Chapter 178 (1/2)

Chapter 178

Xentus Viri… Again

Xentus Viri pounded down on the control panel in front of him. Sparks flew as he easily crushed the reinforced metal supporting the panel. “ARRGGHHH!!! WHY CAN’T I FIGURE IT OUT!!!!”

A calm synthetic voice came from the speaker nearby. “That is because the data of the anomaly is insufficient for research purposes.”

He picked up a piece of metal and threw it at the speaker. With a loud crash, it made a hole in the wall where the speaker had previously been attached. “I DON’T NEED SOME STUPID COMPUTER TO TELL ME THAT!!”

Xentus Viri frustratedly threw himself down in a nearby chair. Covering his mouth, he looked at a complicated diagram in front of him. As he stared, a tear trickled down his cheek.

It had been six years since Lucas had disappeared from his laboratory. When he found out they were missing, Xentus Viri went on a rampage. He immediately gathered as much data as he could from the various scientific instruments that had been active when they disappeared.

Unfortunately, the data collected was far from enough to even attempt recreating the anomaly. The only thing he could make out was the fact that it was some kind of controlled wormhole that had opened up in his shop.

Based on the fact that it couldn’t be a natural phenomena, Xentus Viri desperately searched throughout the entire known universe for some clue. He tried looking for various enemy powerhouses or terrorist organizations, hoping beyond hope that they had kidnapped Lucas somehow.

For three years he attempted this. Finally, he had to conclude that Lucas wasn’t being held hostage and that something else had happened. That whoever took him had some other purpose.

Xentus Viri had been avoiding another possibility for some time and he was finally forced to believe that it was true. That his experiments with black holes had caused the phenomena that had taken Lucas away from him. Upon coming to this conclusion, he was ate up with guilt that he had been the one to cause this.

For the next four years, he attempted to recreate everything that he had done. He tried and tried and tried to create another phenomena just like the one that  Lucas away. Again and again he faced failure.

In one of the failures the black hole suddenly expanded by a tenth of an inch. The increase in gravity exceeded his s.h.i.+elds and caused half his lab to be destroyed. Luckily he had fail-safes that included shutting down the black hole and teleporting himself to Sparta.

Ignoring the risk though, Xentus Viri continued working. If before he had been called a madman, he had truly become a madman now. Due to his eccentric personality, the Sparta council members hadn’t realized anything was wrong yet. Rumors had started though and they were becoming suspicious.

If he was right, then he was working on borrowed time. Already Xentus Viri had heard of a proposal by one of the council members to ask for a record of all the experiments that he had done for the past couple years. Luckily the other council members rejected the proposal but the fact that some were doubting him was impossible to ignore now.

Xentus Viri had truly fallen into despair. He had tried everything he could think of to get his son back and nothing had worked so far. He had failed. He failed his adopted son. He truly was the worst father possible.

As he laid in his chair, tears pouring from his eyes, he heard a sound. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. It was the sound of someone walking down the hallway. Upon hearing it, Xentus Viri straightened up and wiped the tears from his eyes. In a matter of seconds, he was back to the gruff inventor everyone came to expect.