Chapter 30: The Hunt |
About ten minutes ago.
"If it weren't for that reporter with the investigative clearance, we would have taken this bastard out ages ago. Why else would we be dragged out on a cross-district assignment?"
Scarlett complained bitterly, propping her elbow on the car's window sill.
She had repeated this exact complaint at least a dozen times during the drive, clearly still holding a grudge.
"The worst part is that I not only have to loop back and endure that damn interview, but I also have to write him a formal apology. To hell with this... they really need to start restricting these reporters from requesting investigative clearance. Just look at what they actually do with those rights—digging up gossip, invading people's privacy, manipulating public opinion. It's nothing but a bunch of degenerate nonsense."
"I thought you were going to club him over the head before we left?" asked John, steering the vehicle beside her.
"What? No, I'm not that kind of person. The mission comes first."
"And after we head back?"
"Ha, well, that's an entirely different story." Scarlett's Mobile Phone rang at that exact moment. Pressing the device against her ear, she grunted in acknowledgment a few times before her face lit up. "Guess what the communications relay on the outskirts of the city just intercepted?"
"A 911 call? Looking at the time, that Entity is likely already active."
"Ha, you're only half right—it's already started killing. Step on it. We're heading to the Old Industrial Zone."
"Are any other teams coming?"
"They're ninety minutes out. We'll be done and dusting off our hands long before they ever get here!"
Completely ignoring the fact that they were speeding down a highway, Scarlett hoisted herself up to sit on the open passenger window sill. Leaning her upper body outside, she pushed off with both hands and vaulted directly onto the roof of the vehicle.
Hearing the solid thud of her landing safely in the truck bed, John slammed the gas pedal straight to the floorboards.
The engine roared as the truck violently accelerated.
The howling headwind whipped Scarlett's long braids into a frenzy. She whistled sharply into the stinging, needle-like wind, letting out a wild, unhinged laugh.
"Let's go! We're taking that bastard down in one fell swoop!"
After a little over ten minutes of hurtling down the road at top speed, John locked his sights on a looming factory building in the Old Industrial Zone and drove the vehicle straight through its walls.
-----------------
The sheer force of the head-on impact was massive, instantly grinding the heavy vehicle to a brutal halt.
Thrown violently forward by the sudden deceleration, the ballistic plating on John's chest slammed hard against the steering wheel.
Scarlett's orders were always a breed of crazy, but John had long since grown accustomed to her reckless combat style. It was the only reason he survived being her partner.
Looking up, he noticed the front hood was severely crumpled inward, and the right headlight was completely shattered.
"I hit something," he declared.
"Then I heard it right! That damn thing was definitely running around in here. You must've sent it flying!"
Standing in the truck bed, Scarlett swiveled the mounted spotlight, aiming its blinding beam toward the upper landing of a collapsed staircase. The harsh light instantly outlined the silhouette of a person shielding their eyes.
"Hey! You, the Mud-Person up there! We're tracking this thing. It's out of your league, so get your ass down here right now!"
The figure on the landing was, naturally, Shi Rang. He had just managed to pry a Gun from a fresh, still-warm corpse on the floor. He was clutching it tightly, debating whether to keep it as evidence, when absolute chaos erupted in the blink of an eye.
The vehicle smashing through the wall felt as jarring as if it had slammed directly into his own skull, throwing his mind into total disarray. He stared blankly at where the bottom of the staircase had been just seconds ago, completely oblivious to the fact that he was standing precariously close to the collapsed edge, the concrete beneath his boots spider-webbed with massive cracks.
If the thing sprinting through the factory moments ago was some crazed killer or a criminal settling a bloody score, then who in the world were these new arrivals?
What on earth was wrong with this world?
He wasn't given a single second to process the situation. The spotlight snapped directly onto his face, its blinding glare making his head spin. A terrible ringing shrilled in his ears from the explosive crash, deafening him so thoroughly that he couldn't make out a single syllable of Scarlett's shouting.
By the time the ringing finally began to fade, the terrifying hum of heavy machinery spinning up to speed bored into his eardrums, accompanied by a gruff bellow.
"Jump! Kid, jump down!"
