that’s fine, but I don’t want to waste ti."
The words Gio said were grave. Amaya was no longer in training mode, treating him as a student to be taught.
She treated this as a real mission and acted accordingly, charging into the village before Gio could respond.
’Well, I’m not going to deny her offer.’
Bang!
With a loud sound, Amaya started fighting the villagers. It could hardly even be called a fight. The qualitative difference between the Nubile State and the Experienced State was hard to overco whether for humans or beasts.
For the Stage 1 and 2 Sequencers, a single move was enough. They fell to the ground with varying degrees of injury, unable to fight any longer.
Gio only took a few seconds to follow her into the village, but in those few seconds, she’d already subdued half of the enemies.
Hissss!
Gio heard a sharp sound from the side. He raised an eyebrow and moved to the side, narrowly dodging a pouncing enemy.
He looked over to see the reptilian chira. It was evident that she used to be a woman, but her hair had fallen off, her body had been covered head to toe in scales, and she’d grown a tail and claws that couldn’t be called humanoid at all.
She hissed at him again, jumping at him and swinging her claws.
Gio dodged again. It was too easy to get out of the way of movents so obvious. He threw his arm out to the side, intercepting the chira’s path and slamming his fist into the side of its face.
Bang!
It flew back a foot or two before rolling and charging back at him. Gio drew his sword from its sheath and continued the movent into a fluid slash.
The approaching beast was thrown back once more by his force. The Aether in his arms and his blade gave him more than enough power to fight it.
’Its physical abilities feel like nothing.’
That single cut already dug a gash vertically across the chira’s chest. He didn’t have to work unbelievably hard to do damage.
’This is a fight where we’re both the sa.’
Its attacks could do the sa to him. It could tear his body apart with its claws if he allowed it to.
’But it won’t kill with a single swipe like the others, and I’m standing on equal footing to it.’
It was truly equal footing. Its defense wasn’t overly fortified, its strength wasn’t overly developed, and its speed was only so-so.
’This is what I feel like to everyone else.’
He swung his sword again, almost lazily. The chira no longer had the rationality it used to possess as a human. It purely attacked what its instincts forced it to attack.
Gio sighed and sidestepped as the chira approached despite being slashed twice. It ignored the blood flowing out of its body, but unlike the Crimson Ash Bear, it couldn’t keep fighting for minutes on end with such wounds.
’But it’s not human anymore. She forgot how to fear death.’
He swung his sword down. His blade cut cleanly through the chira’s leg, severing it from the knee down.
It fell to the ground at the end of its pounce and tried to crawl towards him, but there was no longer a way for it to attack.
’If you aren’t willing to use a real Sequence, the only way to kill a Sequencer is to be overgeared.’
It wasn’t just because of strength, but also arsenal.
The amount of damage Gio’s current sword could do compared to the one he used in Heaven was enough proof of that.
He raised his leg and slamd his foot down on the chira’s head, pushing it into the ground. It hissed violently for only a few seconds before Gio brought his foot down again and forced its mind out of consciousness.
He looked up. Amaya was gathering the rest of the villagers in one of the small houses. Gio walked over and looked at her questioningly.
"We have to bind them, but I don’t have cuffs. We’ll go old school and use a rope," she said with a shrug.
That was exactly what she did. Using what she could find in the surroundings, she made sothing strong enough to hold them even if they woke up.
In the anti, Gio looked around the village.
’My understanding of how this layout works cos from words on pages. I obviously haven’t seen the blueprints of sothing that never had accessible blueprints in the first place.’
Most of these machines that had been found later on were destroyed in part. They were able to roughly piece together the necessary information, but it only existed in words. Any images were only estimations.
’The processing facility under the central village is where all of the essence is collected before it’s redirected to the main facility. Usually, it doesn’t have to be accessed from above, so it’s not easy to do so.’
They made sure that only people who knew the proper thod could enter. There was no way to find the facility through luck.
Gio went over and grabbed the unconscious chira he’d defeated earlier. Her body had transford back into its human state now that her mind was stable, but that was exactly what he wanted.
He looked over her body until he found a tattoo on her left back near her shoulder blade depicting a seven-pointed star shining above a pyramid of sorts.
’That’s the mark of the Apocalypse Church. It’s more than just an ordinary tattoo.’
Every mber of the church possessed it, but only the highest executives were inford of its true power.
Gio dragged the woman over to a corner of the village.
’There’s a sensor sowhere in the ground. It should be hidden, but not too hidden, and should be marked by an inverted version of the tattoo.’
He had looked around the village before to find it. Now that he had, it was just a matter of using the "key" to unlock the "door."
"What do you think you’re doing?"
Amaya appeared, looking at him strangely. It made sense. There wasn’t a way to hoist the woman up to the symbol without it looking strange.
Luckily, there wasn’t a need to explain.
"This."
He pushed the woman’s body forward and slamd her tattoo into the symbol. Instantly, there was a small glow of light as the two forces recognized each other. Amaya noticed it and moved closer just in ti.
Rumble!
A small area of ground roughly six feet long and wide around them shook. The dirt was unsettled, revealing the inch of distance between the edges of the platform and the actual ground.
As Amaya frowned, that section of ground depressed itself deeper into the earth. She looked at Gio, who nodded and placed the woman in his arms on the ground.
"You were spot on," he said.
"It’s starting to look like you were, too," she responded.
Her expression was anything but happy.
The fact that they were moving deep underground was already enough to prove that at least so of what Gio said was true.
’And if it turns out that even more of it is revealed when we get down there...’
"Haa..."
Amaya sighed.
Really, ever since they arrived in the Wasteland, they’d been falling into murky waters at every turn.
It made her question if the world was really as stable as people said it was.
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