Chapter 40: Finding Paradise!

Declan turned his head toward the table, where his device was vibrating, and picked it up to find a notification displayed across the screen.

{[ALARM NOTIFICATION: 9:00!]}

"It’s time."

Pushing himself to his feet, he headed toward the bathroom.

After another quick shower, he returned to his room and stood before the drawer console, pulling out a dark hoodie and a pair of equally black trousers.

Once he had cleaned up the training room, Declan headed toward the exit, bringing along the bag he’d been given when he first entered the academy.

Tonight...He would finally make his move.

A move that could potentially change everything!

____________

Perhaps it was because most students were occupied with their classes during the day, but the academy streets were noticeably quieter at night.

Every now and then, a group of students on hoverboards would race through the streets, taking advantage of the empty roads to practice, but aside from them, there were barely any students around.

Declan didn’t mind that. If anything, it made things easier.

After all, dirty deeds were better done in the dark.

He turned into a side alley and pulled out his device, bringing up the map to quickly confirm his destination.

Once he did that, he put the device away, and continued down the path.

With his dark hoodie and cap concealing his face, the few students passing by on hoverboards only gave the suspicious-looking figure brief frowns before moving on, with nobody caring enough to stop him.

After nearly forty minutes of walking, Declan finally reached his destination.

A massive wall stood before him, forming a complete dead end with nobody around. Only a few pole lights illuminated the area, while the nearest building was twenty-five kilometers away.

[You sure about this!? While I don’t think it was specifically included in the rules, I still believe this is... illegal.]

The system panel flashed, making Declan’s eyebrow twitch.

’Hey, I’ve already come this far. It’s a little too late to start whispering thoughts of giving up into my head now.’

He raised his head and examined the wall.

Two hundred meters.

That was roughly how high it stood, which would have been an absurd height for most people.

But for Declan?

Not a problem.

He backed away several steps before suddenly running forward and slamming his foot against the wall, immediately pushing himself upward.

Running straight up wouldn’t work, since he’d simply lose momentum and fall, so instead, he ran sideways, his body spiraling upward as he scaled the wall in a wide arc.

One hundred meters...

...one hundred and fifty.

One hundred and seventy...

His momentum began to fade, and Declan’s body started to drop, but he pushed himself forward one final time, stretching his hands upward as far as they could go while gravity began dragging him down.

The last act made him reach his goal, his hands firmly grabbing the edge of the wall.

Declan hung there silently for a moment as he waited, wondering if someone had noticed him, if an alarm would sound, or if someone would shout.

Nothing.

He pulled himself up and crouched on top of the wall, looking back toward the academy one last time.

Still nothing.

He hummed quietly before jumping, his body disappearing over the other side.

Unknown to Declan, a tiny red dot was glowing from one of the nearby pole lights, having already locked onto him and recorded his entire escape. The red dot blinked three times before vanishing as if it had never existed.

__________

"This..."

Declan stared at what lay before him, his eyes practically sparkling.

"This is paradise!"

Ever since entering the academy, Declan had been thinking about one thing.

The academy was a Nexian school, and it even had an entire branch dedicated to Mech Scientists. Anything involving Nexians or Mech Science inevitably involved mechanical gadgets, and gadgets had one major problem:

They broke.

A lot of them became completely useless after being damaged, with no practical way to recycle them, while some weren’t even worth repairing because the cost of fixing them could easily exceed the price of simply purchasing a new one.

Now, combine that with an academy filled with countless students, students who constantly fought, used mechanical gadgets, and broke things on a daily basis.

There had to be somewhere all those useless gadgets ended up, right?

Declan had simply followed the logic.

If the academy produced that much damaged equipment, then somewhere...

There had to be a place where it was all thrown away.

He had looked through the map on his device before, but there had never been a location marked Wasteland.

Most likely, the academy considered the place too irrelevant to bother including it on the student map.

But after running the map through an architectural overlay, Declan had managed to narrow down three possible locations where the Wasteland could have been constructed.

And now, he had found one.

Standing before him was a vast stretch of discarded machinery.

Heap after heap of dirt and broken gadgets covered the area, with most of the devices reduced to scraps of useless metal.

To anyone else, it was nothing more than a giant pile of trash.

