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Chapter 231: Jack-Style Break-Out
🕑 Added 2023-07-12 17:36:00 +0000 UTC“Vanderdecken!?”
Of all the people Jack expected to see as a prisoner in this Animal Kingdom encampment, Vanderdecken was not one of them.
The man had changed quite a bit. Last time Jack saw him, it was back in Earth’s Integration Tournament, when he used his magical electric guitar and Dao of Metal to fight against the Animal Kingdom forces. Back then, he’d been a spirited young man with long hair, chains hanging from his leather jacket, and permanently raised pinkies and index fingers.
Now, he looked like a defeated version of his previous self. His long hair hung soullessly down his shoulders, dirty like he hadn’t washed them in a month. All the chains had been torn away from his clothes, dark shackles bound his wrists, and his guitar was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he was now wielding a rusty pickaxe, repeatedly smashing it into random rocks under this planet’s scorching sun.
In short, he looked terrible.
“Terrible,” Brock muttered from the side.
“That’s what I thought!” Jack replied. “What is he even doing here? He’s not supposed to be out of Earth, let alone out of the Animal Kingdom constellation. And why is he captured?”
A quick scan confirmed that this was, indeed, Vanderdecken. His planet of origin was pretty conclusive. At least, he’d broken through to the E-Grade.
Human (Earth-387), Level 52 (E-Grade)
Faction: -
There was no title visible, even though Jack knew Vanderdecken had at least acquired a Planetary Frontrunner variant. Probably a Planetary Torchbearer, too. He must have chosen not to display them, like Jack had.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t helped him.
“Bro,” said Brock. “Help?”
“Absolutely. We’ve fought shoulder-to-shoulder with that guy. We can’t just let him be a prisoner of the enemy.”
Brock chuckled and bumped his fists together. “Brock smash,” he said.
“Right. Brock smash. The question is, how?”
Jack had previously decided not to bother with this Animal Kingdom encampment, as it was not worth the risk. The moment he saw Vanderdecken, however, that decision was instantly reversed.
Now, they just had to find the best way to go about it.
“Charging them wouldn’t work,” Jack contemplated aloud. “The E-Grade guards are negligible, but they have a late D-Grade and two low ones, plus anyone else that we haven’t spotted yet. I guess we have to sneak in during the night?”
Brock nodded.
“And then what?” Jack resumed his train of thought. “Say we break them out. All the guards will be on us instantly, so we’ll have to fight them anyway. We can’t exactly run away while carrying a bunch of prisoners.”
A quick inspection revealed that, of the prisoners, none was at the D-Grade. They couldn’t help Jack against the D-Grade guards. They couldn’t escape fast enough either, even if Jack found a way to remove their shackles.
“I guess we have to fight the wardens after all,” he concluded. “Time to see if I can match a late D-Grade. I probably should…right? I defeated the three middle D-Grade Hounds. Why not one late D-Grade?”
Brock nodded. “Yes. But.” He pondered for a moment, trying to find the right word. He pointed up at the sun, then mimed it arcing all the way to below the horizon.
“Night?” Jack tried.
“Yes.”
“Sure. Even if it all comes down to combat anyway, we can try to sneak in at night. The element of surprise is a dependable ally.”
“Good bro.”
“Exactly.” Jack reached into his pocket and retrieved the buzzer they’d received from the teleportation hub. “Now, we just have to hope this doesn’t—” The buzzer began to glow and echo with a low buzz. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
This buzzer was supposed to activate when they were the thousandth people in line to teleport, and it meant they should rush over. According to Torm, it usually took two to three days. It had only been one.
“Fuck my life,” Jack said, sighing. “Well, no choice. Guess we have to miss our flight.”
Brock nodded like it was natural.
Which it was. What kind of person would abandon their brother-in-arms when they could just go get a new buzzer at anytime? Waiting another day, or couple of days, was nothing.
Jack tried to deactivate the buzzer. When he was unable to, and so was Brock, they flew away and left it on top of a distant mountain, where it could buzz alone for as long as it liked.
Then, it was strategizing time.
