Chapter 53 - Cleo, You Are Up

"What are we going to do now?" Claudia asked, slowly getting over the confusion and terror that rampaged through her mind. 

"Right now?" Tom repeated her question before shaking his head. "We wait," he announced before finding a place to sit at. 

But he was the only one resting. Before Claudia could make up her mind whether she should just stand and wait or follow the example of the only person she knew, everyone started to move. 

Some people came from the tunnel carrying heavy boxes. The group that was here by the time Tom and Claudia arrived was already busy working around a messy sea of cables. In the small confinement of this dug-out space, only Tom, Claudia, and Cleo could just laze around. 

"Boss, are you going with the standard set or...?" one of the men approached Tom and asked. 

"Pack fewer guns and ammunition. Use the saved up weight and space for food and drinks," Tom ordered. 'The guns will be useful only at the first twenty to thirty floors. Past that point, the monsters will be too hard for those pea-shooters to do anything about them,' Tom thought, making his decision on this simple reasoning alone. 

'But that begs the question. If the Online Hub had access to those portals all that time... How come they didn't use it to create powerful people? Or maybe they did?' Tom's thoughts were full of worries. He had no anxiety towards the ongoing scheme, but the perspective of what he was going against was still overwhelming. 

"Hey," Claudia spoke up as she scooted a bit closer to Tom. "Can you tell me what are we waiting for?" she asked in her still trembling tone. 

"Right now?" Tom replied with a question on his own before nodding his head towards the gathering of elders busy with cables and connectors. "We are waiting for them to..."

"We are finished," the leader of that group announced before Tom could even finish his words. 

"That means I'm up," Cleo said as she stood up and jumped to where all the men were gathering. 

"Boss, your backpacks," one of the men said while passing a massive tourist luggage to Tom. He then looked at Claudia with weird fires in his eyes before passing another slightly smaller backpack to her. "Any weapons of choice?" he then asked. 

"Can you get me a spear?" Tom asked before moving his eyes on Claudia. "Come on, you don't want to end up fighting bare-handed!" he lectured her, forcing the girl out of her shocked state.

"Metal gloves then?" Claudia replied in a dubious tone. She acted as if she could easily piece everything that was happening in front of her eyes together but refused to acknowledge it. 

"Will do," the man replied before disappearing into the depths of the tunnel. 

After a moment of hesitation, Claudia accepted Tom's extended hand and allowed him to help her up. But as she did so, she raised her eyes and saw the thing that Cleo approached a moment earlier. 

"Oh my god," Claudia muttered, weakly pressing her back against the metal sheet behind. "You constructed your own capsule?!" 

If the trembling of Claudia's voice was already dying away, now it was back in its full swing. 

"Not exactly," Tom shook his head sideways. "You can get a private capsule mounted in your house if you the exorbitant prince. We got it for one of my brother's houses and then asked the uncles here to dismantle it before assembling here," he explained the situation. "But less with that. Can you carry that backpack?" Tom asked while looking towards the equipment one of his brothers prepared for the girl. 

"Ugh, let me try," Claudia replied, clearly not happy with the sudden change of topic. 

'Well, it would be strange if she could just accept everything around her on the go,' Tom thought, trying to downplay the potentially problematic nature of this girl. After all, she was the only one uncertainty in the entire plan, the only element that was forced in the scheme.

"Yeah. It's heavy, but I can somehow manage," Claudia said after testing out the weight of the backpack before putting it on her back. 

"Good," Tom nodded his head before bringing his own luggage up to his back as well. 

Soon, the same brother that brough their equipment a moment earlier reappeared in the tunnel while carrying both of the ordered weapons in his hands. 

"I don't think I want to know where did you get those things," Tom muttered under his nose as he accepted the spear from his brother's hands. 

"Courtesy of Marvin," the young man replied while shaking his shoulders. "In the entire family, you were the only one who actually believed in your own act. So it was pretty obvious you would try to follow in your father's footsteps," he said before putting a wild grin on his face as he turned away. "No one expected you to be so throughout with the plan, though," he said as he walked back into the long corridor of the dug-out. 

"I don't even want to know what he was expecting me to do," Tom unknowingly voiced out his thoughts. 

"Huh?" Claudia gasped in surprise when she heard his words, alerting Tom about the blunder he just made. 

"Nevermind that, the show is about to begin," Tom cut the topic once again before moving his eyes towards the makeshift capsule. 

When compared to the ones used at the online hub, the one Tom's family prepared in the tunnel looked too scary for any sane person to go inside. Outside of the complete lack of cooling fuel, a mechanism for which was too cumbersome to carry all the way here, one was unprotected from the overheating and radiation that would accumulate inside the capsule...

The best solution to the lack of cooling liquid was also the simplest one. Rather than dealing with the problems that would arise by enclosing the player within the capsule, Tom's uncles... Just left it open. 

"Claudia," Tom said before casting a quick glance at his childhood friend. She didn't say a word, but her stare was intense enough for Tom to notice her intentions. "You are up."