Chapter 129: Who Saved Me?
When Uhtred opened his eyes next, it was with a violent start.
He jarred awake, his upper body snapping upward as he found himself staring directly into a wide-open, cloudless blue sky.
For a few seconds, complete confusion dominated his mind. He blinked against the harsh morning light, before his memories of the previous night came rushing back...
The paralysis. The mental fog. The ancient variant woman, and the mysterious long-haired savior.
Uhtred quickly looked around, and his eyes narrowed. The entire leather tent was completely gone. He had been left entirely open to the barren elements for the rest of the night.
Not only that, everything within his immediate vicinity was in complete disarray, totally destroyed as if a localized storm had torn through the camp. A pathway of destruction started directly from his stone bed before continuing all the way out toward the distance.
Several neighboring tents, stone tables, and defensive structures along that path were in worse states, pulverized into dust.
All around the camp, human ascenders were milling about in a state of utter dejection. A cloud of grief and fear seemed to hang over the entire camp, dulling morale and confidence.
Uhtred slid his legs over the edge of the stone bed, his eyes scanning his immediate surroundings more carefully. He spotted dark trails of blood at the edges of where the tent would have been. Those trails continued into the distance following the path of destruction out of the camp.
As Uhtred continued to scrutinize his surroundings, his sudden movement finally alerted a pair of low-level ascenders who had been tasked to keep watch over him. A young man and a young woman snapped their heads toward him, their eyes widening in panic.
The young man didn’t even dare to approach. He instantly turned on his heel and sprinted back toward the deeper sections of the camp, clearly moving to alert a higher-up.
Within less than a minute, Black Sun’s familiar figure closed in rapidly. The man’s eyes were locked onto Uhtred from a distance, scrutinizing him carefully as he drew nearer.
Uhtred was also doing the same, but at the same time, his mind was processing the events of the previous night. His thoughts kept returning to the face he had glimpsed in his state of grogginess.
Without a doubt, that face belonged to an ancient variant... a female ancient variant, to be exact. But at the same time, her facial structure was fundamentally different from the Homo erectus and Neanderthal types he had encountered so far.
She was definitely from the third lineage. The very last ancient variant strain.
Uhtred gritted his teeth and frowned. For a fleeting second, his pragmatic nature forced him to consider whether Mateo could have been involved in the assassination attempt.
This was the man’s camp, after all, and it wasn’t impossible to think that somehow, he had come in contact with the third strain of the ancient variants and cooked up an elaborate plan to assassinate the number one ranked human.
But after looking at the destruction within the camp, the puddles of blood that coated the ground, Uhtred didn’t really think the man would do such a thing.
And aside from what he could see of the destruction, there was also his own intuition. Uhtred trusted his intuition about Mateo’s character. Not to mention, the man had a daughter he wanted to save within these trial grounds. Doing something to the detriment of humanity as a whole was not beneficial to him at all.
He shook off any thoughts that Mateo might be involved in this. No. This was a singular, concerted effort from that terrifying ancient variant woman.
Whoever she was, her capabilities were dangerously high. She was powerful enough to completely mask her presence from his high perception. Stealthy enough to penetrate a guarded camp, bypass several tens and hundreds of human ascenders, and single out his own tent...
More than that, she was able to cast some kind of paralysis spell that he still had a difficult time wrapping his head around.
What exactly was that spell? Uhtred thought to himself, his jaw clenching.
Mateo finally reached Uhtred’s stone bed and stopped right in front of him. The man remained silent, simply looking down at Uthred with a calculating look in his eyes.
Uthred, on the other hand, didn’t acknowledge Mateo yet. He was still focused on the sensation of that weird paralysis spell that had severed the link between his intentions and the cosmic essence cycling through his body.
In hindsight, now that he could think with a perfectly clear head, the sensation was remarkably similar to being cast under some sort of extreme drunkenness spell.
