I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 909: Weapon Enhancement and Pursuit

Jack slipped into a shadowed corner sheltered by a great tree and an outcrop of bare rock.

Once he had confirmed that the area was safe for the moment, he crouched down at once to prepare for charging.

He smashed the two communicators he had just taken hard against the ground, prised the wreckage open with the point of his knife, and quickly dug two energy crystals the size of a thumb out from inside.

He also took out the spare crystals he had searched off those two men in black earlier, setting them on the ground one after another.

Four in all. That would do.

Jack let out a breath, glanced around him, and then began to score the damp earth rapidly with his short knife.

Those symbols were no longer strange to him now, and within a few breaths a crude charging array had taken shape on the ground.

“Begin charging.”

Hmmm…

A faint glow lit between the clods of earth, and all four energy crystals trembled at once; then the energy stored within them was drawn out as though by some invisible force gone mad, the lustre of their surfaces dimming fast enough to see.

Snap!

As the last of them cracked apart, the black metal grew faintly warm, and the System’s voice sounded after it.

“Charging complete.”

Jack did not hesitate in the least.

“System, enhance my body!”

The familiar warmth flooded into him again.

Boom!

“Agh…”

Jack clenched his teeth, cold sweat starting on his forehead in an instant.

Even though he had been through it twice already, Jack still found it hard to bear when he faced it again.

Mercifully that force still lasted only a few seconds before it stopped.

Jack had barely caught his breath when his stomach set up a fierce growling.

Hunger swept through him like a tide, and Jack tore open the energy bars he had taken from the men in black at once.

Only after eating three in a row did the hunger finally subside.

Jack stood up, clenched his fist, and then drove that fist into the great tree in front of him!

Bang!

The bark burst outright, fragments flying in every direction.

Looking at the force of that one blow, even Jack was stunned.

“This…” He looked down at his fist.

“There’s no way this is still the strength of a fifth-level apprentice, is there?” Jack’s heart began to beat faster; strength like this was simply outrageous.

But soon another question came back to him.

His extraordinary ability. Why had it still not awakened?

Jack felt carefully through himself once more, and confirmed that he had nothing of the kind the teachers spoke of, no extraordinary ability of his own.

“Still nothing…” Jack’s brows knitted tight.

“Could it be that because the enhancement I’m using comes from the System, it can’t come into being of its own accord?”

But this was plainly not the moment for such thoughts. A faint sound reached his newly enhanced hearing, and Jack was on his guard in an instant.

“Someone’s coming!”

This time he heard it far more clearly: the rustle of leaves, boot soles pressing over leaf litter, the sound of breathing, and even the slight differences in the rhythm of each man’s breath.

“Five of them… and they should all have firearms.”

Jack drew a light breath and did not linger there.

Having quickly destroyed the traces of the charging array beneath his feet, he slipped without sound or sign into the dense scrub beside him.

Once he was moving, Jack could feel the enhancement of this body of his far more plainly.

Each enhancement brought not merely a straightforward increase in strength but an improvement in every direction.

And every direction meant not only gains in his five senses and his speed, but even in the command he had of his own body.

Jack threaded through the thick woods, body low, steps light, and yet his speed was astonishing.

His technique, too, was extraordinary; the rotting leaves underfoot hardly made a sound.

Shrubs he would once have had to go round he could now clear outright with an easy push off.

The sense of release as he ran at speed was like nothing he had known before, and Jack even found himself half lost in it.

His five senses, moreover, had truly been strengthened by a great deal.

From sounds in the distance that were all but inaudible, he could work out the position and the number of his pursuers.

He could even make a rough judgement of some men’s physical strength from the weight of their footfalls and the frequency of their breathing.

“None of them are weak. They should all be at the standard of a fifth-level apprentice.” Jack sized up this squad of pursuers he had slipped past so lightly.

“Still, as I am now, they aren’t so frightening any more…”

This was the confidence that power gave him. Had these men not had guns, Jack even felt he could have turned on his pursuers and killed them single-handed.

“No. I mustn’t let power go to my head. I have no extraordinary ability, and against a proper first-stage transcendent I would come off badly.”

Recalling the black figure that had cut them down so casually, Jack quickly grew calm.

By the strength that figure had shown, there was no possibility of his being a fifth-level apprentice.

“And if he can command a first-stage transcendent, there’s every chance their leader is stronger still!”

All the same, against the pursuers behind him he at least now had the standing to fight back.

Thinking this, Jack suddenly stopped, because he could feel three men coming up ahead.

He lowered himself slowly and looked out through a gap in the scrub. Three black figures were closing on the place in a fan.

They moved steadily; clearly they had had specialist training.

Each of them kept a few paces from the others, in a position to lend support at any moment.

And the man at the rear held a savage-looking short black carbine levelled in both hands, its muzzle raised slightly.

“Only three of them… I can kill them!”

Jack looked at the communicators hanging at their waists, and his eyes turned cold.

