104: Chapter 104 The Melee in Queens

"Let's see how Project Purity handles high-level targets."

The answer was revealed within seven minutes.

The third round of Impact was released from the entire third floor of the target building. Under the kinetic shock, the load-bearing structure of the floorboards emitted a sharp, screeching noise like metal being twisted apart. A crack split the exterior wall of the third floor, extending from the window opening to the eaves, while brick dust rained down.

Within Brute's detection range, three of the four Agents who breached from the front were pushed out of the stairwell. One of them crashed through the second-floor stair railing, falling into the first-floor lobby along with the iron railing, and did not move again.

The rear team was in a slightly better position. When they entered, the target was facing the front team and releasing Impact, allowing the four of them to successfully fire two inhibitor ampoules from behind.

One hit the target's left shoulder.

One hit the wall and shattered.

The one that hit caused the target's X-Gene fluctuations to diminish for three seconds.

Three seconds later, the fluctuations rebounded.

Even higher than before.

Yan Zheng saw the target's silhouette through Brute's long-range detection.

A middle-aged man with a sturdy build. The top half of his cotton pajamas had been shattered, revealing bulging, dense blood vessels across his chest and shoulders. The veins beneath his skin glowed with a dark orange light, and every heartbeat was accompanied by a faint ripple of air.

A Kinetic Release-type Mutant.

Yan Zheng: ( ꐦ ✧ ⌓ ✧ )

"Interesting."

"His body continuously accumulates kinetic energy while in a state of fear, releasing it outward in the form of Impact once it reaches a critical point."

"But he can't control it."

"The output lacks directionality; he even blew up his own walls."

"High talent, zero training."

The fourth-floor windows shattered during the fourth round of Impact.

There were no intact walls left on the third floor; the entire floor was wide open as if someone had pried it apart from the inside, with the cross-sections of reinforced concrete exposed to the night sky in a grayish-white hue.

The remaining three Agents of the rear team retreated to the corner of the building's exterior wall, and the leader whispered something into their communication headset.

Yan Zheng couldn't hear their communication, but he could see the reaction.

The rear door of an armored transport vehicle opened, and a ninth person jumped out from the cabin.

This person wasn't wearing the standard black tactical suit; instead, they wore dark gray lightweight combat armor. They didn't wear a mask or goggles, but a fully enclosed targeting helmet with protruding sensor arrays on both sides.

He held no gun.

He was cradling a long, tubular device with an aluminum alloy casing. The front end had three layers of cooling fins, and the rear end was connected to a cable, the other end of which was plugged into a piece of equipment inside the armored transport.

"A sniper."

Yan Zheng tapped his index finger on the armrest.

"But that's not a conventional sniper rifle."

The long, tubular device was mounted on a temporary stand on the roof of the armored vehicle. The sniper knelt on one knee on the roof, aiming the targeting helmet's sensors at the target exposed on the third floor.

The middle-aged man on the third floor was still releasing Impact—fifth round, sixth round. The intervals were getting shorter and shorter, and the output power was decreasing, but his body was no longer obeying his brain's commands.

Fear drove the gene expression, gene expression drove the kinetic accumulation, and kinetic accumulation drove the indiscriminate release.

A person trapped by his own ability.

His mouth was opening and closing. Across a distance of two hundred meters and the shattered building debris, Yan Zheng couldn't see his expression, but he could monitor his heart rate through Brute's biological signal detector.

One hundred and eighty-seven.

Near the human limit.

Yan Zheng: ( ˵ ꐦ ≖ ⌓ ≖ ˵ )

"The people from Project Purity gave him eleven seconds."

"That Chromium in Midtown also had eleven seconds."

"They have a fixed procedure."

The sniper adjusted the aiming angle for three seconds. The cooling fins at the front of the long tubular device began to rotate, and Yan Zheng could hear the extremely faint sound of electrical charging coming through Brute's long-range audio pickup module.

A muffled thud.

Not the sound of gunpowder propulsion.

The sound of electromagnetic acceleration—low-frequency, dull, carrying the resonance hum of the metal tube wall.

