Chapitre 22: Super Gene Immortal Chapter 22
Lux didn't know why it hadn't occurred to him. But there was the ultimate game that he could make pretty easily. Well not too easily, but it was an intrinsically simple game. Minecraft. Making Minecraft in a world that didn't have it was a sacred duty, one that had so much potential. He could just see all the streamers and content creators causing it to become perpetually popular in this universe. So, he worked on that along with creating CoC. He didn't have enough time to actually finish off the games before classes started, but he didn't really need to worry about studying so he could just use his free time to develop games that would make him filthy rich.
Time passed quickly and soon the classes were set. Each class had to elect a representative to lead their class and Lux wanted no part in that BS. For a military academy the structure seemed rather lax to Lux. Sure, there was a dress code. But there wasn't a uniform requirement which just seemed incredibly odd.
Theory and lecture style classes were almost unbearably boring. But the combat training was quite awesome. The instructors were powerful compared to Lux and the students, they were experienced and had a plethora of knowledge and techniques to pass down. The combat classes were even personalized for those who showed exceptional talent in one area or another. And since Lux was there on the Archery scholarship. He was trained along with the few others who were in the same position as him in advanced archery techniques and skills using some awesome practice ranges.
Another thing that Lux found interesting about this academy was how freaking seriously people took playing Hand of God. There was a whole club/school society dedicated to it. You could even get extra credits by playing the game. Furthermore, the Blackhawks chapter of the Hand of God society was ranked among others throughout the entirety of the Alliance as like number 7 in terms of top tier competitors. There were dedicated facilities for playing the competitive mode that were obviously setups worth millions.
Lux thought about joining the Hand of God stuff but decided against it. People his rank were simply not competition for him and if he was participating in the Evolver league that would definitely bring too much of the wrong type of attention to him. demonstrating his true level of fitness as an unevolved human at this point was not something that he could do safely. Lux hadn't checked in an actual testing chamber at this point, but he had definitely surpassed the fitness rating that was supposedly the maximum for an unevolved in the first sanctuary still.
Instead of getting too involved in the extracurricular stuff, Lux focused on making his games. He was planning on following the evilest empire in histories footsteps. EA. The way they had milked their games for all they were worth and then more was what he planned to do with his gaming empire. He was already plagiarizing games. He might as well follow through with the whole shebang and maximize profits.
One thing that Lux really found fascinating was the Warframes. They were basically mechs that integrated biotechnology. Some of it was actually a little creepy. But the Warframes were essentially just better tanks. They were not strictly bipedal in design, but they were mechs that moved around on limbs and had mounted armaments. A Warframes mobility and versatility just made it better than a tank in nearly every way. The only way that they were inferior in was the price. A dozen tanks could be made for the price of a single Warframe. Those costs are then translated over to maintenance and repairs.
Blackhawk Academy actually had a dozen training Warframes that were just old models. The students would train on simulators mostly, but they could get actual piloting experience on the testing ranges that were maintained by the school. Obviously because of the cost, the Warframes didn't actually use live ammunition for practice runs, but simunitions. Lux was just excited to pilot a giant robot for real when he got the opportunity to use one.
The time that Lux got to spend in the 1st sanctuary had changed quite a lot. Now whenever he was in the sanctuary he usually working with Qin Xuan's gang. It had been rather funny when he'd met Qin Xuan and Yang manli after having gained control of his pheromone production due to his Sutra practices. He had toned down his pheromone production to be just enough that it made him rather attractive to the opposite sex, but it wasn't causing women around him to basically go into heat, as fun as that had been so far it wasn't really conductive to school life nor did it really feel fair. Lux was planning to keep the full force of his powerful pheromones in reserve for actual bedroom activities, and at all other times basically keeping it at really good cologne levels.
Working with the Bullseye gang had evolved into a VIP escort/hunting assistance program. Wealthy people were paying Qin Xuan to essentially babysit their children who were just finding their footing in the 1st sanctuary. And Lux being a very good archer was in high demand for these escorts. It was actually quite lucrative, Qin Xuan kept 40% of the payment and distributed the rest between the people on VIP protection duty. And if Lux's cut was anything to go by, the clients were filthy rich and paying out the nose for this service. It honestly surprised Lux how smart the setup was. Qin Xuan and her people didn't seem like the most intelligent group at first glance, and Qin Xuan had a vengeful streak a mile wide, but Bullseye was a real moneymaker.
