Chapter 311: An Unlucky Vacation (10)
After hanging up, Everly fell into silence.
She had already suspected that the branch investigators might fail to capture the fake Gary, but even she hadn’t expected the situation to spiral into something this disastrous.
The investigators had been the ones to set the trap. They should have been the side with every advantage. So how in the world had they managed to turn such a winning hand into such a catastrophic defeat? They already knew there was a dormant true body lying at the bottom of the lake—couldn’t they have exercised even the slightest bit of caution…?
And now look what had happened. They had dispatched so many people, yet not only had they failed to catch Gary, every last one of them had been killed. Gary grew stronger through slaughter. After claiming that many lives, he had undoubtedly evolved into something far more terrifying than before.
Even worse, those investigators hadn’t just fed him experience—they had handed over a huge cache of items as well. Then the rescue team that arrived afterward had thoughtfully delivered him a helicopter… complete with a pilot.
After this so-called extermination operation, Gary hadn’t suffered the slightest injury. On the contrary, disaster had turned into opportunity. He had essentially reached his fully powered endgame form.
Mike had learned the news from a city police officer in Sunken City. Limited by his rank, the officer had no idea which items the fallen investigators had lost.
If none of them had been tracking items, that would have been one thing. In that case, Everly’s location would still be a secret to Gary—for the time being.
But was that even likely?
A group assembled specifically to hunt someone down would almost certainly be carrying tracking items as standard equipment.
If that was the case, then she couldn’t gamble on Gary failing to find her. From this point forward, every plan had to be made under the assumption that Gary would inevitably track her down.
Taking a deep breath, Everly picked up the satellite phone and called Mike once again.
This time, she instructed him to reveal both her true identity and her exact location, and have the police officer he knew contact the branch investigators.
Everly needed allies.
If the old Gary had merely been an elite monster—dangerous, but still manageable if you figured out the right strategy—then the current Gary had evolved into a full-fledged raid boss. The guns in the panic room might not even be able to pierce his defenses anymore.
Everly needed to know what items Gary now possessed. She needed people to protect her grandfather and friends in the villa. She needed reinforcements from the SAI to fight alongside her.
Mike’s reply came quickly.
The surviving branch investigators had been continuously tracking the rescue helicopter’s location.
After obtaining Everly’s coordinates, they connected them with Emerald Lake Camp’s location and discovered that the line matched the helicopter’s flight path almost perfectly. That proved Everly hadn’t been lying—she really was Gary’s next target.
So many investigators had died, and they’d even lost a priceless S-Class item. There was no way they could swallow that humiliation. They were determined to hunt Gary down to the bitter end. As a result, the investigators—normally infamous for dragging their feet—displayed an almost miraculous level of efficiency for once. The investigator on the other end of the line immediately agreed to cooperate with Everly and also shared a complete list of the items they had lost.
Along with that information came another piece of bad news.
“The rescue helicopter’s top speed is 200 kilometers per hour. However, because the cities around Gilosha are still being battered by heavy rain, it’s only flying at about 120 kilometers per hour. We plotted its current position against your coordinates, and at this rate, Gary’s helicopter should reach your location in about twenty minutes… That is, assuming it doesn’t crash in the storm.”
It probably wouldn’t.
From Everly’s observations, whenever Gary was pursuing someone, he seemed to have a permanent luck buff. Nothing ever seemed to go wrong for him.
“What about your reinforcements? SAI has branch offices in every state, doesn’t it? Can’t you have the investigators from Yanifly State get here as quickly as possible? I’ve got a grandfather who’s nearly eighty years old, and children who can’t even lift a sandbag. Gary’s a ruthless monster—we have no way to deal with him on our own!”
“…”
The investigator on the other end fell silent for a moment before quietly saying, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re right. We do have a branch office in Yanifly State, and it’s located in Gilosha. But during last year’s Gilosha Incident, every investigator assigned to that branch was killed. Since then, the Yanifly branch has been critically understaffed. The trainee investigators we’ve recruited as temporary replacements rarely last more than a few months before either resigning… or dying. At the moment, the branch only has two inexperienced trainees left, and both of them have gone missing in this flood.”
“What about the teleportation array?” Everly refused to give up. “I remember you have teleportation arrays. Can’t they transport living people? Even sending me a few items would help.”
“We do have teleportation arrays, but the conditions for using them are extremely restrictive. A teleportation over such a vast distance… even personnel at headquarters might not be capable of drawing a functioning array.”
Everly caught the implication immediately and didn’t bother dancing around the issue.
“So you can’t help me.”
The investigator took a deep breath, his voice thick with embarrassment.
“…I’m sorry. We’re simply not capable of it. We’re already on our way at full speed. You just need to hold out for thirty minutes…”
Just hold out for thirty minutes.
Easy for him to say.
How was Everly, an ordinary flesh-and-blood human, supposed to survive thirty minutes against Gary? If the branch investigators were the ones in her shoes, could they have managed it themselves?
She desperately wanted to answer with biting sarcasm, but reason stopped her.
At this point, resentment and blame would accomplish nothing. No one had wanted things to end up like this. Rather than waste precious time venting her frustration, she’d be better off figuring out what to do next.
Still, the call hadn’t been a complete waste.
At the very least, Everly now knew what items Gary had obtained—and, more importantly, exactly how the tracking item he had stolen worked.
