Chapter 487 - Soul and True Will
Chapter 487 - Soul and True Will
"Ja-Jake?" Avy stuttered with difficulty, on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, or rather madness.
The overflow of emotions and rebounds had finally got the better of her sanity. She was 99% sure it was him, but the formidable full armor fashioned from a huge mass of liquid alloy made it impossible to discern the facial features underneath the armor except for that unique pair of eyes.
Jake's ears twitched as he heard the young woman's feeble voice and he instantly turned around and lunged forth, thrusting the claws of his right hand straight into her c.h.e.s.t with a fierce expression on his face.
Just as he was about to rip her heart out, a strange glint flashed in his eye and his arm subtly deviated from its path to tear out a good portion of her left shoulder and collarbone.
The sheer magnitude of the pain and the severity of the wound was like an electric shock to Avy and her fragile consciousness regained its clarity and alertness at once. A second earlier, she was poised to die, but not anymore. Jake had definitely tried to save her, and she didn't want to waste his efforts.
Getting up with difficulty, she compressed the bloody wound that would have killed a normal human with a wince of pain, then staggered off in the opposite direction. Jake trembled on the spot as he stared at her slender figure like a predator on the prowl, but his gaze eventually shifted away from the young woman when he caught the scent of more interesting prey nearby.
Giving up on the temptation, Jake let his body's warped instincts take over and charged like a flaming bolt of lightning through the dark corridors of the ruined station in search of his next victim.
As he left, a flash of blue light appeared near Avy and tapped a spot on her neck to make her faint. Ilfora's holographic figure appeared and cast a complicated, but grateful look toward where Jake had gone before taking the general in her arms and disappearing in a second burst of light.
Most of the lucid survivors had already made it to the launch bay or finished killing each other. All the places his mental sense scanned were littered with fresh corpses, both parasites and humans. He already knew where his comrades were, but at that moment he didn't care about their fate. There was plenty of fun to be had where he was, and he didn't have enough willpower to change that.
Because while Jake wasn't fundamentally different from before, the Corruption had definitely turned him into a madman. The constant struggle he was putting himself through to not betray his core principles was far too hard for morality to prevail.
As the wave of Corrupted Fluid engulfed him, several emergency measures were implemented to preserve his soul. One was from Xi, another from Xion Zolvhur's Will Fragment in his possession, and two more from himself.
First, because of his mental link with Xi, he was not totally able to close himself off from her. The Oracle AI's consciousness was more powerful than his own and supported by the nearly 30 tons of liquid alloy flowing through his cells.
In some ways, their two minds could be considered one and the same, and sensing the danger, Xi had pulled whatever consciousness she could into the liquid alloy to protect it. This knowledge was buried in her memories and had been brought back to her at that crucial moment, or she would have informed him of it much earlier.