Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 138

Chapter 138: Blind risk
For some, the night passed fast, while for others, the imminent thought of passing through the innermost area made it seem unending.

The next morning, everyone got out of their sleeping beds without any difficulty and packed their things to get started with the long travel.

A trembling sound began to resound throughout the blizzard a couple of minutes after they began walking.

“This…

Caleb was as shocked as the rest of the team members.

They already knew it was beyond human comprehension, but never could they have imagined it would be that much.

The ground shook, the winds picked up speed in different directions, and the blizzard unleashed even more power.

“The tortoises are moving!!

We will keep up our traveling pace until we get close, and then we will wait for them to pass by before proceeding.

All clear?”

“Yes!”

Now that they were dangerously close to the innermost area, the movements of the monsters had an even bigger impact on the surroundings.

To think that almost a tornado and an earthquake could form just because of the movement of a living being…

It was crazy.

They didn’t even make it in time to get to see the tortoises when the ground stopped shaking, and the wind currents slowed down, making everything return to normal.

Only a quarter of an hour later did they see what had caused those disturbances earlier…

As they were walking, they stepped foot on strangely solid terrain.

For the past few days, they had been walking on deposited snow, that continuously crumbled under their feet, and they couldn’t even use snow shoes because they would’ve meddled with their mobility in case of an attack from the yetis.

But strangely enough, there were only a couple of centimeters of snow beneath their feet before a solid material.

“Ahh… finally, my legs have been killing me for the past few days, it’s good to finally feel some hard ground”

Sighed one of the female teachers in relief.

But replying to her was Hans, who pointed out the wrong exclamation in her phrase.

“I think you got something wrong”

“Huh?”

She said, turning around to see Hans, who had always been last in the walking order.

“This… isn’t ground”

Lily Adams, the science teacher, was quite annoyed by this reply, so she asked back with a rhetorical tone:

“If this isn’t ground then what could it-”

But before she could finish her arrogant phrase, the realization hit her.

“What’s wrong Lily? Why did you stop speaking?”

Asked Caleb who had also taken interest in their conversation.

The science teacher crouched as fast as she could and then wiped off the thin layer of snow from what she thought was the ground.

She uncovered a surface of thick ice, that none of them had felt, since the floor wasn’t slippery.

“He… he’s right this isn’t the ground.

We… are on the back of one of the resting tortoises.”

“Huh?!”

“Are you kidding me?”

This is the back of a tortoise? It’s been four minutes since I felt something hard under my feet, are you telling me in four minutes of walking at a decent speed we could cross its back”

“I’m afraid so”

At that moment, a question arose in the minds of all of them, as a gulp of saliva slid down their throats.

“Just how big… are these monsters”

After they finally got out of the tortoise back’s area, Caleb ordered them to stop and equip themselves with the snow shoes they had brought.

They could do it since they had entered the area of the tortoises, and no monster dared approach the vicinity of those massive walking disasters.

The journey was incredibly smooth for the following hours since no monsters attacked, and walking with the snow shoes made traveling less of a nightmare and more of a relaxing walk, if it wasn’t for the violent snowstorm that almost blew them off from the ground of course.

…

Ten hours later…

It had been more than seventeen hours since they started moving, in just a few minutes, they would have discovered if they had managed to pass the territory of the tortoises, or if they would have been caught up in their dangerous movement.

The sun had set many hours earlier, and since the setting of the sun, their visibility had been reduced by a lot, and their walking pace had quickened up.

They made this last effort to ensure they would exit the tortoises’ territory before they could move, but they weren’t sure they had managed to do so, since just twenty minutes had passed since they passed on another turtle’s back.

They were cold, and their bodies ached, especially so for the awakened who didn’t specialize in continuous physical fighting, like mages and archers.

They also all wondered how it was possible that they hadn’t seen Hans show signs of fatigue since the start of the walk, and Caleb found another interesting element to support his theory of Hans being a physical education teacher.

Even if it looked like he was simply walking, during the last few days he had always been lost in thought.

It started with him trying to guess what the boss of that gate break could’ve been, but it soon took a different turn, and he began thinking about his powers.

There were many things he didn’t know about those, but even less that he knew about what to do with them.

He had been lost in this desire to free his parents since the very moment he discovered how to do it, but he had never thought about what to do with them afterward.

The idea of raising some students didn’t sound bad, but that would just be like dumping all the responsibilities on them, and not caring about the well-being of the other humans.

Then what could he do? Should he just continue to save as many lives as possible? Or maybe rush all around the world to clear gates to ensure that no one gets hurt or dies from the monsters?

Wouldn’t that just make him a slave to humanity?…

‘A slave to humanity….’ he thought while walking.

‘Am I really starting to think like him?’

This was the second time he had found himself thinking like Elijah, it was as if he was bound to.

As if that was the destiny of whoever held enough power to worry about what to do with it.

And after all that thinking, he came to a conclusion:

‘I need to speak with him, and I don’t have much time’

Last time, Elijah told him not much time was left until the evil seed inside his body would completely sprout.

But eight months had already passed, and nothing had happened.

The newspapers didn’t report any unusual activities in New York, and the association branch was still working just fine.

How come Elijah still hadn’t lost control? Maybe he found a way to control his power, or maybe someone managed to restrict him…

Whatever it was, Hans hoped he could still talk to him, because he needed advice, advice that only he could have given to him.

But his thoughts were interrupted by the tremor of the ground, which was way scarier now that they could not see what was happening around them.

“It’s coming!!” shouted Caleb.

“If we haven’t made it, try to look out for the legs of the tortoises, you may be able to avoid one if it isn’t falling perfectly upon you.

And if you can, try to climb up their bodies because it’s way safer up there than down here.”

After those words, all that was left was hope and fear.

After reaching the innermost area they didn’t have anything as a reference, all the survival techniques and the terrain’s differences that they had been taught had now become useless, since it had been a long time since any man had stepped foot on that land apart from Nivi.

They didn’t know if they had made it, but what they did know was that if they were still in the tortoises’ territory, the chances of walking out of there alive were extremely slim.

“Bam”

An incredibly loud noise hit their eardrums, and just a few milliseconds later, a shockwave strong enough to make most of them fall on their butt followed.

They couldn’t see it because the dark and the snowstorm covered it, but they knew that a tortoise had just taken a step not many meters away from them.

There was something that worried them even more however, they feared that a second step would bury them in the snow.

Silence…

The wind blowing in their ears was the only noise they could hear, apart from the distant rumbling on the ground.

They were all quiet, trying to pick up any noise that could give them hints about where to escape.

Even if the dark didn’t affect his vision, Hans could only see a little more than the others, since the snowstorm in the innermost area had mana in it, and it interfered with his {mystic insight}.

“Bam” The sound of the step was still really loud, but it was more distant than the first one, meaning that the tortoise was walking away from them.

“Haaa…”

They all let out a sigh of relief, and Caleb was grateful to the world for letting his team live one more day.