Chapter 546

For a little while, Jake simply circled the wreckage New Hope had become, soaring in wide, silent loops high above the shattered ruins. His gaze swept across the endless sea of broken concrete, twisted steel, and collapsed buildings as he searched for any signs of life.

There were none. Not a single survivor wandered among the debris, and no movement caught his eye. The city lay deathly still beneath him. But Jake would have been surprised if that hadn’t been the case. New Hope was now nothing more than a mangled pile of concrete and metal. Its towering buildings had been reduced to just a pile of rubble and dust. There was simply no way humans could have survived such utter devastation.

What was a bit more surprising was the total absence of mutants. Not a single one stirred among the ruins. One possible explanation was that the System had simply stopped spawning monsters after a city had been purged of humans. Which made sense. After all, what was the point of spawning mutants if there were no survivors left to fight them and gain XP?

As Jake continued to soar high above what remained of the city, scanning the collapsed streets below, he found himself wondering if there were any survivors hiding in the sewers beneath the ruins.

He remembered how terrified he had been to descend into them when he was still human. Once, through a crack in the asphalt, he had caught a glimpse of enormous mutated rats chaotically scurrying through the darkness as they were being chased by a hulking croco-bear. But after transforming into a morphus, everything had changed. Before long, he had been descending into the sewers on a daily basis, hunting mutants and earning large chunks of XP.

So he couldn’t help but wonder if any humans might still be hiding down there. That seemed highly unlikely, though. Even if the terrifying mutants were gone, there didn’t seem to be any way out of the sewers anymore. The wreckage from countless collapsed high-rises now buried the streets above, likely crushing or sealing most entrances beneath mountains of broken concrete and twisted steel. Anyone who had managed to survive underground would have found themselves trapped there with little hope of escape.

Still, Jake couldn’t dismiss the possibility entirely. People had survived impossible situations before. The Spartans, having survived in Dead City for months, were just one example of that. So he figured it was worth checking the sewers himself.

Whether there were any humans trapped in the sewers was near the bottom of the list of things that worried him, though. What mattered far more was how his creations had fared. As his eyes swept over the endless ruins below, he could already tell that the lair he had built inside the ten-story building was no more. It had been completely devastated, just like the building that had housed it.

It had been his main lair, and he had spent countless hours building and expanding it. And now it was gone. Completely gone, buried somewhere beneath mountains of shattered concrete and mangled metal. Which wasn’t really surprising, of course. There was no way whatever powerful weapons had bombed the hell out of New Hope, flattening every building in the city, could have somehow missed or spared the one that housed his lair. It would have taken nothing short of a miracle for it to survive while everything around it had been obliterated.

His very first experimental lair, built in the basement of what had once been a diner, had fared no better. It had never been particularly impressive compared to the others, but it still held a special place in his mind. It was where he had first learned how to harvest biomass from living beings and how to use it to build living structures and develop his own creatures. Now that place, too, had vanished beneath the ruins of New Hope, erased completely as if it had never existed at all.

But even more concerning than the destruction of two of his lairs was the complete absence of his creatures. His crawlers had once roamed the streets of New Hope day and night in constant search of mutants to drag back to the lair, where they would be harvested for biomass. And the managatherers had soared through the air, darting between the city’s towering buildings as they searched for mana clouds.

But now there was nothing. As Jake extended his mutant senses across the ruins, he not only couldn’t detect either of the two lairs that had once been located in the city, but he couldn’t even sense the presence of a single creature. That was definitely concerning.

Clearly, they had all been killed when New Hope had been bombed into oblivion. Still, he kept checking for a while, as there was always the possibility that some of them had escaped before the attack or had somehow survived beneath the rubble. But no matter how far he stretched his senses, he found nothing.

Sure enough, he couldn’t help but wonder if his main lair, the Apex Hollow, hidden deep underground in the Scarlands far from both New Hope and Dead City, was still standing. So he wasted no time mentally connecting with the mana core of the Apex Hollow. The familiar link formed almost instantly, and he was greatly relieved to discover that his main lair was still alive.

So whatever had happened in the world during the past few months (or years?) of his absence hadn’t affected it. That was definitely a tremendous relief.

It certainly seemed he had chosen its location well, hiding it deep underground in the Scarlands, far from human cities, well away from both New Hope and Dead City. He silently congratulated himself for taking the time to choose its location so carefully. It definitely seemed that caution had paid off.

Then he connected to several oculus vines and various creatures scattered throughout the lair to get a closer look at its inner workings. Through countless eyes, he watched crawlers hauling fresh biomass through winding tunnels. Everything seemed to be functioning normally. The lair was alive, active, and continuing its daily routines as though nothing unusual had happened.

