Chapter 75: Inferior
After the second day’s ‘Mark Red’ battle, half of the ten teams were kicked out of the contest.
In the first place, Seven Lights’ goal was only the fifth spot. Judging from the current situation, the four military academies would contest the top four, and all Seven Lights needed to do was to drift along and pass the time. The remaining energy blocks were enough that they could do whatever they wanted to. But Gerrard was slightly dissatisfied with this result. Perhaps those fellows would bring everyone a pleasant surprise?
In fact, the five forces could be said to be rather docile during the few days after the ‘Mark Red’ battle. They only searched their surroundings for energy blocks and did not attack the people of other teams.
Seven Lights had already found seven energy blocks, but used one for daily consumption. That was to say that they needed to search another four or so energy blocks. After five teams were kicked out of the contest, the task to search for energy blocks became a lot easier.
Lung sat against a tree and plucked at the leaves beside him in boredom. Not far away, Cillin was thinking with his eyes closed.
Their patrol group of six was split into three teams: Lung and Cillin, Knight and Copley, and Sird and Hard. Meanwhile, Pride was responsible for piloting the plane between the three teams and the stronghold to transport supplies. If any energy blocks were discovered, Pride would transfer them to the stronghold to avoid them being intercepted by the military academy students.
Up until yesterday, every team was able to find two energy blocks respectively. However, Knight’s team found yet another energy block way early in the morning today, resulting in Lung yelling about not wanting to lose to Knight and finding another energy block to match the score. This was the extent of Lung’s interest in the integrated warfare contest.
However, energy blocks gets harder and harder later on, and in the previous contests, the time spent on searching energy blocks could last up to ten days or so. Sometimes there wouldn’t even be any findings for a day or two.
In Cillin’s head, he had already marked down all of the locations of the energy blocks that were discovered. Some were Seven Lights’, and some were their opponents’. From these burial spot one could deduce how the mind of the person who buried these energy blocks acted, and predict where the next burial spot might be following this line of thought. Otherwise, it would waste too much time to continue searching blindly like this. This might be just a game, but it was Cillin’s final game in an institute. He might never experience such a thing again in the future.
When he saw Cillin opening his eyes, Lung grew spirited, “You’re done calculating?”
Cillin nodded, pointed at a direction, and walked there with Lung. But half a day later, the sensor still did not detect anything. There were no mountains in their surroundings, and the land was as flat as they could see. There was a lake before them.
“Could it be inside the lake?” Lung pointed at the lake and said. Lung believed in Cillin’s calculation abilities, but the reason the sensor could not detect anything might be because that it was shielded in some way or inside the lake. The match officials could not have isolated the block’s energy reactions completely, or they might as well not bury it at all.
Cracking his neck, Lung took off his jacket, took the sensor from Cillin’s hands and jumped into the lake. Before long, he appeared and said excitedly, “There is a reaction, and two no less!”
Lung tossed the sensor to Cillin, “You don’t need to come down. I can handle this myself!”
“Okay. Watch yourself.” Cillin said as if to mean something. When he grabbed the sensor he made a secretive hand gesture.
“Got it!” said Lung before diving back to the bottom of the lake.
At the same time, there were two people not far away from Cillin and Lung. After interacting with each other through a series of hand gestures, one of them closed in on Cillin whereas the other went into the lake to seize the energy block while his companion was holding Cillin back.
Before the person closing in on Cillin could even act, Cillin immediately turned around and fired a single shot. Then he swiftly left the lakeside and went into the forest in search of obstacles to hide behind. The opponent’s gun was probably equipped with a silencer, but Cillin’s wasn’t. This gunshot was to warn Lung under the lake that someone was coming. Previously, he already noticed that there were people around them, which was why he made that gesture to tell Lung to be careful.
Cillin did not assume a defensive state and instead closed in on his opponent using the forest as cover.
Thud thud thud. The bullets slammed into a tree Cillin was passing by, but it did not hit Cillin at all.
If the bullets could penetrate the tree trunks, it would have definitely hit Cillin. However, while the firearms distributed by the base shared nearly the same firing speed as real firearms, they could hardly kill a person, much less penetrate a tree trunk. This was the vulnerability Cillin exploited to close in forcefully towards his opponent.
His opponent got a little anxious as well. He knew that Cillin was Shadow X, but he didn’t think that Cillin would be able to close in on him so quickly. Moreover, Cillin basically dodged the second he was ready to open fire, almost as if he could predict his every move. Although he knew that Cillin was closing in on him, he was unable to stop him. Therefore he had no choice but to back off for now.
While Cillin was closing in on the enemy, his hands weren’t resting either. Bullets flew at that person from tricky angles, although his opponent was an experienced person himself and was able to dodge bullets while backing into the forest.
But right before his foot was about to step on the ground, the person came to a stop. While he was shooting, retreating and avoid the bullets, he had also forgotten about the trap beneath his feet! Although he had sensed it just now, a bullet slammed into his chest during this less than a second’s pause of time.
Mark red!
Now he understood that Cillin’s goal was to force him to the location where the trap was set! To think that he was marked red by Shadow X himself; he wondered how his teammates would look when they heard about it.
In reality, Cillin did not count on these vine-made traps to trap a military academy student at all. He was only borrowing these traps to distract his opponent’s attention.Such traps might be good for catching rabbits, but as military academy students, there was no way they could trap their feet at all. It was exactly because of this mindset that he had neglected the extremely short but fatal pause these things could bring upon them during a critical moment.
Since he was marked red, the guy laid on the ground straight away and gave Cillin a ‘well done’ hand gesture.
Cillin walked towards the person and took a glance, “The Second Military Academy’s Ryan?”
Since a person who was marked red wasn’t allowed to speak, Ryan could only nod his head helplessly. He wasn’t able to meet Shadow X in the combat tournament, but he didn’t think that he would be marked red by Shadow X in the integrated warfare contest. He supposed that this was what they call inferiority in skill.
“I’m very sorry for disqualifying you from the contest. Also,” Cillin pointed at the direction of the lake, “That partner of yours has also been disqualified.”
“What?!” This time Ryan was so shocked that he accidentally spoke up in agitation.
There was the sound of slithering rope as Lung lifted a fainted person in one hand, and the two energy blocks tied together in the other.
Ryan’s face changed colors when he saw Lung holding his partner. His eyes looked conflicted. It would appear that the Second Military Academy was going to left behind just like before. If even Boen had been marked red, then the rest of their teammates wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. Lung Andrea was much stronger than they had imagined.
Cillin obviously recognized Boen. He read the name list and memorised the faces of everyone who participated in the integrated warfare contest.
Lung tossed Boen directly at a side and smiled so widely that his eyes were slits, “Now we’ve found four energy blocks, which is one more than Knight’s group. Let’s see if he dares to show off to me again!”
No longer bothering with Ryan and Boen, Cillin and Lung left the place and sent an encrypted message to Pride to come and take the energy blocks.
“Sigh, if only we have some laxatives to use. We’ll dump them right into their lakes and wait until they shit themselves silly before catching them all in one go. Then we can snatch their energy blocks all for ourselves!” Lung was a little tired of this energy block hunting game already.
“Lung.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re a goddam genius.”