Lost Origins: SS Ranked Awakening-Chapter 103: Twenty minutes

Their supposed twenty minute run had been going on for almost half an hour and they were only halfway to the safe zone and it was only getting harder to advance.

Their bodies felt fucking heavy, the supplies they carried too was extra weight, extra weight they weren’t willing to dump unless absolutely necessary.

SPLASH!!

"..."

The three of them suddenly came to a pause at the same time causing a huge splash of water to rise off the ground.

Each one of them slowly took steps to the back while looking in different directions until their backs hit each other and they had nowhere else to go.

"Watch it, bastards!"

Richard cursed.

"I don’t think this right now is the right time for that"

Kieran’s eyes contracted to the max moving around the black surroundings.

"You feel them too?"

Derrick asked with closed eyes and Richard who was on the receiving end of this question kept quiet, but he knew what they were both talking about.

Hw could feel it too, like countless spiders crawling up his skin. The eyes that had planted themselves on them from within the darkness, he couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there slowly watching them and getting closer.

Kieran on the other hand had pierced through the dark veil of the night and could see it rather clearly, the amber glow in his eyes burning brightly like liquid gold in the cover of the night making his appearance stand out the most, looking more like a predatory monster than a regular human.

With his vision he could see the group of monsters crawling and slowly approaching them exploiting the fact that they couldn’t be seen in the darkness, obviously they had no idea of Kieran.

’What’s that?’

Kieran’s brow furrowed as he noticed the way they moved across the ground and approached them. It was nothing like the previous monsters they had been facing till now.

Those ones moved in an erratic manner, like the crazed beasts they were, but there was something odd about the way these weird grotesque creatures moved, slowly taking their long hands across the ground. There was something deep in their eyes that didn’t fit well with him either.

He felt like he had seen this before somewhere, but he just couldn’t put a finger on it.

"I can’t sense them anymore!"

Derrick’s livid voice broke the silence between the three of them as he pulled off the blindfold he had put on.

"What do you mean?"

"I can still feel their presence, I can sense their eyes on me, but I can’t detect their location on the earth anymore!"

It was just like what Richard felt, only that his sixth sense wasn’t as accurate as Richard’s.

’Their steps!’

Kieran easily identified the reason behind this development.

The previous monsters had moved mindlessly and approached them from all directions.

That was the difference between them and these ones which approached slowly using the cover of the rain.

’Mindless?!’

Kieran finally understood why these monsters felt so unnerving, the way they walked, the way they looked, everything about them.

He recognized the flicker in their eyes and where he had seen it before.

It was the same flicker in the eyes of the shaman he had killed, the same glint in the eyes of the creature that had sent him on a suicide mission and helped him at the same time. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

"They’re intelligent monsters, I don’t know how much, but they used the rain as cover for their footsteps. They move slowly because of that, about 6 meters away from us in all directions"

"Makes sense. What do we do?"

"And why the fuck should he be the one to call the shots?!"

Derrick asked Kieran and Richard disagreed.

"Well, he’s the one who can see them. You’ve got something better to offer?"

Derrick shot back and all he got was the sound of teeth grinding against each other followed by silence.

Kieran who had been observing till now finally spoke up.

"I’m facing the path, so we move with me. They’ll abandon their cover the moment we rush out. I don’t think I would be able to get through. We need fire power!"

Kieran took a pause and continued after Richard gave a Humm of agreement.

"They’re about four meters away now. Richard breaks through. Derrick and I hold the sides. Clear?"

"Clear!"

"Clear!"

Derrick and Richard confirmed.

Kieran and Richard switched positions under the watchful eyes of the monsters and the team of three slowly advanced towards Richard’s edge of the circle slowly without alerting the monsters.

"Now!"

About 2 meters away from the monsters, Kieran gave a signal and Richard shot a blast of flames in the general direction in front of him and broke into a sprint while taking his fire power to the max.

’Not so intelligent then!’

Kieran studied the reaction of the monsters as their pained screams broke through the cover of the rain.

The screams alerted those at the side as they all abandoned their slow walk and approached them in a mad sprint similar to the monsters from before.

A small smile flashes across Derrick’s face as he could sense them as clear as seeing in daylight. Kieran on the other hand didn’t have a particular expression on his face as he watched how the monsters closed in on them with their long limbs.

"Faster!"

He said to Richard who upped his flames again and ran even faster, while Kieran shot as many creatures as he could shoot, pressing a button on the side of the weapon and tossing into the group of monsters.

BANG!!

The weapon exploded and it killed a few of the monsters slowing down their chase a little, but that time was enough for him to pull out his scythe.

It didn’t take long for them to catch up again, and he swung the scythe, cutting off the front limbs of most of them, leaving them immobile.

Luckily, it didn’t seem like there were a lot more monsters in the front or they had been either burnt or scared off by Richard’s flames.

It was a curious scene if viewed from above. An horizontal pillar of flames cut through the darkness in the fields.

About an hour later, after several sessions of swinging, cutting off limbs and constant burning, they finally arrived at the safe zone.

It had already been night for the past few hours without any sign of the sun rising. On a planet where they could just go from day to night in a few seconds, who was to say that the opposite couldn’t happen too.

They had successfully managed to make those monsters give up after a while and now that they had made it into a relatively safer zone, they all crashed to the floor in exhaustion.

"Haaa!!"

Kieran laid his back on the floor, taking deep breaths, it felt like he had been fighting for ages, his arms burnt, but for some odd reason, while his arms burnt and he could feel his muscles grow sore, they didn’t hurt as much as he expected.

The others had also noticed something similar and they all knew why, but that didn’t mean they were willing to accept it.

The broken training August had tailored for them was showing its effects, but they were all reluctant to admit that anything was worth going through that kind of pain for.

"Sigh!"

Kieran sat up and took out some nutrient capsules and some dried rations to eat. He didn’t need to get filled, just enough not to feel hungry was okay.

The other’s did the same and after a few minutes of rest, Kieran asked Derrick for an update on their location and how far off they had strayed from their destination.

Low-key Kieran had somehow become the one incharge of the mission to the silent dissatisfaction of Richard and Derrick who didn’t seem to mind how things had turned out at all.

Before the mission, Kieran had found out how much better Derrick was when it came to reading maps and scouting. His ability was basically suited for it outside combat.

"We went off track by quite a lot..."

Derrick trailed away, looking up at the sky which had stopped pouring.

"It should take us less than the original half a day, between 5 – 7 hours."

The gaze in Kieran’s eyes deepened.

They had been held back by the sudden change to night, the rain, and the monsters they had to fight through.

Considering the fact that the other group which had set out earlier had didn’t have to face the same thing they did, they had to speed up rapidly if they still wanted go gat any hopes of catching up.

Luckily area XA-24 was only the start of the mission, but the rain would have washed off any tracks of them they would have relied on.

"Let’s go, we don’t have time go waste"

Kieran said rising go his feet along with the others, luckily their bags hadn’t suffered much damage so all their supplies were still intact.