As Orion shifted his view to Rio's, he saw her swiftly weaving through an endless horde of zombies, barely taking care of a few that blocked her path while leaving the rest be. They tried to chase her, but she weaved in between buildings with enough dexterity to easily lose them before they could process her presence completely.
It's like she's a whole different person… She's going out of her way not to kill too many zombies. I can understand why she doesn't have an insanely high level. Her skills with the rapier are also completely different from what she showed me before. This isn't Rio Futaba, this is Claire Garcia and her actual skill level.
Before long, she made her way close to the highway and ended up going into a large open mall.
Orion immediately noticed the discrepancy. Since it was an open mall, the main street between the shops should have been filled with zombies, but it was deserted. The entire area was devoid of any zombie presence. After walking a bit further, she turned a corner, and Orion saw a thick metal cylinder sticking out of the ground, with a height of three meters and a slightly smaller radius. Raising her arm, she touched the cylinder, and it lit up for a brief moment before hollowing out. She stuck her arm further inside, and a light shone from the inside, seemingly scanning her.
With a faint green light, half the cylinder slid to the side, revealing what seemed to be an elevator cabin.
Orion was watching everything with bated breath as she walked into the elevator and it slid back to a close. It started going down underground as Rio crossed her arms and waited. After an agonizing wait that lasted two whole minutes, the elevator finally opened, revealing a scene that almost made Orion gag.
It was a small circular area, barely twenty meters in radius, but the walls were all made of flesh and blood, as if Rio were inside a living being right now. The most eerie part of it was the multiple deshaped and deformed constructs all around her, hanging in mid-air by what seemed like tens of fleshy tentacles that were going into the walls and ceiling, and also connecting the twenty or so constructs that Orion counted.
As she stepped out, the entrance closed before a similar opening appeared inside the metal pillar, allowing her to insert her arm into it. Orion observed Rio's system interfacing with the cylinder and understood that she might be planning to do something extreme tomorrow with this. He noticed a new panel appearing before Rio's eyes and immediately focused on the inspection rune to focus on it.
[Origin Harvester - Rank 1]
Supervisor: Claire Garcia
Origin Reservoir: 2,105,397
Area under Influence: 2,415 km²
Daily Harvest: 664,523
Active Drones:
Grade 1 Harvester Drone: 95,980,975/day | Total: 6,645,235,645
Grade 1 Assault Drone: 1/day | Total: 634
[Production]
[Drones]
Orion only saw the panel long enough for him to barely read through it before it shifted to another tab.
[Production]
Grade 1 Harvester Drone
Production: 95,980,975/9,980,975
Cost: 499,048.75 (0.05/drone)
Grade 1 Assault Drone
Production: 1/100
Cost: 1 (3/drone)
"Tsk, just when I thought things were going well, this fucker pops out of nowhere…almost threatening my primary mission. Such a waste of Origin…It's going to cost me ten units per zombie—over three times the cost—in penalties to push the production to overdrive…" she grumbled to herself as another pop-up appeared in front of her eyes. "Even worse, I have to waste the entire night manually combining these dregs to make something substantial that can pose a challenge to that monster. Specifically, that katana of his. It's probably something from the outside, and the reason I got his mission. How troublesome…I was planning to lower the production and by the end of the month, push this harvester to the second rank. Now all that is going to be wasted."
[Are you sure you want to consume 2,105,390 Units of Origin to create 210,539 Grade 1 Assault Drones?]
Just as she agreed to the prompt, her eyes closed, and she fell into her mental space. Orion tried to intercept the signal that she received from the Origin Harvester, but that would involve reading her mind, which wasn't possible with his current Grade 1 Inspection Rune.
Still, the revelation of such a mechanism hidden deep beneath the earth was deeply unsettling to him. Not to mention, it essentially overturned his understanding of the apocalypse on this planet entirely. This was far beyond just releasing an airborne virus; it was far more direct and invasive for the planet. Just the first line stating the serial number of this harvester was enough to tell Orion the scale of this planet's invasion. If every single one of these harvesters had a supervisor, that equated to hundreds of thousands of invaders from the Tower of Chaos.
The reservoir was self-explanatory, but the daily harvest part made Orion pause for a moment. The Active Drones section was downright terrifying when he realized that there were more than six billion zombies in the Kanagawa prefecture area alone, with almost ten million being created every day.
