116: Chapter 116 The Slaughterhouse of the Subway Tunnel

"Let's go, gentlemen. Dinner in the subway tunnel doesn't wait for anyone."

Dinner was already served, though the presentation wasn't very appetizing.

December 5th, 3:41 PM, abandoned section of the A-line, ventilation shaft at the south end of 190th Street Station.

The iron cover of the ventilation shaft was rusted shut. Yan Zheng pried it open after working his scalpel into the hinge gap three times. Fragments of rust fell into the shaft, and the sound of them striking the metal pipe walls echoed back and forth in the vertical space.

He tossed his canvas bag down first. After hearing the muffled thud of the bag hitting the concrete floor, he gripped the steel bars on the edge of the pipe wall and flipped into the shaft.

The rubber surface of his gloves clung to the rusty ladder as he descended step by step. The shaft was about seven meters deep. The deeper he went, the damper the air became; the smell of mold and rust mixed together, occasionally accompanied by a faint, unidentifiable scent of something burnt.

When his feet touched the ground, his heel hit a puddle of water.

The water wasn't deep, just enough to submerge the stitching of his soles and reach the bottom edge of the shoe upper.

Yan Zheng squatted down to pick up the canvas bag, took the flashlight out of the side pocket, and turned it on. The beam of light painted an oval spot on the tunnel wall.

The platform of 190th Street Station had been abandoned for years. Half of the ceiling had collapsed, leaving steel frames and cables exposed, stained dark brown by mold and water damage.

There were no safety doors on the platform edge. The rails stretched naked into the darkness, and the gravel and sleepers between the tracks were covered in grey-white moss.

In the Mental Link, the pulse signals of the Knight and Brute were steadily approaching from the southwest, about four hundred meters away.

"Two more minutes."

Yan Zheng stood on the edge of the platform, shining the flashlight beam along the tracks.

The light was swallowed by the darkness fifty meters away.

But the system panel didn't need light.

[Material Perception activated. Scanning range: one kilometer ahead.]

A dense patch of signal points popped up on the panel.

Yan Zheng's fingers tightened on the flashlight casing.

There were two colors of signal points.

Grey represented deceased.

Dark red represented near-death.

There were fifteen grey points.

There were three dark red points.

They were scattered in the tunnel section four hundred to eight hundred meters ahead.

Yan Zheng: ( ꐦ ✧ ‸ ✧ )

"Fifteen grey. Three dark red."

"The Predators killed fifteen people, and three are still struggling."

There was another set of signals on the panel, with normal brightness, representing living beings.

Five bright spots were gathered about nine hundred meters ahead, moving slowly.

Predator squad.

Further ahead of them, about 1,200 meters away, there was a loose group of bright spots, about twenty or so, moving deeper into the tunnel.

Morlock survivors.

"The Predators are nine hundred meters away, the Morlock survivors are 1,200 meters away. There's a three-hundred-meter gap between them."

"The pursuit is still ongoing."

The Knight and Brute squeezed into the platform area from the west maintenance passage. Golden and dark red phosphorescent flames lit up in the darkness, illuminating the space within a two-meter radius.

Brute's petrified arms reflected a dull luster in the damp air, and his 2.4-meter frame nearly touched the ceiling of the passage.

The dark red muscle texture on the Knight's alloy bone armor pulsed slightly under the phosphorescent light. The vitality granted by the Healing Factor gave this undead creature an unsettling sense of life that other creations lacked.

"Gentlemen."

Yan Zheng jumped off the platform, his soles crunching on the gravel between the tracks.

"There are corpses starting four hundred meters ahead. We'll collect them as we go."

"Mr. Brute is responsible for carrying, Mr. Knight will provide forward reconnaissance."

"Move quickly. The three near-death signals are fading; I don't want salvageable materials to turn into stains on the ground."

The three figures advanced along the abandoned tracks into the depths of the darkness.

Yan Zheng walked in the middle, keeping the flashlight beam lowered below his waist, illuminating only the road two meters in front of his feet.

The tunnel walls on his left and right flickered at the edge of the flashlight beam, and marks began to appear on the damp concrete surface.

First, burn marks.

Large patches of charring burned from the walls all the way to the ceiling. The concrete surface had been stripped away by high heat, exposing the steel reinforcement skeleton inside. The steel bars had turned red from the heat and then cooled, twisting into dark purple shapes.

The one in the Predator squad who can control fire did this.

Then, blood.

Bloodstains began to appear from the edges of the burn marks, starting as splattered dots and later turning into dragging streaks.

Someone had tried to crawl away after being burned; blood and charred skin tissue mixed together, leaving a slimy, slug-like trail on the ground.

