Chapter 73: Infection |
On the other end of the communicator, Shi Rang did not make any moves.
He knew that no one could read the messages he sent.
As a Tamperer, he needed intelligence to operate and exert his influence. But acquiring that intelligence required these Mobile Task Force members to delve deep into perilous situations, paying a heavy price, sometimes even with their lives.
Yet, he did not dare step away from the communicator.
The last time he stepped away to synchronize information and query data, he had moved as fast as humanly possible, only to return and find that Kyle had lost an arm.
He feared that the next time he connected, he would be greeted by nothing but dead silence.
The wails and curses picked up by the communicator were gradually replaced by the sound of footsteps and strained, heavy breathing. He could easily picture the squad captain carrying the wounded man forward. He had missed the exact moment Kyle was injured, but since the communicator was linked to Kyle's Life Support Suit, combined with the captain's words, Shi Rang managed to piece together what had happened.
[Warning: Suit integrity compromised]
[! Unknown airborne particulates detected !]
[Watertight seal failing. Breach location: Right forearm. Shoulder-area fabric tightening]
[Blood pressure drop has slowed. Awaiting further medical treatment]
[Physiological indicators unstable. Lazarus Type-II Medication Kit pending injection]
[Medical intervention failed. Black Box Information saved]
Faced with an excessively high heart rate and massive blood loss, the suit essentially pronounced Kyle's death sentence.
However, the data showed that Kyle was still very much alive—he was even letting out intermittent screams and thrashing wildly. At first, the captain scolded him a few times, but as her stamina rapidly depleted, she simply slung him over her shoulder and ran on in silence, no longer wasting breath on curses.
It was an Anomaly.
Kyle had likely been infected by something.
The Scythe Monsters and the Divinity essence were not the full picture of this unknown anomaly.
Shi Rang proactively triggered the Black Box, flipping through all the saved conversation logs. He documented its infectious properties toward humans and inorganic matter, as well as its ability to replicate architecture, logging everything into a new Record.
[Insufficient traits. Unable to Lock onto the anomaly. Analysis cannot be performed.]
'Still not enough?'
'Why is it still not working?'
'What exactly went wrong?'
The communicator captured the sounds of pursuit closing in from behind. Yet, for some reason, Captain Holly slowed down. She gasped out a curse—"Damn it"—and returned fire at the approaching pursuers.
The initial gunshots came from a rifle, which quickly gave way to a Handgun. The final metallic click of the slide locking back on an empty chamber echoed like a death sentence pronounced.
N4-1: "Motherfucker, give me—"
A muffled thud immediately followed. The communicator tumbled and fell down what sounded like a steep slope or cliff face, finally hitting the ground with a heavy crash.
An avalanche of loose rock tumbled down after it, crashing into the underground depths with a deafening roar that sounded like thunderous rain. It took dozens of seconds for the cacophony to cease.
The echoes gradually faded away.
"Holly? Kyle?"
Shi Rang called out from his end of the communicator, but the device lacked an external speaker function. His desperate efforts were reduced to a single, quiet ping of a message notification.
Kyle's heart rate was plummeting. As for Captain Holly, the communicator wasn't linked to her suit, so Shi Rang couldn't see her vitals. He cranked the communicator's microphone sensitivity to maximum, but it was to no avail.
The silence felt as though the unknown anomaly was mocking him, taunting him for awakening it and granting it such lethal capabilities.
Another sin was added to his burden.
If only he had controlled his curiosity that night, if only he—
Rustle...
The communicator suddenly picked up a faint, indiscernible noise. Just as Shi Rang wondered if the Visitor had arrived to devour the Remains, he heard a sharp, deep intake of breath that only a human could make, followed by an agonizing groan.
Someone was crawling toward the communicator—or rather, toward Kyle's direction.
"Fuck, why couldn't they... couldn't they mix more into this medicine... rookie... Kyle... don't, please don't—
"He's still breathing, still breathing...
"Those things stopped chasing... but it's still not safe, I need to—fuck...
"Damn it, damn it... I can't drag him..."
Holly grabbed Kyle's belt and gave another desperate tug, but her strength failed her.
They weren't going anywhere.
Her rifle had long been emptied and discarded. She loaded a fresh Magazine into her Handgun, felt around for a rock that blended into the darkness, and weakly leaned against it. Her shoulder lamp had completely died, and she didn't have the energy to smack it back to life. On her suit's display panel, the human silhouette representing her physical condition was glowing bright red across large areas.
Three ribs on her left side were broken, her collarbone on the same side was damaged, her left arm had limited mobility, one knee was shattered, and the other was severely sprained.
...How nice. At least they left her one good hand.
Clutching her weapon, she locked eyes with the shifting, glowing irises at the top of the steep slope in the distance.
A moment later, the lights vanished from the crest of the slope, abandoning the Mobile Task Force members to the encroaching darkness.
The Scythe Monsters hadn't followed them down.
Not yet, anyway.
It looked like they weren't making it out of here this time...
Going MIA was the ultimate fate for most members of the Pangolin Mobile Task Force. They often went too deep, traveled too far, and eventually vanished into unknown, forgotten places.
The distant sounds of explosions had ceased a while ago. Her only companions now were the sound of her own breathing and the steadily dimming light from Kyle's half-broken shoulder lamp.
