Chapter 545

This time, it wasn’t a sense of free-falling he felt. Instead, Jake felt like he was hurtling through the darkness at tremendous speed, as though some unseen force had seized him and was dragging him through the endless void. And this time, it wasn’t just a sensation. He could tell that his body was actually moving through space.

It only lasted a few seconds, though. Then the darkness suddenly dissipated without warning, and he saw a concrete floor rushing up toward him. He twisted in midair and, upon hitting the floor, threw himself into a forward roll. A moment later, he came to a halt and leaped to his feet, already prepared for whatever might be waiting for him.

He glanced back just in time to see the Dark Void anomaly behind him collapse in on itself. The swirling sphere rapidly shrank, completely disappearing as if it had never even been there. The room fell eerily still. After that, he took a quick look around. A scene of destruction lay before his eyes.

Everything around him lay in ruins, and for that reason, it took him a moment to realize where he was. His eyes swept over broken concrete, twisted metal, and piles of rubble before recognition finally dawned on him. He was back at the Spartan base, in the teleporter room located in the tech lab.

Only it now looked vastly different from before.

The teleporter behind him was nothing more than a twisted heap of metal. The massive arc that had once towered over everything in the room had been reduced to torn and mangled fragments scattered across the cracked floor.

Thick support beams had been bent beyond recognition, while shattered cables hung limply from the wreckage. The concrete walls surrounding the room had been ripped apart as if a massive explosion had gone off inside it, leaving behind jagged gaps where solid walls had once stood.

One weird detail caught his attention. Metal girders and pieces of rebar jutted out from what remained of the walls, twisting and protruding toward the center of the room where the Dark Void had once been.

It almost looked as though the steel itself had been pulled inward by an irresistible force before being frozen in place. Even many of the smaller fragments of rubble littering the floor seemed to have been dragged toward the same spot.

As Jake looked around at the destruction, examining the pieces of rebar extending toward the center of the room, he realized that instead of an explosion, an implosion must have occurred there.

Everything seemed to radiate toward the center of the room rather than away from it. And the implosion had to have been incredibly powerful, considering it had been able to partly shatter the reinforced walls and rip pieces of rebar straight out of the concrete.

As Jake examined the scene of devastation, he couldn’t help but wonder what had happened there. It was clear that some kind of implosion had taken place where the Dark Void had been. But it wasn’t clear why.

Was it a natural occurrence? Had the anomaly somehow become unstable on its own? Did it react to him and Owen entering it? Or maybe the Spartans had tampered with it, causing it to implode?

Another question was when it had happened. Did it occur immediately after he and Owen were sucked into the anomaly? Or sometime during the following hours?

It was time to find out. He finally left the room through the huge ragged hole in the wall where the door had once been. Broken chunks of concrete crunched beneath his feet as he stepped into the corridor. Once there, he took a quick look around.

Just like in the room he had left, it was dark. Not a single light was on. The emergency lighting wasn’t functioning either, leaving the corridor in darkness.

The corridor was empty and eerily quiet. It was obvious that nobody was there, which wasn’t all that surprising. After all, he had spent over a dozen hours in the Dark Void, so the Spartans must have abandoned their base sometime during that period.

Still, he decided to quickly check the security control room, from where Chen had monitored the recent events before activating the Dark Void to eliminate him and Owen.

He reached the end of the corridor and saw that the door stood open. But he didn’t need to step through the doorway to see that nobody was inside. All the monitors mounted on the wall opposite the door were dark. The computer wasn’t operational. Seeing nothing of interest, Jake turned and ran toward the other end of the corridor.

The freight elevator no longer worked. Not that he needed it to. Clinging to the wall, he crawled up the elevator shaft. Before long, he pulled himself out of the shaft. From there, he made his way down the natural tunnel and soon emerged into the main cavern where the Spartans had previously holed up, hiding from the horrors of Dead City.

Sure enough, there was no one in the cavern now. At least no one human.

Jake immediately spotted numerous bugs milling around the area, crawling over tents and boxes the Spartans had left behind. Some rummaged through open supply crates, while others wandered aimlessly between abandoned equipment, their antennae twitching as they explored their newly reclaimed territory. Each of those overgrown insects was easily the size of a bear. And the cavern was teeming with them.

