Warlord: volume 1

by Chen Ran

  Both of his feet hooked onto a branch, and as living corpse passed by, he drooped down the small tree. Using the dagger in his hand, he stabbed into the center of living corpse's brows, destroying the nerves in his head and stopping living corpse's function. He nimbly jumped down the tree, used his back to lightly prop living corpse up, then used both hands to grab hold of his shoulder. Then, he carried the real body behind the tree.

  Seeing how Zero quietly killed one of the living corpse s, everyone's faces became unnatural. Especially Jehan, he couldn't help but touch his own neck, and felt lucky that his head was still on his own neck. After taking care of the living corpse, there were no other living corpse approaching them. They watched as their group left, and then the people on the carriage heaved a sigh of relief.

  After surviving through the night, the sun had yet to rise during the day. The green car started up, waking many who were still asleep, then turned around and headed back to the highway, continuing the unending journey.

  While they were heading to Remot, a group of carriages arrived at Z7 base at the same time.

  The convoy consisted of two composite armored vehicles, one in front and one behind, and a black sedan that looked like an old era. The black car had an ordinary appearance, but the interior was clad in composite armor, which was sufficient to withstand the powerful impact. Just this car that had such a grand appearance and was also a practical car, its construction cost was not even on top of the armoured vehicle. It could be called luxurious.

  An hour before the convoy arrived at the base, Jetto, who was temporarily in charge of managing the base, brought the surviving miners and waited outside the base. That was the convoy from the Parkland's valve, and Jetto heard that the one who came was a huge figure.

  The team stopped at the entrance of the base. Two large men in black suits got out of the car and respectfully opened the door. When a pair of black military boot s stepped out of the car door, Jetto and everyone else lowered their heads.

  A young man stepped out of the back of the car. He was only in his twenties, with short, golden hair. He wore a dark red leather robe with a high collar. The leather robe was beautifully crafted, unlike the coarse clothing of this era. On the chest of the robe, there was a black pattern. It was a picture of a long sword and shield, with the style of a knight from the old era. As for the cuffs of the robe, there were two black patterns on each of them, making the robe even more extravagant.

  The followers of the young man were all half-bent. Not only was it out of respect for the man's identity, it was also out of respect for the organization that this robe represented.

  The name of the organization was "Dark Council" and this robe was the uniform of the organization's martial arts group "Knight of Blood"!

  Chapter 32 - Specimens

  Soren was twenty-five years old this year, and was currently in a high and mighty mood. He was the grandson of the one in charge of the Parkland's valve family, Jen Blunt. At the same time, Soren was also a powerful special ability user, and was proficient in the third stage of the Fire Element, and possessed a power that no one dared to underestimate.

  Of the currently known five great domains, excluding the theoretical ones based on rules, the destructive power of the remaining four areas is the strongest in the Meteor Realm. Amongst all the different types of Su's abilities, Su Huo Yuan and Su Lei Yuan were the strongest. Therefore, Soren had mastered the skills that Fire Essence Su was proficient in. This made Soren, who had never brought any weapon with him, worthy of being called a humanoid moving weapon.

  If Soren used his full strength, he could even destroy a small military base.

  However, all of these things were far less intimidating than the leather gown that Soren was wearing. This was because this robe represented the core fighting strength of the Dark Council, "Knight of Blood," and the two black Redbud insignia on the sleeves represented the rank of a captain.

  Being able to become a first lieutenant of the Knight of Blood's military system before the age of thirty was already something that Soren was proud of. After all, in this organization where military might reigned supreme, the people they lacked the most were powerful and ferocious people or monsters. Soren had already stood out and in one fell swoop, became the dazzling star of Parkland's valve.

  His illustrious background and tyrannical martial prowess caused this young man with short red hair to exude an air of arrogance.

  Recently, the Parkland's valve received a report that the border base Z7 was almost paralyzed, and the original person in charge of the base, Old Jack, and a large number of base members had been massacred. Although Z7 was an marginal base, it had never received the Parkland's attention. But after all, it was an estate under the Parkland's valve. If something like that happened, no matter if the perpetrator was a person or an organization, it would be equivalent to provoking the Parkland's valve.

  This sort of thing was naturally not allowed, but according to the convention, the family would send a mid-level official to investigate. At most, they would only send direct descendants of their clans to participate in this matter. No matter what, he couldn't trouble a reserve successor like Soren to step forward. However, when Soren saw the video from the surveillance recording of Z7, the arrogant young man became more cautious than he ever was.

  That video was exactly the process of the fight between Su Ling and Hans in the tavern. Soren could clearly see that when Hans rushed into the emergency passage, he was still in his normal human form. However, when he broke through the door, he had already turned into a monster.

  This wasn't a mutation caused by the virus, but rather a mutation. However, when the video expanded, Hans's pair of eyes actually allowed him to rule out the possibility of a mutated ability.

