Shadow Novelist
Volume 23: The Game Changes
← Previous chapter: 714 : What Is This Building ?
Nick made a mental note of the location of the building and what it was for.
Naturally, as a hospital, it was quite big, but it wasn't big enough to fill out more than a square kilometer of area.
It was maybe just a hundred or two hundred meters across, which was already pretty big.
After finding out what this place was for, Nick went to the basement of the building.
'Most likely, the underground city was kept secret from the normal populace. Otherwise, there would be more entrances to the underground.'
'Probably only one or two buildings in the center have an entrance that would lead to the underground city.'
'The chances that it is the hospital are quite high. A good volume of people enter and exit from here, making it easy to keep the passage of people to and from the underground secret.'
Nick looked through the basement of the building and saw more rooms with more machines.
Most likely, this was where they kept the spare machines in case one of them broke.
'Surprisingly, the machines down here are not the biggest of the building. From what I have read, hospitals from the older eras all kept their big and expensive machinery in the basement. It's safer there, and the machines tend to cost a lot of energy to run while also being very loud.'
'Yet, the biggest machines are on the higher floors here.'
'This probably means that the leaders of this place know of the underground city.'
Nick looked through every room in the basement, but he couldn't find any entrance.
At least, not while looking at it from a human perspective.
As a cloud of mist, Nick could squeeze between crevices and crawl behind machines.
Eventually, he found something.
'There is a secret entrance,' Nick thought. 'I didn't expect one to be here, but it actually makes sense.'
There was a big lunch hall that extended from the basement to the ground floor. People could either enter from the basement or enter from the second level of the lunch hall.
On the lower floor of the basement were a couple of rooms that very clearly indicated that they were bathrooms.
Surprisingly, every single stall within the bathrooms was connected to a secret corridor beneath them.
Nick couldn't find any kind of switch, which meant that the opening of said corridor probably worked via the implants.
Most likely, the authorized people could see some kind of virtual button that allowed them to open the door.
Based on the mechanism Nick found, he could see that the toilet would move to the side to open a small hole with a ladder inside.
The ladder went down for about five meters, and all of the ladders converged in a new corridor below the hospital.
Nick entered the corridor and traveled through it.
A couple of stairs led further downward before Nick saw a big gate.
The gate was closed shut, and Nick couldn't find any holes.
Even without any power, the gate was able to keep a Force Specter out.
'Impressive,' Nick thought.
Nick summoned his blades and moved them across the gate.
CRRRRRRRR!
An ear-grating sound was produced, and Nick saw his blades becoming white hot under the stress.
Meanwhile, the gate hadn't reacted yet.
'The gate is harder than my weapons,' Nick thought. 'Cutting through it won't work.'
'Luckily, there are other ways to get through a hard barrier.'
Nick took a couple of steps back.
BANG!
Then, he exploded forward with his full strength and punched forward with his blade, perfectly hitting the space between the two doors.
CRRK!
Nick's blade bent, and his arm broke into pieces.
The gate shook violently, but it had only received a small dent.
Nick would probably need thousands of such attacks to make a small hole in the gate.
'This is definitely rank 6 material. No Demon or Hero can break this with just a couple of attacks.'
'Even if Julius found this, he wouldn't be able to get through it.Aegis would need to send a Protector or a Peak Hero specializing in cracking powerful materials.'
While Nick was thinking that, his arm recovered, and he took something out that he hadn't used in quite a while.
One of his throwing spears.
Nick's move set synergizes much more with his blades. As long as he was close to an enemy, he could launch many individual strikes, while his spear could only land one fully powered one.
Because of that, his throwing spears had grown obsolete.
However, there was just one thing that they could do better.
While Nick could probably launch five to ten attacks in the time it required to perform one single full-throw, that single full-throw was probably a good 50% stronger than one of his strikes.
Nick pulled the spear back, took several steps forward, and threw it forward with all of his power.
CRRNK!
The spear hit the door and compressed like a spring before falling to the ground.
These spears were very flexible, and they didn't break easily.
When Nick looked at the door, he could see a small hole, barely a couple of millimeters deep.
'Better than my strike, but not by much.'
Nick was trying to come up with a solution.
He felt like there was a way for him to destroy the door.
'How can I increase the power?'
Eventually, Nick came up with an idea.
'Physics,' Nick thought.
'I'll just do what all of humanity has done when they wanted to accomplish something.'
'I just create something that will do it for me.'
Nick gathered his Zephyx and started to conjure something.
It took several hours of conjuring since Nick was conjuring something extremely dense and heavy.
After over ten hours of conjuring, Nick was done.
In front of Nick was a thick, massive, and long spear.
It was over two meters long, almost ten centimeters in diameter, and there were a couple of ridges near its back.
In a way, it looked like a massive arrow.
Nick grabbed it and lifted it.
His arms almost shook as he lifted it.
This thing weighed tens of tons, and Nick wouldn't even be able to lift it without using his ability.
Naturally, using this in an attack wouldn't accomplish much.
Sure, it was much heavier than Nick's normal spears, but Nick wouldn't be able to put more kinetic energy into it.
In fact, it would be even worse.
Additionally, while it was much denser, it wasn't any harder than the other spear.
It would bend like the previous spear.
'However...'
Nick moved the spear so that its tip looked down.
Then, a maw opened up beneath it, while a second one opened up perfectly above it.
Finally, Nick dropped it.
The spear dropped into the bottom maw and came out of the top maw.
It fell back into the bottom, came back out at the top, fell into the bottom, came out at the top…
As it kept falling, it became faster and faster.
Its aerodynamic shape would keep its wind resistance to a minimum, while the ridges would keep it straight.
With its insane density, it would reach an abnormally high terminal velocity.
It took a long while for the spear to reach terminal velocity.
By the end, it had essentially turned into a blur, and the wind in the room had reached speeds of several hundred kph due to the force exhibited.
Space seemed to warp around the spear, and Nick felt nervous.
He felt like a mortal standing beside a rapidly moving, gigantic machine.
If he just touched this spear, he felt like his arm would vanish.
By now, the room had also become insanely hot due to the friction.
The stored energy of this thing was terrifying.
However, Nick also lost a lot of Zephyx.
Every time the spear traveled through the maws, a chunk of Nick's Zephyx was used up.
'I should hurry,' Nick thought as he moved far away from the spear and the door.
Then, Nick took out a metallic plate and pointed it toward the distant gate.
An instant later, the top maw vanished and appeared on the plate.
WHOOOOOM!
The spear shot out of the plate and hit the door.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
It was bright!
It was like there was an actual explosion!
The gate broke off its hinges, and a bunch of mist shot into the space behind the door.
The spear had quite literally been vaporized!
The doorway behind the former gate became blurry as everything heated up by hundreds of degrees.
An instant later, the shockwave hit Nick, and he was blasted back.
The shockwave pushed him against the wall at the back, compressing his body.
Luckily, his body was hard enough to resist the force.
Nick would have thought a bit about the power he had managed to unleash just now if he hadn't been distracted by something else.
Moments after the gate had exploded, Nick's ability had deactivated.
Someone had sensed him.
The pillar of Crimson City was so massive and thick that the citizens would have, at most, felt a tiny quake, and that wouldn't be enough to pinpoint Nick's location to a degree that would deactivate his ability.
This could only mean that someone was relatively close to him.
Most likely, they were inside the pillar.
'Something living is here,' Nick thought.