After searching an area far away from the two armored vehicles for a while, Russell discovered that the gains were nowhere near as plentiful as he had imagined.
There were only two or three batteries that could be taken without any dismantling work.
There was quite a bit of Ether Plating, but that stuff wasn’t easy to sell.
Unless there was a fixed Agent demand chain for it, it was difficult to move through private channels.
Just as Russell was planning to head farther west to take a look, the roar of armored vehicle engines echoed from the distance.
This meant that HAND’s Investigators had finished their surveying and were preparing to move out.
Russell immediately gave up the idea of further exploration and silently took out the Map, using the sound to judge the direction they were heading.
Pulling out a marker pen, he marked a point on the map.
This point represented the location from which those people had departed.
Leaning against the second-floor platform of an old workshop, he watched as the two armored vehicles slowly entered the main road of the eastern factory district.
The outlines of the armored vehicles were slightly distorted by the refraction of the Ether Energy drifting through the air, their edges blurred as though someone had erased them with a rubber eraser.
Russell didn’t rush to follow.
He simply spread out the map and, starting from the point he had just marked, slowly moved his fingertip forward along the road line.
The lines on the map squirmed slightly as the Hollow changed in real time—a corridor on the southeast side that had been a passage three seconds ago became a dead end three seconds later.
“Still pushing forward,” Russell muttered quietly.
The people from HAND weren’t simply charging deeper at random.
Their Carrot calculations were clearly still being updated continuously.
The armored vehicles alternated between moving and stopping.
Each stop lasted roughly three minutes, likely for recalibrating their data.
Estimating that their position was approaching the edge of the map, Russell put the Map back into the System Inventory and stood up, stretching his stiff joints.
Following them was non-negotiable.
But after nearly being discovered once, he had no intention of staying too close.
At a time like this, the map that came with MC alone wasn’t enough.
He brought up the MC system menu, opened the mod list, and selected the JourneyMap Mod.
[Memory Usage 128MB/128MB]
That’s right.
Russell’s MC System could install mods.
If the vanilla MC System put him roughly on equal footing with ordinary Agents through Ether Aptitude, then an MC System capable of running mods had already become something bizarrely powerful.
Of course, under Russell’s current circumstances, the mods he could use were limited by the MC System’s memory capacity.
At present, the maximum memory capacity of his MC System only allowed him to install a single mini-map mod.
In other words, 128MB.
Any mod below that memory requirement could be purchased and loaded into the system.
“This mini-map is anything but mini.”
Russell complained verbally, but the moment the system’s mini-map mod activated, a smile immediately appeared on his face… This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
This was the real reason he dared to tail an elite from Section 6 like Tsukishiro Yanagi.
The functionality of the mini-map mod was very simple.
Besides displaying the surrounding terrain, it could directly show the coordinates of all neutral and hostile units within the area.
It was practically wallhacks.
That was why, among all lightweight utility mods, the 128MB mini-map was considered one of the larger ones.
The smaller mods Russell commonly used, such as Vein Miner, Traveler’s Backpack, and Fast Crafting, were generally all below 100MB.
Moreover, in theory, the mini-map mod possessed an even more absurd ability: Waypoint Teleportation.
Unfortunately, Russell had already tested it…
It didn’t work.
Most likely because his system was merely a standard survival version and didn’t have operator privileges.
With the help of the mini-map, Russell easily maintained a distance of more than 500 meters from HAND’s convoy without losing track of them.
He could also avoid all the wandering Ethereals.
Combined with the chaotic industrial ruins scattered everywhere, getting discovered was practically impossible.
On the mini-map, Tsukishiro Yanagi’s convoy gradually moved farther away.
Russell jumped down from the second-floor platform and quickly pursued them in their direction.
To the east stood a row of connected old warehouses.
More than half of their roofs had collapsed, but the walls remained largely intact.
More importantly, there weren’t many wandering Ethereals there.
Russell moved through the shadows along the walls, searching for a route through the ruins.
He wasn’t worried about losing the convoy anymore.
The only thing he needed to worry about was finding a path that looked traversable on the display but proved impossible for him to cross because of his poor physical condition.
When Tsukishiro Yanagi’s armored vehicles stopped for the sixth time, Russell suddenly noticed something unusual.
On the mini-map, about two hundred meters directly ahead of the armored vehicles, three gray icons were slowly moving.
Gray represented neutral units.
Inside a Hollow that had been deeply corrupted by Ether for three years, where even the plants had changed color, neutral units could only be one of two things—
Either other Hollow Raiders, or wandering intelligent constructs.
But intelligent constructs probably wouldn’t advance through the depths of a Hollow in a triangular formation.
Russell frowned slightly.
The coordination and synchronization displayed by those three dots on the mini-map clearly didn’t resemble ordinary Hollow Raiders either.
He stopped advancing and immediately slipped into the stairwell of a nearby three-story building.
The stair railings had rusted through long ago, and the steps were covered with unhealthy yellow-brown vines.
Russell turned sideways as he climbed, placing every step on the innermost edge of the stairs to avoid making creaking noises.
He had already noticed from below that the third-floor windows provided a perfect view of the area in front of the armored vehicles.
Stepping onto the windowsill, Russell pulled something from his bag.
Not from the System Inventory, but from the ordinary canvas backpack on his back.
It was a heavily worn military-grade pair of binoculars.
He ran a secondhand shop.
He had bought this thing from a Hollow Raider for only 200 Dennies.
Tools with such narrow applications were always expensive when you needed them, but ridiculously cheap on the secondhand market when you didn’t.
Though there was a small crack in one of the lenses, it didn’t affect usability.
The MC System wasn’t lacking in items like telescopes, but Russell really didn’t want to spend two copper ingots and one amethyst shard crafting one.
After all, MC’s telescope had a narrow field of view and severe shaking.
It wasn’t even as good as an ordinary civilian telescope, much less the military model in his hands.
Russell raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus.
The armored vehicles in his field of vision had already stopped.
The doors of both vehicles were open, and the Investigators and engineers were setting up a second batch of monitoring equipment.
Tsukishiro Yanagi stood beside one of the vehicles, holding an electronic display.
Her pink hair swayed gently in the breeze drifting through the Hollow.
Asaba Harumasa leaned against a vehicle door.
His coffee can was still in his hand, but his posture had shifted from casual relaxation to alert vigilance.
Russell adjusted the binoculars and looked farther into the distance.
The three gray icons on the mini-map had already stopped moving.
Although they were out of sight from his angle, he could roughly determine that they were hiding on the roof of an old factory building about 150 meters away from the armored vehicles.
Even though he couldn’t see the people themselves, he could see what they had set up.
As the owner of a secondhand shop, Russell felt that the object looked very much like a military-grade signal amplifier.
This was clearly not something a Hollow Raider would carry around.
Oh, right.
One piece of common knowledge in New Eridu was that signals inside and outside a Hollow were isolated from one another.
Without special methods, penetrating a Hollow’s signal-blocking effect was extremely difficult.
Russell naturally knew who possessed such special methods.
But people with that capability would never appear in a place like this.
Which left only one explanation.
They were sending a signal to another group of people somewhere inside the Hollow.