The managatherers had once brought mana to the Apex Hollow from New Hope, but that clearly was no longer happening. He couldn’t help but wonder where the lair was getting the mana it needed to sustain itself now. Since it had survived all this time without the managatherers bringing mana from New Hope, it had obviously found another source. The mana core certainly wasn’t showing any signs of starvation.

It didn’t take long for him to discover that his creatures had adapted. After losing the steady supply of resources from New Hope, the lair had found another way to sustain itself. Rather than remaining idle, it had simply adjusted to the new reality, just as he had designed it to do.

Crawlers now wandered the vast network of underground tunnels surrounding the Apex Hollow, capturing enormous bugs and other subterranean creatures before dragging them back to the lair to be harvested for biomass.

As for the managatherers, they now collected mana from clouds drifting through the immediate vicinity of the lair. The supply was nowhere near as abundant as it had once been around New Hope, but it was steady enough to keep the mana core healthy. Whenever a cloud formed nearby, the managatherers immediately converged on it, harvesting every last trace of mana before returning to the Apex Hollow. The process wasn’t as efficient as before, but it was clearly enough to sustain the lair and all its occupants.

So it was definitely a huge relief to know that the Apex Hollow had managed to adapt and survive without his assistance. He couldn’t help but feel proud of his creations. They could observe, adapt, and continue carrying out their purpose even after losing the city that had once supplied them with most of their resources.

If the Apex Hollow had fallen, he would have had to start all over again, rebuilding everything from scratch. The thought alone was exhausting. But fortunately, he would be able to continue developing it from where he had left off.

Still, even though he now knew the Apex Hollow remained intact and functioning as usual, the loss of his other two lairs still hurt. They hadn’t been as important as the Apex Hollow, but they had still been his. He had invested time, effort, and no small amount of biomass into building them from the ground up. They had served him well, helping him gather resources, expand his influence, and grow stronger. Seeing them erased so completely left a bitter feeling in him.

He knew he wasn’t going to leave whoever had destroyed them unpunished. That was for damn sure.

He doubted they had flattened the entire city simply to destroy his lairs, though. That would have been an overkill. More likely, whoever had destroyed the city had done so for reasons entirely unrelated to him. His lairs had simply been collateral damage, insignificant casualties in a far larger operation. Maybe they hadn’t even known the lairs existed. Maybe they had never intended to destroy them in the first place.

Still, that didn’t matter to him. Intentions didn’t change the outcome. His creations were dead. His lairs had been reduced to rubble. Whether they had done it deliberately or by accident made no difference to him at all. They had destroyed something that belonged to him, and that alone was enough.

He was going to find whoever had done it and do to them exactly what they had done to his property. He would tear apart everything they had built, reduce it to ruins, and make them watch it disappear just as he now looked down upon the shattered remains of New Hope. Knowingly or not, they had crossed paths with somebody they shouldn’t have.

He didn’t yet know how he would find them or even where to begin looking. Whoever possessed enough firepower to flatten an entire city wasn’t likely to be easy to track down. But that was a problem for later. One way or another, he would find them and deal with them. He knew he wouldn’t rest until he fulfilled the promise he had just made to himself.

Before getting to that, however, he had a few other things he needed to take care of. First, he descended into the devastated city below and detached from the wyrmcaller, landing atop a massive slab of cracked concrete that had once been the upper floors of a high-rise. The silence was absolute. There were no distant roars, no cries, no crack and rattle of gunfire. The only sound to break the silence was the occasional groan of shifting rubble.

It took him some time, but he eventually found an entrance to the sewers, partially buried beneath collapsed asphalt and chunks of broken concrete. He had to clear away part of the debris before he could squeeze inside. The stale air that greeted him carried the familiar smell of damp stone, stagnant water, and decay.

He descended into the dark tunnels beneath the city and spent some time exploring the maze of underground tunnels, occasionally passing flooded sections, collapsed walls, and abandoned maintenance rooms. The place looked much as he remembered it, save for the absence of life. The huge mutated rats and croco-bears that had once prowled these tunnels were nowhere to be found. The underground felt just as dead as the city above.

And he found no survivors trapped there either, not even a single indication that anyone had ever taken shelter there. It definitely looked like no one had ever sought refuge in the sewers after the city’s destruction.

The fact that there were no mutants came as no surprise. After all, if the System had stopped spawning monsters in the ruined city above, why would it continue spawning them in the sewers below? Without humans around to hunt them and gain XP, there was little reason for the System to keep populating the area with hostile creatures.

Satisfied that there was nothing left to find, Jake made his way back to the surface. Once outside, he summoned his wyrmcaller, merged with it, and took to the skies once more. Leaving the ruins of New Hope behind, he turned toward the Scarlands and headed for the Apex Hollow.