Chapter 15

Jack’s bare feet felt cold on the concrete floor of the corridor he crept along, they’d taken his shoes along with everything else he’d been carrying, including his weapons and armour. All he had on was a plain white tee shirt and black cargo trousers. He made it a point to see if he could find his gear along with the exit.

The corridor he walked along was lined with cells similar to his own, he looked in a few of them but they were all empty. He walked the thirty or so metres to the end of the corridor, to his right was the room where they had intended to dissect him and to his left was another corridor with a set of stairs leading up at the end.

Jack was about to turn left to go for the stairs when he heard a cheerful but tuneless humming coming from the room to his right. He turned just in time to see the cheerful doctor coming out of the room, they saw each other at the same moment and froze in shock. Then the doctor gasped in fright and hurriedly went back in the room, slamming the door shut behind him.

Again, Jack didn’t consider himself a vindictive guy, maybe a little vengeful, but not a real sadist. But still…when an opportunity presented itself, like when you had the man who wanted to dissect you, trapped like a rat. Well Jack wasn’t really a ‘turn the other cheek’ sort of fellow, more of a ‘internalise and let it fester whilst fantasising about various revenge scenario’s’ kind of fellow.

Jack knocked gently on the metal door.

“Little pig, little pig, let me in……” he softly called out. He conjured a blade of light and jammed it into the door locking mechanism. After cutting into it he unlocked it and ripped out what was left of the lock. He swung the door open to find the doctor by one of the walls frantically talking into the phone.

When he saw Jack step inside he dropped the phone he was talking into and squealed in fright, cowering against a wall.

“How - how - how did….you do that?” he stuttered as he backed away along a wall.

Jack didn’t answer, he simply shrugged and smiled as he slowly walked over to the doctor. He felt a bit like the villain in a slasher movie. The doctor clumsily lunged for a nearby scalpel but Jack shot him with a weak quick bolt. The doctor squealed in pain and dropped to the floor, he jerked and spasmed as he tried to crawl away.

Jack reached him and stepped on his lab coat, preventing him from crawling any further.

“Please! Please! Don’t…don’t hurt me!” the doctor cried in fear, sobbing.

“Urgh…” Jack looked down at the pitiful sight in disgust, about to finish off the man but he stopped. He let his guard down momentarily and the doctor took advantage of that.

“Yargh!” the doctor screamed out as he suddenly sent a wave of fire from his hands at Jack. The wave of fire however, was weak. He’d seen newbie G rankers pull off something better, the flame fizzled out, barely warming his chest. He glared at the doctor, the doctor cowered on the floor, a wet puddle grew underneath him.

Jack put his foot on the doctor's chest and pressed down slightly.

“I’ve got questions,” he said softly. The doctor tried to reply but Jack pressed down harder, the doctor wheezed.

“Where am I, this facility, where is it?” he asked as calmly as he could.

“We…we’re in East Anglia, a se - secret underground facility, run by the guild! Off the books!” he explained in a high pitched voice laced with panic as Jack ground his foot into the doctor’s chest.

“Mm, good. Now, you must know, what crimes have I been accused of exactly?”

“You - they said you’ve been going around….killing people - all over the country, using them for cultivation material for the past couple of months! They said they had evidence against you!” he cried out.

“What!? That wasn’t me! How the fuck am I supposed to have been traveling all over the country when I’ve been in the Dire Woods all this time?! I have a fuck tonne of alibis!” Jack shouted in indignation, he shot an accusatory look at the doctor that wordlessly said he’d better explain.

“They know! The evidence was fabricated by us, the police will realise that soon but by then it’ll be too late!” he said fearfully.

“Why will it be too late exactly?” Jack hissed, his patience was thinning.

“We - we were going to say that you…tried to escape from guild custody..that you erm….died trying to escape…that it was all a….tragic misunderstanding?....heh heh…” the doctor let out a nervous chuckle and gulped in fear. Jack angrily gazed down at him and the puddle underneath the doctor grew.

“I’m supposed to die in the escape attempt eh? Shall we put that to the test?” he asked softly.