It was interesting. Jake didn’t know exactly when the Spartans had left, but it was clear it had only been a few hours ago. While the Spartans had been there, they had protected their base, preventing the bugs living underground from invading it. Before the Spartans established their base in the cavern, the bugs must have roamed through it freely. And now that the humans were gone, the creatures had reclaimed the territory that had been theirs to begin with.

It was interesting that it hadn’t taken them long to return. It had been only a few hours since the Spartans had abandoned their base for good, and the huge bugs had already reclaimed the cavern. Perhaps they had somehow sensed that the humans were gone.

As Jake entered the cavern, the bugs spotted him almost immediately and swarmed him from every direction. Their screeches echoed through the vast chamber as dozens of massive insects charged across the rocky ground, their chitinous legs clattering against the stone.

They didn’t pose much of a threat, though. Within moments, Jake cut through them one after another, leaving their enormous bodies strewn across the cavern floor. The last survivor quickly retreated into one of the surrounding tunnels, and silence gradually settled over the cavern once more.

Then, standing in the center of the cavern, he took another look around. Ignoring the bodies of the bugs he had just killed, scattered all around him, he focused only on the things the Spartans had left behind. The humans had taken most of their belongings, leaving behind only things that clearly weren’t of much use to them or could be replaced without much effort.

As Jake continued to look around, a sense of unease washed over him. Something didn’t feel right. He looked around again, trying to figure out what was bothering him. His eyes swept over the abandoned tents, supply boxes, workstations, and the countless small traces left behind by the Spartans. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but the strange feeling that something was off only intensified.

He decided to go to the comms room just off the main cavern and give Catalina a call. She had to have returned to her base by now. If anyone could tell him what had happened while he was trapped inside the Dark Void, it would be her.

A moment later, he entered the comms room. Aside from a thin layer of dust and a few pieces of debris that had fallen from the ceiling, it looked much the same as before. A mana crystal sat in the battery slot. It was completely drained, so Jake refilled it with a portion of mana from his own reserves.

The comms system hummed to life, and the consoles flickered as power flowed back into them. Jake wasted no time dialing the number for Catalina’s base. There was no immediate answer. Jake waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The only sound in the room was the faint hum of the equipment and the rhythmic tone signaling that the connection was still being attempted. A full minute passed, but nobody answered his call.

Jake didn’t like it. Even if Catalina wasn’t at her base, somebody else should have been there, taking charge in her absence. Someone should have answered his call. But nobody did. And he didn’t like it one bit. A base like hers wasn’t supposed to be left completely unattended.

There were two more bases in New Hope. One by one, he called them, but there was no answer from either. Each unanswered call made the situation seem a little stranger than the last. It wasn’t just Catalina's base anymore. Something was clearly wrong.

Finally, Jake shut down the comms system, left the room, and returned to the main cavern. He spent a couple of minutes studying it more carefully, slowly walking through the abandoned camp and searching for anything unusual, but he still didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary. With no more answers to be found there, he finally decided to leave the Spartan base.

However, he didn’t immediately return to the surface. Instead, he made his way through the subway tunnels until he reached the teleporter that led to Mick’s base. Before long, the teleporter came into view.

Another surprise awaited him when he attempted to use it. Nothing happened. The platform remained completely inert, showing none of the usual signs of activation. It didn’t let him travel to Mick’s base. He stepped off, tried again, and then several more times, but the result was always the same.

Of course, the mere fact that the teleporter didn’t work didn’t necessarily mean anything. Mick might have simply blocked the teleporter in his base for fear that the Spartans would discover the one hidden in the subway while making their way to the surface and attempt to use it. It was exactly the sort of precaution he would take. The inactive teleporter by itself wasn’t enough to draw any conclusions.

However, when taken together with everything else, it painted a different picture. The Dark Void’s implosion. The three New Hope bases not answering his calls. The non-operational teleporter. And the strange feeling he had experienced inside the abandoned Spartan base. None of those things necessarily meant anything on their own. But together, it was clear that something was wrong. Something significant had happened while he was trapped inside the Dark Void, but he had no idea what.

Finally, he emerged from the subway. It was broad daylight outside. After all the mysteries he had just encountered, he was almost surprised to see that nothing seemed amiss, at least at first glance. The city looked exactly as it had before he disappeared. The Ravage Contamination was gone, and the streets were completely devoid of the organic plague that had once consumed them. So there were now only small groups of regular mutants wandering aimlessly through the abandoned streets.