Lux even got to participate in Sacred-Blood creature hunts. Three of them actually. The Bullseye gang had a rather large net and they were pretty good at finding creatures. Though the hunts for Sacred-Blood creatures tended to be for beasts that were far too large to be beneficial to a single person quickly. Especially when all the meat was divided up among the participants. But Lux still managed to get 2 points out of his portions from the three hunts, brining his total Sacred-Blood Geno points up to 61.
"Han Sen!" Lux heard a familiar voice call out when he walked into the Bullseye area once more, "Come, Bullseye has a job and Qin Xuan thinks that you will be perfect for this one." Yang Manli spoke firmly as she turned to lead Lux to Qin Xuan's office in the shelter.
"An individualized mission?" Lux asked as he sat before Qin Xuan, holding a small file with the details.
"Yes, it's the daughter of a… exceedingly wealthy client that is paying in S-class licenses for the Saint Hall. Seeing as how you are the only member of Bullseye currently in Blackhawk and the VIP is an active student there, I figured that this would be the perfect job for you." Qin Xuan said while gesturing at the papers, "The VIP is Wang Mengmeng. She started entering the 1st sanctuary a month ago and is already fairly well equipped. Her family is paying to have someone act as mainly a hunting partner and bodyguard."
"Ok… How many of these S-class licenses are we talking?" Lux asked, even though he didn't really need them, he could auction them off and make some serious money, or even trade them for favors… like advertising his games or something.
"Just the one. But it will be yours. This mission will be completely on your shoulders as well, you screw up and there won't be any backing from us. You will have to deal with the fallout yourself."
"That's not very comforting." Lux commented.
"It's just the nature of this particular mission. We weren't hired to guarantee safety and give her a full protection squad. Its just for one hunt out to a place that she has already picked. If your fitness score had been lower I would have picked a team to send out with you and just paid them out of pocket but I don't expect there would be any real issues. If things go sideways, we can't protect you if you do take the mission and fuck it up. If you don't want to do this solo we can make it a group thing, but I'd rather have the men out scouting than babysitting in a relatively tame hunting zone." she said with a shrug.
This particular mission seemed to be some kind of under the table deal. Luckily, Lux was pretty confident in keeping people alive in the areas surrounding the Steel Armor Shelter. This newbie would be quite easy to protect if he applied himself. Lux was also pretty sure that this mission would be going into some kind of file on him as an evaluation tool by Qin Xuan and by extension the Military.
"Sure, I'll take it." Lux finally said, "When do I meet the VIP and where?"
"She is actually here in the Shelter right now. Yang Manli will escort you to her." Qin Xuan said, dismissing him and turning to a pile of paperwork.
Lux was glad that he wasn't in charge of anyone, dealing with paperwork was one thing that he truly disliked to the point he would call it hatred. He followed Manli out of the office and over to one of the Bullseye Gang's archery ranges where his VIP was taking shots at the targets using a practice bow.
"Miss Wang, your bodyguard has arrived!" Yang Manli spoke, getting Mengmeng's attention.
"Great!" The girl cheered, dropping the practice bow and whirling around to greet them.
Mengmeng was quite the looker. Long straight black hair that was tied into some kind of braid that reached her hips. A slender figure with a decent amount of muscle definition that said that she was no stranger to the gym. She wasn't no goddess, but she was quite pretty.
Lux had been prepared to meet a spoiled rotten rich kid. But what he met seemed to be a bubbly, kind of shy, but very polite and enthusiastic young woman. Her personality made her quite a bit more attractive than she otherwise would have been. And it also meant that this babysitting mission was not going to be as unpleasant as some of the escort missions had been. Though Lux could definitely see her being an idiot and getting herself into a bad situation if he wasn't careful.
After the meeting Lux found himself bombarded by questions as Wang Mengmeng became more confident around him. She turned out to be a Lux fangirl and asked him dozens of questions specifically about the gold clad figure that had saved a classroom full of kids from that evil shura. Lux entertained the questions answering a few and evading some with misdirecting answers.
Mengmeng had read a lot about the areas surrounding Steel Armor Shelter and wanted to hunt in the desert that was about 3 days travel away from the shelter. She specifically wanted to hunt a kind of creature that inhabited the desert because she wanted to get their beast souls. She wouldn't tell Lux exactly what that creature was. But she was well equipped with Sacred-Blood beast souls already. So, Lux figured that the longer hunt would be just fine.
