There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)-Chapter 460 - 453. Down The Hill

"Ugh...what time is it?" Leehan groggily stepped out of his tent, and bumped into another zombie-like entity who only stared at him dazedly in response.

"Oh, hi, morning..." Dheera rubbed her eyes before standing still and disoriented. "Is it morning?"

"Dunno..." Leehan looked up at the dark sky--no, the dark ceiling covering the sky--and the similarly dark surroundings outside the boundary of the temporary safe zone. "Kinda feel like having a jet lag."

Still in a daze, Dheera looked around the camp to try and find her bearing. At the center of the camp was a campfire surrounded by chairs, and on one of those chair was her bearing. Her eyes lit up and she wobbled forward.

"Captaaain..."

Like chicks looking for their mother hens, the guides trudged forward as if following a lighthouse--although the person they were looking for was wearing all-black. With stretched arms, Dheera crouched on the ground and hugged the older guide from the side. Leehan, meanwhile, laid his head on their Captain’s knee.

"Haa..."

The moment they made contact, the two guides let out a long sigh of relief. Zein smiled and patted their heads, sending out a bit of soothing mana to them. "Did you sleep well?"

"Nggh--we sleep well, maybe because we’re exhausted, but..."

"Waking up didn’t feel too good..."

Ron chuckled at the whining guides. "It must be weird, isn’t it, waking up in the dark even though your body telling you it’s already morning," he said, and the guides nodded. "It can’t be helped; you need to get used to it soon."

"You should put on an alarm and get used to waking up at a certain time," Zein jerked his leg to nudge the two guides. "You’ll be fine after a few days."

"Did you do it like that too, Captain?" Dheera finally let go of the older guide before the Commander gave her a stink eye.

Instead of Zein answering, Ron was chuckling on the side. "Being able to sleep comfortably in a tent like this is not something a Unit’s personnel could experience," he said.

"We didn’t have a compressed tent or purification device after all--there’s no budget for that, you see," Zein continued. "And without a safe zone, it’d be too dangerous to build a regular tent that needed at least fifteen minutes to be deployed."

"Huuh? Then how did you...?"

"How else? We just looked for a place to hole up and take turns sleeping for a few hours," Ron shrugged, and the two guides gasped, looking horrified.

"In...in the dark?!"

"W-without the purification device?!"

Zein chuckled. "In the first place, this purification device is only something that Mortix created for this Operation, and is yet to be released to the public, so there’s no way the Unit would have something like that when we didn’t even have decent equipment."

The two guides, who had been spending a few months in the simulation immediately imagined themselves in that perpetual darkness for a few days without any time to have a proper rest and shuddered, immediately holding onto their Captain’s leg again and shook their head.

"Well, that’s why we never spend more than a few days inside, and never went in if it wasn’t a must," Ron smiled as he watched Zein calming the two guides like an older brother would. In that sense, the man did not change at all. "Now you know why the guides here don’t want to get near Deathzone at all."

"And that’s why no effort could be made to reclaim the Deathzone before this," Bassena added, coming back with a plate of food for Zein. "And it won’t go this smoothly without you."

Zein glanced at a new storage ring on his little finger. It was a specially made one bound to Zein, with a returning spell that prevented the ring from getting lost no matter what. Inside, after all, was the most important thing in this Operation; the shard fragment of Setnath.

"Go wash up and get some breakfast," Zein patted the two guides after taking a deep breath. "We’ll move out right after."

"Yes, Captain!"

Ron watched the two guides scurry off with a chuckle. "They’re just like your little followers."

"Oh, it’s only two for now. Once the whole of them come, he’ll have a whole cult," Kei told the fellow scout with a grin. "It’ll look real funny."

"Hee..." Ron glanced at the scoffing Zein with a smirk. "I guess the guides in the high zones are more innocent, huh?"

* * *

"Alright, put them together just like that..." Han Shin raised his arms as he instructed the defenders.

Julian and Banner each held a half-circle heavy metal plaque that they placed around the beacon and the purification device. The deep and dull sound their steps made told the rest of them how heavy the plaques were.

"Captain, what is that?" Dheera asked in a whisper.

"We need to protect the beacon," Zein explained. "Hagalaz squad will only arrive in the evening, and even then, after they moved out to catch up to us, there will be only one or two espers keeping guard. The beacon still needs protection when it’s under attack until a squad is deployed to get rid of the beasts."

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"That’s where most of the money went," Bassena added. "The beacons, the purification devices, the guards--we had to produce dozens of each. If it’s not Mortix, do you think anyone could make it?"

"No wonder the government just threw the mission to the guilds," Ron smirked. "There’s no way they have this kind of money."

"Hey, they might have," Gus chimed in, wiggling his fingers. "But the willingness to spend it is another story."

They laughed as the defenders and Han Shin were busy assembling the mini bunker around the beacon and the purification device. Once the bunker was placed, Kei checked on the local link signal to make sure the bunker did not prevent the connection’s availability.

Thankfully, it didn’t. She gave an okay signal to Bassena and they started to move again, continuing the hike along the riverside.

"We still following the old trail?" Zein asked Ron in surprise.

"Just until halfway," Ron said. "To the peak of the hill, so we can go down the other side."

"Did you check on the original one?"

"We did," Ron nodded. "We want to check the underground tunnel, even if the way to the core is blocked. But..." he pursed his lips and glanced at Zein. "The hole in the cave ground we used as the entrance is closed up."

"Is it collapsing?"

"No, there was no sign of it--there was no sign of anything at all, actually," the scout replied. "The floor was just...returning to its original state, as if there was never a hole to begin with."

Zein raised his brow. "Are you sure it’s the same cave?"

"I thought I was mistaken too, at first. But there was no other cave around, and unless my bearing missed by several kilometers, then..."

Zein shook his head. He worked with Ron for three years, and the scout had never missed any path or a bearing he made once. He was the best scout the Unit had after all. If he missed, then any other scout would miss.

"Was the cave healing by itself?"

"Who knows," Ron shrugged. "Might be a work of another Specter, or perhaps...the core’s influence got stronger after we got rid of two Specters on its way?"

"Hmm..."

Another thing to be noted. Deathzone was full of mystery anyway, so anything felt like it might happen. It was a dungeon on steroids, basically. He mulled over this for a while, but decided there wouldn’t be any answer unless he checked it for himself--and even then, there might still be no answer.

He had no time for that now, however, since their priority was to establish a base, not to do research. There would be time for that once they reached a somewhat stable environment.

"Alright, here we are," Ron said after a considerable hike. There was a slight slope following the river that Zein recognized as the path leading to the cave. "We still haven’t found the entrance to the underground path, but we found a path to the tree fortress made by the core."

The scout steered to the side, entering the jungle again, which to the guides’ dread, got even more grotesque--looking more like some monster part fused together into towers than trees. They scooted closer to their Captain as they followed Ron further inside and down the hill.

"Alright--this is a new territory, so there’ll be skirmishes ahead," Bassena clapped his hands. "Don’t forget to check for any presence of a commander type, and try to see if they have some kind of stones in them."

"So we have to get those stones, right?"

"Right, right! Make sure to have them whole if you can!" Han Shin added to the instruction.

Zhan chuckled while crackling his fist. "Haha, what’s this? Another challenge?"

Bassena clapped his hands once more, loudly, as if baiting the whole forest. "Alright! Let’s go--to the core."