The first thing they did was fly to the teleporter hub and get a new buzzer. The process went without a hitch—all they had to do was declare their destination to the register. Jack’s disguise had been broken when he used Meteor Punch before, so he didn’t need to worry about it being spotted by the guards.
In return, he had to worry about people recognizing his faction and deducing his identity, but it shouldn’t be a problem this deep into the Exploding Sun constellation.
After getting their new buzzer and quickly leaving town again, they landed on the same mountain peak they’d previously used to spy on the Animal Kingdom encampment. Hidden behind boulders and cliffs, they set to watching the wardens and waiting for night time.
The sun moved fast. Jack didn’t know much about Derion—the planet they were currently on—but its day and night cycle was noticeably faster than Earth’s. After about four hours, the sun had descended from its peak to the horizon, where it slowly disappeared after painting the sky dark red for a while.
The night was dark on Derion. The heavy miasmic clouds hid away the stars, and Jack failed to spot any moon. In combination with the planet’s empty wastelands, it was like someone had draped a black blanket over the land. The only source of light in sight was the pale torchlight coming from the Animal Kingdom encampment.
In fact, this night was so dark that Jack couldn’t even make out the ground from where he stood on the mountaintop. It felt like he was trapped in a lightless, empty sphere, like the dark part of Trial Planet’s Space Ring.
It was terrifying. At the same time, it made their job easier.
Hardening their hearts, a man and a brorilla descended from their peak, one flying and the other riding on the first’s shoulders. They flew low, under the cover of the night, until they were at the lip of the canyon where the Animal Kingdom had set up camp.
They peeked down.
Not many things were visible in the little light. The large red tent stood in the middle, only licked by the torchlight when the wind made it sway. Four more tents were spread around it, gray in color. The cage stood ten feet away from the red tent, its steel bars doing little to shield the prisoners from the cold night wind, while three guards patrolled the perimeter inside the canyon. There were another three outside the canyon, but given its size and the night’s darkness, Jack had easily remained unseen.
Overall, the canyon stretched for miles in either direction, had a width of several hundred feet, and a depth of at least fifty. The encampment took up one of its broader parts, leaving heavy darkness on either side.
Jack took all of this in with one glance. He knew that the three immortals stayed in the red tent, so he had to remain as far away from it as possible. Thankfully, it didn’t look like they expected an attack, or there would have been an immortal standing guard as well.
“Let’s go,” he whispered to Brock.
He let himself fall into the canyon, gliding smoothly next to the wall and remaining shrouded in darkness. Despite that, he tried to avoid the guards’ gazes as best as possible—maybe they had darkvision.
When his feet touched the canyon floor, he crouched and waited for a moment, ears tense to pick up any sign of activity.
Nothing. The guards stayed on their patrol routes, and the red tent remained undisturbed. It looked like they weren’t noticed. Good, Jack thought. Brock dismounted from his back, since they no longer needed to fly, and the two of them crept together until the nearest tent.
Jack had flashbacks of his infiltration into the goblin village in the Forest of the Strong. He couldn’t help the grin on his lips.
They reached the tent and stayed still. Brock held his breath, while Jack just deactivated his, which was more of an instinct than a necessity at this point. When no suspicious sounds came—besides the discreet snoring from inside the tent—they circled around it to come face-to-face with the cage. They crouched by the side of the tent, where the darkness was densest.
Fifteen feet still separated them from the iron bars, but they didn’t actually need to approach it. The D-Grade came with all sorts of nifty abilities. Flying was one of them. Transmitting your thoughts into another person’s head with the Dao as your conduit was another.
Jack glimpsed Vanderdecken’s angular face, tucked into a ball between other prisoners. His eyelids were flickering, and his body was shaking from the cold.
“Vanderdecken,” Jack thought, focusing. No response. “Vanderdecken!”
The man’s eyes shot open as he looked around in confusion and fear.
“Don’t make a sound!” Jack said telepathically. “I am an immortal here to rescue you. I am currently speaking inside your mind. You can reply the same way. Pretend there is nothing wrong, or the guards might be on to us.”
Vanderdecken closed his eyes and pretended to fall back asleep. Silence reigned for a while. As Jack was beginning to believe the man really had returned to his sleep, a tired voice rang inside his mind, transmitted back from the same Dao strand that Jack was using as a conduit.