The doctor tried to respond but Jack cut him off. “That was a rhetorical question.” Jack shot the doctor in the face with several rapid fire quick bolts. The good doctor’s face was rendered into a charred, ruined, caved in mess but for Jack it was cathartic.

He stepped away from the steaming corpse and the puddle of urine, he took a deep breath, ignored the smell and thought things through. Whether he was proven innocent or not, he was in an underground and apparently illegal facility, he was under no illusion that even if he was found to be innocent, no one was going to let him out of here alive. He’d likely have to fight his way out or sneak out, as far as the people in this base were concerned, he was a witness to whatever messed up shit they were doing here.

Again, he turned back to his latest kill with regret, not that he’d done the deed, but that he hadn’t asked the guy where his stuff was. He was pretty sure Gary would make him come back here if he left this place without the axe and spear at the very least.

With a sigh, Jack left the operating room and walked along the corridor to the stairs. There was a map on the wall at the foot of the stairs, he examined it briefly and saw he was on floor fifteen, that's fifteen floors down. He was on the bottom floor! It probably made sense. If you’re going to frame a famous person for a horrendous crime, then kidnap him and dissect him, you definitely don’t do it in broad daylight.

He saw an elevator next to the stairs but didn’t trust it, never take the elevator in the event of a fire or when you're escaping an off the books illegal experimental facility where they want to cut you open like a frog in a biology class. It's just common sense.

When looking at the map he also noticed that the stairs didn't lead all the way up past each floor, but instead he would have to traverse each floor to get to the next staircase. He sighed impatiently, he was sure to run into trouble like this, so much for a discrete exit.

With one last forlorn look at the elevator, he began his climb up to the fourteenth floor.

After a single flight of stairs he reached the next floor behind a thick door with a magnetic lock. He pressed a button to buzz himself out and stepped through. On the other side he turned to look at the door and saw that one would need an ID and to submit to a retinal scan to get back through. It seemed the bottom floor was heavily restricted, probably because it was Flamewrought or the late doctor's personal oubliette.

He turned around and found himself at the end of a long corridor. On either side of the corridor, glass panelled walls allowed him to see into what appeared to be some laboratories. Multiple people in white lab coats and gloves were working at various things on lab benches. He didn’t see any point in engaging with those people so he quickly walked down the corridor for a hundred metres or so until he reached the foot of the next set of stairs.

Before he could start walking up however, he heard surprised voices above him.

“Oh shit!”

“The prisoner is loose! I repeat! The prisoner is loose!”

“All guards converge on stairwell N! Converge on stairwell N!” someone shouted and the crackle of a radio answered.

“Take him down! Shoot to wound only! Flamewrought wants him alive!”

Jack conjured a shield in front of him and continued to walk up the stairs, time to give his new toy a real test.

He made a turn and found several guards armed with firearms, all aiming at him. The two parties stared each other down for a moment before a man with a shotgun fired. The buckshot impacted on Jack’s blue shield with a dull cracking noise….but it held. Jack felt the searing pain in his left arm increase noticeably but he pushed the pain aside. His shield was crumpled and ragged looking, like an empty plastic shopping bag, he drew more power from his core and reinforced it, the shield reformed and repaired itself.

“What the fuck was that!?” one of the guards cried out in surprise.

Jack was in no mood to converse and instead answered him with a bolt of lightning which he threw around his shield. The other guards opened fire. Multiple bullets impacted his shield forcing Jack to continuously feed it energy while slinging lightning at the guards.

One by one he took each of them down, they didn’t appear to be hunters or strong cultivators, just hired guns. Jack calmly stepped past the twitching, smoking bodies of the guards who lay sprawled out on the stairs. He debated taking one of their rifles but he’d only ever had basic training with guns and was more comfortable using his element and getting into knife range. He was better off just sticking to what he knew.

He made his way up to the thirteenth floor.

Just as he stepped into the next floor from the stairs, a strident alarm began going off, likely because of his escape.

The thirteenth floor appeared to be a large, dark, open plan lab or warehouse. All around him were large glass cylinders lining the walls or standing free. When he looked into the glass of one cylinder and wiped off the condensation, he started in surprise when he found a monstrous face looking out at him.