A projectile shot out from the long tubular device. The caliber was small, estimated to be seven to eight millimeters, but the speed far exceeded conventional ammunition.

The projectile did not rotate during its flight path; it wasn't stabilized by rifling, but by active guidance with tail fin attitude adjustments.

Hit.

Directly in the target's right temple.

The projectile did not penetrate the skull.

It expanded the moment it contacted the surface of the skull. Three petal-shaped metal shells pierced into the subcutaneous tissue and anchored onto the skull, exposing the projectile core.

The core was not metal.

The core was a miniature coil array.

The moment the coil was energized, an electromagnetic pulse was pumped directly into the cranial cavity from inside the projectile.

The middle-aged man's body twitched.

The X-Gene signal plummeted off a cliff within Brute's detection range.

From a high level to zero.

No transition.

His eyeballs were directly scorched by the electromagnetic pulse inside his cranial cavity, and his irises turned grayish-white. His legs lost support at the same time, and his whole body tumbled forward from the edge of the fractured third-floor floorboard.

The body did not release any Impact in mid-air.

Kinetic accumulation had returned to zero.

Because the neural center driving the kinetic energy had already been burned through.

The corpse smashed into the pile of broken bricks in front of the first-floor entrance, kicking up a cloud of dust.

From the sniper setting up the gun to the target hitting the ground, it took a total of fourteen seconds.

Yan Zheng's fingers paused on the armrest for five seconds without moving.

"Neural synapse cauterization round."

"No penetration, no explosion."

"Directly anchors to the skull, electromagnetic pulse pumped into the brainstem."

"Physically formatting the Mutant's brain."

Yan Zheng: ( ꐦ ≖ ‸ ≖ )

"The Military's development progress on anti-Mutant weapons is at least half a year faster than I estimated."

The Agents on Main Street began to wrap things up.

The movements were swift.

The remaining seven Agents had a clear division of labor. Three entered the building to search for other targets, while four set up a cordon on the perimeter.

Two minutes later, the three brought out two people from the building, a man and a woman. Both had been injected with inhibitors and were limp as they were shoved into the back of the armored transport.

The sniper dismantled the long tubular device and packed it into a specialized case, retracted the cable into the cabin, and folded the roof stand.

The armored transport started up. With its lights off, it drove west along Main Street toward the highway entrance.

The second armored vehicle followed behind.

Seven minutes.

From start to finish, seven minutes.

Main Street returned to silence.

Broken bricks and glass shards were scattered across half the street. The gap on the third floor whistled in the night wind, and the exposed steel bars bent into strange angles in the shadows where the streetlights couldn't reach.

The corpse of the Kinetic Mutant still lay in front of the first-floor entrance; no one cared.

There were two other corpses nearby.

Yan Zheng had Brute's detector scan them.

Both were civilians. A man and a woman, older, wearing pajamas and slippers.

Residents of the building caught in the Impact. They died from blunt force trauma; the degree of damage to their heads and chests indicated they were within five meters of the source during the second or third round of Impact.

Yan Zheng didn't look at these two corpses for even a second longer.

"Team B, enter."

Brute leaped down from the top floor of the parking garage, crossed the Main Street road surface in two steps, and landed in front of the target building.

Frost Archer slid down from the elevator machine room and climbed along the building's exterior wall to the gap on the third floor to provide high-position security.

Acid Walker crawled out from a sewer manhole cover and hugged the base of the wall to conduct a perimeter scan.

Yan Zheng's gaze fell on the corpse of the Kinetic Mutant.

"Mr. Brute, carry him."

Brute crouched down, petrified his arms, and lifted the corpse. The expanded projectile on the right temple was still anchored to the skull, the metal petal-shaped shell reflecting light in the shadows.

The system panel popped up in the mental space with a golden border.

[Material Collection: Kinetic Release Gene, quality: Excellent.]

[Application: Long-range strike-type Elite-level creation, can be used as the core gene for the Impact attack module.]