“How do you know my name?” Vanderdecken asked.
“Because I’m Jack Rust.”
Silence fell again. Jack could almost hear Vanderdecken’s disbelief.
“Jack Rust?” he finally asked.
“Yes. It’s a long story, but let’s just say this is a huge coincidence. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is, I’m here to rescue you.”
Vanderdecken sounded hesitant. Finally, he asked, “Who did you shag during the Integration Tournament?”
“…This is highly inappropriate.”
“It is something a fake wouldn’t know. Answer me.”
“…”
“Come on. It wasn’t a secret, anyway.”
“Vivi.”
“Dude!!! Holy shit, it really is you!!” Vanderdecken’s mental voice did a sudden one-eighty, and back was the hopeful young bard. “It’s been so long! How the hell have you been?”
“Pretty good. I explored a bit, kicked some ass, became an immortal. You know, typical Monday stuff.”
“Duuude, that’s awesome. Can you, like, fly now?”
“I can.”
“Will you take me for a ride?”
“You do understand that you’re still a prisoner, right?”
“Please?”
“…Yeah, I will. But focus. Chitchatting can wait until later. Right now, we have to rescue you.”
“How did you become an immortal so fast!?”
“Vanderdecken. Focus.”
Jack was also looking forward to talking, but there needed to be priorities.
“Sorry. I’m focusing. Okay. Rescuing me. Dude, I’m so glad you came. These guys are massive dicks.”
“I can imagine. I saw you breaking rocks.”
“Yeah. For no reason at all. They just want us tired so we don’t think of escaping.”
“Speaking of. Where is the key to the cage? Also, can you use your Dao?”
When watching the camp before, Jack had seen no prisoner utilize even the tiniest bit of Dao. It was to the point where he suspected something was up.
“These shackles are System items. They lock down our access to the System, which includes our skills.”
That was interesting information. Jack’s training with Copy Jack had taught him just how much he relied on the System to execute his skills, but it had also taught him that, with proper practice, he could learn to use them himself. If somebody put these shackles on E-Grade Jack, they wouldn’t have worked as well.
“As for the keys,” Vanderdecken continued, “the warden has them. But be careful; she’s a late D-Grade. You can’t fight her.”
“Oh, I will, but I’d rather rescue you first. Is there any other way to let you out?”
“Uh… None that I can think of? Even if you did, another warden has the keys to our shackles. I… I don’t know how you could do it.”
Jack nodded somberly. He could sense the despair creep back in Vanderdecken’s voice. As a rule of thumb, the fewer “dudes” he used, the more lost he was.
“Don’t worry. We are brothers in arms—I will rescue you no matter what. It will be fine. I just need you to calm down, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Now, I have a plan. Can you do me a favor and go stick to the steel bars farthest away from the red tent?”
“...Okay?” Vanderdecken stood up, grabbed his waist as if it hurt from sleeping in the same position, and went to lie down near the steel bars where Jack had indicated. “Now what?”
“Now, just watch.”
If Jack used even the tiniest bit of his strength, the immortals in the tent would pick it up and rush him. Thankfully, Jack and Brock had already discussed what they would do in this situation.
“Plan A, bro. One of the low D-Grades has the shackle keys,” Jack said. Brock nodded. They fist-bumped, then Jack walked out of the darkness and into the light, reaching a corner of the cage in an instant. He was now right between the cage and the red tent. The torchlight flickered sharply in the edge of his vision—some guard had spotted him, but it didn’t matter.
“Intru—”
The guard’s shout was overshadowed by Jack’s fist smashing right through the steel bars, eliciting a terrible shriek from the metal. The roof of the cage dented inward as the bars pulled at it, and the entire cage slid a few feet to the side, but even the metal’s innate resistance wasn’t enough to resist Jack’s strength. A hole was instantly made in the corner of the cage, where two bars were shorn off enough for a grown man to crouch through.
Before anyone could scream, Jack turned and unleashed a full-power Meteor Punch at the red tent, which was in the opposite direction from the cage.
“Good fucking morning!”
