BXBX NOVEL Chapter 25 In A Faraway Land
His freetime was spent as such from now on; indulging himself in whatever he liked–stealing, violating, and at times plundering the souls of those who simply looked at him the wrong way.
After a couple weeks of this tyrannical lifestyle, managing to stay undetected through committing such acts in stopped time, he was atop one of the skyscrapers again, holding a smile as he felt fulfilled with this new life.
FWOOSH.
Glancing back, he found the shift in air pressure to be a result of his azure-haired companion warping in just behind him.
Yukio stood beside him while Noah was sitting on the edge of the building, taking in the view as well.
"It seems like you\'ve been living the life, I take it?" Yukio asked.
"You can say that," Noah replied with a smile, leaning back as he looked towards the stars.
Flicked between the eccentric system wielder\'s fingers was a note, conjured by verdant embers before he handed it down to Noah.
"What\'s this?" Noah asked, sitting up as he took it.
Yukio looked at him with a sly smile, "That\'s the location of one of the Sentinel\'s bases."
"...It\'s in the middle-of-nowhere Antarctica?" Noah raised an eyebrow.
Standing beside him as his black suit withstood the high-altitude winds atop the building which presented digital billboards to the tens of thousands of people below, Yukio tucked his hands into his pockets.
"You should know by now that the Sentinels are an overly-cautious organization, especially as things are right now. Let\'s just say you\'ve riled things up, after what you did to Victor and their assault squadron," Yukio told him, "That base there is part of a research facility tucked underground, it\'s headed by one of the \'Twelve\'--a troublesome guy named Asiimov. Word around organization is that he\'s responsible for developing a weapon capable of taking down a certain troublesome somebody–you."
"He\'s got a system, too?"
Yukio nodded, "Each of the \'Twelve\' do. As for Asiimov\'s system, well…I don\'t know much about it myself, but I do know it\'s called the \'Reath System\'."
It was enough information to get Noah into focus as he stood to his feet, slipping the note bearing the address in his pocket.
"I take it you\'re going to head there immediately?" Yukio asked.
"Is there a problem with that?"
"Not at all, but I\'d advise you to move forward with caution. I\'ll admit your \'Creator\'s Grimoire\' is the scariest system I\'ve seen, but in a battle between systems, the more skillful and experienced fighter will win a majority of the time," Yukio warned him.
"Duly noted."
With that, he used ["Spatial Warp"] to fling himself into the domain of clouds before propelling himself in the direction of the far-off land.
\'Ah…right, I\'m probably going to miss school tomorrow. I should tell Emily so she can vouch for me,\' he thought.
While flying through the skies, he spun around, casually flying backward as he took his phone out from his pocket, beginning to dial up Emily\'s number.
[EMILY: Noah? I didn\'t expect you to call so late. What\'s up?"
"Hey, Em. Yeah, sorry–I\'m just feeling a bit under the weather, so I\'m not going to class tomorrow. Can you tell the professors and the others?" He said, speaking into the phone while speedily traversing the skies.
[EMILY: Oh, err, sure. Are you alright?]
"Yeah, I\'m fine. My mom practically forced me to take a day to rest, though," he chuckled.
[EMILY: Alright! I\'m glad you\'re fine…Get better soon!]
Getting his intended message across, he hit the "End Call" button before sliding his phone back into his pocket, kicking off the air with a sonic boom as he bulleted forward like a jet, sweeping through the clouds.
There was an urgency in confronting the enigmatic organization, as it was the singular entity standing between him and the utopia he dreamed of. Beyond that, handling the Sentinels alleviated him of the paranoia of being ambushed again.
\'This time, I\'m striking first, and hard,\' he thought.
Soaring towards the stratosphere, he shattered the sound barrier multiple times over as the sky cracked and clouds parted in his path before he reached the upper-levels of the world, able to look down and look at Earth as though gazing at a map.
\'...Let\'s see, he scribbled a rough map and estimate on this. So it should be…somewhere around there,\' he deduced.
Setting his sights on the massive chunk of frosted land that was \'Antarctica\' he invoked ["Spatial Warp"], phasing through a wormhole before instantaneously reappearing in a foreign land.
Beneath his shoes were thick sheets of ice, stretching on for what seemed to be forever as a roaring snow storm swirled around him, swallowing the land in unequivocal cold.
\'Dome R\'; it was a sector of Antarctic land claimed by Russia. Just from standing there for a few seconds, he could feel just how cold and bitter of a place it was.
["Cold Resistance"] ["Internal Heat Amplification"]
It was only with these two skills that he was able to comfortably exist in the barren land without having his fingers and toes go dumb and ice fill his lungs, beginning to slowly march forward as he looked around.
There was nothing of note; it was empty and desolate, filled only with raging snow, however–he knew this was a lie.
\'An underground facility, right? Well, let\'s flush it out,\' he thought.
As he knelt down, pressing his palm against the snow, he invoked ["Absolute Sensory"], sending a signal of his mana propelled through the sheets of ice and into the Earth below, scoping out what it hid beneath its skin.
It resounded like a bat\'s echolocation, bouncing off of the nothingness below before he finally discovered something of interest that existed below the surface.
"Bingo," he muttered.