Ex-Human Morphus [A Mutant Evolution Apocalypse LitRPG]
Chapter 180

Chapter 180

At the other end of the corridor, where the dead body of the last guard lay sprawled on the floor, a door led into the lounge area. Jake jogged the length of the corridor, stepped over the lifeless body of the bandit he had just killed, and approached the door. Pushing it open, he stepped inside and paused for a moment to survey the vast room.

He quickly identified the spot on the wall where the three sub-bosses had hidden the Skeleton Key, recalling the recorded footage he had watched in the security control room. Jake crossed the lounge and stepped toward the wall. It didn’t take long for him to find the hidden button. When he pressed it, a section of the wall slid open, revealing the front of a small safe embedded within it.

A touchpad was embedded in the front of the safe. Jake had memorized the four-digit code Dominic used to unlock the door to the security control room. He couldn’t help but wonder if the safe was secured with the same code, but he decided against trying it.

He looked at the safe for a brief moment, evaluating its durability. Jake was confident he could breach it with relative ease. Stepping back, he activated Acid Spit with a thought.

He felt the mana flowing from the mana pool located in his midsection to his mouth through one of the channels. A glob of acid formed in his mouth and hovered there, waiting for his command to be released. Thanks to the Quick Charge upgrade for the ability, the entire process was nearly instantaneous.

Jake aimed at the safe, opened his jaws, and launched the acidic projectile from his mouth. It struck the front wall, splattering acid everywhere. Almost instantly, the metal started to sizzle, sending curls of smoke upward. Thanks to an upgrade called Enhanced Potency, which he had acquired some time ago, his Acid Spit had become significantly more powerful, capable of dissolving various metal surfaces with ease.

Moments later, a large hole with melted edges opened up in the front wall of the safe. Jake leaned closer to look inside. Apart from the Skeleton Key, the safe was empty. He slipped his hand through the opening, grasped the key, and swiftly pulled it out. He paused briefly to examine the Skeleton Key lying in his palm.

The key was large, though not excessively so. Its only notable feature was the design at the top, shaped like a demon’s head. The head sported two horns curling back along its skull, while the gaping mouth displayed rows of shark-like teeth. Two small red gems, resembling rubies, glinted in the demon’s eye sockets.

For a brief moment, Jake considered how to carry the key. He could hold it in one hand, as it wouldn’t greatly interfere with his climbing or fighting capabilities. However, he preferred having both hands available. In the end, he opted to place it in his mouth. After all, he didn’t have a throat cavity, so he wouldn’t accidentally swallow it. As long as he kept his mouth shut, the key would be securely stashed away. He just needed to avoid using Acid Spit for the time being to prevent melting the key inside his mouth.

After that, he left the lounge and headed for the stairs leading to the second floor. When he reached the bodies of the guards he had killed near the door to the outside, he halted. After slaying the two of them, he had detached his bladed tentacles. They couldn’t survive on their own, and when separated from his body, cut off from the mana that nourished them, they quickly turned into small piles of dust, as always happened. Once separated, they withered, shrinking in size several times, leaving behind nothing more than small piles of dust.

When Miller tried to figure out what had happened inside HQ, he would surely notice the evidence. While he might not be able to identify it and learn what those remnants were, Jake still wanted to make the residue as unnoticeable as possible. To that end, he took a moment to scatter the dust piles, spreading them across the area to make the residue barely visible. On the second floor, he repeated this process with the piles of dust the tendrils had turned into after being detached from his body, carefully spreading the residue across the entire width of the corridor.

Before returning to the roof, he took a moment to think. One body lay in the corridor on the second floor, and another was in the security control room. Several more bodies were on the first floor. He had taken great care not to use Claws, Smashfists, or any other abilities that could expose him. His goal was to make it seem as if all the guards had been killed by knives, so he solely employed Bladed Tentacles, always ensuring the wounds looked as if they had been inflicted by a human rather than a powerful monster.

