375: Chapter 375 A Dead End Chessboard

Su Qingxue bit the filter in her mouth, warily scanning the tightly closed, pitch-black container doors around them.

"The deputy captain and the others were completely off guard when they entered. If they inhaled a high concentration of gas, they wouldn't even have the strength left to draw their guns now."

Chen Mo walked to a red container on the right, his slender fingertips brushing over a layer of condensation on the door handle.

"It's not that they lacked the strength to fire."

He brought his damp fingertip to his nose and sniffed, his brow slowly furrowing.

"It's that there was no physical target for them to shoot at."

Su Qingxue stepped forward and immediately caught sight of a palm-sized bloodstain remaining on the container door.

"This is a mark left by Old Li's tactical glove; he was severely injured while resisting."

As she spoke, she reached out her left hand, wanting to push open the heavy door that had been left slightly ajar.

Chen Mo's left hand cut across from the side, his black liquid metal wrist pressing heavily on the back of her hand, forcibly stopping her from pushing the door.

"Don't move recklessly."

His gaze followed the dark red bloodstain all the way down, finally locking onto an extremely inconspicuous piece of rusty tin at the bottom of the door crack.

"This is a trigger-type Thermite Fuse. The moment the door is pushed open, an instantaneous high temperature of three thousand degrees will incinerate the entire container and anyone within ten meters into ash."

Su Qingxue pulled her hand back as if struck by an electric shock, fine beads of cold sweat breaking out on her forehead; the back of her shirt under the bulletproof vest was completely soaked.

"The Emperor's rule has always been to leave no survivors."

Nightingale looked coldly at the fuse hidden in the rust, her toe kicking a piece of rubble on the oil-stained ground so that it jammed perfectly into the gap of the door hinge to act as a block.

"They are intentionally leaving these bloody markers to lead us into a dead end, using the lives of those missing police officers as bait to wear us down."

Chen Mo turned and bypassed the red container full of explosives, continuing to advance deeper into the yard with steady steps.

"Old Li and the others are SWAT Officer who have undergone top-tier training at the Municipal Bureau. Even if they encountered an extremely difficult ambush, they would have pressed the emergency distress button on their walkie-talkies before losing their ability to resist."

He stepped over a large puddle of mixed engine oil and sewage on the ground, his deep gaze scanning every inch of the surroundings Li Ke radar.

"But the officers outside providing backup only heard pure silence, which means that the moment they were attacked, they didn't even have the 0.1 seconds of reaction time needed to press the button."

"What kind of person could subdue four fully armed and highly alert SWAT Officer in an instant?"

Su Qingxue followed closely to Chen Mo's left, her breathing becoming increasingly heavy under the pressure of the gas filter as her muzzle pointed toward the thick white mist ahead.

"It wasn't a person doing the work at all."

Chen Mo stopped at a crossroad formed by stacked containers and bent down to pick up a thumbnail-sized fragment of a black plastic shell from the mud.

He used his fingernail to scrape the surface of the fragment twice, peeling away the paint to reveal an intricate miniature gold-plated circuit board inside.

"It's a High-frequency Directional Acoustic Oscillator."

He held the mud-stained fragment up in the air and handed it to Su Qingxue behind him.

"This thing can release infrasound waves exceeding the human hearing limit the moment it's turned on, directly destroying the inner ear's balance system and causing someone to fall into a deep concussion-induced faint without any warning."

Su Qingxue looked at the extremely precisely crafted fragment, the anger in her eyes no longer suppressible.

"So they were directly knocked unconscious by sound waves and then dragged into the depths Li Ke sacks of rags."

Nightingale leaned against the edge of a container on one side, her muscles tensed to the limit as her ears caught any slight movement in the surroundings.

"This kind of indiscriminate acoustic weapon also has a fatal impact on the user themselves—unless the person firing it is a Biochemical Puppet with their auditory nerves removed."

Just as she finished speaking, a muffled metallic impact suddenly came from inside a blue container ten meters away to the right.

Chen Mo turned his head at the sound; in the darkness ahead, only a few faint rays of light shone through holes rusted into the sheet metal, forming several eerie pillars of light in the mist.

"They're in that container."

He set off, approaching the eerie blue container without hesitation.

The pure white brand on his left forearm began to emit a searing heat under his black sleeve, and a strange sense of resonance was transmitted to his brain along his damaged and reorganized nerve endings.

"This resonance did not come from cold evidence at a death scene, but rather from some twisted psychology hidden behind the scenes that was currently in a state of extreme excitement."

The iron door of that giant blue container was not locked, merely left ajar with a two-finger-wide gap, Li Ke the gaping mouth of an abyss waiting for its prey to fall into the trap.

Chen Mo stood half a meter from the threshold, not in a hurry to reach out and pull open the rusty door.

"Li Ke, respond."

He raised his right hand and pressed the button on the tactical communicator clipped to the edge of his ear.

"Cut into the abandoned Network Base Station of this Dismantling Plant and see if any abnormal electromagnetic fluctuations have broken out in this vicinity within the last ten minutes."

The static in the headset hissed, and only after a full five seconds did Li Ke's slightly anxious, cracking voice come through.

"Brother Mo, the signal jamming network in this damn place is extremely strange. It's not the kind of full-band interference that blocks everything, but a one-way digital filtering net."

The crisp sound of Li Ke frantically tapping on his keyboard reached Chen Mo's eardrums directly via radio waves.

"You can send texts or audio out, but external commands are all blocked by a virtual high wall. Inside, an independent small local area network is performing ultra-high-frequency data transmission."

"The other party is doing a real-time broadcast."

Chen Mo snorted coldly and cut off the communication, his fingertips hovering over the cold iron door across a layer of air.

"The people from Tartarus aren't just making an example of them; they also want to package this execution into a live killing show for all of us."

Su Qingxue gripped the gun handle tightly, the cold sweat from her palms making the originally non-slip texture somewhat greasy.

"This is a completely unreasonable madman."

"A mentally deranged madman would at least make logical errors, but the person who set this trap is extremely sober."

Chen Mo's right hand finally firmly grasped that rust-covered door handle, his knuckles turning pale from the force.

"Cover me."

As he shouted low, the muscles of his entire right arm suddenly bulged with power, violently pulling open the container door that weighed hundreds of pounds.

Extremely blinding searchlight glare poured out from inside the container Li Ke a waterfall, causing the three people outside to lose their visual focus in an instant.

Accompanied by the ear-grating sound of metal friction as the door opened, a thick, nauseating smell of blood mixed with the stench of fermented engine oil rushed at their faces.

The interior of the container was not a conventional space for stacking goods at all; instead, it had been hollowed out and transformed into a crude execution room with a strong industrial-religious character.

The four SWAT Officer who had gone missing earlier were hung upside down in mid-air by chains as thick as a forearm, their tactical vests and ballistic plates having been crudely stripped and tossed into a corner.

Their bodies swayed extremely slowly in the air with the airflow as the sea breeze poured in.

Blood dripped from their hanging hair, hitting the steel plate below drop by drop.

At the deepest part of the container, against the wall, an old-fashioned CRT television was emitting a ghostly blue flickering light.

No specific images were playing on the screen.

Only a string of rapidly jumping red numbers was performing a cold and ruthless countdown.

04:32.

Time was precisely stuck on the life-and-death boundary of less than five minutes.

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