It was the head and partial torso of some sort of monster or mutant. He looked in several other glass cylinders and saw similar things. Sometimes it was heads, other times a limb or two, but every cylinder held some kind of monstrous specimen, all floating suspended in some sort of clear fluid or gel.

Jack shivered and moved on, lord only knew what they were up to down here, though he doubted he’d find his gear on this floor.

What he did find however, were multiple flashlights piercing the darkness ahead of him. It was too dark to tell but it seemed several guards had made their way down to the thirteenth floor and were searching for him. Jack hid behind one of the cylinders and assessed his options. There was no real cover, not even along the edges of the large room, so he did what he always did when he was outnumbered; he attacked.

He swiftly but silently padded forward to the nearest beam of searching light and focused on the dim form of the man holding it, the flashlight was attached to a rifle the guard was wielding. Jack got close enough that he was able to conjure a blade of light and ram it into the guard’s head, he caught the man as he died and gently lowered him to the floor so he wouldn’t make a noise.

He was able to make a repeat performance on four more guards until only the last one remained, the guard in question was getting increasingly panicked when fewer and fewer of his fellow guards were returning his radio hails. When he finally found himself alone in the darkness, he promptly turned around and left for the stairs in a dead sprint. It was too late however because Jack was already there, waiting for him.

After dealing with the last guard, Jack jogged up the next flight of stairs whilst listening to the radio chatter of the guards from a radio he’d looted. Apparently they were making a proper barricade on the fifth floor and were hoping to stop him there or at least delay him until a team of high ranked hunters on Eric Flamewrought’s payroll could arrive from outside. All available guards had been pulled back to the barricade, giving Jack free reign until the fifth floor. He decided to try and hurry, not particularly wanting to face off against an entire team of powerful hunters.

He jogged along multiple floors throughout the secret facility, all containing a variety of illicit secrets Jack doubted the guild wanted the world to know about. He passed through laboratories where individuals in lab coats or full hazmat suits were doing all manner of things from studying different liquids and minerals to performing full vivisections on still living creatures.

One floor he passed through appeared to be a forge or a manufactory where the people there were studying metallurgy, Jack saw what must have been tens or hundreds of millions of pounds sterling worth of elemental crystal.

More than one floor had secure cells which held living specimens of different mutated animals in, he didn’t think any were actual monsters due to the fact that that would cause other monsters to spontaneously spawn throughout the facility.

Another floor he passed through which disturbed him the most, was one in which the late doctor, who’d been known as doctor Farley, had spent the most time on and had conducted many of his experiments in. Thankfully it was empty of occupants.

It was the seventh floor, despite himself, Jack couldn’t help but investigate a little when he saw a picture of the doctor along with a team of white lab coat wearing scientists on someone’s desk. He explored the different rooms within the laboratory floor and again saw multiple glass containers similar to what he’d found on the fourteenth floor, though these were much smaller and in the shape of cubes.

When he looked inside them, rather than seeing the preserved remains of different animals or monsters, he instead saw strange fibrous bundles of some sort of wire or thin vascular growths of different colours. Upon reading a discarded clipboard, Jack realised with horror that these were human elemental cores, extracted from human beings.

They had the containers stored in large fridges, just stacked up on shelves and labelled with different lab numbers. Just one fridge contained at least ten human cores and throughout the floor Jack could see around twenty fridges! Due to the nature of this place, Jack had serious doubts that the core’s were obtained from volunteer donors.

A little further searching revealed the location of doctor Farley’s office, his morbid curiosity propelled him towards it, he turned the door handle and stepped in. It looked like a normal office at a glance, not even that big, just a desk with a laptop and various papers stacked messily on top plus some shelves loaded with books lining the walls. However, one little out of the ordinary detail was the small glass cube sitting on the desk, it was different from the other cubes due to the fact that it was fixed to a wooden base with a small engraved plaque on it.

The plaque read; ‘Thomas Henders 19/12/77 - 13/07/26’.