The energy crystals inside those communicators, and the energy bar rations they carried, had for Jack as he was now become simply another way of saying that he could grow stronger.

“Now!”

Seizing the moment as the men passed by him, he sprang out like an arrow off the string.

The first cut!

Thuck!

The throat of the man in black on the left was opened, and blood sprayed out at once.

And before the remaining two could react, the second cut had already followed.

Thuck!

The blade drew across the back of the second man’s neck; blood spurted, and the body crashed down.

By now the third man had finally reacted.

“Enemy attack!”

He roared it instinctively, and his muzzle came up at the same moment.

Bang!

Along with the bright flash of the shot, Jack’s pupils contracted sharply.

And then… he felt as though time had slowed.

The bullet slowed within his field of vision, its direction, its speed, its whole trajectory becoming perfectly clear.

“I can knock it aside!”

Jack’s heart hammered, and the short knife in his hand came up in the same instant.

Clang!

Sparks burst out; the bullet was struck hard off the flat of the blade and spun away into the trunk of a tree beside them.

Whump!

A great sheet of bark split apart, and the shock left Jack’s hand somewhat numb.

But he had, in fact, knocked a bullet aside with a knife!

The man in black opposite was left half stupefied at the sight. “How is that possible?!!”

Jack gave him no chance to think. He stepped in, closed his body against the man’s, and drove the short knife up from below on the diagonal!

As the knife went into his heart, the man in black’s body went rigid.

Jack twisted his wrist, the edge churning the heart to ruin, and the light went swiftly out of those eyes as the body sank slowly down.

Jack stood where he was, breathing in great gulps; the astonishment in his own mind was in truth no less than the dead man’s.

Or rather, he truly had not imagined that after his enhancement he would be capable of anything like this!

Jack looked down at his own hands without thinking. “So this is my strength…”

But he soon put his feelings aside and searched the bodies quickly.

Guns, communicators, energy crystals, energy bars; everything he could carry off he gathered up.

Sensing footsteps closing fast behind him, Jack did not linger but turned and ran.

He ran a long while more, and only once his speed had shaken off his pursuers for the time being did Jack duck into a patch of shadow and sink slowly down against a tree trunk.

His chest heaved violently, his heart all but leaping out of it.

“So tired… is that because the enhancement burned through too much energy?”

Feeling the hunger come over him once more, Jack let out a slow breath, then tore open an energy bar and began to eat.

He was not eating in such a rush this time, so he could attend to his body more closely.

And so he discovered something stranger still.

Jack found that his body was still growing stronger. Slowly, yes, but it truly was still growing stronger!

He glanced at the energy bar in his hand and understood.

The previous rounds of enhancement had not in fact taken full effect. It was more as though a door had been opened a crack, and for his body truly to absorb that potential, enough nourishment was needed to sustain it.

Feeling the strength still slowly increasing in him, Jack clenched his fist. “So that’s how it is…”

That meant that so long as he had food and energy enough, his body would go on growing stronger even without further enhancement.

“In that case… I may as well try out some of the System’s other abilities.”

The fight just now had given Jack ample confidence in his own power, and with the realisation that his body could go on strengthening besides, his attention naturally began to turn elsewhere.

He looked down at the short knife in his hand. The edge was covered in nicks, and that collision with the bullet had left the blade riddled with cracks.

Seeing the state of it, Jack could not help frowning. “This thing is about done for.”

He could of course have gone on using the weapons taken from the men in black; but since he wanted to try out the System’s other functions, was this not exactly the chance?

With that, Jack quickly laid out the array, and once the charging was done he set the short knife on the black metal block.

“System, enhance the short knife!”

“Beginning weapon enhancement.”

Hmmm…

As the System’s voice sounded, a light flashed across the short knife and was gone.

“That’s the enhancement finished?”

Jack examined it closely, rather doubtful; to look at, it seemed no different from before.

Only the nicks and cracks had all vanished, the edge restored more perfectly than a new knife’s.

Jack swung it a couple of times. It did seem to handle more smoothly, but beyond that there appeared to be no further change.

“Is it only repair, then?” Jack frowned despite himself. “Or is there some property I haven’t found?”

Just then Jack suddenly took cover, because he could hear a great many sounds rising in the forest ahead.

A great many people!

“After him!”

“Don’t let him get away!”

Crack!

With the sound of a branch snapping underfoot, a figure came into Jack’s view.

The man was stumbling, drenched in blood, his clothes long since in tatters and his hair plastered in disorder across his face; plainly he was at the very end of his strength.

Jack stared at the figure and found it somehow familiar; after looking closely to be sure, his pupils contracted slightly.

He had it. It was him, the prodigy who had been the first in their class to reach fifth-level apprentice!

And now this prodigy, whom everyone had once envied, was running for his life through the forest like a wounded stray dog.

Behind him a group of men in black came on without letting up.

Hidden behind his tree, Jack watched and narrowed his eyes.

“A trap? Or is he really being hunted?”