94: Chapter 94 Death Doesn't Knock

When Sarah opened her eyes, the pilot's voice came through her earpiece.

"Ms. Mitchell, we have arrived at the designated airspace. Altitude is 5,200 meters, five kilometers north of the target manor."

She took off her sunglasses, wiped them, put them back on, and stood up to stretch her wrists. The temperature in the cabin was a few degrees lower than at takeoff, but her body temperature remained unchanged—after being modified by the Ouroboros Virus, her body's ability to adapt to environmental temperatures far exceeded that of an average person.

Sarah walked to the cabin door and pulled the handle. The hydraulic rods hissed as a blinding white light flooded in.

The wind at over 5,000 meters slapped her directly in the face; any ordinary person would have had difficulty breathing. Sarah squinted and looked down—below the clouds lay an endless tropical rainforest, a green so deep it was almost black, looking like a giant carpet of moss spread across the earth.

The pilot poked his head out of the cockpit. "Ms. Mitchell, the rappelling gear is in place. Do you need—"

"No need."

Sarah zipped her trench coat to the top and checked the wingsuit membrane device inside. This thing was custom-made by Chen Feng's people; it was usually folded into the lining of the coat, but once deployed, it formed a pair of carbon fiber wings under her arms and along her waist. Theoretically, it was enough to support a weight of about eighty kilograms for high-altitude gliding.

Theoretically.

"Jumping directly from this height?" The pilot's voice faltered noticeably. "We didn't bring a backup parachute—"

"I don't need one."

Sarah secured the injection gun to the outside of her thigh with a quick-release buckle, then looked back into the depths of the cabin at the large creatures waiting quietly.

Nemesis was still suspended by chains, its head drooping slightly. Two Tyrants stood motionless. Four Hellhounds lay in their cages; one of them looked up, its crimson eyes fixed on her for two seconds before letting out a low whimper from its throat.

"Wait for my signal."

Having said that, Sarah didn't give the pilot any time to react. She kicked off the edge of the door and plunged into the airflow at 5,000 meters.

The howling wind instantly filled her ears.

The weightlessness of free-fall would be enough to trigger physiological panic in an ordinary person, but Sarah's heart rate remained steady at fifty-two beats per minute, exactly the same as when she was resting with her eyes closed in her seat.

She counted down three seconds and spread her arms.

The membranes inside her coat snapped open, and the carbon fiber frame expanded in the airflow. Her descent was suddenly arrested as her vertical fall transitioned into a diagonal glide, silently skimming the bottom of the clouds.

The rainforest below rapidly enlarged in her field of vision.

Sarah constantly fine-tuned her body angle to control the gliding direction. An ordinary person would need hundreds of hours of wingsuit training and GPS assistance for this, but she relied on her naked eyes—her dynamic vision, modified by Ouroboros, allowed her to see the textures and gaps in the rainforest canopy clearly from a height of 5,000 meters.

In the final two hundred meters, Sarah retracted the membranes, and her body entered a brief free-fall again. The branches and leaves of the canopy rushed up from below.

She chose a gap between two coral trees with the widest spacing, turned her body ninety degrees, and zipped through the ten-meter-wide opening in the canopy. Leaves brushed against the surface of her coat with a rustling sound, but not a single branch was broken.

Landing.

Her feet landed on a thick layer of decaying leaves, her knees bending slightly to absorb the final impact. The leaf litter bounced once, but not even a full footprint was left behind—the muscular system modified by Ouroboros was like having a set of biological shock absorbers installed in her body. Jumping from 5,000 meters was essentially no different for her than jumping off a table.

Sarah straightened up and glanced around.

The rainforest air was humid and muggy, smelling of humus mixed with unknown flowers. The canopy overhead was impenetrable to light, with only scattered sunlight leaking through the gaps in the leaves, casting dappled spots of light on the ground.

She tapped her earpiece.

"Landed safely."

Two seconds later, Chen Feng's voice came through. Despite the distance of tens of thousands of kilometers and the satellite relay, it was surprisingly clear.

"How long did it take?"

"Four minutes and twenty seconds."

"Thirty seconds faster than expected. Any issues with the wingsuit?"

"It works well, though it's a bit stiff when folding it back." Sarah said as she folded the carbon fiber frame of the wingsuit back into her coat lining.

"I'll have the tech department adjust it when you get back." Chen Feng paused. "The target manor is twelve degrees south-southeast of you, a straight-line distance of 4.7 kilometers. Satellite thermal imaging shows at least three layers of security perimeters, with ground sentries and patrols numbering an estimated forty to fifty people."

"That's manageable."