Of course, Uhtred didn’t really think she placed him under a drunkenness spell, or if there was anything like a drunkenness spell, but the sensation felt similar to that.
It felt as if a mental lag had been placed on not just his mind alone, but his very consciousness, enough to ensure he couldn’t even form a coherent spell before his focus would slip again.
He tried to think of where he could classify such a spell under. It didn’t fit the parameters of an elemental spell. It didn’t even fit the weird force kind of spell that Zara used usually.
This was a new type of spell to Uhtred, an entirely new branch that he had never experienced before and one that actually terrified him because he didn’t know how to respond or defend against it the next time.
He clenched his jaw and put the thought aside for the moment, finally looking up at Mateo.
The two powerhouses said absolutely nothing to each other for several long seconds. Uhtred could see Mateo searching his eyes, probing his expression to see if the number one human was harboring deep seeds of hostility or suspicion regarding the camp’s security failure.
He also knew it wasn’t far-fetched to think he was in on it. However, Uhtred didn’t speak on anything about that. Instead, his gaze flicked over to the dark puddles of blood just outside where the tents would have been.
Mateo’s gaze followed his, and then he finally spoke, "Those were my two men. Felipe and Gabriel. They died along with thirteen other capable ascenders I personally tasked to keep watch over your quarters and monitor the vicinity."
Uhtred’s mind immediately went back to the hefty, Level 10 men he had inspected with his skill right before entering the tent the night before.
From the fury he could feel radiating from Mateo, Uhtred knew those men were very important to him. The man looked thirsty for blood and revenge. Instead of grief in his eyes, it was only pure anger.
Uhtred kept his facial features entirely unbothered, but internally, a similar dark flame was beginning to ignite within his chest.
For the first time since the integration began, this was the closest he had ever come to death.
To make matters worse, this wasn’t even like his fights against beasts, where if he died, at least he knew it was due to his lack of skill or power. Rather, this was purely an assassination attempt. He had been lying in his sleep at his most vulnerable state and was nearly killed.
Uhtred thoroughly hated that feeling of helplessness. His thoughts burned with a cold, vicious urge to hunt down that female ancient variant and return the favor several fold.
He gritted his teeth, letting out a low breath to calm himself, before his mind finally moved to the last thing he had seen before he blacked out: the long-haired human silhouette, the person that had saved him in the end.
"Do you know exactly who it was that arrived to intervene at the final moment?" Uhtred asked Mateo, his eyes locking onto the man. "Someone engaged the intruder right before I lost consciousness."
Mateo frowned deeply, looking down at him with a clear trace of frustration.
"We are even more clueless about what happened here last night than you are. We don’t know who the intruder was, and this is the first I’ve heard of someone coming to save you," he shook his head. "All we know right now is what we figured out from the tracks of the battle and our dead. Other than that, we know nothing."
Mateo paused, looking out across the vast ruins.
"The same spell that hit you last night was cast on everyone else in the camp, including me. It seems to have affected us less since we woke up much faster... but still..."
Mateo shuddered, an expression that looked strange on him.
"To put more than two thousand people to sleep at the exact same time? Just what kind of terrifying power are we dealing with?"
Mateo muttered the final question more to himself than to Uhtred, his expression turning grim.
Uhtred chose to keep his personal observations entirely to himself. He made a calculated decision not to respond or reveal what he had actually seen, heard, or deduced regarding the third variant lineage.
Instead of dwelling on the assassination attempt, he stood up with a cold expression and spoke:
"The past is done. Somehow, we survived, that’s the main thing. We can analyze the specifics later, but right now we’re going to begin the continent-wide announcements."
Mateo immediately nodded. He understood Uhtred’s intent to bury the security failure and move straight to their agreed-upon strategy.
In fact, the lethal occurrence from the previous night had clearly lit a massive fire under both of them, filling them with a deeper, hyper-focused sense of urgency.
That very morning, Uhtred’s announcements were the very first thing that appeared on everyone’s interface across the entire continent of Australia...