An instant later, a roaring torrent of lead, laced with glowing Tracer Rounds, erupted from the source of the light.
If there was one thing Shi Rang desperately needed in that moment, it was a clear set of instructions.
Amidst the deafening barrage of gunfire, he panicked and tipped forward, plummeting directly into a pair of astonishingly powerful arms. The owner of those arms had to be easily two meters tall and was heavily armored in ballistic gear. After unceremoniously dropping Shi Rang onto the ground, the giant flipped down a pair of Night Vision Goggles attached to his Helmet, observing the impact points of the heavy fire.
Leaning against the heavily scratched exterior of the truck, Shi Rang had a fleeting moment where he seriously doubted his own sanity, wondering if he was hallucinating.
Because no matter how many times he blinked, the reality remained: a woman was standing in the back of the truck, wielding a massive heavy machine gun. Using Tracer Rounds and the blinding spotlight to guide her aim, she was mercilessly hosing down the pitch-black second floor of the factory.
The second-floor wall was shredded to pieces under the storm of bullets, opening massive holes that exposed the night sky. As the hail of gunfire swept horizontally, it literally chewed a jagged, gaping fissure straight across the concrete structure.
The already crumbling factory shuddered violently. Suspended walkways and upper-floor rooms collapsed one after another in a roaring avalanche of brick, shattered concrete, and choking dust. Ignoring Shi Rang, who was cowering on the ground with his hands clamped over his ears, the towering man conducting the Observation vaulted back into the driver's seat. Gripping the wheel, he slammed the vehicle into reverse and tore out of the building.
Tucking his head down, Shi Rang sprinted desperately after the retreating headlights, scrambling to escape the structure.
Not even a second later, the factory let out a horrific, groaning shriek and completely collapsed under the weight of the savage structural damage.
The resulting shockwave from the thousands of tons of falling rubble swept outward. Scarlett and John merely ducked into the safety of the armored vehicle's cover, but the blast of displaced air picked Shi Rang up and slammed him face-first into the dirt.
Up in the truck bed, Scarlett finally ceased her relentless fire, allowing the glowing-red barrels of the machine gun to spin down freely. She immediately killed the spotlight, flipped down the Eyepiece attached to her Helmet, and peered intently into the thick clouds of swirling dust.
The surrounding area was far too vast and open; a single, limited light source would only serve to restrict her field of vision.
Besides, the prey she was hunting was no longer just a frantically sprinting Sleepwalker. It had mutated into a full-blown monster with double the speed and a vastly thicker hide.
She was absolutely certain that the target they were tracking was dead. The body still radiated heat, yes, but the host was definitely deceased. Because of this, its accompanying Anomalous Properties had mutated—a frustratingly common occurrence. Anomalous Properties didn't shift or disappear just because the host's consciousness faded. While a living host could consciously suppress the anomaly to avoid harming others and cooperate with the authorities, a corpse had no such restraint.
She had led her shots perfectly during that barrage, yet that abomination had tanked the brunt of the heavy caliber fire. Unfazed, it relentlessly circled the entire perimeter of the factory, scurrying up a different staircase just to get its hands on that Rookie.
This obsessive tracking behavior aligned perfectly with what she had noted during her initial Observation...
She threw a quick glance at the Rookie, who had scrambled back to his feet and was currently using the truck's chassis for support as they backed away.
Despite the blood trickling from the guy's nose and mouth, he appeared largely uninjured. More importantly, he hadn't panicked and bolted, remained reasonably composed, and had actually held onto his weapon.
For the Private Hunters she normally dealt with, those were remarkably solid survival instincts.
Judging by the sheer amount of filth caked onto him and the putrid stench he gave off, he must have been staking out the area for hours.
The kid certainly had guts.
Zero tactical gear, zero logistical backup, armed with nothing but a pathetic little Water Gun, and he still dared to hunt a Threat Entity of this magnitude.
Hmph. If he hadn't lucked into her crashing the party, he would have been butchered without ever knowing what hit him.
"It's still moving," John reported, slamming the brakes. "That barrage wasn't enough to put it down."
"Keep on your Observation."