Wait, with four months of apocalypse, that can't add up. She couldn't have started at the current number and had to have slowly brought it up there. Even if she had, it's still impossible to produce as many zombies as the population of the entire human race until two to three decades ago… And this thing seems to have a progression system based on ranks; was there some sort of initial burst of zombies that made this number come to be? After all, when I kill zombies, I get either 0.01 or 0.02 units; those lower Origin Energy ones must be the extra ones that were created under special circumstances, while the ones from now are created by this harvester. I get it now, though…I've been killing harvestor zombies that aren't made to battle. That's why it's so easy to kill them.
The following parts that he saw deepened his understanding of the situation somewhat. It also allowed him to understand why there were never any zombie corpses left, no matter how many of them he killed. Their remains, after he sucked away the Origin Energy, were essentially a hollow shell that either dissipated in the wind or was directly transformed into a new zombie with the existing biomass.
"What a pain…" He groaned.
"Let's go," Mai suddenly appeared beside him.
"No need," he shook his head. "There's no point in going there for the time being. We can't access the place. She's going to mount an attack tomorrow. We can deal with her directly then. "Sorry for making you run all the way here."
"What did you see"?
"Something that has now completely overturned my understanding of this apocalypse," he said. "Let's go. I'll tell you on the way. I just want to watch a movie and take a nap after seeing all that crap."
She didn't say anything, but also didn't disappear, calmly walking beside him as he went down to the street.
"You remember when I told you that there's an external entity behind this apocalypse, right? Well, I've come to understand a little more about the way this apocalypse is working. It's more than just turning existing humans into zombies. A lot more…"
He gave her a short rundown of his conjectures after seeing all the things he had seen about the Origin Harvester. She didn't say anything as the two of them made their way back to the apartment and separated. She hadn't said a single word to him and only listened to the things that he told her.
Inside, he quickly cleaned himself off and wore some fresh clothes before going back to the living room.
Still feeling mentally exhausted after spending the whole day keeping track of Rio, he grabbed one of the comedy genre movies from the stash Mai had given him and played it while lazily sitting on the couch in front of the TV. Today had been even more exhausting than the other days in which he had dreamt for hundreds of years and killed hundreds of thousands of zombies. Continuously keeping track of Rio for the entire day while worrying about her backstabbing him had taken more out of him than he'd expected. Adding to that, the huge bomb that was dropped on him at the end, he was very tired.
"She's preparing something dangerous for me… I don't want to be caught unprepared. And I especially don't want to die to her superzombie or whatever…"
Glancing at Rio through the mark, he noticed that her eyes were still closed as she performed some kind of mental task that he wasn't privy to.
Despite his stress, it seemed that there was some kind of magical effect in the movie where, at the eight-minute mark, he burst out laughing. As a few more minutes passed, he naturally forgot about the stress of his situation and simply enjoyed the movie. This one was also a post-hiatus movie from Mai, starring her in an anti-man comedic role. By the end of it, almost all of his stress had disappeared amidst the jokes and laughs.
"Man, she should've gone international… She probably would have if not for all this," he shook his head, resisting the temptation to immediately rewatch it. "Still, she's a gem…"
Turning off the TV, Orion's gaze went to his status. While he had calmed down, he was well aware of the threat pressing down on his head right now.
"Hopefully Rio doesn't pull a surprise on me and ambush me while I'm asleep…"
Name: Orion Vaelor
Exile Gear: Infinite Dream
Specialization: Creation
Origin Energy: 5,335.26 Units
Physique: 117.68
Matter Limit: 20 KG
Runic Energy: 57/117 Units [Grade II]
Aspected Runes: [Grade 1 Inspection]
Slot I: Grade 1 Light (100%)
Slot II: Grade 1 Storm (100%)
While five thousand units might seem like a lot, they weren't enough to get him any significantly powerful ability that would outclass the firepower of his Light Rune. Instead, he decided to unlock the third rune slot to give himself a different means of combat while also pushing his physique to another height.
Consume a thousand units to enhance my physique.
He came to immediately regret those words as his body seized and his voice got stuck in his throat, unable to come out. This was the fastest that he passed out after giving the command to enhance his physique, within mere seconds of the Origin Energy disappearing from his status panel.
***
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