At least that was his intention. Barely a few steps away, he turned around as he remembered an important detail.
“One more thing… Do you still feel this presence? I mean that feeling of being spied on unbeknownst to you?”
Tim and Lily were startled as they listened to his question, but when they began to carefully contemplate how they felt a disillusioned surprise settled on their childish faces. The presence was completely gone. Everything was back to the way it was before. Actually, the feeling of imminent danger had also diminished significantly as they had moved away from the clearing.
Seeing their reaction, Jake didn’t need to hear their reply. He had already gotten the information he wanted. Barring a miracle, Sarah and the others had been captured. Otherwise, they had no reason to move away from the clearing in the same direction, and further towards the center of the island, which was even more dangerous.
To maximize their chances of survival in the face of a land enemy, heading towards the beach where he was training would have made much more sense. They could also have disbanded to make it more difficult for their pursuers.
Jake had hastened to set out to rescue them, but after tumbling down the hill and into the jungle again, he began to regret his choice. The night was still young and visibility was at a minimum. The creatures were active and for those with red blood they were in their berserk state. He could regularly hear a roar or a beastly howl resonating from a distance almost impossible to assess.
His wounds had not yet fully recovered and he had no choice but to move underground at a moderate speed to avoid being exposed to a group of rabid enemies. Despite this, his movement speed could not be considered slow and he expected to catch up with his fellow prisoners in a short time.
For this reason, his face grew more and more grim and ugly as the night passed without him finding any trace of their passing. From time to time, Jake would sneak up to the surface in search of clues such as footprints or the passage of a group of beasts, but there was none of that.
Either their attacker was incredibly good at covering their tracks or they had not used the land route to get around. If, like Jake, it could fly, it could effectively cover up any trace of their passage, but transporting an entire group through the air was a whole different matter. With his present abilities he could do the same, but it was not without its drawbacks for his own mental fatigue.
The weight of his companions was not the issue here, but dividing his attention to make several people levitate was. It was like holding one’s arm up in the air in front of oneself with a 2kg dumbbell in the hand.
The first few seconds would be effortless, but after a minute or two it would start to sting. Even the simplest gestures, if executed under constant tension, without any resting time, could become unbearable in the long run.
That’s why Jake at least expected the culprit to have landed every now and then to rest. Even if it was only for a second or two, it would have given him or her the rest time he or she needed to fly properly.
The absence of tracks was therefore particularly disturbing, but there was also the possibility that, like him, their assailant had used the underground method to travel. Except that even when scanning the ground at a radius of twenty-five meters he had found nothing that might suggest that the galleries below the volcano extended all the way to the outermost parts of the island.
In the end, Jake arrived at the volcano at dawn without having met anyone except for an epileptic dilophosaurus and a fucking diplodocus that had decided to go after him instead of eating grass or leaves like any self-respecting herbivore.
The first dinosaur was not much of a problem. Jake had twisted his neck with a simple telekinetic slap. But the second one was a major hindrance.
The dinosaur was so big that Jake would have preferred to bypass it, but for some reason it had decided to camp out in front of the entrance to the secret underpass. Such a prehistoric monster had no business being on the slope of a volcano where vegetation was scarce, but it was there anyway, determined to stand in its way.
If Jake had been in the jungle he could easily have avoided it by moving underground, but it happened that the surface of the volcano, except for a few centimeters of accumulated ash, was mostly rocky and formed by the accumulation of cooled lava. Escape through the ground was therefore impossible.
Drawing his machete, Jake first tried to probe this gigantic opponent using the easy way. With his telekinesis he tried to twist the monster’s neck or to crush its carotids to asphyxiate it, but nothing worked.
The sun was not yet fully up and the berserk state of the diplodocus had not yet subsided. The reddish bestial aura emanating from the monster was repelling its attempts to control it. The Aether inside the dinosaur and in its immediate surroundings was beyond his grasp.
Jake had already recognized the fist sized red crystal embedded in the monster’s forehead. The creature seemed to be obeying orders and would stop attacking him as soon as he distanced himself from it. As soon as he got within 50 meters of the entrance to the secret passage, it would attack him again.
After a few minutes, Jake decided to retreat temporarily to think of another plan.He was confident that he could defeat the monster in hand-to-hand combat, but the ruckus would not go unnoticed. It was better to wait for the monster to suffer the repercussions of his berserk state once the sun was fully up.
He checked with his Shadow Guide the current position of Sarah and the others and his eyes suddenly bulged when he noticed that Lu Yan was not with them.
“This bitch…”
From the beginning, he thought that she had been taken prisoner by this mysterious enemy because the Shadow Guide had been showing that she was in the same direction as the rest of the group. It was only now when he reached the foot of the volcano that he realized that she was now behind him.
Vanishing underground again, he rushed towards the Asian woman like a missile and dragged her underground, pulling down her feet before she could do anything. Resolidifying the ground around her, Lu Yan rediscovered the intense joy of being buried except for her head and her neck which protruded like a recalcitrant nail.
Powerless, she tried to use her own telekinesis to dislodge herself from this earth cage, but to no avail.
“You are dreaming if you think you can escape from earth under my control. “Jake jibed sardonically as he saw the young woman struggling.
Recognizing the deep voice of the culprit, Lu Yan immediately stopped struggling. Twisting her head back in an attempt to see Jake behind her, she spewed as fast as she could,
“It’s not what you think! I swear, I wanted to help them. “
The fervor in her voice seemed sincere and her expression showed a certain resolution. However, even for today’s Jake this level of acting was child’s play, not to mention Lu Yan who was an expert at lying.
“So why are you the only one out there? “Jake asked with a smirk.
“Because I can fly and I’m stronger mentally. “Lu Yan answered instantly, as if she had anticipated his question a long time ago.
“Explain.”
Seeing that Jake seemed willing to listen to her, she wasted no time and told everything she knew.
It turned out that their base had indeed been attacked early last night, but it had not been the crushing defeat he had imagined. At first the fight had been more in their favor, as evidenced by all the monster corpses strewn over the clearing.
The situation had turned sour when the mysterious presence had moved into action. Two giant hairless humanoid monsters with obsidian-colored skin had appeared out of nowhere and neutralized Sarah and Kevin in an instant. Lu Yan, who was in battle with another enemy, had immediately fled into the air when she witnessed this nightmarish scene.
“Why didn’t you save them after fleeing? I’m sure you can use your powers to make them fly with you for a few minutes, right? “Jake picked up on an obscure part of her explanation.
“I tried and I’ve almost died.” Lu Yan shook her head as she remembered the event.
“What do you mean?”
“The mysterious presence that kept us awake at night showed up. “Lu Yan sighed with a shiver running down her spine. “He looked like one of those dark elves in heroic-fantasy video games. His eyes were blood red and had a hypnotic glow. I recognized those eyes right away. When I used my telekinesis to save them, he looked up at me and I’ve blacked out. I fell from the sky like a rock and regained consciousness down the hill just before hitting the ground.
“Realizing what had just happened to me, I used the cover of the jungle to escape. There was no way I could have saved them. When I went back up the hill, they were already gone and the presence I had felt for three days had disappeared.”
