by <unknown>
With built-up strength as a special forces soldier over the years, anyone whose lower body was struck by this kick would be immediately immobilized, whether it was a man or a woman!
Having said that, this kick was bound to miss. As the opponent slightly took a step back, Geraldson's kick fell short. After that, the opponent proceeded to go in for a simple counterattack. With his right fist raised, he thrust his fist into Geraldson's chest in a devastating blow!
Having just committed to a kick, there was no chance of avoiding the attack. Still, the battle-hardened veteran instinctively formed a guard with his arms crossed across his chest!
"Clack!"
Unfortunately, his opponent's blow barely grazed his arms but instead prodded into the gap between his arms at a sharp angle, instantly shattering his ribs!
"Ah!"
A small trace of blood appeared on the corner of Geraldson's lips. With what remaining battle will that was left in him, he made a last-ditch effort to poke the mysterious man's eye, but his fingers only barely grazed a fedora. He snatched the hat off his opponent!
A pair of unfathomably cold eyes barely resembling that of a human's immediately presented themselves before Geraldson.
Just what sort of eyes were these supposed to be…
Geraldson had seen countless pairs of eyes in his time, some of them were vibrant, some of them dark. Some of them were full of anger while others were drowned in sorrow… However, not a single person he had met had eyes like this person before him. Those eyes reeking of death without the faintest signs of life behind them!
"What kind of monster are you…"
Geraldson muttered the words and gritted his teeth before he ferociously slammed behind him!
The jarring sound of shattering glass took over. Geraldson had completely crashed through the window and was going to tumble down the building!
This was no time for him to worry about his colleague's life. If he fell here, there was still a chance of him surviving this encounter. He was certain that he was going to die if he continued confronting this monster in front of him!
This was the only thing Geraldson had in his mind at this very moment.
Everything that had just occurred only took place within a matter of seconds. From the common person's point of view, the two had only exchanged blows briefly. However, within these few short seconds, the two had gone from armed combat to hand-to-hand combat, in which Geraldson, the retired ace of the special forces, was ruthlessly toyed around by his opponent!
Just as Geraldson was preparing to potentially fall to his death, he felt yet another tug at his chest. The opponent had reached out of the window with his giant hands and grabbed Geraldson by the collar!
It was over…
Geraldson's body was frozen solid. The despair in his eyes was unmistakable…
Chapter 253: Recycle |
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is ABC morning news. Today is another day approaching Christmas and yet today has become our darkest day…
"None of us expected a new type of creeper virus would appear out of nowhere and invade our network, crippling our communications. The entire continent was plunged into a medieval era devoid of modern communication for twenty-four hours.
"According to investigations by various countries, this was certainly an act of terrorism. The total economic damage it caused totals up to 300 billion U.S. dollars, which makes it the largest scale and most costly damage inflicted by a computer virus. So far, not a person or organization has claimed responsibility for this event…"
The day after the dust had settled, all television networks and online media were reporting on the events which happened in North America. Many people speculated that this was the work of a hacker or a hacker organization.
The fact that the virus was remotely controlled and that North America was the only continent affected further solidified the theory.
Furthermore, the virus only existed for twenty-four hours. After the twenty-four hours duration, the virus had disappeared from all of the computers in North America. This bizarre event that felt more like a fever dream bewildered all programmers.
This event also turned out to incite fear across the other continents, extending to the entire Earth Federation.
After all, if the virus could invade the North American network and cripple an entire state, the other continents could very well be at the mercy of the creator of the virus as well.
Nobody would choose to be put in such a position with a sword of Damocles hanging overhead.
Therefore, the entire Earth Federation set forth on a mission this very day, expending every resource available to them to find the organization responsible for crippling an entire state.
Unfortunately, the mysterious organization responsible for invading the North American communications network went into hiding again after that day…
On the other side of things, more bad news emerged from North America. The violence department of the Earth Federation – the Los Angeles branch of the FBI was purged by an underground organization.
All 153 members of the department were assassinated. There was not a single survivor. The victims included four high-ranking FBI officers…
To prevent a mass panic event, the Federation had tucked the information under covers.
Based on context, many people began speculating that there was a great deal of connection between the virus invasion incident and the FBI incident both occurring in the North American Continent.
For the mysterious organization to silence so many mouths, there was a chance they were trying to hide some secret.
Over the next few months following the incident, the entire North American Continent was driven into a state of panic and chaos. Underneath all the chaos, countless investigators were silently dispatched to find relevant information they could regarding these events.
Sadly, all their hard work would bear no fruits.
A week later.
Chen Chen had boarded an international flight and arrived in a small town named San Diego in the region of Los Angeles.
In the end, he did not issue the order to have the three statues delivered back to Namibia because something else suddenly occurred to him.
If the Earth Federation had previously set the three statues in the large province of North America, would they catch wind of the information should Chen Chen have the statues delivered back to Africa?
If that were to happen, he would be losing more than he bargained.
When the Earth Federation found out that Chen Chen was the hacker behind the attack on the North American communication network, no number of excuses would spare him. It would all come down to a devastating crash-and-burn.
It would not make a difference even if Chen Chen was doing this for the sake of mankind.
Therefore, this showed that Chen Chen still did not have enough in his arsenal to make Earth Federation tread carefully around him as he could not call the shots just yet.
Chen Chen did not dare to risk having the Earth Federation find out about the statues so he did not have them sent back to Africa.
Still, the statues would have to be dealt with eventually, otherwise, humanity would end up just like they did in Elysium.
