369: Chapter 369 Rats in the Pipes

404's knee knocked against a weld on the inner wall of the pipe, the pain so sharp he nearly cried out.

Nightingale's combat boot soles appeared less than half a meter ahead of him, moving forward silently and at a steady pace, as if controlled by an invisible force.

The cross-section of the pipe was only sixty centimeters square.

404's backpack scraped against the top of the pipe, making a rustling sound.

With every contact, the soles of Nightingale's boots would pause for half a second—a silent warning.

404 bit his lower lip, tugged his backpack straps down two centimeters, and continued crawling forward.

The air in the pipe was sweltering and humid, thick with the smell of rust and something resembling rotten eggs.

In a sealed space that hadn't been ventilated for over twenty years, the oxygen level was only enough to sustain basic breathing; any slight increase in pace caused his chest to tighten.

He used the miniature terminal strapped to his right wrist to calculate the distance.

From the lateral pipe branch into the main network, crawl north for one hundred and twenty meters, turn left at the third T-junction, then advance another eighty meters to reach the ventilation grille above the Core Control Room.

He had already crawled two hundred and ten meters.

Only the final straight stretch remained.

Nightingale stopped ahead of him.

404 nearly collided with her soles; he braked just in time and looked up.

Nightingale's right hand reached out from her side, making a fist gesture.

Stop.

404 held his breath.

A sound came from outside the pipe.

It wasn't the sound of machinery operating, nor the viscous sound of flowing metal.

It was footsteps.

Or rather, a sound simulating footsteps—uneven in rhythm and inconsistent in weight, like an infant learning to walk.

The sound came from below the pipe, less than two meters away from them.

404 pressed his face against the floor of the pipe, peering out through a weld gap less than a centimeter wide.

His pupils suddenly constricted.

A Mimic was in the corridor right below them.

But this Mimic was different from the ones Chen Mo had encountered.

It was only half the size of a normal human, with disproportionately long, slender limbs, moving horizontally along the corridor walls like a metal spider.

There was no face attempting to form on its spherical head, only a circular hole that kept opening and closing—

Like a mouth, silently chewing on something.

Chen Mo said there were seven.

This was the eighth.

404's hands began to shake; he struggled to keep his teeth from chattering.

Nightingale's left hand slid silently to her waist and drew a short blade.

The blade was only fifteen centimeters long, its matte coating completely invisible in the darkness.

Outside the pipe, the spider-like Mimic stopped.

Its spherical head turned slowly, the circular hole aiming toward the pipe.

404 felt like his heart was going to jump out of his throat.

His wrist terminal emitted an extremely faint electronic beep—a low battery warning.

In the silent underground space, that sound was as piercing as a scream.

The Mimic's reaction was instantaneous.

Its four limbs exerted force simultaneously, launching its entire body off the wall to latch precisely onto the outer wall of the pipe.

404 could feel the metal plate beneath him vibrating.

The thing was crawling on the outside of the pipe.

The sound of metal on metal moved from his feet toward his head, getting closer and closer.

The outer wall of the pipe began to deform; a visible bulge was swelling on the metal plate, as if something was trying to squeeze in from the outside.

Nightingale moved.

Her body performed an incredible flip within the sixty-centimeter square pipe—

She shifted from a prone position to lying on her back, short blade in her right hand, the tip aimed at the expanding bulge.

The bulging metal plate was pierced from the outside by a dark green metallic tentacle.

The tentacle was less than two centimeters in diameter, its surface covered in dense barbs like the feelers of some deep-sea creature.

It swayed back and forth inside the pipe, searching for a living target.

Nightingale didn't cut it.

404 opened his mouth to ask why, but Nightingale's left index finger was held to her lips.

The tentacle searched the pipe for three seconds without touching anything—

Nightingale's body was pressed against the inner wall, maintaining a gap of less than two centimeters from the swaying tentacle at all times.

Her breathing rate dropped to four times per minute, and her body temperature began to fall under this extreme control.

The tentacle retracted.

The bulge on the pipe's outer wall slowly flattened, and the sound of the metal spider's crawling moved in the opposite direction, gradually fading away.

404 realized his back was soaked in cold sweat; his shirt clung to his skin, chilling him to the bone.

"Is it gone?" he asked in a breathy whisper.

"For now." Nightingale flipped back into a prone position and returned the short blade to her waist.

"Why didn't you cut it just now?"

"Severing the tentacle releases liquid metal fragments. The fragments have independent tracking capabilities."

404 stored this information in his brain, while internally raising his fear level by two more notches.

"Move." Nightingale began moving forward again, thirty percent faster than before.

On 404's wrist terminal, there were only forty meters left to the control room.

He forced himself not to think about that tentacle, not to think about how many uncounted Mimics might be outside the pipe, and not to think about what would have happened if that thing had touched his face.

He only thought about what Chen Mo had said.

Three minutes.

His mind began an automatic countdown.

One hundred and eighty seconds.

One hundred and seventy-nine.

One hundred and seventy-eight.

Twenty meters.

A ninety-degree downward turn appeared in the pipe ahead; below that turn was the ventilation grille above the control room.

Nightingale stopped at the corner and extended a palm-sized reflector mirror.

The mirror reflected a space of about thirty square meters.

The control room.

Unlike the abandoned environment in the tunnels, the equipment in this room was still running.

In the center of the room was a cylindrical device, about two meters in diameter, reaching all the way to the ceiling.

The surface of the cylinder was covered in dense coils; every coil was emitting a low-frequency hum, with blue-white electrical arcs jumping between them.

An Electromagnetic Generator.

404 stared at the device, his tech-geek instincts overriding his fear.

He saw the logic in it.

The design architecture of that equipment was different from anything he had seen in textbooks or papers.

The coils weren't arranged in a conventional spiral, but in a triple-nested ring structure—exactly like the brand of three interlocking circles on the Brass Key.

"Sister Nightingale," 404's whisper held a hint of the excitement unique to technical personnel.

"I can shut it down, but I need direct contact with the control panel."

He pointed to a console shown in the mirror, next to the base of the Electromagnetic Generator.

The console had twelve physical knobs and a display screen that was mostly shattered.

"From the grille to the console, it's four meters vertically and two meters horizontally." Nightingale's assessment was precise to the centimeter.

"Jump down, three seconds to the console."

"How long do you need to shut it down?"

404's mind raced through calculations.

"If the panel still works, thirty seconds. If not, I'll have to manually disconnect the coil power supply, which takes about... one minute."

Chen Mo's voice came through the bone conduction communicator.

The voice was half a pitch deeper than before, mixed with heavy breathing.

"One minute is too long."

A muffled thud of metal impacting metal came from the tunnel side, and the audio in the communicator briefly distorted.

"Forty seconds," Chen Mo said, and the communication cut off.

404 ground his teeth.

"Forty seconds it is."

Nightingale had already unscrewed the four screws of the ventilation grille with her short blade.

Holding the grille plate with one hand, she silently removed it from the frame and placed it in the pipe.

Cold air rushed in from below, carrying the ozone smell characteristic of electromagnetic equipment.

Nightingale's body slid out of the pipe opening; she landed the four-meter drop with almost no sound.

404 peered down from the pipe opening and took a deep breath.

Then he closed his eyes and let go of his grip on the edge of the pipe.

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