Chapter 273 - Securing The First Flag.
Meanwhile back in the forest, Felix was leaning against a tree while playing with a black square-like device in his hand. The device was just a thin screen, resembling a smartphone.
This was the tracker for the flags, the most important item in this competition!
Felix might know that the competition was based on points in secret but he also knew that the flags were worth something.
He just didn't recall their exact worth and Asna was too busy playing games with the J?rmungandr to bother addressing any request of his.
Ti-ring!
After pressing on a button that was at the side, the tracker was turned on after ten seconds delay.,
The moment it was on, the screen was turned into a blue radar, that was scanning 1 km around Felix.
"Oh? There is one south?" Felix scratched his cheek in boredom while looking at a red dot that was blinking approximately 700 meters away from him.
The 1 km was split into lines and between each line, there was a 100-meter distance. So it was pretty easy to calculate it.
After noticing that there weren't any other dots besides this one, Felix turned off the tracker to save up the battery.
He searched the package before and didn't find any extra batteries or a charger.
Soon, he stood up and went to his teammates, who were currently cleaning up the messy camp. Although it was engulfed within the fog, some teams must have fought near it before.
While the process might be c.u.mbersome but at least they retained this camping spot plus they kicked out a lot of teams in the area.
Currently, only the Canadian team, the Philippines Team, the Malaysian team, and lastly the England team were still left somewhat near them.
The rest were already extracted by helicopters immediately after the final battle was concluded.
It was obvious that the supervisors waited until no more fights were happening before sending an extraction crew.
Right now, Olivia and the rest were chatting with a lax attitude while cleaning as they knew that no one in the area was going to pose a threat to them.
Unless a new team had decided to venture away from their camp to come here.
"There a flag 700 meters away from us." Felix informed them while shaking the tracker in his hand.
"Nice!" Walton exclaimed in delight and carried on by asking, "When are we moving?"
"Let's move after lunch." Felix sat on a log next to a turned-off campfire and said, "We are left with only 6 days, so we can't be wasting them."
Kenny nodded his head and asked, "Are we going to stick to the plan or we should change it a bit?"
Everyone wondered about this as well since the original plan which they made with George entailed that if they secured a tracker, they must cover at least 5 km diameter around their camp.
They must look south, north, west, and east for flags. Only after they find not a single flag should they move their camp to another zone.
That's why Felix didn't want to aim for the nearest flag currently as he wanted to carry on searching after getting it instead of just sending Kenny or Walton to bring it.
"Let's keep it as it is for now." Felix said casually, "If we don't find a flag for each member in the next day or two we will expand to 10 kilometers for the remaining days."
"What if we don't find them even then?" Olivia asked with a hint of worry in her tone.
She was scared of the idea that some of them would have flags and some won't. She didn't want to imagine how the team would turn like on the last day of the competition when that happened.
Are they going to fight for flags? Leave Felix to decide who will take one and who won't? Or just be gracious and give away the flag to another voluntary?
Every option was bound to make some upset and she didn't want to see that.
If they reached that point and Felix gave her a flag, she wouldn't hesitate to give it to another. Her guilt would eat her up if she didn't do so.
Thankfully, Felix also didn't want to place himself in that position as he was too lazy to deal with such dramatic issues. He still remembered the chaos that rose in some teams' streams due to those flags.
He raised his head and looked at Olivia with a kind-hearted smile, "We will simply rob others."
"Haha, My thoughts exactly!" Johnson laughed as he said, "With the tracker in our hands we can easily spot the flags in other teams' hands."
Kenny shook his head, "Just like we can see their flags, they can also see ours. Thus, we can never ambush other teams with trackers unless we don't carry our flags."
"We will think about those matters when we first fail to locate flags in the region." Felix pointed at the deer's meat that was hanged on a tree by a rope, and said, "Prepare lunch for now, and don't forget to use the spices from the package."
After saying so, Felix stood up and dusted his rear. He went to the silver package that was placed in the middle of the camp and picked a medium-sized box that had a poison logo in it.
He then went to his black tent and closed the entrance on him.
"Damn, he didn't spend much energy and lucked out on refilling." Johnson complained softly while looking at the cursed package that didn't have a single energy stone for his element.
Well, it was pretty normal as the package couldn't have energy stones for every element.
After searching through it carefully they found 10 medium-boxes each contained 20 medium-grade stones for a different element.
Most of them were common elements like fire, water, earth...etc
Since it was common knowledge that healing abilities mostly originated from plant element and light element, those energy stones were in abundance as well.
However, for elements like darkness and fog? It was all depended on luck to find them.
In the package, they found stones only for Olivia, Felix, Lena, Walton, Lexie, and Nathan.
The rest were left to use the emergency energy stones which they were allowed to bring with them. the amount allowed was barely enough to refill 50% of their energy.
There was no way that was enough to sustain them for seven days straight.
Alas, Johnson could only whine about it softly while heading to his tent to use those backup stones.
...
One hour later, the team had seethed their hunger and filled their energy tank with as much energy their capital allowed to.
Currently, they were preparing to kick off their search for flags by putting only the necessary items in their backpacks.
Since they were going to search for hours and hours there was no way they would be leaving behind someone to protect the camp or carry everything at once with them.
Thankfully, they already took care of most teams near them, thus there was a pretty low chance that their camp would be found out.
"All set?" Felix asked.
After receiving a confirmation, he took off in direction of the red dot while followed by the rest in a defensive formation.
The girls were placed in the middle of the pack while Kenny and Walton were walking hundreds of meters ahead of them acting as scouts.
Since 700 meters wasn't really that far, they managed to reach their destination in a couple of minutes by jogging.
Felix brought the tracker from his backpack and turned it on.
Beep! Beep! Beeep!
Immediately after the screen brightened up, the tracker started making sounds like a metal detector.
The beeps weren't rushed which meant that the flag was around but they weren't that close to it yet.
On the radar, Felix could see that they were standing exactly on the red dot.
"Split up and search this area thoroughly, the flag is just around the corner." He ordered while inspecting the trees, branches, leaves, and anything that met his penetrative eyesight.
He never stopped walking as he was doing so.
Before long, Felix managed to spot a piece of yellow cloth hanged between leaves, making it almost impossible to notice it if it wasn't for his enhanced eyesight and the tracker making those rushed beeping sounds while near it.
'Found it.' He sent a mental message while jumping upward, clasping into the flag in the first attempt.
After landing, he started inspecting the flag, which appeared the same as the one Mr. Rodrigas showed them in the gathering.
A triangle-like piece of cloth that had a QR code in the center of it plus a tiny electronic chip.
Felix avoided the chip at all cost since if he somehow destroyed it intentionally, the Queen wouldn't hesitate to rat on him to the supervisor.
By then, the supervisor would have no choice but to disqualify him due to breaking the rules. The moment a team gets a flag it becomes their responsibility to protect it at all cost.
If somehow the flag was ruined in the fights, the holder wouldn't receive any punishment but he wouldn't be considered as a flag holder anymore.
"Damn, did they really have to make the color yellow?" Johnson complained the moment he saw the flag in Felix's hand.
"You should feel glad it wasn't green." Felix folded the flag and placed it in his backpack. "Let's carry on searching, we got 9 more to cover."
No one made a sound at the fact that Felix kept the flag to himself instead of giving it to one of them.
It was already decided that Felix would be holding all of the collected flags until the last day of the competition.
For a simple reason actually, who the f*ck could get them from him?