Chapter 92: Splitting Up |
The elevator carried Bai Mu and Stephen downward. Bai Mu had pressed the button for the fourth basement level. When the doors finally slid open, a pale corridor greeted them. The metallic alloy walls gleamed under the harsh, cold white lights illuminating the surroundings.
The metallic stench of blood permeated the air. Crimson stains and dismembered body parts were scattered everywhere.
He spotted torn white lab coats and shattered bulletproof vests. These were the remains of the soldiers and researchers slaughtered by the Walrider. According to the priest, there were no survivors left in the Underground Laboratory.
The Walrider had gone on a rampage a day ago, massacring every single person down here.
The researchers had attempted to shut off the Life Support Pod of the Adapter, Billy, in a desperate bid to stop the Walrider's rampage. The gruesome result of their failure was laid bare before them.
Bai Mu raised his Camcorder to record the horrific scene: [You have collected evidence: The Bloodbathed Underground Laboratory.]
Right at that moment, a shadowy specter suddenly materialized in the camera lens.
It hovered at the far end of the corridor, drifting silently through the dim darkness.
Suddenly, abandoning its previous indifference toward the two of them, the entity lunged forward.
"Fighting a boss like this right off the bat... is this really a D-rank Script?" Bai Mu had anticipated a confrontation, but he never expected it to happen so abruptly.
"Run!" Bai Mu roared. He grabbed Stephen by the shirt and dragged him into a mad sprint toward a fork in the corridor to their right.
The elevator doors would never close in time to stop the entity. Before the metal panels could shut, the phantom would tear through and twist them both into human pretzels.
Terror washed over Stephen's face as his legs pumped furiously. He was well aware that this monstrosity was completely immune to human strength. Fleeing was their only option.
Bai Mu refrained from activating Berserk. The skill only lasted for three minutes, and he had no idea how far they were from Billy's Life Support Pod.
He was completely unfamiliar with the Underground Laboratory's layout. Three minutes would almost certainly not be enough time to find it.
Once the effects of Berserk faded, he would be plunged into a Weakened state, leaving him as helpless as a fish on a chopping block.
There was a corner up ahead. Bai Mu planned to round the bend and summon his Charger in the straightaway. He obviously wasn't going to use it to attack the black phantom; the Charger couldn't even withstand bullets, let alone survive being crushed by the Walrider.
Instead, he intended to ride the Charger, letting the beast carry him and Stephen forward at a dead sprint.
He had already decided to abandon the Side Quest tied to Stephen. If entering the laboratory meant immediately fighting the black phantom to the death, then holding back his abilities was no different from committing suicide.
However, before they could even reach the turn, a heavy, muffled crash echoed from behind them.
Bai Mu whipped his head around, only to see a thick alloy blast door slam down, completely sealing off the corridor.
The black phantom was no longer visible through the Camcorder's lens, though wisps of dark mist were already seeping through the microscopic cracks in the sealed door.
"Do not stop," a frail, elderly voice echoed from above.
The voice crackled through a speaker attached to a spherical security camera, its lens aimed directly at Bai Mu's face.
"The blast door will not hold him for long. He will squeeze through the gaps and the ventilation ducts shortly."
"I will control the security doors to buy you time. Keep running forward. Hurry."
There was no time to figure out who the voice belonged to. Driven by pure survival instinct, Bai Mu and Stephen bolted down the hallway.
"Turn right."
"Enter the storage room on your left. Go straight through the door on the opposite side."
"Take the left path. The right is completely blocked."
Whoever this mysterious benefactor was, they seemed to know the black phantom and the layout of the Underground Laboratory like the back of their hand. Communicating through the PA system and watching via the security cameras, the stranger expertly guided the duo. They preemptively opened and closed security doors, carefully mapping out a route with the fewest obstacles to keep the monstrous entity at bay.
Thanks to this unexpected assistance, the two of them miraculously managed to outrun the spectral pursuer on their own two feet—at least for the time being.
After running for about five minutes, they stumbled into a room littered with corpses.
The area was pitch black, forcing Bai Mu to rely on his Camcorder's night-vision mode. What he saw was a gruesome paste of pulverized flesh splattered across every surface. There wasn't a single intact body part left; it looked as though these people had been thrown into a massive meat grinder and churned hundreds of times.
Organs, shattered bones, blood, and bodily fluids were all sickeningly mixed together. Everything in the room had been utterly destroyed, and even the thick alloy walls were twisted and warped out of shape.
"Ugh... hurk..." All the color drained from Stephen's face. Unable to hold it back any longer, he hunched over and violently emptied the acidic contents of his stomach onto the floor.
