The Achievement Junkie

Chapter 721 - Jack's Forceful Surrender

"Huh?!" Wollice laughed, dashing forward to take Jack head-on. "What kind of half-baked nonsense are you spitting now?"

Woltin led his vines forward as well, becoming the perfect support to his twin brother. Together, the twins tore through the few constructs standing between them and Jack.

Jack, on the other hand, was unfazed by the twins and their actions. He teleported toward the back of the room where more than a hundred untouched constructs waited their turn to attack. But those constructs suddenly began to fall through the floor, which had been replaced by a giant spatial rift.

To the twin’s surprise, those hundred or so constructs were now falling on top of them through a rift that had opened overhead. Now, they were effectively surrounded by all of the room’s constructs.

"A bit more than two hundred left..." Jack mumbled to himself as he looked over the surrounding horde of constructs. A childish grin then appeared on Jack’s face. "I wonder what I’ll get for this..."

Teleporting again, Jack appeared directly into the center of the swarm. He now stood in between the twins, only a few meters away from each of them.

"Are you--"

"Yes, I’ve been called insane all my life," Jack laughed as the twins momentarily focused on getting situated at the horde’s center. "And I’ll be called crazy for however long I live!"

While Jack laughed and cackled gleefully, the twins noticed something strange about him.

Jack had dropped his transformation and reverted to his human form. Also, Jack’s apparel was completely different. His dark, mysterious cloak was gone, as was Jack’s typical garb. Apart from a plain shirt and pants, all Jack was wearing now was a set of crudely crafted plates of metal affixed to his torso and limbs. Neither Woltin nor Wollice would ever call such an atrocity of metal armor, but Jack wore it proudly as if all of his worries were now gone.

"What--" Both twins shouted at Jack, now able to attack him after creating a bit of wiggle room inside the construct horde. However, Jack’s sudden, nonsensical shout drowned out their voices.

"LEEEEEEEEERRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYYY JEEEEEEEENNNNKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNSSSSS!!!!!"

The atrocious armor on Jack’s body instantly turned pale white and decomposed into pure energy. That energy seemed irritable and about to burst outward, yet it first sank into Jack’s body. Only then did that energy explode with violent passion, along with the entirety of Jack’s energy reserves and the latent energy within Jack’s entire being. All within a fraction of a split-second.

A pure white explosion forced its way through the room with no person and no construct able to react or put up a proper defense. The wild, raw cosmic energy consumed everything and shook the walls that tried their best to contain it. Being in an enclosed space only made it worse, causing some of the shockwave to reverberate back through the room.

Nothing was left. No remains were found anywhere, only hundreds of silver cores lying on the ground and signs of energy corrosion along the roxite walls.

At the same time, two figures suddenly appeared inside the waiting chamber. The appearance of those two, in particular, set off an alarming conversation among the dozens of cosmicians who had failed to at least remain in the keep, regardless of how many treasures they had claimed.

Before one of those two men could speak due to their own confusion, the plain-looking man standing on the platform spoke for everyone to hear, "You two have lost the challenge."

"WHAT?!" Wollice shouted. "But why were we--"

"Calm down..." stated the man, patiently waiting for the Sicabor son to silence himself. "Are you listening now? You two were pulled from the competition due to necessity. Given your circ.u.mstances, your loss was undeniable and your revival would be entirely uncertain. There’s a great chance that we could’ve never revived you, which would have made you two the first permanent casualties of Glacier Keep. And we refuse to tarnish our reputation. Do you have a dispute with my logic?"

"N... No..." Wollice sighed.

Placing a hand on his brother’s back, Woltin chuckled in disbelief, "Jack really did that... He really killed himself..."

"Not exactly," commented the man, startling the crowd and the twins especially. "All will be explained later."

Everyone in the waiting chamber began to recount the last time they saw Jack and the twins on the illusory screens. Both were last seen in that small treasure room, the one that the twins had raided and where Jack had opened a passage no one knew about. But there had never been a screen for that hidden room, leaving everyone in the dark as to what the twins and Jack had just experienced.

The Sicabor twins were hounded with questions, many from their closest aides that had joined them for the challenge. But the twins refused to answer any of them. They were anxious to ask their own questions to Jack, the man who had supposed defeated them while giving up his life yet wasn’t anywhere to be found in the waiting chamber or counted as a permanent casualty of Glacier Keep. Their interest in Jack had reach levels they had never imagined, making them all the more proud to have participated in this round of Glacier Keep’s challenge.

That plain-looking man walked to the back of the platform, acting aloof and solemn so that no one dared approach him without a good reason. He was busy holding a black crystal, the same crystal that allowed him to see all of Glacier Keep and monitor even that hidden room.

Despite his appearance, the man was utterly astonished but what he had just witnessed. More so than when Halmut forced a pitifully unstable ascension through faux-ore. More so than when Skaryn finally chose to stop forcefully-delaying his ascension. More so than learning about Oli’s creating a small black hole to neutralize a four-star self-destruction.

Jack’s self-destruction defied logic. It was nothing like a late one-star self-destruction should have been and it had come from a man that Daruun had raised personally.

All that man knew about Jack was his relationship with Daruun, and his knowledge of Kartonia as a whole was even more limited. He knew nothing about Jack’s abundant energy reserves, the same energy reserves that more than ninety percent of one-stars could never imagine having before ascending to the next star. The man was clueless about Jack’s armor and that such a suicidal thing existed outside of forced torture tactics. He could sense that Jack’s armor had acted like a catalyst to amplify the explosion as a complete set, but he hadn’t anticipated the ensuing explosion to almost rival a median two-star self-destruction.

But what stumped the man mot of all was what came the moment the explosion subsided. When he could sense Jack’s energy starting to regather at the origin of the explosion.