The buildings towering over him looked just as they had before he left, skeletal carcasses consisting of nothing but exposed girders and beams. The empty structures stood silently against the sky, their hollow frames unchanged by whatever had happened during his absence.

He reached out with his senses and immediately detected the Saurian Prowler. It was still there, alive and kicking, now dealing with regular mutants roaming the city, though not gaining much XP from them.

He also sensed several wyrmcallers circling the nearby rooftops. The winged creatures moved lazily through the air, gliding over the abandoned buildings. He summoned one of them. A moment later, he merged with the beast, taking control of its body and spreading his wings.

Soaring high above the rooftops, he circled over Dead City for a few moments, scanning the streets and buildings below. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. No indication that anything unusual had happened while he was gone. Finally, he turned toward Mick’s base and headed that way.

It took him a few hours to get there. The journey passed without incident, but the moment he reached the area surrounding Mick’s base, he immediately noticed that something was wrong. Where the chasm leading deep underground to Mick’s base had once been, there was now a huge, ragged hole in the ground. The familiar entrance was gone, replaced by a gaping wound in the earth surrounded by broken stone and scattered debris.

Jake landed at the edge of the chasm, peering into the darkness far below. The bright light from above barely reached the depths, revealing only jagged walls and an empty shaft where the hidden base had once been. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like it at all.

He pushed off from the rocky edge of the chasm, plummeting into the darkness below. The walls rushed past him as he descended, loose rocks occasionally breaking free and tumbling into the depths beneath him. Just before reaching the bottom, he spread his wings, slowing to a hover before landing softly on the uneven ground.

Mick’s base was gone. There was nothing left of it. But it wasn’t destroyed. There were no remains, no fragments, no shattered machinery, no nothing. Also, there were no signs of a battle at all. Instead, it was as if the entire facility had simply ceased to exist.

Yet it didn’t look as though it had simply been teleported away. The shattered walls of the shaft, the torn edges of the underground cavern, and the massive ragged hole above made it seem as if Mick’s entire base had been ripped out of the earth by some enormous force. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been a simple disappearance.

Jake didn't have the slightest idea what had happened there or where Mick was now. But he didn’t dwell on it for long. There were already too many unanswered questions. He simply added this new mystery to the growing pile of others he had encountered.

He soared upward and, moments later, burst from the chasm into open air. Climbing higher and higher above the ground, he left the ruined underground chamber behind and headed toward his next destination: New Hope.

The journey took him several hours. During that time, he saw nothing unusual, but when the outline of the city finally appeared in the distance, he immediately realized that something had happened. Which didn’t really surprise him. After all the mysteries he had already encountered, he had expected to find another one waiting for him in New Hope.

He soared high above the city, examining it from above. Or what was left of it, anyway. The Ravage Contamination was gone, meaning that when the Spartans had arrived, they had eliminated it just as they had promised. The organic plague that had once covered the city was nowhere to be seen. But the city itself now lay in ruins. Far more than before, that is.

New Hope was unrecognizable. The familiar skyline had been completely erased. Most of the high-rise buildings had collapsed, crashing into one another and shattering into thousands of pieces that littered the streets below. Entire sections of the city had been reduced to piles of rubble. The ground was dotted with huge scorched craters, some of them large enough to swallow entire buildings. It looked as though New Hope had been relentlessly bombarded by countless powerful weapons until it had become nothing more than one massive, jumbled pile of twisted metal and broken concrete.

As he kept circling the city, Jake was able to locate what remained of the three human strongholds. He recognized their locations easily, but there was almost nothing left to identify them by. Just like everything else in the city, the once-sturdy bases were now nothing more than mishmashes of twisted metal, shattered concrete, and scattered debris. No wonder nobody had answered his calls.

As Jake continued to circle the devastated city, he kept thinking that there was no way all of this could have happened during the dozen hours he’d spent trapped in the Dark Void. There was no way the Spartans could have completely eradicated the Ravage Contamination from New Hope and no way the entire city could have been bombarded into oblivion in such a short amount of time.

There was simply no way such major events could have taken place over only a dozen hours. Which could mean only one thing. Time had clearly flowed differently in the Dark Void. While he had spent a dozen hours battling monsters, exploring the dungeon, and solving its puzzles, much more time had passed in the real world. Months, or maybe even years.

One thing was certain: a great deal had happened in his absence, and he had returned to a very different world.