"What do you mean no rewards? I completed the mission fastest than anyone ever could!" Marx shouted in his mind. He had just appeared in the middle of nowhere from the mission. That was the ideal term though for there were no coordinates.
There was a blue bike leaning on a tree. Marx had not forgotten to take another one. He did not want to waste more time walking on foot.
Marx felt like he could cry. Slacking off? Was the system not the one that had extended his time there with one month? What more could he do? He just trained daily for there was nothing else. It was not his fault right?
"Fuck you!" Marx said pained. He walked to the bike and started cycling towards the direction the ship would land. It would take him two good months by foot but with a bike, it was going to take him one and a half.
***
It was better to wait for less than half a month for the ship to leave than wait for a whole month. His journey was not as eventful. It was only him hunting and no more missions. He had cleared all the first segment's.
Marx had left the bike at the foot of the mountain. He was currently at the top most part of the mountain. Jerry was on next to him. They were lying forward on their belly staring down the mountain.
Almost hundred meters away from them, was the ship. Saying that it was huge was an understatement. It was had black, blue and red colours around it. It was around 100 meters wide. It was then around 300 meters long. It was 50 meters high
If Marx knew about spatial properties, he would be shocked because if rocks had spatial properties, so did metals. Metal were even better and sturdier. Inside the ship, it could be spanning around three kilometers long and a kilometer wide. Then 500 meters tall at some parts.
This ship was one of the largest but not the largest there was. It had enough facilities that it could be stranded in space for ten years without getting its resources depleted. What one would find shocking was the fuel tank.
If it was checked from the outside, it was almost 30 meters wide, 10 meters high and 40 meters long. But the material used to create the tank was even more spatial oriented such that it could be over one kilometer long and around 750 meters wide then it was 250 meters high. One can imagine the amount of fuel carried here.
The ship could consume too much energy just to enable it to take off. But it was very efficient and conservative. The ship alone needed ten pilots for it to take off. It could move at speed no less than any other normal ship.
Around the ship were ten guards. They had been here for 15 days and it was only after another 15 days that they could be leaving this planet. They had guns strapped on their shoulder.
There were other hundreds of drones if one could call them so. They were cubes of around two meters. They produced a blue light in front of them. These drones flew above the trees and they would focus the light on a tree for a while before proceeding to cut it or not.
The trees were cut with lasers and then a chemical would be poured on the stamp. This was to enable the tree to grow once again. The drone would then cut off the branches and leave a pole. The trees were around 30 meters tall.
When a tree was cut, there were other foot drones. These drones were in numbers of thousands. Not more that 30 centimeters long but they were wide enough to carry the trees. Around ten drones would move towards a pole.
The drones had two wheels on each side. The drone would then carry the tree towards the ship. From above, one could see over hundreds of air drones scanning and cutting trees and branches then smearing the chemical on the stamp.
There were thousands of foot drones ten of them carrying a single tree. They all were heading towards the ship. Almost a hundred drones were all carrying the trees towards the entrance of the ship which was more than 50 meters wide.
The drones would then follow towards a single direction inside the ship. It was like an ocean of trees here. It was like there was a pool inside the ship where these treee were all taken. Whenever the drone reached the pool there were holes enough to fit the trees diameter.
The drones would stop there after the trees were inserted inside. The trees then got sucked from the drones top like they were inside a vacuum. The trees would then fall deeper into the pool which was around one kilometer long, 500 meters wide and around 300 meters deep.
The pool was not even past half full. It was going to take the rest of the remaining 15 days to fill it up. The drones would then head back to the woods by passing between the incoming drones.
The process took place seamlessly without any problem. During this expedition, other than the pilots, there were only ten more experts. Then the number of guards had been increased from the usual 50 to a new number of 500 after they learnt about the threat of the boy.
Inside the control room, the ten experts were all on the computers. They had just learnt a new way of using a computer but it was yet to get utilized. But that did not diminish the quality of these computers.
They had the ability to hack into any system just by pressing the button hack! Unless there was an even more powerful firewall stopping it, they would not fail. The ship was designed that it could scan for heat signatures.
These were exactly as what Marx called thermal radiation. Their ideal name was heat signatures. The system did not usually correct him and let him find out things on his own. These experts had the ship scan for heat signatures every one minute.
They were expecting the boy to come and they were prepared. They had come here armed but they had not been attacked even once. They had even assumed that the guy had found a way to leave the planet.
This was good news for them for they did not want to deal with an overrated brat. He was nothing but a brat to them. Someone they could easily crush. They could scan for heat signatures for two kilometers but they had not found him in the 15 days.
***
"Prepare for take off," came a voice. The doors closed and the ship shut itself such it could not be opened again. The speaker was one of the ten pilots. The others started playing with buttons and numbers on the dashboard.
It took a whole ten minutes before the screens in front of the cockpit lit up. The screen displayed ten engines of the ship. Each pilot had his own engine. The pilot at the centre pressed a red button and the whole cockpit lit up with a red light.
It could appear like it was danger warning but it was not. The red button was like the start button. The reason it lit up was because after pressing it, the other ten pilots had to press the green buttons on their stands.
If not the ship would go to safe mode and it would not start engine unless the whole ship was powered off and restarted ten times. The buttons had to be pressed in ten seconds.
The pilots did their part and pressed the buttons and then a green light lit the room and then faded. The screens cleared and resumed their normal display. Outside the ship.
The ship as stated above had ten engines. They all lit up in different parts of the ship. They started with a blue spark that became like a flame. The flame got stronger and larger and lit up.
They started increasing in heat as they appeared to produce an orange glow at their end. By now, the ship had started shaking form side to side. The ground vibrated and the creatures in the vicinity had to run away.
Other than the vibrations, there was no loud noise produced other than the whizzing sound from the engines. The blue flame with orange edge seemed to detach itself from the engine with a few centimeters.
Now the ship was showing signs of attempts to levitate but in a shaky manner. The flames kept increasing their distance by from the engine by centimeters and the ship seemed to levitate to a few meters aboveground.
The ship stayed at this position for few seconds or a minute. By now, the flame was no longer there but a scorching heat as the air around was being burn like vapor. The ship then became stable and it produced a backfire of multiple colours with red being the dominant one.
By the time it sounded, the ship was no longer on Earth's atmosphere. It was impossible with the size of the ship from logic to leave almost instantly but it was very possible. The ship was flying at unimaginable speed headed to the outer space.
It reached space and it appeared like the ship had stopped but it was moving at speed even faster than when it had departed...
Marx was in one of the rooms of the pilots. It had been cozy here for the past 15 days. No one bothered him. The food here was top notch and he did not want to leave any of it. The only thing that had 'irritated' him was the turbulence before the ship took off.
But he was in no position to be picky for he had just 'borrowed' a ride and accomodation from them and they had done so to his satisfaction.
"Outer world, here I come..."