Bai Mu's brow furrowed in disgust, but with the black phantom still hot on their trail, they had no choice. They trudged through the squelching, gory paste, their shoes crunching over shattered glass as they crossed the room.
[You have collected evidence: The Destroyed Laboratory.]
The heavy doors leading out of the room had been torn clean off their hinges by an immense force, granting them unimpeded access into a new corridor.
The mysterious guidance abruptly ceased. There were no more security cameras or speakers in sight. The final instruction had simply been to walk to the very end of the hallway.
Two trails of bloody footprints stretched down the corridor, leading to an isolated control room enclosed in thick, transparent glass. Inside, a wall of monitors displayed various security feeds from across the facility.
While some camera feeds had been reduced to static, others remained crystal clear. Bai Mu spotted the corridors they had just sprinted through. Glancing across the screens, he quickly located the black phantom. The entity was still relentlessly pursuing them, violently attempting to force its way through a massive alloy blast door.
Bai Mu recognized the location on the screen. There were at least three more blast doors separating them from the monster.
Flanking the control room were the mangled corpses of soldiers and medical personnel. The reinforced glass walls were heavily fractured, spiderwebbed from the forceful impact of bodies being thrown against them.
Inside the control room sat a frail old man with a breathing tube attached to his nose, somehow completely unharmed. He was confined to a motorized wheelchair. The man was practically skin and bones, his skull-like cheekbones jutting out sharply beneath his pale skin, and his head was entirely bald.
He looked utterly incapable of moving under his own power. His muscles were severely atrophied, and his head lolled weakly to one side. The only part of his body that moved with any agency were his bony fingers, which delicately operated the complex array of buttons on his wheelchair's armrest.
"Wernicke!" Stephen exclaimed, his eyes wide in disbelief as he pointed a trembling finger at the old man. "You're actually still alive!"
Rudolf G. Wernicke, the chief researcher behind the Walrider project. It made perfect sense that it was him; there was no one left in the world who understood the Walrider and Mount Massive Asylum better than he did.
"I'm glad you recognize me, outsiders. It saves me the trouble of an introduction," Wernicke rasped, rolling his wheelchair closer to the glass. "You need to shut down Billy's Life Support Pod. Once that machine is turned off, the entity hunting you will disappear."
After Wernicke manipulated the controls on his armrest, one of the monitors shifted to show a pale figure suspended in a fluid-filled Life Support Pod. The screen split in two, displaying the feed on the left and a detailed schematic map of the laboratory on the right.
"Open the pod's valves and drain the nutrient solution. This is your only chance at survival. The Walrider has already locked onto you. The only way you live to see tomorrow is if you kill him first."
"Why are you the only one left alive?" Bai Mu asked, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. "Why hasn't the entity attacked you?"
"I know, I know... I should be dead along with the rest of them. But Billy... he is taking care of me. Perhaps he views me as a father figure. He loves me, of course... poor boy."
Wernicke fell into a fit of violent, rattling coughs.
"You must hurry. He is closing in on you."
Wernicke brought up another camera feed. The black phantom was now relentlessly bashing against the final blast door separating it from the control room.
"We need to go, Bai!" Stephen urged frantically.
Bai Mu shot Wernicke a profound, calculated look. He had originally assumed that Billy was nothing more than a mindless, rampaging lunatic. But Wernicke's survival completely overturned that theory.
The priest's mysterious injection, Wernicke's miraculous survival, the white chrysanthemum he had found near the pool of blood, the email sent by an anonymous whistleblower...
In his mind, the disparate puzzle pieces finally clicked together.
"Let's move, Stephen!"
Bai Mu burned the map's layout into his memory before leading Stephen out of Wernicke's line of sight.
Once they were swallowed by the darkness of the next corridor, Bai Mu shared his theory.
"Bai, that sounds... completely unbelievable," Stephen murmured.
"Do you trust me, Stephen?"
"Of course. I'd trust you with my life."
"Then I need you to do this for me," Bai Mu said.
Stephen fell silent for a few seconds before nodding. "Alright. I understand."
"Take my Revolver and these three grenades. I brought them from the outside for self-defense. Here is a bottle of painkillers and the last few candies I have on me, too."
"I know how it is, Bai. A professional Reporter always has to pack some heat when out in the field."
"Go. Be careful out there."
"You too! Watch your back!"
The two men parted ways at a nearby intersection. Bai Mu headed toward Billy's location alone, while Stephen, gripping the weapons and supplies tight, set off toward a completely different sector.
It was one of the few areas on the map devoid of security cameras—a total blind spot in Wernicke's surveillance network.