Adventuresse
patreon
The Apocalypse Grinder - Chapter 214
🕑 Added 2025-09-08 21:03:18 +0000 UTC<< Chapter 213 | Index | Chapter 215 >>
Ronan looked at the twelve streets that ran away from the tower. He had no idea which one he needed to go down in order to reach the spaceport. He also wasn’t sure how far the alarm could have been heard from.
He needed to seal the bubble in order to stop any of the supply ships from leaving the city. However, that seemed like it might be an insurmountable task given the size of the walls surrounding Kayir. They were huge, with the city itself being at least twenty kilometres in diameter.
An even better idea suddenly came to him as he thought of the spaceport and a particular space movie. If he couldn’t stop the ships from leaving, then all he had to do was make sure there weren’t any ships in the first place.
He only had to figure out how to get there…
Ronan eventually found the spaceport. He ran into quite a few grathen on the way, most of whom simply gave him a salute or a wide berth. At one point he nearly ran into one of the pedestrian streets but immediately made a u-turn. He didn’t want to expose himself to more of them than necessary, at least not until he discovered where the spaceport was.
After nearly an hour of frantic walking, he spotted it in the distance. In the end it turned out to have been just a few blocks away from the logistics headquarters, but on the opposite side from the one he began his search.
I have to say I’m a fucking idiot. I should have at least done a circuit of the roundabout and the nearest blocks to see if I could spot anything before just walking off in a random direction…
He couldn’t change the mistakes of the past, unfortunately, but he could make better decisions in future. The spaceport loomed large, but it wasn’t that tall. Only a few criss-crossing towers made from metallic beams reached towards the bubble that covered the city, but the true size was in how much ground it covered.
There seemed to be an entire district of the city reserved just for the spaceport. All of the nearby buildings, while still having the same look as the rest, had a high frequency of uniformed technicians, and other grathen wearing grey and red uniforms, streaming out of them.
Over the walls of the spaceport Ronan could see the large ship that had come from off-world. It was just sitting there being worked on by a few people he could see crawling along the outside of the hull, but it was incredible. This was his first time seeing a spaceship in real life, and he wanted to savour the moment.
While he was somewhat surprised to see a spaceship, he wasn’t going to question it. The integration had destroyed humanity’s technology on Earth, but that didn’t automatically mean it was incompatible with technology. Clearly the Grathen had figured out how to advance even while integrated.
The ship was the size of a large cargo boat, but it was a lot cooler. It flew in space! Once he’d got over his nerd excitement, Ronan could finally start thinking about how he was going to destroy the spaceport.
It would hurt him to destroy all the ships, but it was necessary to complete the Path of the Gladiator. More rewards from the system were worth a lot more than some ships he could only look at and not even fly.
With how populated the spaceport was, there was no way Ronan could attack it without drawing attention. The tower had been another story, due to its relative isolation from the rest of the city, but the spaceport was different. While the ordinary citizens did seem to be restricted from entering the area immediately around it as well as the spaceport itself, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of grathen workers flowing in and out of the place.
The moment he made his first strike they would all know about it. He had no doubt the spaceport had defences in place to stop intruders, and as they’d done in the logistics headquarters, many of the technicians and workers would fight back to protect their home and workplace.
Putting it that way made him feel guilty for taking them out, but it had to be done. He could try and justify it morally, but the truth was he was killing mostly innocent people. Even if their race was invading his homeworld, he didn’t know if the people living here were part of that or supported it. On the other hand, when he began a new iteration it would be as if none of this even happened.
Life was getting harder to understand, but there was one thing that was simple. Doing this would make him more powerful, permanently. That was the only way he might have a chance of ever actually making a difference for himself, his sister—once he found her—and the rest of humanity.
His first instinct was to target the spaceship. However, he realised that was pointless. The spaceship would likely not be able to power-up and escape while he was attacking, but the smaller supply ships would. The entire point of his attack was to cut off the resources to the rest of the planet. If the supply ships escaped, that would become much harder to do.
Therefore it made sense for him to attack the supply ships first, and then see what he could do to cause the most damage. People escaping the city on foot while he figured out how to seal it was less of an issue. They couldn’t carry sufficient resources to operate the rest of the planet’s infrastructure in their raptor-pulled vehicles or their pockets.
Now he just had to figure out how to get inside without drawing too much attention to himself. He’d made it into the logistics headquarters without much fanfare, but it had been far less crowded. Would a soldier walking amongst these workers be out of place, or simply offputting?
There was one skill that Ronan hadn’t used much which would be exceptionally handy here. Light manipulation was something he had little experience with, but he figured it wouldn’t be that difficult to get it working how he wanted.
The first time he activated the skill, nothing happened. At least, it felt that way. His heart flared to life and he felt his mana dancing at the ready, but not actually doing anything. The skill still seemed to be active, though, which he found odd.
Unlike other skills which were one-time use and then bam, this was some kind of constant skill. With it still active, Ronan imagined the light that was hitting his middle finger shifting to the side and avoiding it.
Suddenly the space around his finger distorted, almost vanishing from his senses. He couldn’t see it whatsoever, but he could vaguely sense its presence due to other factors such as touch and some kind of underlying sense—magic or spirituality or something introduced by the system.
He did a few more experiments, increasing the complexity each time. His proficiency with magic allowed him to get past the first few quite easily, but when he started attempting to do the really difficult manipulations he struggled. For example, he attempted to make the uniform he was wearing look completely new by manipulating the light around it, but it still had rough edges and the light rippled strangely.
That was when he realised another problem. He had no idea if the Grathen even used the same sort of vision as humans. Perhaps they saw in ultraviolet or infrared or something entirely different. What he was attempting to do might backfire if they didn’t perceive it in the same way. What Ronan thought was a perfect disguise could actually be him painting a big warning sign on himself.
There was no harm in trying, but he decided to stay away from anything too complicated. In the end he figured that simply stopping all light from reaching him and sort of reflecting it back into the surroundings was his best shot. Hopefully it would just look like a strange ripple in the air to the workers who looked his way.
The mana drain was pretty large, but compared to his over 20,000 total mana it was negligible. Once he felt confident moving and maintaining the light manipulation, he started to pick up the pace and head towards the nearest entrance to the spaceport.
There were dozens of workers moving in and out, so it hadn’t been hard to find. He made it halfway to the gate without being spotted, though a few of the Grathen who looked in his direction did pause and squint at him for a few moments. None of them seemed to notice anything awry, however, and continued with whatever they had been doing beforehand.
The gate had four soldiers guarding it. That surprised him. The logistics headquarters had only technicians, so he hadn’t expected uniformed soldiers to be at the spaceport. Then again, it was arguably more important to guard this place as it was a gateway to the rest of the Federation and not just the rest of the planet.
However, even the soldiers didn’t notice Ronan slipping past them. He had successfully made it inside the spaceport.
On his right a little further down from the entrance, Ronan saw the spaceship up close. It was majestic from this distance, and his desire to go inside and see what it looked like intensified. His mana wasn’t infinite however, and he had a job to do.
Of the seven smaller ships that were being loaded from a large pile of cargo, the one at the far end of the spaceport seemed to be closest to taking flight. There were a few hoses attached to it which he guessed were to refuel it, and the workers were streaming down the ramp as an orange uniformed grathen started powering up a device in its hands, white energy radiating from it.
That was his first target.
<< Chapter 213 | Index | Chapter 215 >>
Comments
Scott Snyder
Interesting. At least he’s finally using the illusion skill!
Takehiko0
oooof...