The item was called “Kitty’s Ball of Yarn.”
Mila was a mischievous little kitten. Chasing after a ball of yarn that had rolled away, she ran out of the yard and onto the streets, where she was frightened and pursued by mischievous children and vicious dogs alike. By the time Mila was finally safe, she had lost her sense of direction and could no longer find her way home.
Scarred and battered, Mila clutched the ball of yarn in her mouth as she shivered in the bitter winter wind. Exhaustion overtook her, and before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.
Winter gave way to spring. The snow melted, and warm sunlight filtered through the bushes, shining upon a set of bleached white bones. As a hearse carrying loneliness, sorrow, and tears passed by the thicket, the weathered ball of yarn suddenly rolled free, tumbling down the slope until it came to rest beside its owner.
With the ball of yarn in her mouth, little Mila finally found her beloved Grandma Valentina.
And so, from that day on, the road to heaven was never lonely again…
The investigator explained that the Ball of Yarn was a single-use item. It could only be used to locate someone the user had seen before.
To activate it, the user had to imitate the kitten by holding the ball of yarn in their mouth while picturing the person they wished to find.
Once activated, the yarn would pull taut in midair, pointing directly toward the target.
There was, however, one critical rule: before reaching the target, the user could never let go of the ball of yarn. The moment it left their mouth, the item would instantly lose its effect.
Clearly, the item tracked Everly’s current, real-time location, not a fixed set of coordinates.
For Everly, that was both bad news and good news.
The bad news was that as long as Gary kept the ball of yarn clenched in his mouth, it wouldn’t matter where she ran—he would always know exactly where she was.
The good news, however, was that she no longer had to worry about dragging Old John and the other two into this.
As long as she left the villa immediately and fled as far away as possible, Gary would never go after her family and companions.
As for where she should run…
Everly’s gaze first lingered on the Sacred Tree bracelet around her wrist before passing through the clear glass window and settling on the vast sea beyond.
She could certainly try summoning the Sacred Tree’s true form, but how long it could remain manifested—and whether it was even capable of defeating Gary—were complete unknowns.
Besides, Gary wasn’t the only threat on shore. There were also the elusive monster fish.
Their attacks barely fazed Gary, but if they landed on Everly, they would be more than enough to kill her. Facing two kinds of enemies at the same time was not a battle she was confident of surviving unscathed.
By comparison, whether she chose to flee or stand and fight, the sea—her home turf—would be the better battlefield.
After ending the call, Everly sprang into action.
There wasn’t much time. She had only moments to think. At the moment, her plan was extremely rough: first, try to escape, putting as much distance between herself and Gary as possible, and see if she could hold out until the SAI arrived. If a direct confrontation became unavoidable, she’d find a way to recover the restraining item Gary had stolen, use it to immobilize him, and then summon a whirlpool to drag him down to the seabed and imprison him there.
It was going to be an incredibly difficult battle.
She needed to conserve every bit of her strength.
That meant the best option was to find herself a boat. If she swam through the ocean in her own body, the drain on both her stamina and mental energy would be far too great.
After thinking it over for a moment, Everly quickly settled on a target.
A few nights earlier, while night fishing off the pier, she had spotted a speedboat about three meters long.
Coincidentally, during the time she’d been confined to the villa, she’d passed the boredom by reading The Mirror Lake Village Murder Case, the latest novel by the famous mystery writer Noah Pipe. As an aside, Lucas had shamelessly insisted on mailing her the book after finishing it, and she’d casually tossed it into her luggage, figuring it might help pass the time on the flight.
Although it was a honkaku-inspired mystery novel with supernatural elements, many of its details were written with strict adherence to real-world conditions. The story was set in a fishing village called Mirror Lake Village. Being located beside the water, it naturally featured boats in several parts of the plot.
In one chapter, Noah Pipe explained that modern speedboats generally fell into two categories.
Some civilian recreational speedboats didn’t require a dedicated ignition key. As long as the power was switched on and the throttle lever was engaged, the boat would start.
Others, however, were more professionally outfitted or used for commercial purposes, and these typically required a key to start the engine.
If the key was lost, there was still an emergency option: hot-wire the ignition.
In the novel, the murderer escaped by hot-wiring a speedboat. Lucas had painstakingly researched the process and described every step in meticulous detail.
To an ordinary reader, the passage might have seemed confusing yet somehow impressive. But Everly had learned how to hot-wire a vintage car from Old John. As she read that section of the book, she could practically see the entire procedure playing out before her eyes.
In principle, the wiring of a speedboat wasn’t all that different from that of an old car. If she had to do it herself, Everly was confident she could get the engine running within three to five minutes.
It had started raining on the very night they went deep-sea fishing, and by the following morning the rain had turned into a torrential downpour.
In weather like this, no one would normally head out to sea, so the speedboat was most likely still moored where she’d seen it.
As long as Everly could reach the pier and board the boat, she’d have an incredibly fast means of transportation.
Fuel wasn’t an issue either. The novel had mentioned that the vast majority of speedboats ran on diesel—and the backup generator at Everly’s villa used diesel as well.
Even in the absolute worst-case scenario, if the speedboat was gone, she could always dive straight into the sea and swim.
Things couldn’t get much worse than they already were.
It was worth trying.