Transcendent Gene
Chapter 253: First Kill [3]

Chapter 253: First Kill [3]

The damp room had one old wooden door as an exit. Nobody was touching that door.

It was the first place Gio’s eyes went, but he realized that he had a more important job.

Subtly, he sent Aether into the bodies of his comrades. They could barely feel the energy, but it forced them to freeze for half a second while they processed the world around them.

It was important that none of them showed any kind of fear or cowardice in this moment. Even wariness would be dangerous.

Gio silently stood in front of the other three, meeting the gazes of those staring at them.

Some were playful, seeing teenagers and knowing they were not competition. Others were more malevolent. Whether they showed their hostility openly, teasingly, or not at all, it was true that all of them were hostile.

There were sixteen people other than them. With the four of them included, the number increased to twenty.

’And I’d assume the majority of us are enemies with each other.’

If the rickety wooden door could be opened, the sixteen of them wouldn’t have been waiting for Gio’s party when they appeared. Neriah, Serene, and Shiro didn’t know why they kept so still when they appeared, but they took it as an instinctive reaction and maintained their silence.

Gio quietly motioned with his hand, urging them to stay calm. They weren’t in immediate danger, at least.

Nobody needed to tell them that these people were waiting for something. That something wasn’t necessarily their party...

’...but we’re the final piece, I guess.’

Just as Gio thought, when sixteen became twenty, everyone’s attention immediately went to the door.

"If it doesn’t open now, I’m killing someone. It’s been six fucking hours. None of you can blame me..."

Someone’s mutters filled the room.

Click!

A lock on the wooden door clicked open, and instantly, everyone else in the room scrambled for the door. They climbed over each other to reach it, all practically leaving the small room at the same time.

"..."

"..."

"..."

"...are we late?"

Serene muttered the question. Gio could only nod.

"I guess so. They’ve been trapped here for a while, so they must’ve formed grudges and alliances already. We have no idea what the context of anything is."

"Yeah, but this is what we were looking for, right?" Shiro commented.

"It’s a secret area hidden under the monster world. We’ll probably find stuff here."

"Well, that’s the goal. The rest of them acted fast, and there’s no sign of anyone in the vicinity anymore. If they’re rushing so much, then they must be aiming for some prize."

Gio’s comrades responded positively to his assessment. None of them were fans of waiting behind and letting others take their loot, so they continued the rest of the conversation on the move.

Directly outside of the small room was a larger chamber held up by several pillars that created a circular barrier separating the room’s outer ring from its inner ring.

There were four people sitting in the middle of the room and meditating. There was another who was slouched against the outer wall and leaking a pool of blood all over the ground below.

The four meditating Sequencers had their eyes closed and their minds completely removed from the environment.

Gio held his finger up to his mouth, telling his comrades to stay silent. They had two large tunnels to choose between, neither of which was very welcoming.

He motioned between them, asking his party members to choose one. The majority vote took them to the tunnel on the far side of the chamber, directly across from where they were.

They quietly made their way around the side of the room. Gio made sure to move in the opposite direction of the body on the ground.

’Neriah saw it and didn’t react. Shiro’s trying to hide it, but he froze up the moment he saw it. Serene hasn’t seen it yet, but...’

There was no way to avoid it. She’d have to see a corpse at some point. She managed to hide from it for as long as possible, yet, when they reached the other side of the chamber...

"Ah...!"

Serene gasped and covered her mouth with her hands.

She averted her eyes to her comrades, but all of them only shook their heads and sighed.

There was nothing they could do. Shiro was turning green from holding in his vomit. Only Neriah and Gio had seen it enough times to not be phased.

The two of them led their other two party members away from the corpse and into the next tunnel where they could avoid it...

But perhaps they should’ve waited a moment to see how that corpse ended up where it was.

XHUUUM!

Gio and Neriah jumped back, dragging Serene and Shiro with them as they barely avoided a massive wall of green lasers that swept down from the ceiling.

Vooooooooom!

A sound spread across the entire tunnel as mechanism after mechanism was activated.

Platforms rose from the ground of the tunnel. The space between the platforms was filled with boiling acid. Like the green laser wall that attacked them seconds ago, several other traps made of superheated energy formed across the tunnel’s air and surface, obstructing the paths between platforms.

As if that wasn’t enough...

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Several tentacles shattered the tunnel walls and flicked across the tunnel. Grotesque arm-like things joined them, mixing technology with a type of animalistic horror before Gio’s party’s eyes.

"Definitely not what I was expecting."

Shiro’s words spoke for all of them. This didn’t look like what they thought they’d find in a Monster Race world. Gio’s mind, however, was elsewhere.

’If this is the way forward, then why did he...?’

He turned around and nodded in understanding.

"We were being kind, you know?" He said.

"We let you have your space, so common courtesy says you should do the same for us. Don’t you think so?"

His words prompted the rest of the group to turn around.

The meditating Sequencers weren’t meditating very much anymore. It was somewhat impressive how quietly they’d managed to stand up and equip their weapons without being noticed.

"You can’t really blame us, kid," the skinny man in the middle said.

"You look too easy. You kids have heard of Sequencers like us, haven’t you? There are rumors that we eat flesh and drink blood to get stronger."

There were such rumors about djinn, but they were mostly fallacies. The majority of djinns were terrible criminals, but almost none of them would stoop to cannibalism.

That didn’t mean they didn’t exist. They were just rarer.

"You’re saying you want to eat us?" Gio asked.

The skinny man shrugged.

"Don’t look at me like that. I don’t care about the meat on your bones. The energy in your blood, on the other hand, smells great."

There was a second definition for cannibalism established after Sequencing became common.

One meant to consume the flesh of the same species.

And the other meant to feed on the energy of one’s peers.

To drain the vitality and strength of others for the sake of one’s own improvement was one of the vilest paths to strength existing for humanity.

As for Gio’s energy...

Well, he could think of several reasons why it would attract such Sequencers.

Really, it was his own fault for having too many good things.