Chapter 599: Horror (1/2)

Seeing the scene behind them almost made Zac forget the primal fear the tide of hands had elicited just a few seconds ago. The whole base had simply disappeared just a hundred meters behind them, replaced by a Void that stretched into infinity. It looked like the series of red barriers had been erected to maintain atmospheric pressure to the base.

There were no stars or nebulae in the Void, yet it wasn't completely dark. A thin strand of light stretched across the horizon, like a beam of light that had squeezed through a crack. Zac had no idea what that crack was, but he figured that it perhaps was a path to a real spacetime rather than the void between dimensions.

The scene was pretty shocking, but it was nothing compared to the appearance of the Collector.

The disgusting hand-tentacles were horrifying enough, but its main body easily topped it. Zac had imagined some sort of Lovecraftian horror after seeing the tentacles, but he wasn't sure whether the real Collector was better or worse. It almost looked like an ashy-gray blob of yarn floating in space, but the more he looked the more horrific it became.

Its form was a slightly uneven sphere that spanned thousands of meters across, making it a creature far larger than anything Zac had ever encountered before. He initially thought it was covered with coarse skin or short-haired fur, but a second glance actually revealed that they were just more body-parts sewn onto its real form. However, it wasn't just hands on its main body, but everything from legs to whole torsos and heads.

Worse yet, the bodyparts moved in everything from lackluster swaying to frantic clawing. Zac even spotted a head-and-handless torso desperately clawing at its midriff with its two stumps, probably trying to rip itself off from the Collector's body. The scene made him gape in horror, and an intrusive thought pushed away everything else.

Were the collected bodies still alive?

There weren't only humans attached to the body either, but Zac quickly spotted hundreds of werewolves as well. But that wasn't the extent of it as he could easily discern at least thirty different races in short order. It looked like the Research Base wasn't the Collector's only hunting ground, which would explain why it had disappeared for so long.

As for the tentacles, there were hundreds, most of them randomly swaying about in the void like strands that had come loose from the ball of yarn. Only a few of them actually had bodyparts covering them though, with the rest appearing to be made from something that looked like an oily liquid. Om fact. there were large patches of bare parts on the main body as well, meaning that the Collector wasn't done with its horrifying undertaking.

The Collector only had one additional feature, a weird hole in the middle of its body that seemed endless, like it led into a dimension of its own. Just looking into the depths made Zac's soul shudder, immediately forcing him to look away. He had actually felt a pull on his soul, like the maw of the Collector had some sort of spiritual pull.

A clanking sound dragged Zac out of his muddled state though as a series of enormous metal rings floated out in the void. There were over a hundred of them, each covered in dense scripts and thrumming with power. Zac quickly realized that the rings were made out of Memorysteel, and it was likely this 'Administrator' who had chosen to completely transform a section of the base to defend against the Collector's attacks.

The rings were of varying sizes, with the smallest ones being just ten meters in diameter with the largest ones being at least a few hundred meters across. The rings moved themselves to form a series of uneven tubes aimed at the creature before they started spinning with increasing velocity. The rings had turned into a blur in almost an instant, easily having reached tens of thousands of rpm.

Radiant motes of light soon appeared out of nowhere in the center of the tubes, likely somehow generated by the spinning. It was hard to tell whether the lights were made from extremely condensed energy or if they were an actual liquid, and it made Zac think of the experiments on plasma he had read about years ago.

However, this definitely wasn't something that would have been possible to create in some Earth lab, but rather some high-tiered energy that definitely exceeded anything he had seen aboard the Little Bean. Zac knew that he would instantly be turned to ash if he even got close to those things, and he kept backing away as he gazed at the accumulating lights with trepidation.

Suddenly one of the blobs of light turned into a ten-meter wide streak, hitting the Collector's main body like the discharge of a rail gun. Cascading lights illuminated the Void, and Zac felt a series of small wounds appearing on his soul from just looking at the spectacle. The Collector shuddered from the collision, but it clearly wasn't dead as dozens of tentacles shot toward the still-accumulating energy weapons.

”Run! Just being witness to a fight like this is a death sentence,” Leviala screamed, blood streaming down her nose.

Zac wordlessly nodded, no longer daring to stay on to watch the result of the clash between Void Creature and the base itself. He snatched up the scouts who had all fallen unconscious as he rushed back where they came from, barely keeping himself upright after a series of shockwaves that meant that the battle had started in earnest.

The base was at least occupying the Collector's attention now, allowing Zac to only worry about the spatial tears as he ran for his life. However, that was easier said than done since the epic struggle was causing serious damage to the already weakened section. It looked like the whole place could collapse at moment's notice, with pieces of wall and ceiling falling all around them.

The spatial tears constantly poured through the cracks, and Zac was forced to jump back and forth like a monkey to avoid getting himself and his people cut into ribbons. On top of that, there was the constant threat that the Collector would return full of vengeance after having been blasted by the base's energy weapons.

Zac's heart was beating like a drum when they finally reached the inconspicuous part of the wall that led back to the forest, and he quickly took out the tablet, his shaky hands barely able to maintain a grip on it.

The gate the was conjured same way as last time, with Leviala being much too distracted to even care about how he did it. She kept a constant vigil to their back in case the tentacles returned, and she only turned back when she heard the sound of the gate sliding open. Zac didn't wait for even a second as he rushed out.

Seeing the lush forest felt like a stay of execution, and he unceremoniously fell down in a heap on the grass as he dumped his followers on the ground. He didn't know why, but it felt like the enormous wall would be able to keep the monster at bay, and the System apparently agreed as he suddenly got a prompt that he had completed the third part of his training regimen.

A wave of exhaustion hit him the second he saw the prompt, but he barely managed to keep himself from falling unconscious. His pumping adrenaline had kept him going even after unleashing the power of Oblivion, but his debts had come back to haunt him as a searing pain spread from his head down to his shoulders.

He quickly ate a series of pills, ranging from soul-mending to fasting pills to provide nutrients, and he took out both a Soul Crystal and a D-Grade Nexus Crystal to start restoring his condition. The scouts started to come to one after another as well, and they quickly sat down and focused on recuperation as well after having taken in their surroundings.

Three hours passed before Zac sighed and opened his eyes again, having barely reached a combat-ready state. New flesh had once more covered the cracks formed from unleashing the Annihilation sphere, and his mind didn't feel like it was full of cotton any longer. However, he knew that he was spreading himself too thin at the moment, and he wasn't sure how many more training quests he had in him.