When the leader of the gang tried to determine what had happened in HQ, his prime suspects would undoubtedly be his three closest subordinates: Dominic, Minh, and Patrick. Besides him, only they had access to the security control room. He would likely deduce that one of them had lured the guard at the door into the security control room, where the assailant had killed him. The second victim was the guard in the corridor. Following that, the assailant descended the stairs, systematically taking out all the guards one by one.

Perhaps, Miller would also suspect that the culprit wasn’t working alone. He might contemplate the possibility that two of his sub-bosses were working together. Alternatively, he might think that the culprit enlisted help from one of the guards on the first floor to assist in killing the others, and afterward, the assailant eliminated that guard as well to leave no witnesses.

Sure enough, Dominic, Minh, and Patrick would insist they had no part in the massacre that had occurred at HQ. Since they weren’t friends and were completely terrified of Miller, the three of them would point fingers at one another, desperately trying to deflect suspicion away from themselves.

One of them might even point out that the safe had been breached with some kind of acid, asserting it as evidence of their innocence. However, Miller would counter that the safe hadn’t been opened simply by entering the code for a reason: it was likely deliberately staged to make it seem like an outsider had breached their headquarters.

So the three sub-bosses would claim that an intruder infiltrated their base, somehow managing to sneak in without being detected by the guards stationed everywhere, as well as the top-notch, super-sensitive machine gun turrets, which Jake knew from experience was nearly impossible. Then the culprit somehow hacked into the security control room, evading detection by the guards inside HQ. Afterward, they killed everyone inside and, to save time, broke open the safe instead of hacking into it.

However, to Miller, this version would sound far too unrealistic for him to accept. In his opinion, a much more plausible scenario would be that one of his sub-bosses had stolen the Skeleton Key and made a clumsy attempt to make it look like an intruder was responsible. After that, the three sub-bosses would simply start pointing fingers at each other, trying to divert suspicion away from themselves. In the process, they would inadvertently reveal a lot of their own dirty secrets, such as Minh spying on the base leaders and Patrick being critical of Miller behind his back.

Ultimately, all evidence would suggest that one or possibly two of his closest subordinates were responsible for stealing the Skeleton Key and staging it to look like an outsider was responsible. Since Dominic, Minh, and Patrick would deny their involvement, Miller would likely choose to torture each of them in order to uncover the truth of the situation.

A detective with a sharp mind, one capable of noticing all the details and quickly piecing everything together, might have been able to solve this puzzle. However, such detectives existed only in fiction, not in the real world. At first glance, it would certainly appear that his sub-bosses were the ones who stole the key.

After torturing his closest subordinates for a while, Miller might eventually realize that none of them had stolen the Skeleton Key after all. However, it was impossible to tell how long it would take for him to come to this conclusion. By that time, Jake might already be preparing to launch an attack on their base. Or perhaps one of his sub-bosses might confess to stealing the key simply to bring the suffering to an end.

Jake’s gaze fell upon the remnants of Klaus’s assault rifle. Jake remembered biting into it, splintering the weapon into several pieces. He hadn’t intended to grab the weapon with his teeth—it was an instinctive reaction he couldn’t resist. When the weapon had been thrust in front of him, Jake simply couldn’t help but bite through it. Now, however, it posed a bit of a problem. He wanted to frame the massacre as the act of human assailants, but it was clear at first glance that no human could have inflicted such damage on the weapon. Jake needed to minimize any evidence linking him to the guards’ deaths. So, he made the decision to take the remnants of the rifle with him. He bent down, picked up the pieces from the floor, and clutched them tightly in one hand. It was the better option. While Miller could quickly notice the destroyed rifle, his mind might not even register the absence of the weapon, too stunned to fully and immediately process the massacre that had taken place at HQ.

Before stepping onto the rooftop, Jake activated Cloak, becoming invisible once more. After the skirmish at HQ, his mana reserves were critically low. While he was eager to get out of the bandit base as quickly as possible, he knew that rushing would be counterproductive. To avoid detection by the turrets, he needed to move slowly to prevent causing any disturbances in the air that the 360-degree scanners on those turrets could immediately notice.