Lux had run into a… problem. It wasn't a bad thing really. But it was a setback. Aster, his Mutant Three-Eyed cat pet beast soul had been so close to unlocking its combat form. But it was no longer a Mutant. It had finally upgraded to a Sacred-Blood, and Lux was disappointed to find that it was now hungry for all types of meat once more. Which meant that whatever counter the beast soul had for growth would reset when it ranked up. He didn't know how long it would take for a beast soul to go from Sacred-Blood to Super. But he was now wondering if the combat form would be maintained through the rank up. Which meant that he might just end up wasting a lot of resources. He shrugged off the potential waste. He wasn't aiming to maintain maximum efficiency at all times, if he was, he would just abandon going back to the alliance at all before he evolved all the way back to the 5th sanctuary.
Aside from Lux's little issue with his pet beast soul, he found himself contemplating what he had read about the Devil desert. Their destination. The local creatures that had been documented as common in the region were Sand Sprites, Earth Lurkers, Rock Worms, Cacnea, a couple type of fox creatures, and some kind of Owl that only had on had sightings, but no one had ever killed one and reported what it was. Obviously, there were more creatures out there that were more nomadic in nature. But knowing the general ecosystem was always a good thing.
The journey to the desert was smooth and fast. Wang Mengmeng had a Sacred-Blood mount that was fast and could carry more than one person at a time. It was a huge bearlike creature that looked like it belonged in a museum of natural history or something. A creature of this size had no business getting to and maintaining the speeds that it was moving at. It was kind of creepy how even down here at the lowest rungs of power, things were already demonstrating such defiance of what was normal for life on earth.
For context on how scary Sacred-Blood creatures already were in the first sanctuary. On Earth, just the bearlike mount would have been an unstoppable force of nature. The only weapons that humanity on earth had that could damage the mount would have been high yield missiles, bombs and nukes. Machine guns, tanks, and handheld weaponry of Earth would have been utterly useless. Even shooting the mount in the eyes with an antimaterial rifle would just irritate it. Steel was not hard enough to scratch these creatures, and the forces that their bodies could withstand were basically measured in the kilotons of force. And that was just the creatures in the first sanctuary. Things just got more and more terrifying as you went up to the fourth sanctuary. The Fifth Sanctuary was weird. No spawning mechanisms for monsters, and most native life ranged in physical capacity going from completely mundane to the Demi-God rank.
Anyway, along the way to the devil desert the pair hunted a few creatures and cooked them up. This was just to help Wang Mengmeng who hadn't maxed out on anything yet. Upon arriving at the deserts outskirts the ground transitioned from loamy and fertile to cracked and yellowed before giving way to sandy dunes over only a dozen feet of transition space. Lux found the geography of the 1st Sanctuary to be rather strange. The transitions of biomes were sharp and had very defined borders. It just felt artificial in an almost game like way sometimes like this particular instance.
Hunting in the desert was going fairly well. Lux was essentially being a sharpshooter and making sure that nothing came close enough to hurt his charge. Mengmeng was surprisingly strong for her supposed number of Geno points. She was from a rich family that had prepped her with Hyper Geno Arts ever since she was a child. So she was doing quite well for herself. Lux was almost half tempted to say that she didn't really need a babysitter. Except that she had horrible situational awareness. Most creatures in the sanctuaries acted like animals usually do. They hid from humans, didn't go out of their way to try and hunt humans usually. But there were exceptions to that rule quite a bit more than among the more natural animal environments. Whereas the wild areas on the planets ruled by the alliance would occasionally have an animal attack, that was usually because an animal was starving or sick or something. Here in the 1st sanctuary there was a significant chance you'd be seen as prey by any given creature wandering around, so it was generally a good idea to keep your head on a swivel.
A day and half into the hunting was when the shit hit the fan. Mengmeng spotted a horned foxlike creature that was obviously a Mutant. It was bigger than the ones they had seen so far, and its fur was a deep crimson that rippled like fire as it moved. Mengmeng hopped onto her mount and tore after the fox as it fled across the dunes. This would have been a problem if Lux wasn't as high on the fitness scale as he was. He was able to keep close enough to Mengmeng to support her with his bow and arrow without having to resort to his wings. Lux could technically use his wings as Han Sen as long as he didn't use his armor along with them, the armor usually coated the wings and made them look golden instead of purple. But Lux would rather avoid people associating Lux with having a fast pair of wings.
