Chapter 616: Blood for Blood (1/2)

The kiss came without warning, but it didn't feel wrong. Zac’s hand moved to Thea’s waist, and the two pressed closer in a passionate embrace. However, the warm softness disappeared as quickly as it came when Thea took a step back, leaving behind only her scent. It left Zac standing with a blank look, the series of events playing on repeat in his head.

“Uh,” Zac eventually said after much thought, eliciting a snicker from his sister.

“Just in case,” Thea shrugged as she pushed back one of her blond locks behind her ear.

Zac still had some trouble comprehending how things had come to this. Had she mistaken him getting the Gemling crystal as a grand declaration of love? He looked over to Ogras who stood to the side with a wide grin plastered across his face.

“Hey, don’t look at me. One is all you get,” Ogras snorted.

“We’ll talk later. I’ll get you out of here, I promise,” Zac finally said to Thea as he composed himself, and Kenzie activated the machine.

A weird egg-like bubble immediately enclosed the two before it shrunk back and dropped into a spatial tear that appeared right beneath them. Both the Atwood siblings were gone a second later, and the tear closed behind them. Left were just Ogras, Thea, and a sterile lab.

“So, where’s my reward?” Ogras snickered as he turned to Thea. “I almost got my ass handed to me to get that little stone out. How about it? We will probably be stuck here for a wh-“

Ogras didn’t get any further as he hurriedly escaped into a swirl of shadows to avoid a sharp blue light that shot straight for his head. He appeared on the other side of the room a moment later, and Thea only gave him a scathing glance as she sheathed her weapon.

“What a violent girl,” Ogras laughed. “I think Zac’s better off picking one of his off-world misses.”

“What are you talking about?” Thea asked with a frown.

“Oh, now you’re talking with me?” Ogras grinned as he took out the [Corporeal Serum]. “I guess I could tell you, but where would the fun be in that? More importantly, the Lucky Token and our Computer Whisperer are gone, you better ready yourself for what comes next. Things will probably only get worse before they get better from here on out.”

---

A painful current ripped through Zac's body as it felt like he was being squeezed through a thin tube. But the pain was thankfully gone as quickly as it came and Zac realized that his surroundings had already changed. He found himself in the corner of a warehouse, and he breathed out in relief when he saw his sister standing safely right next to him. Their surroundings were not as lucky, as everything within a sphere of 5 meters around them had been completely disintegrated, though new Memorysteel was already moving to make up for the parts lost.

The scene made Zac's heart thump an additional time, but he quickly calmed down when he realized there actually wasn't any response from the automated defenses. His eyes turned toward the disk beneath their feet, his best guess was that it contained some sort of failsafe that stopped the base from acting out.

Kenzie breathed in relief when he saw that the disk was still fine, and she bent down and stashed it away. She had already taken away all the other machines from the Lab, leaving just the spatial gemstone and the protected metals behind. It wasn't that Zac didn't want to take them, but just getting out the second item had been dangerous enough, and he didn't want another incident on his hands.

“Let’s go,” Zac quickly said, and he grabbed Kenzie by her waist as he flashed away, hurriedly leaving the room before setting her down. The base still hadn't responded to them blasting a hole in its wall, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn't do so in a second or two.

“We’re alive,” Kenzie said, almost looking surprised. “I guess Ogras was right about you. You’re a luck magnet. You didn’t just survive, you even got the girl. I’m jealous.”

“Have you had enough?” Zac asked with exasperation, though he was inwardly a bit embarrassed.

He hadn’t expected Thea to make a move like that out of the blue. They had gotten along quite well during their exploratory outings in this place, but she hadn’t let on any interest at all. Then again, he wasn’t the sharpest when it came to those things, and the more perceptive Demon had hinted to there being a spark a few times already.

Zac would be lying if he said he wasn’t interested himself. Thea was smart, driven, and she cared for the people around her. She had an aura that inspired confidence even when she didn’t say anything, and they seemed to be seeing eye to eye on a lot of things. It was just that Zac hadn’t really been thinking about these matters since the integration, especially after what happened with Hannah and Alea.

It almost felt like he was cursed when it came to love, perhaps to make up for his luck in other departments. But mostly it was the simple fact that it was hard to think about matters of love when you had the fate of a whole planet riding on your shoulders.

“Hey, why are you looking all scrunched-up like that? I know you’re interested, it’s good that you’re putting yourself out there a bit after Hannah. Although, I guess it was rather that Thea finally got tired of waiting? You should have gone all out, like in that picture of the sailor going off to war,” Kenzie said.

“Alright, alright,” Zac sighed as he looked around. “I’ll deal with this after we’ve prevented our people from getting slaughtered. Can you tell where we are?”

“One second,” Kenzie said as she took out her tablet, but a frown slowly spread on her face. “We were teleported in the right direction, but we're a bit far-off. Look.”

A series of dots appeared on the screen the next moment, almost looking like a star constellation.

“I don’t have a map in this sector, but these dots are my communication modules,” Kenzie said before she pointed at one solitary dot far from the others. “This is us.”

“It looks like we’re in the Outer Ring at least,” Zac said with a frown. “But we’ve been sent too far. We passed our own base and have been sent in the direction of the True Sky Faction.”

“Yeah, not even our scouts have made it this far. We’re over ten hours away if we go by the speed of scouts,” Kenzie said.

“Can you contact our people?” Zac sighed.

“No, we’re too far. I need to get closer to my network,” Kenzie said.