He cautiously approached the edge of the roof and took a moment to survey the area. He noticed that Dominic, Minh, and Patrick were located in different parts of the base. They obviously weren’t constantly together, which perfectly aligned with Jake’s plan. As he continued to scan his surroundings, he saw that Miller’s vehicle was still missing, suggesting that the base leader had not returned yet.

Jake also noticed something intriguing. The damaged machines that Minh had designated for repair from the security control room were now encased in semi-transparent blue boxes. When he focused on one, he saw a progress bar that displayed the time left for the structure to be fully restored.

Jake then glanced at the watchtowers overlooking the perimeter walls of the base. The turrets positioned atop the towers had a clear view of the entire base and the surrounding area. The alert lights were green, indicating that none of the turrets were currently aware of his presence. Jake intended to keep it that way. So instead of jumping off the roof of the two-story building, he crawled down the wall, moving slowly and carefully to avoid creating any air disturbances that could catch the turrets’ attention. He still gripped the pieces of the broken rifle in one hand, but it didn’t hinder him much.

When he reached the ground, he began moving toward the gates, which still hadn’t been repaired. He wanted to get out of the base as quickly as possible, but he knew he needed to avoid detection. He wished he could have deactivated the turrets because doing so would have allowed him to accomplish two goals at once: facilitate a quicker escape and make it look like it was an outsider who had stolen the Skeleton Key.

Jake was convinced that Miller would attribute the theft of the key to one of his sub-bosses, who then, in Miller’s opinion, tried to pin the blame on an outsider by breaking into the safe instead of entering the code. Deactivating the turrets would have aligned perfectly with this plan because it would have suggested that the actual thief had disabled them to make their getaway faster, further supporting the idea of an outsider’s involvement.

On the other hand, since Jake didn’t know how clever Miller actually was, he might have refrained from deactivating them after all, because it might have made Miller actually buy into the narrative his sub-bosses would push—that whoever infiltrated the HQ had come from outside—while Jake wanted the blame to fall on the sub-bosses themselves.

What would really support Miller’s version that his subordinates were responsible for the massacre at HQ, as well as the disappearance of the Skeleton Key, was the fact that all the guards had been killed in close-range combat, without having the chance to fire a single shot. This would indicate that whoever eliminated the guards was well-known at HQ, which explained why the guards had been relaxed and allowed the assailant to approach without raising any suspicion.

Sure, there would still be lots of questions left in Miller’s mind—why the culprit did this and why they didn’t do that—but all this confusion would only add to the perplexity of the situation, which would only work to Jake’s advantage. The more time Miller spent trying to piece together what had actually happened at HQ, the better it was for Jake.

His line of thought suddenly came to a halt as he realized something: his mana level was critically low. The last time his mana dropped to this level, Cloak had shut down to conserve what was left. That meant it was about to happen again.

He immediately stopped moving. He was still halfway across the base, too far away from the gates. If he continued to move, Cloak would deactivate in a few seconds, exposing him to the guards and turrets surrounding him. He was stranded in the heart of the bandit base!

Even remaining still drained mana, though at a slower rate. It wouldn’t be long before Cloak shut down completely. Acting fast, he glanced around. To his right were several tents. Without wasting a moment, Jake made his way toward them. Just as he reached the nearest one—a larger tent that provided enough space to stand—Cloak deactivated.

Just a fraction of a second before he became visible, he dashed inside the tent, pushing the flap aside with one hand. He noticed that none of the turrets’ green lights had switched to orange, which meant “Caution”, suggesting that, fortunately, none of the turrets had detected him. However, he wasn’t sure about the guards. That’s why immediately after entering the large tent, he spun around toward the entrance, straining to listen for any sounds that might indicate he had been noticed.

However, no suspicious sounds from outside reached him. It looked like he was lucky enough to have avoided detection. But what was he going to do now? Without Cloak, slipping out of the base unnoticed was literally impossible. Was all his meticulous planning to steal the Skeleton Key and frame Miller’s three sub-bosses for nothing?

Suddenly, a sharp gasp echoed from behind. Jake realized he wasn’t alone in the tent!

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.