Anyway, Lux didn't like where this was going one bit. The Foxlike creature was obviously baiting Mengmeng, and it was fast enough that it outpaced her Sacred-Blood mount. Which, now that he was thinking about it set off some alarm bells in his mind. Those alarms were only being set off now that he was paying attention to how the fox was moving. It wasn't getting tired, it wasn't straining, and it kept looking over its shoulder with an almost feline look of smugness on its foxy face.
Little did the foxlike creature know though, that Lux was going to rip whatever trap it was leading them into to shreds. Lux's confidence was in the fact that he was absolutely sure that he could take care of anything short of hundreds of foxes. A pack led by a Mutant couldn't be that big. And even if he couldn't protect Mengmeng from hundreds of foxes, he could always grab her and fly up into the sky as a last resort. That or find a cliff to jump off of. There always seemed to be a cliff in these sorts of places even if it didn't make sense.
Soon enough, Lux's suspicion of the fox creature leading Mengmeng into a trap was realized. It perched atop a hill and howled like a wolf. Then dozens upon dozens of foxes with horns popped out of the sands around, their fur the same color as the sand itself. There were at least a hundred of the damn things. From his position far behind Mengmen who seemed to have realized that she was about to get ganked, Lux unleashed a Sacred-Blood arrow aiming for the fox leader. Before the arrow was even halfway towards its target Lux had knocked and loosed three more times.
"MENGMENG GET OUT OF THERE!" Lux screamed at the top of his lungs as he unleashed as many arrows into the hoard of oncoming foxes. That was also when Lux noticed that there were about fifty fully white foxes mixed in with the sand-colored ones. Which meant that the one that had led everything was actually a sacred-blood creature.
With Lux's arrows raining down around her, Wang Mengmeng ordered her Sacred-Blood mount to retreat. Fleeing towards Han Sen at an angle that should let him still have a decent line on her pursuers. Mengmeng found herself in awe of Han Sen's skill with the bow and how fast he fired off his arrows. He was like a machine gun. Even more his deadly accuracy. She had noticed how good he was with the bow over the course of their so far. But at this moment he was driving arrows into eye sockets from half a mile away on moving targets that were actively trying to avoid his shots.
Lux's first shot at the leader of the foxes had only grazed his target, cutting a slice through its triangular ear. That particular arrow was poisonous, but Lux wasn't sure how poisonous and whether or not it would be enough to put the creature down.
This ambush had not gone the way that the fox leader had thought it would go Lux imagined. With Mengmeng fleeing and the foxes attempting to run her down, he was picking them off one by one at a rapid pace. He felt like John Wick with a bow as his arrows landed on his targets one after another.
Suddenly there was a screeching howl that almost sounded like what Lux would imagine a woman being murdered in a corn field would sound like. He glanced at the source and found the fox now mounted atop a giant golden Rock Worm. Apparently the fox leader was pissed and calling for reinforcements. Although unfortunately for the fox leader this really wasn't going to save it from the predicament that it didn't realize it was in.
As Mengmeng passed him by, Lux planted himself between the remaining forces coming after her and started firing off arrows as fast as he possibly could. Kill notifications were ringing in his mind over and over again with every draw and release. This mini hoard/large pack of foxes didn't seem to realize how many of them had died on their charge. Because there were only 13 left by the time they got to his position and Lux reluctantly materialized his daggers to avoid using his signature spear in front of Mengmeng.
With an explosive burst of speed, Lux dashed, ducked and weaved through the remnants of the pack wielding a pair of daggers and systematically slaughtered them before instantly rematerializing his bow and arrows and starting to unleash hell on the fox leader and rock worm that were charging his position. The Golden Rockworm took a Sacred-Blood arrow through one of its tiny eyes and unleashed a bellow as a moment later the fox leader found another arrow hitting it square in the neck.
Lux didn't stop unleashing arrow after arrow until he heard the final sanctuary notification resound in his mind. At which point he stopped. Feeling almost like one of those movie scenes where a gun finally stops firing and you just see the steam rising from the barrel. After assessing battle field Lux finally dematerialized his beast souls and turned to Wang Mengmeng.
Mengmeng was looking at Lux with eyes that said that he was now the god emperor of humanity incarnate. The sheer level of hero worship in her eyes was crazy. Enough that Lux was uncomfortable just looking at her expression.
"Well… that just happened." Lux sighed as he turned to the battlefield. There was still a lot to do.
État de l’alimentation hebdomadaire
-- Classement
Power Stone 
-- Power
stone