There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)
Chapter 612 - 606. Farewell

Chapter 612: Chapter 606. Farewell

Two hours after he woke up, Zein was already out in the Deathzone again.

The surprised reporters flashed their cameras at the few seconds window of Zein’s appearance before the guide entered the car and went away again. He was one of the people the reporters wanted to see the most, but the man hadn’t shown himself at all, and no one was willing to tell them where he was or what he had been doing.

But they weren’t given time for an interview, because the guide immediately dashed away in a car with several espers. The car headed east, across the desert, before turning into a mountain range Bassena had seen before on the first day of their dungeon hopping.

"This feels so stupid," Bassena muttered.

He had seen that mountain range before, but he hadn’t thought of searching on the mountain. To be fair, they were just looking for dungeons and beasts at that time, with only a two-hour time limit. Still, he felt foolish to never think of coming back to look for it.

"What are you doing there, anyway?" Zein asked while patting his annoyed esper’s knee.

"Training," Zhan shrugged his shoulder. "I’m going to get a prosthetic later, but I feel like I should use the chance to train using one hand too--you know, in case the prosthetic malfunctioned in the middle of the fight or something."

Zein raised his brow. It was admirable how the spearman was so nonchalant about having to re-train his whole posture and balance, but...

"In the mountain?"

What kind of spearman-ship training was there to do in the mountain?

"Oh, I want to try climbing with one hand," Zhan laughed lightheartedly as if climbing with one hand was the same as jogging around the neighborhood. "Oh, there--so you see that weirdly shaped boulder? Stop there!"

Lex stopped the car right in front of a huge boulder that Zein thought kind of looked like a two-story high cone. Zhan thought it looked like something else though.

"I was running around and got bored and found this poop-like boulder, so--"

"Poop?"

"Yeah, isn’t it look like that poop emoji? Anyway--"

Zein had to grip Bassena’s arm and sink his face into the esper’s back to muffle his laughter while listening to Zhan’s story. It seemed like the co...poop-shaped boulder intrigued the spearman, who thought it would be fun to try and climb it. It was hard doing it with one hand, but he also had both of his legs to support him, so even though it took a considerably longer time, he managed to reach the tip of the...poop.

Anyway, Zhan felt exhilarated at that moment; the same feeling of accomplishment he got when he was mastering a new technique. It was something he had stopped feeling for a few years now, and the dopamine rush made him think;

Would it feel better if he could climb the whole mountain?

Zein looked up at the mountain, which had an almost ninety-degree slope, and could be called a cliff in some places, and thought--this guy was crazy.

"Did you not think you might die?"

"I did, but thinking you might die means you have no choice but to succeed, right?" Zhan laughed and pointed up. "Let’s go!"

Zein looked at the spearman incredulously, before turning toward Bassena. But he just patted Zein’s back with an empathetic face that said ’that’s just him’ and moved on. It would be tiring to try to understand someone whose life running on adrenaline addiction.

As they walked toward the boulder, however, Bassena tilted his head to ask. "But why didn’t you just mark the place on your map and call us through commlink?"

Zhan raised his left arm, where his commlink was. "My fingers and my commlink are attached to the same arm, you know?"

"Ah..."

"Also, I didn’t know that Zein was already awake," he shrugged. "I thought ’we won’t be able to get it without him anyway’ and so I decided to just come back," Zhan’s patted the boulder he called looking like poop, and spoked with a laugh. "It’s not a hard place to find again

"Well, he’s not wrong for that," Tian Yu chuckled. "But let’s not tire up someone who just woke up."

The old man snapped his fingers to create a flight of stairs so they could climb more easily without having a heart attack from watching Zhan swinging through every foothold with just one hand. Despite everyone’s concern and Bassena’s offer to just teleport up, Zein opted to walk since he wanted to move his legs, which had been doing nothing for two weeks.

"Ah..."

The moment they were near the peak, Zein paused and took a deep breath through his mask. The air was still riddled with miasma, but it was intertwining with something else. Before Zhan pointed the way for them, Zein had already moved forward.

"You can feel it right away, huh?" Zhan laughed while following Zein. Indeed, it was the right way.

They walked deeper into a boulder formation and once they slipped past two boulders that looked like a gate, they were greeted by a small clearing.

"That’s..."

The esper paused as they looked at the spread of green grass and colorful small flowers blanketed the small clearing. Sitting on a bed of flowers was a glittering shard, and it almost looked like a completely different world.

"In such plain sight..."

"Right?" Zhan laughed and clapped his existing hand on his thigh. "I was just looking for a resting place after reaching the top, and there it is!"

The fact that he managed to find these shards by pure coincidence because he was just too bored and wanted to play around also felt out of this world. It almost justified all of the jinxes he had induced.

Watching the shard that had quite literally been rolling around in the bed before stiffening at their presence, Tian Yu muttered with a chuckle. "It doesn’t seem like it even has any intention of hiding."

Truly; the other shards had been hiding so well in many ways, from burying themselves underground or creating a field of mist. But this one...this one looked like it just had been chilling in this secluded part of the world, with no privy to the chaos happening outside.

The old man felt a weird sense of kinship with the shard.

When the espers were crowding the ’gate’, the shard flinched slightly like a student getting caught ditching their classes. It straightened up and slid back a little bit, but stopped when Zein stepped forward. It tilted slightly and swayed side to side in curiosity.

Zein retracted his mask and carefully walked among the flowers before crouching in front of the shard. When he reached out his hand, it calmly flew to him without any caution. Like a sniffing dog, the shard moved from Zein’s hand to his nape, circling the guide’s upper body before settling on his cheek.

"Pfft," Zein gently stroked the shard who was nuzzling him happily--perhaps because it finally met ’something’ that smelled like it. Zein pressed his forehead against the shard to read what had happened and why this one was just chilling here without care, and ended up laughing out loud. "Ahahahaha!"

The espers watched the interaction with curiosity, wondering what made Zein laugh so hard. The guide’s shoulder shook while conversing with the shard, and he turned around a few minutes later. "This one...doesn’t even know a fight was happening outside."

"What?!"

From what the shard told him, it had been here for as long as it could remember. Perhaps because it was far away from the others, it didn’t even know the existence of the other shards. Sure, the shard had an inkling that it wasn’t the only one of its kind, but it had no idea how to look for its kin.

Just like that, without being able to feel any signal, the shard just lounged inside the stone forest. The place itself was situated on the border and rarely had any dungeon spawning. No beasts ever passed this place since they were immediately heading down the mountain after breaking out of the dungeon, and it seemed like even the fragments did not think there would be a shard this far in the outskirts.

Moreover, this shard had given up sending out signals during the first few decades of the split up, so no one could catch its presence.

When Zein relayed the story of the shard just lounging around the clearing, blissfully unaware of the war and chaos, the espers couldn’t help but laugh like Zein before.

"Is this what they called ignorance is a bliss?"

"Well, no wonder it was so hard looking for this one."

"Yeah, it all depends on luck in the end," Bassena smacked Zhan’s back, who was grinning smugly in response.

Zein chuckled and talked to the shard again, pointing at the ring in his thumb. The shard buzzed sharply, as if gasping, and flew inside the ring without any need for coaxing. It was so exited finding out there were six others like it inside that ring, and Zein said there were even more outside!

Finally! It wouldn’t be lonely anymore!

"Well, then..." Zein stood up and wiped the dirt off his hands, glancing in the direction of the Sanctuary. "Let’s go and say farewell to the Deathzone."