[Additional Note: This gene's expression is greatly influenced by emotional fluctuations; when stitching, it must be paired with a stabilization auxiliary module to avoid loss of control.]

Yan Zheng: ( ˵ ꐦ ≖ ᗜ ≖ ˵ )

"Quality: Excellent."

"Two grades higher than that Sonic Scream gene."

"Use Kinetic Release for the Impact module, pair it with Frost Archer's long-range freeze—freeze first, then explode, then freeze again."

"Another tactical synergy line."

He had Brute carefully remove the projectile from the skull, placing the metal shell and the internal coil array separately into the temporary storage cavity in Brute's chest.

"This projectile must also be brought back."

"The coil structure and electromagnetic frequency parameters of the neural synapse cauterization round are enough for me to analyze Project Purity's current technological level in anti-Mutant weapons."

"Knowing what they can do allows me to know what to defend against."

While scanning the perimeter, Acid Walker found a piece of a broken communication headset in the rubble.

The Impact had shattered most of it, but the chip was still there.

Yan Zheng had Walker take it as well.

Team B's extraction took four minutes.

Brute carried the corpse and retreated through the sewer. Frost Archer retracted the ice-blue light and followed behind. Acid Walker was the last to enter the well; the sound of its mucous membrane sliding against the well wall was wet and light.

Only two civilian corpses and an apartment building with its third floor blown out remained on Main Street.

Yan Zheng switched the Team B footage to background monitoring and shifted his main consciousness to Team A.

Things had already ended in Harlem.

Knight's detection records showed that the Agents completed the containment operation at 1:15 AM, taking away three Mutants. There was no resistance from abilities during the process, no casualties, and two vans disappeared heading south along Eighth Avenue.

Yan Zheng noted down the action summaries for both locations on graph paper.

Harlem: Six-person team, three Mutants captured, zero kills, duration twenty-three minutes, convoy retreated south.

Queens: Nine-person team including one professional sniper, one Mutant killed, two captured, duration seven minutes, convoy retreated west.

He drew a horizontal line under the two records and wrote a line of text below it.

Two directions.

South and West.

"The Harlem vehicles are heading south; the destination might be in New Jersey."

"The Queens vehicles are heading west, also in the direction of New Jersey."

"The destination is highly likely the same place."

Yan Zheng turned the page of the graph paper and wrote down several items in the blank space.

Harvest List. October 30th.

Item 1: Four sets of Project Purity Agent equipment, including one encrypted communicator, one investigation map, and one inhibitor syringe.

Item 2: One Kinetic Release Gene, quality: Excellent.

Item 3: One neural synapse cauterization round wreckage, containing a miniature electromagnetic coil array.

Item 4: One broken communication headset chip, pending repair and decoding.

Item 5: One complete tactical observation report of Project Purity's three-point synchronized operation.

He placed the fountain pen back in the pen slot and added a final line of notes below Item 5.

The writing was very small, written on the edge of the paper near the binding line.

Note: Project Purity deployed at least twenty-three field Agents and three armored transport vehicles in New York within the same night. The frequency and scale of operations are accelerating and escalating. Four weeks until the Registration Act vote.

Yan Zheng: ( ˵ ꐦ ✧ ⌓ ✧ ˵ )

He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and slowly withdrew his Mental Power from the high load of dual-line control. His temples throbbed with dull pain for a few seconds before relaxing.

The tea in the enamel cup had gone cold; he didn't touch it.

"Mr. Stryker, your business is getting bigger and bigger."

"Catching five Mutants in one night, plus killing one."

"After the Registration Act vote passes, the number of test subjects in your hands will likely multiply several times over."

He took the scalpel out of his pocket; the blade pressed against his index finger, the metal icy cold.

"However, the fuller your warehouse is, the higher my expectations become."

"Tonight's Kinetic Release Gene is just an appetizer."

"The high-quality goods listed later on the menu will have to wait for you to fatten them up for me."

He spun the scalpel once, put it back in his pocket, and tapped his fingers on the table one last time.

"All units withdraw, return the same way."

"Gentlemen, I give tonight's business trip report full marks."