Transcendent Gene-Chapter 308: Savior [2]

From Gio’s perspective, everything happened so fast that even he hardly comprehended exactly what he was doing.

However, it was a lot easier to see from an outside perspective.

The academy was hit and forced to the ground. When it landed, several airships appeared above Celestelle.

The voice Gio heard came from them.

"The ’Art’ of Sequencing, as they call it...isn’t it pathetic?"

The Apocalypse Church was a religion. Their primary goals were two. The first was to convert others to their cause, and the second was to act upon their cause.

They were doing the latter already. Naturally, they used the fear instilled by their actions as a way to accomplish the first as well.

"We, the real humans, were the ones meant to rule this Earth. Sequencers are not the same as us! They are a plague, and for as long as they exist, humanity will never escape its misery!"

The speech’s contents were as one could expect from the Apocalypse Church.

It was almost a streamlined speech that had been prepared and used several times, but that didn’t matter.

The point was clear.

Sequencers were the problem. Sequencers were the reason why the world was in shambles. Sequencers caused the problems they were trying to cause. Ordinary humans were the true master race and the ones who deserved to own the world.

To someone who didn’t share their views at all, it sounded like nonsense, but to those who even somewhat agreed, they were the devil’s whispers.

And it was even worse when the words were accompanied by images.

VOOOOOOOOM!

A huge wave of aura spread across the world below the floating city, prompting several massive holographic screens to be deployed in the sky.

Around the same time, air reinforcements from a nearby military base arrived. Several jets streaked through the sky and approached the airships above Celestelle.

The screens fully manifested, displaying the world below, where hundreds of beasts were swarming towards the academy ruins under the control of humans who rode them and walked alongside them.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Several missiles shot through the sky, but none of them reached the fleet of airships.

Before they could, a large energy barrier appeared and protected the ships from harm.

The jets circled around, communicating the outcome back to base when they ran into the invisible barrier.

They didn’t have enough time to react.

They didn’t expect the other side to possess military-grade technology.

BOOOOOOM!

Two of the jets exploded. One burst into a ball of flames while the other careened towards the city below.

The other two barely managed to dodge the barrier, but the enemy was prepared for them.

BANG!

An array of purple-black energy balls was fired from the airship, turning the sky into a minefield.

Only a single jet made its way out of the mines. The other was incinerated into nothingness, while the pilot of the other instantly chose retreat over confrontation.

This was much worse than an ordinary terrorist attack.

It took them much longer to notice than it should have.

As the military was embarrassed, showing the citizens perfectly that they could not fight against the terrorists, the speech continued, and their attention was drawn to the screens.

Farrah stood on top of her lab building, frowning as she tried to contact people outside the city.

Their communications to the outside world had been shut off. Several barriers separated the city from the world below and the world below from the world outside.

Everyone was trapped in an inescapable net.

’I shouldn’t have brought him back,’ she thought with a frown.

She saw the same thing as everyone else.

On the screen above her head, the beasts headed towards the academy reached their target.

Nobody needed to be told that their skies would show them a massacre on this day.

Every single person in Celestelle, no matter how they felt about it, understood the event as a disaster that could almost never happen.

Yet, it was happening within Celestelle, one of the most "secure" cities in the federation.

The public was experiencing a great panic. Mass hysteria spread through the city, and the police had no choice but to intervene to keep people safe.

The people who could do nothing but watch an institute filled with young Sequencers be slaughtered didn’t know what to do with themselves.

But...

Surprisingly, the situation on the ground was much calmer.

The most worrisome of the three separate parts of the ruins was where the first and second years were situated.

It was the one place where death was almost completely unpreventable.

The destruction of the academy didn’t leave most people time to react. Those who could react were able to save themselves, but only if they had the power to ward off both the falling rubble and the impact on the ground.

Third and fourth years were fine. They had undergone the training to respond in time.

Second years were split, but first years...there was almost nothing any of them could do.

When Asher arrived, he saw a ruin stained in blood. He forced his stomach to stay still and rushed inside, using his ability to manifest a fortress and collect everyone within it.

His own fortress took physical shape and swallowed the ruin along with those within. The non-living material was all terraformed into a piece of the fortress, while organic matter was kept on the fortress floor.

Almost his entire energy pool was wasted in a single movement, but he also cleared the area faster than otherwise possible.

’Tch!’

He gritted his teeth and stabbed himself with a vial of revitalizing serum that Gio gave him. Feeling his stamina return, he shook his head and looked around.

Some of the students were alive and looking at him, while others were hard to discern.

"If you can walk, come here! If you can hear me, listen up!"

There was a ring on his finger that had been gifted to him by the Mercy Guild. It wasn’t as big as Gio’s by any margin, but it was big enough.

Gio gave him a shelf of healing serum as well. Most of the money he had ever made was spent on this very incident.

Asher wanted to question it and even how Gio knew he had a Storage Hole, but he didn’t have the chance.

He had to concentrate on the task at hand, which was saving as many young talents as possible.

If only he had the time to properly gather people, it would have been so much easier.

However, that wasn’t his decision to make.

ROOOOAAAAAR!

A massive roar shook the fortress, attracting Asher’s attention.

He quickly handed the healing serums over to any students who could move and told them to administer it to anyone who needed it.