"Don't be careless. Escobar's private guard was trained by retired Israeli instructors. They're more than a level above those street thugs in Los Angeles; they have night vision and scheduled drone patrols."

Sarah drew the HK45 from her waist, racked the slide to confirm a round was chambered, and then holstered it.

"Chen, do you really think a few Colombian drug traffickers with night vision can stop me?"

The communication channel went silent for a second.

"Fair point. Keep the line open and contact me if anything happens."

"Copy that."

Sarah cut the communication and began moving south.

She didn't run, nor did she intentionally lighten her steps. But if someone were watching, they would notice something very wrong—every step she took covered about two to three meters, equivalent to a normal person's jog, yet the decaying leaves and moss under her feet made almost no sound.

The Ouroboros Virus's modification of her muscle and nervous systems allowed her to control every muscle fiber with abnormal precision. The force, angle, and contact area of every footfall were unconsciously optimized for minimum noise.

This wasn't trained; it was instinct.

She covered the four kilometers of dense forest in less than fifteen minutes.

The first security perimeter appeared.

Sarah stopped behind a tree so thick it would take more than three people to encircle it. She didn't even need to peek—her modified hearing allowed her to pick up the heartbeats of two people from over fifty meters away.

Two beats.

Thump... thump... thump...

One heart rate was about seventy beats per minute, the other slightly faster, in the low eighties.

Their breathing was steady, with no signs of tension. Veterans, but currently in a relaxed state.

Sarah closed her eyes and focused.

Beyond the heartbeats, other sounds began to surface layer by layer: the slight rustle of clothing, the faint clink of metal buckles on gun straps, one person chewing gum, and another taking a puff of a cigarette every few seconds.

Using sound source localization, she sketched a 3D image in her mind: forty-three meters to her front-left, in the bushes, one person crouching and facing northeast; fifty-one meters to her front-right, behind a large rock, another semi-reclined and facing northwest.

Two sentries, with overlapping coverage, separated by an open area about fifteen meters wide—a strip of brush that had been artificially cleared, so anyone passing through would be exposed to at least one sentry's line of sight.

Sarah circled a short distance to the right and found a tall enough tree in a blind spot. With a single leap, she scaled the canopy over ten meters above the ground. The whole process took less than two seconds, quieter than a monkey.

She crossed the open area by stepping through the branches overhead; the two sentries never once looked up.

The second security perimeter was more professional.

Infrared ground sensors were buried about ten centimeters below the surface, arranged in a line with two-meter intervals. Sarah stopped on a tree and looked down at the mud; an ordinary person would see nothing, but she could—every two meters underground, there was a faint heat source, the residual warmth emitted by the sensors' electronic components as they worked.

In her vision, those things glowed like Christmas lights.

She continued moving through the canopy, passing silently ten meters above the infrared sensors without even dropping a leaf.

The third layer.

Drones.

Through the gaps in the canopy, Sarah saw a quadcopter drone flying along a fixed route, carrying an infrared camera. It was flying at an altitude of about thirty meters at a moderate cruising speed.

She noted the time interval of its passes—roughly one cycle every four and a half minutes.

In the gap between the drone's passes, she dropped from the canopy back to the ground and quickly traversed the last stretch of jungle.

Then, the manor appeared before her.

A sizable white complex. The main building was three stories high in a Spanish colonial style, surrounded by neatly manicured tropical gardens and a modest swimming pool. The perimeter wall was two and a half meters high, topped with barbed wire, with a guard post every thirty meters.

Crouched behind a low bush outside the wall, Sarah began to "scan" the entire manor with her ears.

This was an ability she had discovered after merging with the virus—if she focused enough, she could precisely isolate every individual heartbeat from a sea of noise and judge their number, status, and approximate location based on heart rate, rhythm, and position.

She closed her eyes, and the world became nothing but sound.

The first layer—the walls and gardens. Twelve heartbeats distributed around the perimeter of the building, heart rates between 65 and 85, a normal patrol state. Two of them were in the guard post at the southwest corner of the wall, with lower heart rates, likely dozing off.

The second layer—the first floor of the main building. Eight heartbeats concentrated in the east wing, heart rates on the high side—in the nineties, with one even over a hundred. Emotional agitation? No, excitement. The faint sound of clinking chips and laughing insults drifted over. Gambling.

The third layer—the second floor of the main building. Five heartbeats.

Four of them had heart rates between seventy and eighty, quite ordinary.

But the fifth one—

Sarah's attention locked onto that heartbeat.

Thump... thump... thump...

Fifty-eight beats per minute. The rhythm was extremely stable, like a precision metronome. Every beat was powerful, calm, and without a hint of fluctuation.