  Its pupils were pitch black, and its eye sockets were made up of countless scarlet rings. In the middle of the eyes were eyes that were the size of grains of rice, which reminded Soren of a top-secret file that he had seen in the Dark Council.

  The Dark Council was the most mysterious and powerful organization in the Mainland China. Its origins could no longer be verified, and even within Dark Council, it was forbidden to talk about this topic. As a captain, Soren still vaguely knew that the council was composed of a bunch of nobles and scientists who had survived the calamities of the old era.

  But it could not be denied that the Dark Council controlled the majority of the resources of the Mainland China. The Parliamentary Arbitration Panel is the highest administrative body of the organization, under which are the Academy of Sciences, the Knight of Blood, the Correctional Services Department and other systems. There were also four Wealthy Classes under the Council's banner, and these ancient families held a large amount of resources and military power. For example, the Parkland's valve could already be considered a big company and a big noble, but compared to the Four Wealthy Class in the Dark Council, they did not even have the qualifications to help him carry his shoes.

  It could be said that the power of the Dark Council enveloped the entire Mainland China. It was the true master of this continent.

  For an organization like this to possess so much information, it was truly astounding. And many unknown phenomena and organisms can be found almost in the organization's internal information base.

  Soren once saw a type of existence called "disorderly person" in the records of monsters in the information warehouse.

  This was the only type of monster in Dark Council that couldn't be classified as dangerous level. One of the characteristics of this monster was precisely that pair of devil-like eyes that Soren saw before him. At that time, due to the limitations of Soren's authority, he was unable to access any more information. Now, after he reported the matter of Z7 to the Dark Council, his authority had increased a little.

  That day, there was a video of the massacre at Z7, and all the related information was forced by the Dark Council to be extracted. After the assessment experts targeted that segment of the tavern's battle
video and assessed the strength of the monsters that they had, they determined that Hans's fighting strength was equivalent to a level three monster, the investigation mission at Z7 had fallen onto Soren's head.

  Because of this, the relevant information regarding "disorderly people" was made available to Soren at the same time.

  A disorderly person is a monster that possesses great destructive power and irrational behavior. It could be said that this description wasn't too different from a level seven monster's danger level. However, in the detailed description, it described the differences between these monsters.

  The most special thing about these monsters was that they all appeared as humans before they became monsters. However, once certain conditions were triggered, it would turn into a monster destroying everything within its line of sight. Even with the power of the Dark Council, up till now, they still did not know how this monster was formed. The appearance of the first disorderly person could be traced back to forty years ago and ten years after the "Cataclysm".

  The scientists in Dark Council believed that this monster should be the first species to have a mutation in the gene during the Cataclysm. The earliest species to be recognized by the world was only born in Cataclysm Day 15 years later. As for Adepts, their rapid growth in power would continue for the next five years, reversing everyone's understanding of its power.

  It could be said that the secret of the disorderly would help the parliament to have another breakthrough in the field of gene evolution. Therefore, when the investigation mission landed on Soren, he received an order: Do everything possible to bring back the blood samples of the disorderly!

  Chapter 33 - Tracking

  Jetto lowered his head and bowed. Along the way, they led Soren and his subordinates to the base's monitoring room. Not waiting for Soren's orders, one of his subordinates, an information processing expert led his assistants and started to collect the base's monitoring records and related information.

  Every Knight of Blood had their own private army. The army commanders and soldiers could be recruited from the outside, or they could be rented out or even bought from the military. And the size of the army often reflected the strength of each Blood Cavalry. For example, Soren, because of his clan's financial support, his private army was maintained at around a hundred people.

  This army consisted of 90 ordinary soldiers, one information processing expert, one Tracing Specialist, one biochemical expert and seven level 2 espers.

  Just to maintain this army's daily needs, Soren had to pay around 100 thousand every month. This did not include the daily maintenance of the equipment, salaries, etc. But from what Soren knew, there were a lot of people in the private army that numbered in the thousand, so his group was not really that big of a deal.

  Naturally, in other places. This kind of hundred man army was enough to pose a threat to bases under the middle class, and it had not even included Soren's strength as a Element Domain Capable of the third step.

  With his own strength, just the investigation on the disorderly person was more than enough, whether it was the council itself or Soren himself.

  Jetto humbly lowered his body and told everything that he knew about what happened that day to the red-haired youth. After he finished reporting, Jetto's body was already trembling slightly. Standing beside Soren was like standing next to an armory that could explode at any time. Fire-element Su would always unwittingly emit its own intense and ruthless aura of fire. It was already considered pretty good for Jetto to be able to stand there for so long without fainting.

  Each Adept had their own unique style. These auras were related to the powers of the Adepts themselves. Only the highest ranked Adepts at the tenth step or higher were able to seal their own auras, making them no different from ordinary people. Soren was still far from that realm, moreover, he had never intended to retract his aura. That was his symbol, his glory. In his view, only cowards would restrain their auras, because they were afraid of challenges.

