Chapter 79 | Get Them Out!
The observation room sat twelve floors above the dungeon floor, enclosed behind reinforced walls and lined with state of the art monitoring equipment.
Ten meter wide rows of screens displayed feeds from various examinations ongoing in different dungeons.
Rachel sat near the back, her eyes fixed on a particular screen. She had bribed her way into this room specifically for this.
Her friend, a frazzled blonde girl with a security clearance smuggled her in for a favour.
She wanted to watch Dexter battle. That was all. She simply wanted to see that man fight with her own eyes.
On the screen, the first wave of beasts poured into the clearing.
Dexter stood among his team, but he didn’t attack and the team seem to be protecting him instead.
Rachel tilted her head, watching and pondering why he was at the middle and the it seemed like the team was protecting him instead.
The other participants engaged the creatures, but Dexter simply observed.
"I have no idea why you came here to watch that weakling. You can teased the favour for something else." Her friend whispered to her.
"Just keep on watching."
She knew better than to think he was helpless from the beginning she knew there was singing different about him.
The first wave ended and the beasts were easily dealt with by the others.
Rachel smiled as the second wave came.
They were the Dire wolves this time, circling the participants with coordinated precision.
It was then she saw Dexter finally move killing both the beta Dire Wolf and the Alpha Dire wolf easily!
Rachel leaned forward in her seat, her grin spreading wide across her face.
"I knew it! I knew he was stronger than he let on."
The blonde girl beside her shot a sharp look and pressed a finger to her lips. "Shh. Keep your voice down. If teh boss knows I snuck you in here, we are done for."
Rachel covered her mouth with one hand and nodded, but the smile did not leave her face.
At the front of the room, the Head Supervisor stood with his arms folded, his gaze locked on the screens.
He was a broad man with a square jaw and a strict behavior.
Around him, several other invigilators monitored their assigned stations, though more than a few of them kept glancing at the same screen Rachel was watching.
They recognized the Ashford bastard and in just a few minutes, there was a quiet wager circulating through the room.
People had placed bets on which wave Dexter’s group would fail. First wave, second wave, third wave, or fourth. A few optimists had even bet on seventh wave.
When Dexter and the others decided to exit the dungeon, the workers who had bet on the first two waves collected their earnings with satisfaction. One man near the left terminal actually chuckled as he pocketed his winnings.
Suddenly. They saw from the feed that the extraction device wasn’t working
The mood immediately shifted.
An invigilator near the center console frowned and tapped his earpiece. "Extraction watch is not responding."
A murmur rippled through the room. The Head Supervisor turned sharply. "What do you mean, not responding?"
"The extraction watches on the participants, sir. They are not activating."
The Supervisor frowned. "Then activate a remote extraction."
The worker immediately got to work but a red alert filled his screen.
"Sir! The system is not acknowledging the command."
The man who had just collected his winnings slowly closed his hand around the money in his pocket. His smile disappeared.
The Supervisor stepped forward, his face hardening as he growled at the workers. "Fix it. Immediately."
Immediately, tens of workers fired at their keyboards.
Three different operators began running diagnostics simultaneously, their faces illuminated by the pale blue glow of their screens.
The room had somehow gone quiet. The only sounds were the tapping of keys.
Thirty seconds passed. Then one of the operators raised his hand without looking away from his monitor. "Sir, it has been sabotaged internally. This is not a system error. The extraction protocol has been deliberately tampered with from inside the watch units themselves."
The silence that followed was intense.
Rachel’s smile vanished. She turned to her friend. "What the fuck does that mean?"
"Calm down," the blonde girl said, though her own fingers had already started moving across her keyboard. "Let me work."
Before anyone could process the implications of the first alert, a second one fired. A sharp, shrill tone cut through the room, and every screen flashed red with a cascading warning message.
[Dungeon 1435: WAVE 3 TRIAL UPGRADED TO WAVE 5 TRIAL.
Every operator in the room went still. The Head Supervisor’s face drained of color. If they could barely handle wave 3 just what would happen in wave 7?
"Sir," another operator said, his voice tight, "the watch protection bubble has also been destroyed. The participants have no defensive barrier active."
The Head Supervisor’s face finally paled.
"Bang!"
"Fix it immediately. We cannot allow this to continue. The others, fine, but if an Ashford dies in this facility, there will be consequences that none of us can survive. Do you understand me? Even the director will not be able to protect us from what the Ashford family would do. Fix this now."
He straightened up and pointed toward the elevator. "Open the gate manually. Send a team down to extract them physically."
Three guards and two technicians immediately moved for the elevator.
Rachel was on her feet before she fully realized she was moving, and she slipped into the elevator just before the doors closed. Nobody stopped her as no one was paying attention to her.
They descended fifteen floors and came down.
At the far end was the heavy arc door, the entrance to the dungeon zone. The lead guard placed his palm on the access panel.
Nothing happened. He tried again. The panel flickered but the door remained sealed.
"Override it," one of the technicians said.
The guard entered a manual code. The panel flashed red. He tried a second code. Red again. He tried a third.
Still nothing.
"Back to the observation room," the lead guard said through gritted teeth. "Now."
When they returned and delivered the news, the Head Supervisor looked as though he might strangle someone.
"Do you understand what happens if Dexter Ashford dies in there?" he growled with gritted teeth.
"The others are expendable. He is not. Find a way to override the system and get a team inside that dungeon. I do not care what you have to do. Hack it, break it, tear it apart if you must. Get them the fuck out."