Chapter 20: Ascent

Yuxing swiftly returned to the surface, checked his positioning, and then buried his head as he sprinted north. In that direction stood not only a warehouse storing raw cocoa beans, but also a single-column signal tower, estimated at about fifty meters high—the sort of communications base station commonly referenced.

Typically, the communication base stations used in urban areas are lower in power, with signal towers rising only thirty to fifty meters. In mountainous or open regions, however, more powerful stations are employed, with giant towers reaching anywhere from a hundred to five hundred meters. Though Little Dot, when standing upright, reached over seventy meters, with all fours on the ground it should stand less than thirty-five meters high—barely enough for Yuxing to reach its head.

Yuxing intended to take a chance. Though he didn’t know how much good his efforts might do for Little Dot, at this moment, he found himself incapable of just standing by and watching. His conscience would never allow it. Not only could he not remain a bystander—in fact, a reckless courage welled up inside him, the kind that drives one to act in spite of knowing the odds. He was, it seemed, living up to the meaning of his own name: Yuxing, “fortunate.”

As he ran, Yuxing opened the light screen within the Taiga Light Key. The +1 bond value he’d just received from Senior Ayu hadn’t yet been put to use. According to the distribution order, this bond point landed under the fourth enhancement category: “General.” The number of unassigned points changed from zero to one.

To his surprise, Yuxing also noticed an unassigned point in the first enhancement category: “Core,” at the far left.

…?

Where had that point come from?

But Yuxing didn’t check the Taiga Light Key’s status constantly. Since the bond value +1 prompt hadn’t floated up right before his eyes, he had no way of knowing its source.

Still, having extra points was always a good thing—Yuxing would never refuse them.

So he flipped to the first enhancement category and assigned the second bond point to “Physical Ability.” He’d realized that the bonus to attack speed put a strain on his body; if his stamina didn’t keep up, a single punch might break his own finger bones before it did any damage to an enemy.

He couldn’t always rely on the Light Key, either. Once this was all over, he’d have to start serious physical training to boost his baseline stats.

In the fourth enhancement category, “General,” Yuxing placed the bond point into “Item Pickup Range.” In Diablo III, this was called “Gold Pickup Radius,” but in practice, not only gold, but all energy orbs, progression orbs, and health globes from monsters were included.

This trait allowed one to ignore physical barriers and draw target items to oneself. Now, the word “gold” had been replaced with “items,” making the scope much broader.

Yuxing sprinted into the sea wind, stretching out his hand toward a pile of leaves spinning in the breeze ahead.

Nothing happened. The leaves continued their dance with the wind, spinning across the ground.

Hm? Was he using it wrong?

Still, Yuxing didn’t give up. He focused his attention on one particular leaf with a notch in it, hand outstretched as he ran.

Just as he was about to pass the pile, the leaves finally responded. As if tugged by invisible threads, they flew toward Yuxing with a sudden swish, several of them slapping against his arms and body before dropping to the ground like severed strings.

Only the notched leaf landed squarely in his palm, and Yuxing caught it.

What was this? An Ultraman-style, Diablo III-adapted telekinesis?

He dropped the leaf, having grasped the basics of this new move: an effective range of about one meter, with other limitations yet unknown. Immediately, bloodier thoughts flashed through his mind. For example—

If the target object was part of a whole, could it be extracted?

If the object wasn’t originally part of a whole, but had been forcibly attached or sewn in, could it be pulled out?

If he didn’t know what the target looked like, could he still retrieve it?

If he didn’t even know what the target was, could he just grab something at random?

Turning these questions over in his mind, Yuxing ran toward the signal tower, soon reaching its base.

Around the tower, a ring of steel pipes about a meter high, joined by iron chains, formed a simple barrier. There was no real enclosure, so Yuxing stepped over it easily. The earth trembled beneath his feet, and the sea wind howled. As Yuxing climbed the maintenance ladder along the tower, the vibrations and swaying grew ever stronger.

To say he wasn’t afraid would be a lie. The fifty-meter tower shook more with every meter he climbed. Though the steel structure was unlikely to break, Yuxing now worried less about that than about whether Little Dot’s rampage would destabilize the foundation and send the entire tower toppling, roots and all.

When Yuxing finally reached the maintenance platform at the top, Little Dot had already demolished its way nearby.

Driven half-mad with hunger, it charged at the warehouse, guided only by the scent of cocoa beans. It reared up and crashed down onto the warehouse roof with its forelimbs. A series of thunderous cracks and collapses split the air as the two-thousand-ton beast crushed the warehouse beneath its bulk.

Leaning against the platform’s railing, Yuxing looked down at the giant beast sprawled some twenty meters below. He could now see clearly the savage wound across Little Dot’s head. What had before been a narrow gash had, through its reckless rampage, torn wider and deeper, exposing raw flesh.

Twenty meters was a fatal height to jump from without any buffer—certain death, most likely.

Yuxing inspected the tower’s pipework, searching for a foothold that might let him climb down the back ladder to a safer height before making the leap.

Just then, a deafening roar drew closer overhead.

The fighter jets circling above had fired another salvo of missiles, but such attacks could do no more than drive the creature away. To render it truly immobile would take many more rounds. Now, with the beast rampaging through the warehouse district—an area thick with flammable food additives and marked strictly off-limits to open flames—the pilots dared not risk another missile strike. One errant warhead could ignite the stores, setting off a chain reaction that would obliterate the entire complex.

After another circuit, the jets began to climb, preparing to abandon their ultra-low-altitude maneuvers.

But at that precise instant, the beast, still sprawled atop the warehouse ruin with its head buried in the rubble, suddenly jerked upward. Bloodshot eyes glared furiously at the buzzing intruders, and, gathering its strength in its hindquarters and belly, it surged from a thirty-meter sprawl to stand upright at over seventy meters.

And then it snapped its jaws around a jet that was almost flying straight into its mouth.

As a child watching television, Yuxing had never found such scenes jarring. Most monsters were fifty to seventy meters tall, maybe eighty at the most, and the defense force jets always seemed to be swatted down by a single claw. But those jets must have been flying dangerously low. A hundred meters was already stunt-flying territory. Any lower, and you’d expect to see crop dusters or aerial survey planes, not fighter jets.

But Yuxing had no time for such digressions. As Little Dot pushed itself upright, Yuxing gauged the shrinking gap to its head. At the critical moment, he vaulted decisively over the railing!