Sure enough, the cube contained the preserved remains of a human core, though he didn’t know why this one seemed to hold pride of place on Farley’s desk or why it had a plaque.

Jack sifted through the notes scattered across Farley’s desk because he couldn’t access Farley’s password protected laptop. From what he could tell, Farley was crazy interested in the mechanics of cultivation and the underpinning science behind it all. And he sure as shit had absolutely no compunctions or anything remotely resembling moral scruples in how he gained his data.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The notes Jack was reading from were too disorganised to make too much sense from, a lot of them were fairly rambling in nature and sometimes read a lot like a diary. In many of them, Farley would mention Thomas Henders, from what Jack could surmise, Thomas Henders was Farley's first attempt at core extraction, or his first victim. Thus the core’s pride of place on his desk.

It was especially disturbing to note that Farley had actually extracted Hender’s core over a torturous period of several days! Farley spoke of his elation and feelings during the procedures, how he even came to care deeply for Henders while he was under his scalpel, if it wasn’t clear to Jack before, then it was certainly clear now, doctor Farley was a full blown psychopath.

Jack shivered violently as if someone had walked over his grave but was incredibly glad he’d killed the man, he was a monster hunter after all.

A little further reading revealed one of the projects which was being done on behalf of Flamewrought and several other interested investors. The desired end result of the project was to successfully implant multiple cores of different elements into another human being. There were plenty of notes detailing one horrific failure after another along with several gruesome photos attached to the notes and folders.

From what he’d been able to determine so far, the facility had quite the body count. He had no idea where all the people being fed into the place were coming from, but in this day and age it was probably depressingly easy to mask the disappearances of large groups of people.

Jack stopped reading Farley’s notes with a faintly queasy feeling in his stomach, he got the idea. He needed to get out of this place and preferably inform the authorities, even if he was persona non grata for the time being.

Before leaving, he made sure to gather up all the notes plus Farley’s laptop and stuff them into a nearby briefcase. He should be able to give it all to the authorities and they could use it as evidence to nail as many people to the wall as possible.

Jack left Farley’s floor of horrors and kept going to the sixth floor. This floor looked to be some sort of processing and sorting room where different materials would come in for study and then be sorted to other more specialised floors. It was here that Jack finally managed to locate his gear.

Jack quietly entered a room about the size of a school classroom from a corridor, in it were about a dozen people, non-combatants from the looks of them, all amiably chatting with each other as they examined his gear on different workbenches.

“Are you sure we don’t need to evacuate? That alarm has been going off for a while now,” one of the women said in concern.

“Nah, that alarm goes off every other day, it's just another escapee from one of the lower floors. The guards’ll handle it like they always do,” one of the others dismissed.

“Hey, I think this vest has Glimmer spider silk in it,” a technician told one of his colleagues sitting next to him.

“Oh! That's so cool! Do you think he killed it himself?”

“Probably.”

“So cool!”

“It's kinda weird that you’re such a fan of the guy when we know he’s probably getting diced up into bloody chunks by doctor creepo downstairs as we speak,” a technician pointed out. “Do you still have his card in your pocket?”

“No!.....yes, but it's a collectible. You know they stop making the cards as soon as the hunters dies, so the sooner the hunters dies then the rarer the current cards become. I actually heard a rumour that they’ve only had time to make one shiny of him! Just one!”

“Nerd.”

“Have you seen his spear?” Another technician elsewhere in the room held up Jack’s explosive spear in admiration. “It's incredible! All these magnets and interconnecting locking mechanisms, and it has a hammer and pin firing mechanism for these explosive shells! Haha! Who made this bad boy!?”

“Gah! Hey, can someone help me with this axe? It's seriously heavy, I need to get it down to the smelters on floor eleven.”

Jack quietly walked into the room, no one had noticed him yet. He approached the man handling his axe from behind and reached past him.

“Here, let me,” he said softly as he grabbed his axe.

“Ah, thanks buddy, I -! I - I…..” the technician stammered and stopped, gaping at Jack in silent horror as Jack stepped back.

“What's up Jakub?” one of his colleagues asked him before gasping in shock at the sight of Jack looming over him and mimicking him in his horrified silence.