  The moment Jetto finished reporting, the information processing expert also finished his own work. When Hans sneaked into the base, the first thing he did was to paralyze the base's electrical system. As a result, in the monitoring devices scattered around the base, a majority of the cameras had lost their power supply and stopped working. Only a small fraction of the instruments equipped with backup batteries are still functioning properly.

  But out of these surveillance devices, only two of them recorded the match between and Zero. The information expert organized the videos obtained from the three pieces of equipment, clipping them together to form a complete video. Then, he transferred it to the tablet computer that he carried around with him, and played it for Soren to see.

  In the video, the fight between Su Yun and Hans was extremely short. There was only 1 minute and 23 seconds of video, but two-thirds of the time it took for the two to chase each other through the base. The final scene of them leaving the base one after another was deeply engraved in Soren's mind.

  At noon, the biochemical expert came to report. He was in charge of heading to the base bar where the two of them were fighting to extract the blood of the disorderly, but unfortunately, even though Jetto and the others had preserved the scene, their target's blood had already solidified and the cells inside had already died, so they were unable to use it for research purposes.

  "Then we can only go to the wilderness. Kabu, everything depends on you. " Soren's gaze landed on a short and thin person.

  This man called Kabu was's Tracing Specialist, and was also a second class ability hunter. His ability to survive in the wild and his tracking abilities on living organisms were exceptionally outstanding, thus Soren placed great importance on him.

  It had already been almost a week since the battle between Zero and Hans, and the traces of the battle between them in the wilderness had almost disappeared. However, Kabu did indeed have the skills of a human. Relying on his judgement of smell, mud stone and other subtle clues, Kabu had brought Soren to quite a few battle locations. Of course, although Hans's blood still remained in these places, they were still necrotic cells like the ones found in the tavern, and could not be used as specimens in the research.

  At the foot of the mountain beside the base, Kabu found the place where he had used the high concentration of alcohol to burn Hans down. Behind the old tree that was already charred, there was also a piece of mountain rock that had been burned into black ash.

  Soren picked up a shard of glass that had been left beside the tree, which reflected his face that had a disdainful smile on it.

  "Interesting fellow." Soren said softly, not pointing at Hans, but zero.

  Under Kabu's lead, they found a few battlefields, and also discovered a few traps. Kabu deduced that the soldier called Zero did not have the strength to fight the disorderly, but he used all kinds of traps to try and kill the monster. Judging from the different categories of traps, Kabu inferred that Zero had been eliminating the possibility of killing Hans step by step and was trying to find the weakness of the disorderly person.

  "It's high temperature this time." Kabu lied on the ground and took a big sniff with his nose. He even picked up the sand on the ground and gently licked it with his tongue: That's right, it's high concentration of alcohol.

  He fished a warhead out of his pocket and pointed at the broken glass on the floor. "The soldier must have used some method to get the target to pick up the bottle of alcohol, and he himself shot through the bottle in the distance with a sniper rifle and set it on fire," he said. Their goal was naturally to use high temperature flame s to burn the target to death. However, the plan failed because the target had traces of moving towards the east. Judging from the speed of the move, the target did not suffer a fatal blow. "

  "Got it, keep chasing." Soren frowned.

  Looks like this mission isn't as easy as I thought. As the red-haired youth spoke in his heart, he suddenly thought of zero. To Soren, Zero's fighting style was like a hunter or a so
ldier. In addition, while there were not many warheads left on the battlefield that Karen had discovered, almost every disorderly person had suffered varying degrees of damage.

  That meant that Zero's marksmanship was very good, and the shooting angle and timing were perfect. To be fair, if it weren't for the fact that the disorderly possessed some special abilities, the other monsters of the third step would have already died under these traps and bullets.

  When did this small base recruit such powerful gunmen? Soren thought like this, and naturally, no one could answer his question.

  When they were at the base, he had already asked Jetto and knew that Zero had already left not long after Hans's death. He thought to himself, what a pity, otherwise he would have recruited this gunner under his command.

  Soren's team was currently lacking an outstanding Sniper Specialist. Undoubtedly, Zero was quite suitable for this role.

  Chapter 34 - Remot

  "This should be the last battlefield."

  In the evening, Soren and the rest appeared in the Gold Devourer's cave. Kabu followed a trail that led Soren all the way to this place. At the top of the cave, they found fragments of the detonator, equivalent to enough to shatter even the strongest of the Level 3 monsters. However, from the traces in the cave, it seemed like the disorderly could still move.

  If he wanted to survive such a powerful explosion, he would need at least a fourth step defense. However, judging from the previous battle, the physical body of the disorderly person was not that strong. A bullet from zero could easily penetrate its body. The might of ten or so detonators exploding together was not a problem.

  However, the more it was like this, the more it meant that the disorderly person had a hidden ability, and the more it meant its value.