They had no chance to adapt to the corpses and scenes of gore before they were mobilized.

To say they reacted well...would be a lie.

A lot of them were in shock and unable to move. If it weren’t for the minority who kept their wits, everyone would have been doomed.

But the minority acted first, and the rest followed.

They healed each other and helped each other so there wouldn’t be any more corpses added to the count.

However, they were always mindful of the pitch-black fortress walls around them. They rumbled concerningly. Despite the roars and howls of beasts coming from a distance away, even the walls around the young students were being shaken by them.

Still, they were protected inside the inner fortress, which had four floors, of which onto the top two had windows. Beyond that stronghold were the main fortress grounds which separated it from the outer walls, which were fortified and manned by phantom troops.

Asher stood there surrounded by phantoms. His arm had three needle marks in it as he looked out on the horde of beasts crawling up onto their land and rushing towards the walls.

"Fire!"

On his command, a volley of flaming arrows launched into the sky, creating a perfect arc before landing within the beast tide.

They elicited no more than a few pained cries, but they weren’t meant to do real damage.

’No good news. If that test shot is accurate, they’re around Origin Level 1-3 or 1-4 on average. Anything under that would have been injured enough for me to notice.’

He looked back at the stronghold, sensing gazes on his back. There were some students in the windows looking out at him.

’I don’t know how I’m going to convince them to play an active part in anything, but...’

He didn’t know how Gio knew him well enough to choose him for this task, but his judgement was perfectly accurate.

Asher was someone willing to tackle these challenges in order to save the first and second years, and he was one person who would never give up on a life that was right in front of him.

Even if he couldn’t man the fortress using the energy of those students, he’d find a way to do it himself.

From the very beginning, that was his definition of the duty of a Sequencer.

***

Whoosh!

Gio dropped to the bottom of the pit in silence. His feathered movements attracted no attention, but he was in the open the instant he hit the ground.

’Tch!’

He clicked his tongue and rushed behind the nearest semi-large structure he could find, some sort of rectangular container near the facility’s outer wall.

He wasn’t stupid enough to send his senses out in a facility made by people who were diametrically opposed to Sequencers. Hekat was more than enough to get the job done for him.

The snake’s imperceptible energy sank into the ground and became one with it, filling Gio’s eyes with information.

’Six people. Two of them have suits on, the rest are regular humans.’

They looked similar to the mech suit from back then, but it was much more tame than that iteration.

’If I fight, I’ll be revealed instantly, but the door is shut tight. It doesn’t look like it’s possible to get through without identification...’

There was only a single change made to the facility, and Gio noticed it immediately.

’Unlike before, they don’t have any energy tanks in the exit room.’

He had to make it through the door on the back wall if he wanted to reach the actual inside of the facility.

’Hmm...’

’Hekat, it’s time for you to show off.’

The Rune of Change was his best option.

Hekat was healed decently now. It wasn’t anywhere near where it used to be, but it couldn’t be called weak anymore.

Gio had to find ways around its weakness to make it useful before, but those worries were over.

Now, Hekat could finally show a bit of its true potential.

Vrr!

The snake charm vibrated joyfully. It couldn’t wait to show itself off.

White energy flowed through Gio’s veins without his prompting and left his feet, fully melding into the ground and spreading like a plague.

Gio’s eyesight was replaced by a view from the perspective of that energy.

The world turned into a grid, and everything inside the world was tracked into spaces on that grid.

’First, the mechs.’

The mech suits developed by the Apocalypse Church used Aether to function and were highly resistant to gene energies. Fighting them head-on or with most special means would leave one at a disadvantage.

’However, Hekat doesn’t use gene energies.’

Hekat’s energy was closer to Genesis Essence. It wasn’t impeded by the same factors as gene energies were.

In fact, because the suits had to be powered with Aether, there were actually pathways within their systems that were catered to energies like Hekat’s.

Gio’s vision crawled up two different mech suits, perusing their energy pathways until a perfect picture of the suits’ internal structures was present in his mind.

Hekat slowly influenced the world’s forces of change.

Nothing worth mentioning happened. At this point, making it look like nothing was happening was the goal.

The suits sparked strangely and started moving more slowly. The machines didn’t completely break down, but both of them suddenly experienced strange errors that could indicate bugs that needed to be addressed.

"What’s going on?"

"Not sure, but I don’t like how it feels. Should we say something about it?"

"Only one of us needs to go..."

"Yeah, but do you want to stay here? Because I definitely don’t."

The men talked without paying any mind to the others in the room.

The four scientist-looking individuals went about their business as if they heard nothing, emboldening the men who were meant to protect them.

"It’ll be a ten-minute trip, at most. What could happen?"

"You’re right," the second man agreed.

"I saw the cameras. The world outside is covered in beasts. Nobody is making it here."

Their suits continued to malfunction as they spoke, finalizing their decision.

Together, the two of them approached the door and looked back.

Though they sighed, two scientists walked up to them and helped them open the door.

’Retina scan, fingerprint scan, gene scan. It’s a thorough system, but as long as I can also get two of them to open the doors for me...’

Psssssh!

Gio stared into the hallway that revealed itself beyond the now-open doors.

Within the next minute, he would be there as well.