Slowly, the rest of the room became aware of Jack’s presence amongst them, they all froze. Jack channelled a small amount of energy from his core and allowed arcs of lightning to play across his skin, not much, but just enough to intimidate.

No one made a move against him so he decided to leave them unharmed unless they attacked, just like with the rest of the non-combatants he’d seen so far.

Jack slowly walked over to the man who was handling his flak jacket and gently took it from his frozen fingers. He noticed his greaves, boots, gauntlets and vambraces stacked on a nearby workbench. He went over to them and began to pull everything on over his bloodstained clothes. Nobody else moved a muscle or made a sound, they all remained completely still, staring at him with wide eyes. Judging by the shallow rapid breathing coming from the group, they were either angry or completely terrified, he could also detect the faint smell of urine yet again so his money was on the latter.

He wasn’t going to hurt any of them, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t find their fear a little bit satisfying. It was clear from what he’d overheard that these assholes knew all about this place and what went on here.

After he’d finished putting on his armour and weapons harness, he located his sword and chains and attached them to his belt and fixed the briefcase he’d stolen securely to some spare clips on his harness. His pouches of steel marbles were nowhere to be found unfortunately. One unexpected find though, was a black knife about a foot in length and several inches in width with a slight curve. It was amongst all his stuff for some reason and he didn’t remember where he’d obtained it until it clicked in his mind, it was from some dungeon goblins he’d killed several months ago in the Clifford’s Hill dungeon. He’d been meaning to find a use for it and get Gary to make a sheath for it but instead he’d completely forgotten about it and left it lying in the bottom of his gym bag all this time. He really needed to take better care of his equipment.

He quietly and with deliberate slowness, walked stalked across the room and gently took his spear from one of the paralysed technicians, a woman burst into quiet sobs as he passed. Another man vomited in the corner. His last stop was a young woman who’d been trying on his helmet as he’d walked in, again being careful, he undid the clasps on the helmet and slowly slid it off her head while she watched him, paralyzed with fear. She looked up at him with wide eyes and trembled violently, breathing frantically through her nose.

He impassively looked her in the eye as he put his helmet back on and slid the visor down with a click. She let out a quiet whimper as she stared into the monstrous visage of his helmet visor, he purposefully exhaled heavily, allowing his breath to come out through the respirators in a distorted angry groan. She shivered and whimpered again in fear.

Now that he had more or less got all his stuff back, he’d given up on getting his various tools and pager back since he could just buy some replacements for them, it was finally time to head out.

He slowly made his way to the door and quietly slipped out, gently closing the door behind him, the occupants of the room never moved a muscle.

Just before he stepped on the stairs to go up to the fifth floor, he had a sudden thought. He took up the walkie talkie and composed himself, getting into character before speaking into the radio.

“Target….cough….target neutralised….repeat…target….neutralised. Send a medic…” Jack spoked in a strangled voice into the radio before taking a few gasping breaths. “......my arm! God!....I’m bleeding….everyone’s dead!...please….send…help…” Jack switched off the radio and waited, he thought he’d given a pretty convincing performance.

“Nice try Errant but we can see you on the security cameras,” a voice came through on his radio.

Jack looked around and saw a camera tracking him at the corner just above the stairs. He slapped himself on the forehead, feeling very stupid.

“Doi!”

“Just give up Errant, we don’t have to fight,” the voice came through the radio again.

“Just give up!?” Jack asked incredulously. “Where's the motivation for that? Would you also just like me to cuff myself up and march meekly back downstairs and strap myself down onto the operating table? Should I also dissect myself too huh? Where’s your work ethic? If you want me then you’re gonna have to earn it!”

“You can’t fight us, we have a team of high ranked hunters up here and I’m an A ranked hunter. Flamewrought himself hunts with us and uses us to back him up.”

“Wow, an A ranked hunter and Flamewrought’s bitch, that's definitely something that would look good on the old resume,” Jack mocked.

A tired sigh came through the radio. “Look, just give up and we’ll kill you quickly, no one needs to get tortured or dissected.”