The trail ended seven meters ahead.

The first corpse.

Yan Zheng squatted down, the flashlight illuminating the form on the ground.

A short Mutant, whose gender was difficult to determine from appearance, had skin covered in fish-scale-like keratin layers, most of which had been charred by fire.

The system panel popped up a material notification.

[Material Collection: Keratinized Epidermis Gene, Low Quality. Applicable for: Mook-level outer armor supplementation.]

"Mr. Brute."

Brute squatted down, his petrified arms lifting the corpse and storing it in his chest cavity's temporary storage compartment.

Yan Zheng stood up and continued walking forward.

The second one was twenty meters away.

The third one was curled up against the base of the wall.

The fourth and fifth ones had fallen together, their posture suggesting they were protecting something. After Yan Zheng had Brute separate the two, he found a crushed ragdoll between them, cotton poking out from the tear, soaked in blood.

He didn't linger on the ragdoll.

The system panel's material notifications popped up one after another, and the grey signal points disappeared from the panel one by one, replaced by green markers indicating collection.

"Five bodies. Six bodies. Seven bodies."

Yan Zheng: ( ˵ ꐦ ≖ ⌓ ≖ ˵ )

"The Predators don't pick spots for their kills. Corridors, corners, open sections, between pipes against the walls."

"The Morlocks had no room to fight back."

Next to the eighth corpse was a puddle of melted metal; judging by the shape, it looked like a modified pipe wrench.

Someone had tried to resist with a tool, but the weapon had been melted into a puddle of molten iron by some ability of the Predators.

The ninth. The tenth. The eleventh.

The speed was increasing.

It wasn't that Yan Zheng was walking faster; it was that the distance between the corpses was getting shorter and shorter.

The Morlocks were becoming more clustered during their escape; panic made them huddle together, and the damage caused by the Predators' attacks was much higher in the dense crowd than when they were dispersed.

At the twelfth body, Yan Zheng stopped.

Not because of the material.

It was because the way this corpse died was different from all the previous ones.

The previous eleven had died from burns, blunt force, cuts, and some kind of acid corrosion.

The twelfth had no external injuries.

A lanky Mutant lay in the middle of the tunnel, eyes wide open, no expression of pain on their face, skin intact, no bloodstains.

But their eyeballs were blank.

Not blank in the physical sense. The pupils and irises were there, but the reflection of vitality that should have been behind the eyeballs had completely vanished.

Yan Zheng squatted down, shining the flashlight from the side to illuminate the surface of the eyeball.

"Mental-type attack."

"The soul was stripped away directly."

A line of red annotation appeared in the material assessment popped up by the system panel.

[Material Collection: Weak Mental Resonance Gene, Low-Mid Quality. Applicable for: Mental defense auxiliary modules.]

[Note: This corpse contains trace amounts of exogenous mental erosion. There is a mental-attack-type Mutant in the Predator squad.]

Yan Zheng tapped his fingers on the flashlight casing.

"One out of the five is a mental-attack type."

"Mr. Liu's informant didn't mention this."

He stood up, his gaze following the tunnel into the darkness ahead.

Of the three dark red near-death signals on the panel, one was moving deeper into the depths at an extremely slow speed, its trajectory crooked.

Crawling.

The other two signals were no longer moving, their brightness continuously fading.

The five bright spots of the Predators had stopped at the nine-hundred-meter mark and were no longer advancing.

Yan Zheng: ( ꐦ ≖ ‸ ≖ )

"The Predators have stopped."

"They stopped after killing fifteen people."

"Is their stamina bottomed out? Or are they resting?"

He turned off the flashlight, and darkness re-engulfed everything.

The Knight's golden phosphorescent flame and Brute's dark red phosphorescent flame became the only light sources. The two flames danced in the damp air, illuminating just enough for Yan Zheng to see the road one meter in front of his feet.

"Continue collecting."

"How many bodies can Mr. Brute's storage compartment hold?"

The dark red pulse in the Mental Link fed back a value.

"Twelve have been loaded; the limit is fifteen. There are three spots left."

"For the remaining three bodies and the three near-death targets, we'll transport them back in two trips once we've collected them all."

He took the scalpel out of his pocket. The tip of the blade was invisible in the darkness, but the temperature of the metal transmitted against his fingertips.

"Mr. Knight."

The golden pulse jumped.

"Help me keep an eye on those five bright spots ahead."

"As long as they don't walk in my direction, ignore them."

"But if they turn back."

Yan Zheng's voice traveled a distance in the damp tunnel, mostly absorbed by the darkness and the concrete walls.

"Please let me know, so I can make room for the new gentlemen."