Uncovering Town's Secrets

Mark returned to his truck and drove around the area where Sarah had mentioned that this group seemed to do its business. He also used his last Turck Point, not for a Skill but for a Truck Upgrade. In theory, it was something that Truck-kun could already do.

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Truck-kun learned <Smart Phone Form>

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That changed Truck-kun's appearance to be more modern and could do more than make calls. For example, it could use apps from different stores, or play some games through it, which Mark doubted Truck-kun would let him do. But Mark could access the Net through it and also used it in combination with his <Beginner Hacker> Skill to find out about rumors of the area on the Net.

He was still in Vever Town but beyond the neighborhood where his apartment was. He followed some leads he got with his search over the Net and had Truck-kun speaking with different vehicles.

At first, it surprised Mark when Truck-kun explained that all vehicles could speak, but only Truck-kun could talk to people. So what explained a bit about the name of his first upgrade <Vehicle Possessor>, as Mark thought it would be more of close to hacking the vehicles than possessing them. But in reality, it seemed that all cars had what people would consider a 'conscience, 'but they did little in controlling their own 'bodies', except in sporadic cases. Those rare cases were considered like something had broken on the vehicle.

So, in the end, Truck-kun could speak with them and ask them if they had noticed anything useful, but because they couldn't actually see or hear things, they could only share the routes they took. Still, even that information was helpful, as people delivering illegal products would use regular routes, or if they did, they would do so when they were empty. Fortunately, vehicles had a sense of time to help with that.

Each talk took just a couple of seconds as Truck-kun didn't need to speak them with words like humans did. That way, even if it got late, Mark had found quite a bit of information.

According to all his investigations on the Net and through different vehicles, he had decreased the size of their whereabouts in two places. One was an old storehouse, while the other was an orphanage. The storehouse made sense as they would need some place to keep whatever they delivered before doing so. The site was known to be sketchy, but for some reason, police seemed to let it be like that.

As for the orphanage, there were two reasons he suspected it. First, many of the vehicles that he and Truck-kun interrogated pointed that place to be the beginning of many suspicious activities. Some vehicles were part of those deliveries, while others had noticed other vehicles that fit Mark's description of their model and moving at weird hours. Even if a vehicle couldn't 'see' like people did, each had a sense that allowed them to detect nearby vehicles, so they knew if they had ever 'seen' one fitting the description given to them since their memory was immense.

The second reason Mark suspected that place was that he had technically already known that this place wasn't acting within the law. That was the orphanage where he supposedly got adopted from the Ranac family. Mark knew for someone like his family to produce these papers wouldn't be too hard, but he doubted that the orphanage itself wasn't aware of the deceit they took part in.

When Mark investigated that place, he found two sides to it. The one was the public side, which made it look like a place for taking care of the next generation who was unlucky to have no parents or lost them while too young to take care of themselves. It also kept doing campaigns helping, even outside this town, to take care of the problem of child abuse and children living in the street.

But something hid deep on the other side of the coin that very few knew. Without his Skill, Mark wouldn't be able to find it, but he had assumed since long ago that it wasn't a nice place either way. There were apparently cases of child abuse within the orphanage, mistreatment of said children, or even sudden disappearances of some of them. Most of those cases didn't reach the public, or if they did, they introduced them as some children running away after causing trouble or leaving to leave their love or some other crazy story.

He didn't plan to inform Sarah about his findings yet, as it would be too suspicious to do so. After all, he is just a simple truck driver who had a common friend with her. Moreover, it would be too suspicious of doing possibly a better job than her in such a short time.

But he wouldn't delay it much either, as he wanted to take these people behind bars and make the neighborhood even a bit safer the soonest as possible.

"You know that someone else will likely take their place after we deal with them. Isn't that how your system works? "Truck-kun spoke through the radio speakers since they hadn't yet reached the apartment.

Mark spoke with Rubes, who told him it was ok if the former kept it as long as he could get earlier tomorrow to have enough time to load it with the next delivery. As for what Truck-kun said, Mark knew it was very much the truth, as taking care of groups like that wouldn't be that easy. However, because of his <Beginner Hacker> Skill and his investigation, he better understood the situation and knew that there was more than one group of people acting beneath the law in different ways.

Some even had deals with the police, making it impossible to get them down. Although, of course, what he had found out about the people he was currently going after, they didn't have the police under their thumb. They should have bribed a few individuals, at least, which seemed commonplace on that side of the business.

Mark was sure that Sarah wasn't of the people getting bribed, as it wouldn't make sense for her to investigate this group then. But still, Mark had to be careful as he didn't know if she worked with anyone else in the police station who could be getting bribes.

As he found a place to park his truck and reached his apartment, he noticed no lights or noises coming from Rubes' apartment. Either he was sleeping or out to work, but Mark didn't mind as he didn't need him for something specific. He would see him tomorrow either way if something came up.

After having another shower to help him calm himself and organize his thoughts, Mark sat on the floor meditatively. He took a few deep breaths slowly as he started concentrating.

He raised his hand as he kept his eyes closed, and yellow energy started gathering at his hand. At first, it began collecting to surround his hand, but soon after, it started taking another form. He kept focusing his Trucki to form the blade and finished doing so in almost four seconds.

It wasn't a perfect blade; it had the right shape but didn't look too sharp. Still, it was much faster and better quality than what he could do in the Darkroom, which showed how much easier it was in the real world. Mark hadn't tried doing so outside the Dark Room, but he thought it was about time to do so.

Mark also checked to see how fast he could create the shells on his fists and feet, which was much faster and of better quality once again. He was confident about using them in actual combat, as it took much less focus than making the Trucki Blade.

The next thing he tried was every move that he trained in the Trucko Martial Art, which wasn't such an extensive list, and little he could do by himself.

'I need to get a training dummy or something. '

Some techniques used the body or his opponent against them, which was difficult to practice alone. There was actually an item called <Practice Dummy> in the [Store], but Mark had no <Truck Coins>, and it cost 50 <Truck Coins> either way. He could buy so many D-Rank Skills if he had so many coins instead.

But he could buy a Dummy meant to practice Martial Arts from the Net, although he wasn't sure what would be the difference between the two. Ultimately, he doubted that such an expensive product was that simple to find in the real world.

But for now, Mark kept testing the limits of his <Martial Art> while awake, and he checked how much he could combine it with this <Minor Sword Mastery>. After all, he didn't plan on letting the police have all the fun.

Truck-kun had informed of a detail about a way for him to level up other than going in <Dungeons>—- defeating stronger human opponents. If he beat them by using his Skill, either by killing them, which he didn't want to do, or bringing them in unconsciouses, he would earn some Exps. Of course, by not killing them, he could earn less exp, but Mark didn't mind.

But only by defeating people of a higher level than him would that work, but according to Mark, level 10 was quite a low level for an adult human, but most humans didn't have access to Skills like Mark, but only Stat boosts.

In the end, he planned to use that advantage as fully as he could, as that was the only way to improve faster.