“Uh huh, that's a fair offer. Let me make you a counter offer, you let me pass and I’ll step past you instead of stepping through you.” Jack crushed the radio in his fist and marched up the stairs.

From looking at the maps he’d found at the base of each stairwell, he knew that the fifth floor was a training room. It was a large arena like room with various obstacles and targets where different techniques and tactics were created and practised. However the layout could be altered according to the whims of whoever was practising that day so he could guarantee that whoever was waiting for him upstairs had set things up so that he would be at a disadvantage. Plus they could see him coming.

He turned around and gave the camera tracking him the middle finger before shooting a quick bolt at it, rendering it into a fused, smoking mess of plastic and metal.

Just before he reached the top of the stairs he conjured a shield in front of him and peeked over, no one was waiting for him. He saw a short wide corridor with several doors on the side leading up to a larger set of thick metal double doors. He couldn’t see anything else, he was blind to what lay ahead. The enemy however, had multiple cameras trained on him, he made sure to take out all the ones he could see.

The large set of doors should lead straight to the arena and obstacle course, the doors remained shut, it seemed they were waiting for him to come to them. Jack didn’t really fancy stepping through and emerging into a shooting gallery, he explored all the side doors and saw they were simply small rooms for storing equipment, rather than ways around the ambush that was undoubtedly waiting for him.

He faced the large double doors with a sigh, prepared to bite the bullet when another thought took form in his mind. He reached into his core and maintained his awareness of his surroundings at the same time, gradually he began to hear faint buzzing noises and he could smell the burning tang of metal and sour ozone. He saw almost imperceptible blue lines all around him in the walls, in the ceiling and in small clusters everywhere he looked. All other sounds, sights and smells seemed to grow dull and dark in comparison, he looked around and beyond the double doors he saw dozens of humanoid shaped blue clusters spread out throughout the room.

The clusters were all moving slightly, he now knew the relative location of his ambushers. He saw that most of them appeared to be massed in three separate spots with a smaller number randomly scattered in other places. He took note of each of the locations and stepped up to the door, letting his senses go back to normal, he wiped a faint trickle of blood away from under his right eye.

He reached deep into his core and got several fully powered lightning bolts ready to go, he allowed one to travel down his right arm and wait there, ready to release at a moment's notice. He could feel his arm and hand vibrate and shake whilst containing the power inside it. He hit the switch at the side of the doors and they opened up slowly with a grinding noise. Upon stepping through, Jack immediately fired off the first blast of lightning at the nearest group of people waiting for him, a straight, thick, crackling blue arc of lightning leapt forward from his palm and sheared straight through ten people with guns and melee weapons.

Straight after that he conjured an umbrella shaped shield in front of him and sprinted forwards, after a moment’s delay bullets began impacting his shield but it held. He went straight for the next group of enemies hidden behind a series of large cube stone obstacles, he raked another lightning bolt over them but only managed to take out three.

His shield kept taking bullets and allowed him to close the distance and get in amongst them. He shot off a few quick bolts before dismissing his shield and then laying about him with a conjured blade of light. He cut one gunman in half before stabbing another, he reconjured his shield and rapidly fired his quick bolt to finish off the rest of the scrambling enemy around him.

The stone blocks around him began to lower down into the ground with a mechanical whine. As his cover disappeared, bullets started striking his shield from all around, Jack staggered from the assault and his left arm burned with the pain of feeding more energy into the shield. Blood began to run from the runes cut into it, leaking out of his armour.

“Into him!” a deep voice shouted out. A moment later a heavily armoured individual crashed into his shield with a massive sword, his shield disintegrated and he was forced to dive out of the way to avoid getting cut in half.

“Those were some neat tricks sparker, don’t suppose you’ll tell me how you did that?” a woman's voice came out from behind the helmet visor of the sword wielder.

“Yeah, just give me your number and I’ll get back to you!” he cried out as he shot a quick bolt at her.

She easily caught it on the flat of her blade and chuckled. More heavily armoured individuals ran in to surround him. Other gun wielding guards stood behind them and aimed their weapons at him.