To Declan?

His eyes practically glowed as he spread his arms and charged toward the nearest heap of junk.

[Hey, you’re outside the academy’s jurisdiction for students.]

[They might not have specifically included this in the rules, but anyone with a functioning brain can tell it’s illegal.]

[So maybe get your ass off the ground and hurry up!]

The system hissed quietly.

Declan hummed in response before pushing himself back onto his feet.

He quickly checked his device.

"10:21."

It was already getting close to morning.

He needed to be quick.

With that thought, Declan immediately began his pillaging spree.

He ignored the mountains of ordinary metal and steel. He would have loved to haul some of them back and use them to create something more durable. After all, the spear he had used earlier had been made from nothing more than a tree branch, and it had still helped him survive three weeks in the jungle.

Unfortunately, all he had was a simple bag, and those materials were far too large.

The last thing he wanted was to get caught carrying a mountain of stolen junk back into the academy and end up banned from this paradise on his very first night.

So instead, he dug deeper.

Much deeper.

Before long, he began finding things worth taking.

Batteries, for example.

They were tiny, but each one contained roughly three megawatt-hours of stored energy.

Three megawatt-hours.

For something that small, that was absurd.

A single battery could easily provide enough power for a small neighborhood despite its size.

Of course, they were defective, which was precisely why they had been thrown away.

But defective didn’t mean useless to Declan.

...Into the bag they went.

He also found several broken attack and defense gadgets. Some had defense mechanisms like lasers and net stingers, though their energy reserves had already been completely exhausted.

Normally, they would have been worthless.

To Declan, they were spare parts.

...Into the bag they went as well.

His scavenging continued for nearly thirty minutes before his hand suddenly encountered something strange.

Declan’s fingers pushed through the garbage, searching for anything remotely valuable, when all of sudden, he touched something.

Something...fleshy.

His fingers instantly froze as his eyes widened in disbelief.

"A flesh-oriented gadget!?"

Those things were practically theoretical.

Declan grabbed the object and pulled, but it was hard.

He pulled harder, and strangely it felt as though whatever he had grabbed was actively pulling back.

The resistance only grew stronger the more force he applied.

"No way I’m letting real gold slip away!"

Declan gritted his teeth and reached into the garbage with his other hand, grabbing the mysterious object with both hands.

The muscles in his arms tightened, with veins bulged beneath his skin.

He pulled with everything he had, and finally...

BOOOOOM!

The entire pile of garbage erupted as Declan ripped the object free.

Trash flew in every direction while the object came tumbling out, dangling from his hands.

"Got you!"

His grin vanished the moment he looked down, and noticed it was a tail.

Declan’s expression stiffened, and then he slowly followed it down, and noticed a pair of crimson eyes staring up at him.

Then another pair, making a total of four glowing crimson eyes that illuminated his stupified face with a red light.

"Oh-oh."

It was a Trash Radiorat, and not a small one.

The creature was a full meter long, meaning it was more than half Declan’s height.

But that wasn’t the problem.

Radiorats only had two crimson eyes, yet four eyes were staring at him.

That was because above the rat whose tail he was holding was another enormous Radiorat, roughly 1.2 meters long, positioned directly on top of it.

Declan’s eyes shifted downward.

Then he noticed what was happening.

The lower rat’s long red "koochie"was still buried deep within the female beneath him.

The situation was painfully simple.

Two Radiorats had been having a little private time, happily continuing their species’ bloodline, when a hand from hell suddenly grabbed the female’s tail and started dragging her away while the male was still very much attached.

Now both rats were staring directly at Declan, who silently stared back.

"You know..." Declan slowly reached toward his bag and tightened it shut. The sack was already filled to the brim.

"Before hell and heaven, man, I ain’t even gonna think about banging another man’s wife, you feel me?"

He slowly shook his head.

"That’s some gay-ass shit, man. You feel me?"

He had no idea when his street genes had decided to activate.

"So here’s what we gon’ do, partner."

Declan carefully lowered the rat’s tail.

"Imma just let you off like this, you feel me, man?"

Thankfully, the Radiorats didn’t immediately attempt to rip his face off.

Declan slowly backed away.

"And we all gon pretend like we ain’t see none today. What you say my man?"