It was incredibly dark down here; she could barely make out the silhouette of any object. It was almost impossible to imagine that a blue sky existed somewhere above this abyss.
She should have voiced her doubts when they first drew up the Operational Plan.
A six-man formation like this wasn't the standard operational mode for the Pangolins. Before they deployed, she had even joked with the others that perhaps this bait mission would finally break the curse of having the Bureau's highest missing-in-action and casualty rate...
Damn it all!
They had gathered so much intel, but they couldn't transmit a single byte of it back. When the time came, new operators would be sent down to repeat their mistakes, dying until someone finally managed to relay the message: "There's a monster nest down here, set up a Machine Gun emplacement and wipe them all out before exploring." God knows how many years would pass before someone dug up her Black Box, brought it back, and decoded it, only for everyone to sigh in regret, lamenting, "If only we had gotten this intelligence sooner"—what kind of bullshit was this?!
Beep.
That couldn't possibly be a sound made by a monster.
"Command Headquarters? There's a massive amount of—"
"Bzzzt..."
The signal was still disconnected.
Then where did that sound come from?
Kyle's shoulder lamp was on the verge of dying entirely, but a new light suddenly flared to life at his waist.
The Special Communicator.
Holly staggered and dragged herself over to Kyle, yanking the communicator free from its clip. Her eyes hadn't faced a direct light source in quite some time, so she couldn't read the text on the screen at all. Deciding on a quicker method, she pulled out her own suit's connection cable, swapped it with Kyle's, and routed the Life Support Suit's audio interface into the device.
A mechanical voice spelled out the message in her ear:
[Dump Truck: Report your situation, Captain.]
Dump Truck.
She had heard the recent Urban Legends circulating within the Bureau, but she knew a bit more than the average operator—she was a Mobile Task Force squad captain, after all.
On the other end of that line was a Council Member of the Supreme Council.
Never in her life did she expect to be speaking directly with a Council Member.
[N4-1: Officer, do not send cave-exploration backup. This area requires a total purge. Please mobilize heavy firepower. The number of Entities down here exceeds a thousand. Containment is impossible until their numbers are drastically reduced.]
[Dump Truck: What is your status?]
[N4-1: I am still combat-capable, but Number 5 is done for.]
[Dump Truck: Check his physiological data.]
Holly lifted Kyle's left arm, pressed the button to open his suit's control panel, and stared at the still-beating graphs in silence for a moment.
She hadn't had the time or supplies to stop his bleeding, yet miraculously, his blood pressure was still registering as normal. Kyle had left a trail of blood the entire way here and was currently soaking in a pool of his own gore.
A normal person would have bled out long ago.
Holly had seen things like this happen many times before; she just didn't know how this specific scenario would play out.
Would he be turned? Would his body rot away until he died? Would he lose his mind and become a monster?
Before the tragedy could fully unfold, she still had a chance to stop it.
She raised her gun.
[Dump Truck: Report the specific Anomalous Properties to me, Captain.]
Holly remained silent for a moment before obeying the order.
Kyle's right arm was still completely severed, and the bleeding had almost entirely stopped. However, when Holly peered closely at the cross-section of the stump, she was horrified to see a crimson eye growing right out of the flesh.
Behind that unblinking red eye stood a pale, sickly leg.
The weak beam of Kyle's shoulder lamp outlined a vaguely humanoid silhouette. As Holly snapped her head up, a gaping maw filled with razor-sharp teeth materialized right before her eyes. She violently jerked her gun up to aim, but the sudden movement tore at her injuries, causing her to fall backward onto the ground. Only her muzzle remained stubbornly locked onto the target.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Three shots rang out, yet the Visitor remained entirely unfazed. When she blinked a second later, the entity had vanished into thin air.
A hallucination.
No, her psychological evaluation scores ranked in the top three of the entire Mobile Task Force. She was completely lucid right now; she wouldn't just hallucinate out of nowhere.
It was a Cognitohazard.
Oh, that explained it. Her Eyepiece had shattered in the fall, rendering it unable to censor and pixelate the hazard source...
The gunshots hadn't yet roused the glowing eyes in the darkness. They hadn't drawn the Scythe Monsters over. Not yet.
Holly rapidly tapped at her suit's control panel, feeding the fresh intel back through the connection.
Right at that moment, Kyle, who had been lying on the ground like a corpse, kicked his legs out, let out a loud shout, and suddenly shot up into a sitting position.
Relying on the dim light, he saw Holly sitting beside him. He opened his mouth to ask how long he had been unconscious, to ask for a sitrep, but found himself completely stunned, staring blankly at the barrel of her gun aimed directly at his head.
"Captain..."
A bizarre movement caused both of their gazes to reflexively snap toward his severed arm. Holly's eyes instantly darted away the second they made contact, but a few seconds later, she looked back in sheer bewilderment.
The red eye on Kyle's stump had completely vanished at some point. Instead, the raw flesh and blood were squirming. Fresh bone pierced through the tissue as tendrils of granulation intertwined and spiraled upward, blossoming outward to form new layers of skin. Finally, it fully restored itself into a complete, pristine arm protruding outside the suit. From skin to bone, it was as good as new.
The Cognitohazard did not reappear.
Instead, a single black eye rested on the back of the newly regenerated hand.
Under the watchful gaze of them both, it fluttered its wings, blinked delicately, then shifted into a deep crimson color before melting entirely into his flesh and blood.