Scarlett spared the Rookie another brief glance while her hands moved in a practiced blur, seamlessly feeding a fresh belt of ammunition into the machine gun as she quickly analyzed the situation.
During its Sleepwalker phase, the target religiously hunted down anyone it had recently come into contact with, pursuing its marked victims one by one until they were dead. A large, clustered group of targets could bait it into ignoring its sequential hit list to prioritize the group, but unfortunately, they didn't have the numbers to trigger that aggro.
It was a damn shame the dead couldn't be brought back to life as bait.
It was an even bigger shame that the bastard refused to stay dead.
Now that the factory was a pile of rubble, the Entity's sole remaining target was likely the Rookie shivering next to their truck.
Scarlett, naturally, failed to connect the ragged survivor huddling against the vehicle with the fresh-faced reporter she had confronted at the drive-in diner a few days prior. The difference in their clothing and demeanor was simply too vast. Furthermore, this Rookie was so thoroughly coated in grime he looked like a literal Mud-Person, making his features completely indistinguishable. And honestly, she was the type to only memorize a person's investigative credentials, not their actual face.
"It's digging its way out. Ten seconds," John relayed.
Scarlett hummed in acknowledgment.
...Given its terrifying sprinting speed, the moment it broke free from the rubble, it would be on top of the Rookie in a single heartbeat.
Once the kid was dead, Scarlett could have John attempt to kite the creature with the truck. However, after violently ramming through a concrete wall and striking the Threat Entity head-on, the vehicle was running a serious risk of breaking down. Plus, she couldn't be certain the Entity wouldn't just accelerate past a hundred and twenty miles per hour and catch them anyway.
Waiting for backup was entirely out of the question. By the time another Evaluation Team arrived, they would only be useful for scraping the three of them off the pavement.
The Black Under-suits she and John wore were exceptional pieces of tactical armor, but their true specialty lay in stopping high-caliber bullets, not crushing physical blows.
So, how exactly did one force a hyper-agile target to stand still and take a beating?
Scarlett's eyes darted sideways, locking onto the chaotic path they had just blazed into the zone.
The rugged path John had navigated was absolutely littered with deep craters of varying sizes. They had even managed to wedge one of their massive tires into a pit on the way in...
"John!" Scarlett barked, slamming her fist against the machine gun's receiver. "Throw him in!"
Down by the truck, Shi Rang's head was still violently spinning.
He hadn't suffered a full mental breakdown, but it certainly wasn't out of bravery. The sheer, overwhelming absurdity of the night's events had completely overloaded his capacity to process fear, leaving him in a state of near-catatonia.
It wasn't until John hoisted him entirely off his feet—tucking him under his massive arm as easily as a sack of flour—that Shi Rang realized the maniacal woman had been talking about him.
"Let go! Put me down! Let—"
Shi Rang, who had only recently managed to claw his way out of a burial pit, found himself bodily hurled straight into the depths of a crater. He landed hard on his rear, the impact against the muddy bottom knocking the wind completely out of his lungs. He lay there, utterly incapable of getting back up.
The suffocating terror of being buried alive flared in his chest all over again. The looming shadow of death clawed at his mind as he forced out his final ounce of adrenaline, desperately digging his fingers into the crater's walls to drag himself to his feet, screaming at the top of his lungs.
But the earth-shattering roar of the heavy machine gun easily drowned out his frantic cries.
He watched as a furious stream of Tracer Rounds streaked back and forth across the opening of the crater. For some insane reason, the blazing lines of fire swept horizontally across the lip of the pit—from left to right, then right back to left. It looked as if the shooter were mercilessly hosing down a donkey sprinting in a panicked circle, or simply laying down raw, indiscriminate suppressive fire over the entire clearing. The staccato rhythm of the gunfire was so deafening and dense that down in the pit, the concussive shockwaves felt omnipresent. God only knew how many barrels were firing out there.
From time to time, scalding-hot shell casings and spent warheads rained down from the sky above, forcing him to curl into a tight ball, wrapping his arms around his head for cover.
He was entirely convinced he had just run into a pair of absolute psychopaths.
Heavily armed psychopaths with access to military-grade firepower, no less!