This was not the heartbeat of an ordinary person. This was the cardiac rhythm of someone who had faced life and death for years, whose nerves had been worn down to a dull edge.

Escobar.

Sarah opened her eyes.

"Found him," she said to herself.

Second floor, southeast corner, by the window.

Her gaze climbed up the exterior wall of the building, locking onto a large window with a balcony on the second floor. Through the glass and the sheer curtains, a warm yellow light shone. Several figures could be seen moving around, with things piled on the table—playing cards.

Playing Texas Hold'em in the middle of the night, completely unaware that a c-17 transport plane had landed five kilometers away, let alone that the enemy who had been soundly beaten by the Los Angeles police a month ago had bypassed his three layers of security and was now crouching at the foot of his wall.

Sarah moved silently along the shadows of the wall until she was directly beneath the main building.

The bottom of the second-floor balcony was about four meters from the ground, which was like a step to her. But she didn't rush to jump up—figures occasionally passed by on the balcony, and going up directly would make too much noise.

She needed a cleaner route.

Then she noticed a spot at the corner of the first floor below the balcony—a thick drainpipe extending from the roof to the ground, rusty but still sturdy, less than two meters horizontally from the target balcony.

The first-floor window next to the drainpipe was open, and the noise and smell of smoke coming from inside told her that was where the group on the first floor was gambling. Fine, not that way.

Sarah circled to the back of the building and found a better option—an exposed structural beam next to the kitchen exhaust fan, from which she could climb up to a window in the second-floor hallway.

Three movements. Step on the beam, pull up, climb through the window. Five seconds.

No sound, no wobbling, no wasted movement.

She stood in the second-floor hallway.

The hallway was long, carpeted in deep red, with several tacky oil paintings hanging on the walls. The air smelled of a mixture of cigars and cologne.

At the end of the hallway was the target room, the door slightly ajar, light and voices leaking through the crack.

But between her and that door, there were two more people.

In the middle of the hallway, one on each side.

They leaned against the walls, holding submachine guns—Uzis. These two weren't ordinary patrol guards; their stance and the way they held their weapons showed they were systematically trained personal bodyguards.

And their positions were perfectly situated in the security cameras' blind spots.

A slight smile touched Sarah's lips.

Interesting. Placing people specifically in blind spots meant Escobar didn't fully trust his electronic security system, or rather, didn't fully trust his subordinates in the monitoring room.

But it didn't matter.

Sarah's right hand reached for her holster, her fingertips touching the grip of the suppressed HK45.

She didn't hesitate, nor did she intentionally speed up; she simply walked forward step by step. The carpet absorbed all her footsteps.

The one on the left noticed her first.

It couldn't exactly be called "noticing"—his peripheral vision caught a shadow deep in the hallway that shouldn't have been there, and while his brain was still processing the "what is that" signal, his hand reflexively reached for the Uzi's grip.

Then his world was frozen in that second forever.

Pfft.

Pfft.

Two bullets left the barrel almost simultaneously, one to the left and one to the right, precisely drilling into the temples of the two guards.

Their bodies went limp, then slid silently down the wall to the floor. From detection to the end, less than half a second had passed; they hadn't even had time to flip the safety on their Uzis.

Sarah walked between the two corpses without stopping or sparing them a glance.

She was now standing at the door of the target room.

The door wasn't fully closed.

Through the two-centimeter gap, she heard the conversation inside.

"You're fucking raising again? What the hell do you have in your hand?"

"Cut the crap. You calling or not?"

"Like hell I am. This hand is total garbage."

Then came a steady voice, with a distinct South American accent and a leisurely pace: "Stop arguing. Show your cards."

—Escobar.

Sarah looked down at the shock-resistant case on the outside of her thigh.

She opened the quick-release buckle and took out the injection gun. The G-Virus, kept under low-temperature storage, still maintained its eerie state, the viscous purple liquid slowly writhing inside the transparent tube as if it had a life of its own.

Sarah held the injection gun in her left hand, her right hand still on the trigger of the HK45.

She looked through the crack in the door into the room.

Chips and cards were laid out on a square table, and the ashtray was piled high with cigarette butts. Four subordinates sat around the table, their expressions varying.

And at the far end of the table, sitting with his back to the balcony—a dark green silk shirt, an ostentatious gold watch on his wrist, fingers short and thick but with neatly trimmed nails.

He was looking down at the cards in his hand, his expression so calm it was almost bored.

Escobar.

Fifty-three years old, head of the "Viper" cartel, controlling half of Colombia's cocaine trade network.

Sarah took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

She looked down at the writhing purple liquid in the injection gun, a faint blue light reflecting in her eyes.

Here we go.