“That's enough Errant, surrender now and it’ll be quick,” one of them said calmly, sounding a bit tired but otherwise completely unflustered about the havoc Jack had wrought so far. It was a man, he wore full heavy black plate and kevlar armour and wielded a huge crimson coloured axe, a heavy great helm obscured his face.

Jack looked around at his situation, it did not look good. He’d just have to play it by ear, he still had tricks up his sleeves.

“Uh, what if hypothetically, I don’t surrender?” he queried.

“Then we gun you down but make sure to leave you alive, then we drag you back downstairs,” the man answered calmly.

“Okay sure, sure….and if I do surrender?”

“You take off that helmet, then one shot to the head, instant death.”

“Uh huh, both good options. But can I suggest a third alternative?” Jack asked hopefully.

“And what would that be?

“It's a bit old fashioned, but how about a warrior's death? Fight me with honour, let me die fighting,” Jack suggested. Obviously he had no intention of dying, honourably or otherwise, if he had to die then it would be kicking and screaming, but this was the only thing he could come up with that would extend his life and let him come up with more options.

“You can’t be serious!” one of the hunters surrounding him scoffed, incredulous.

However, it seemed the apparent leader had other ideas. “Fine, we’ll do it your way,” he acquiesced with a nod, barely taking anytime to consider it.

“Boss you can’t be serious!?” a man cried out along with others. “He’s just trying to play for time! Just let me kill him right now!” The hunter who spoke hefted a large machine gun at Jack and took aim.

The man in charge ignored the protestations of the others. “Sonia, you’re up,” he ordered and the woman who had attacked Jack before stepped forward.

“Finally! Let's do this sparker! Hope you don’t mind me cutting your head off!” she cried with delight from behind her helmet visor.

Jack got out his spear but didn’t extend it yet. He unhooked his black chain and held it concealed behind the small of his back.

She rushed towards him with a yell, at the same time he swung his chain and wrapped it around her, a brief surge of lightning had her crumpling to her knees with a confused, pained grunt. He rushed forward and placed the tip of his spear to her throat while she was bound. He looked up to the rest of her comrades.

“Let me go and I won't kill her!” he called out to them as he reached into his core and drew out an especially thick strand of lightning, he just needed a few seconds to get it ready.

They looked angry and readied their weapons, slowly starting forwards towards him.

“I thought you wanted a warrior's death Errant? What happened to -.” the man in charge started but Jack interrupted him.

“I changed my mind!” And with that he released his lightning bolt and waved it over the group of hunters stepping towards him. It outright sliced through several of them and caused the rest of them to be blasted away as their armour took the hit. Some of them had been holding onto elemental techniques and they accidentally released them as they were struck with the lightning. Explosions of flame, smoke, water, gusts of wind and eruptions of earth exploded all around them. Jack stayed on his feet and booted the woman he’d been holding hostage away then turned tail and ran. He went straight for the double doors at the other end of the arena whilst reconjuring his shield, not a moment too soon as bullets began impacting on it straightaway.

He slammed his fist on the door release and they swept open. Jack was through them and charging upstairs. He reached the fourth floor and didn’t stop for a second, he just kept on running, not paying any attention at all to whatever lay around him.

Within five minutes he’d charged through and up the last remaining floors and stairways and was on the top floor. It was a large underground parking garage. He was in a small security office that looked like it restricted access to and from the main car parking area.

Jack swiftly walked up to bewildered looking security guard and grabbed him by the throat before lifting him up.

“Buzz me out,” he told the guard calmly. The guard spluttered and choked, his eyes wide with panic. Jack placed him near the guard’s computer console and let him go. The poor man frantically tapped a few keys on his keyboard and the door to the parking area slid open.

“Thank you,” Jack said before leaving. The door slid shut behind, before leaving he pulsed a crackling wave of electricity through the door’s locking mechanism, hopefully fusing the lock closed. There was a scattering of ten or so cars and trucks parked here and there throughout the garage, Jack shot a bolt of lightning into each of the cars engines.

With that done, he walked up a shallow ramp and approached the daylight outside.