For the moment, Chen Chen would not even dare to study the statues. Previously, X-112 had said that humans with their current technological advancement could barely scrape the core principles of the statues, no less utilize them on a higher level.
With the escort of the Black Knights, Chen Chen arrived at a manor and proceeded into the underground section.
Although it was a rented manor, it was decorated quite extravagantly as it also came with a spacious basement. There was a desk in the basement with a laptop set on top of it.
Positioned beside the desk were the three oddly-shaped statues that seemed to originate from the world of Elysium.
This was the first time Chen Chen saw the statues in person.
So far, he had always been ana
lyzing these statues by remotely controlling the X-122 artificial intelligence in Elysium. One thing that was clear was instead of Chen Chen's suspicions diminishing, they only continued to fester and grow.
Looking at the three statues, an absurd idea occurred to Chen Chen for the very first time. So far, he had determined that these three statues did not have the ability of thought, movement, attacking, and such. If not for everything he had observed in the world of Elysium, he would never have imagined that these three statues would be the agents of destruction of a civilization.
As for the motivation behind Chen Chen's sudden boldness, it was because he was already familiar with how the statues killed people, which was with what appeared to be an electromagnetic wave propagating at the speed of light. Therefore, it would make a minimal difference even if Chen Chen were to hide on a separate corner of the Earth. In that case, he might as well confront it directly.
Besides, it seemed like a certain condition had to be met to activate the world-ending destructive capabilities of these three statues. Without meeting these conditions, they were just three ordinary mounds of rocks.
Chen Chen believed that the trigger condition was the three brains.
Previously in the world of Elysium, X-112 discovered a human brain in each of the three statues while studying them. The owner of the brains had long been deceased several centuries ago.
However, despite being the first person in the universe of Elysium who had his brain extracted by the statue, the Grosses in reality was still alive. This meant that there was a good chance that all three statues were hollow inside and were not a potential extinction threat at the moment.
Still, these were mere speculations. Though Chen Chen had a certain degree of confidence, he would not say it was a hundred-percent guarantee.
Therefore, to eliminate this looming threat, Chen Chen only had one option – to open a passage to another dimension where he could dispose of the statues.
All of this brought him to the current basement.
"Since the apocalypse statues were first discovered in the universe of Elysium, you shall return to your sender!"
Chen Chen snorted coldly and plugged the USB drive into the laptop. He opened the passage to the world of Elysium again.
After that, three Black Knights hugged a statue each and tossed them into the world of Elysium on the other end of the passage.
This was probably the most standard green waste disposal method in the world…
Chapter 254: Déjà Vu |
"Thwack!"
"Thwack!"
"Thwack!"
Inside the dimly lit basement, Chen Chen continuously tossed around faintly glowing blocks. These blocks radiated a faint blue glow in the darkness, instantly turning red upon being held in hand.
Their red glow started strong but as time went on, they slowly grew dimmer and dimmer until they eventually fizzled out.
By that point, Chen Chen would toss them by his feet and reach into the display again to extract more similar objects.
Several hours later, countless such blocks the size of a fist that had already extinguished were littered around Chen Chen's feet. Upon closer inspection, one could see that these objects were crystal clear substances resembling a gem.
"Phew…"
After silently tallying the total amount, Chen Chen finally heaved a sigh of relief. He wiped his bleeding nose and proceeded to get up.
As Chen Chen got up, his expression suddenly changed as he doubled over and collapsed onto the ground, causing a commotion.
Immediately after that, he vomited a pool of bile. The strong stench of bile began to fill the entire basement which at that point, several Black Knights helped him up.
At that point, Chen Chen had long passed out.
Due to the previous incident with the statues, Chen Chen became fully aware of the hostility of the USB drive. He gave up on conserving energy and immediately exhausted a large portion of the energy accumulated in the USB drive over the last few months. In one short burst, he had extracted five hundred pieces of cut crystalline.
A piece of crystalline weighed 4.7 kilograms. Chen Chen had extracted a total of 2.4 tons worth of substances from the USB drive, which was equivalent to two months of electricity generated by the nuclear power plant.
This maneuver cost him more than when he previously converted them for the Medpod 3000 fully-automatic medical platform, immediately setting Chen Chen back to the medieval ages.
The symptoms Chen Chen was exhibiting were the result of mass exposure to radiation. Since even the movie itself did not show the effects the initial exposure had on the three protagonists, Chen Chen did not anticipate such a drastic side effect after absorbing as much crystalline as he did for the very first time.
…
Early dawn next morning. The first glimpse of sunlight beamed through the windows and landed on Chen Chen's cheeks.
After a full night's rest, Chen Chen slowly opened his eyes as he emerged from his dreams.
Instead of the head-splitting headache commonly experienced by people after having passed out, Chen Chen immediately felt rejuvenated. Each cell in his brain seemed to be soaring with energy after enjoying a lengthy rest.
The first thing that came into view was a splendid, pink-colored room.
The room was adorned with large, reflective decorations. There was a wind chime at the head of the bed spinning to a rhythm of its own, a fine fragrance loomed in the surrounding air…
Chen Chen sat up in a blur and set his bare feet on the floor as he inspected the room carefully.
This place appeared to be a woman's bedroom?
Chen Chen frowned a little and came to a desk. Apart from a messy arrangement of women's magazines, he also spotted a framed picture of a Chinese girl.
Chen Chen instinctively reached for the picture frame. Before his arm could graze the picture frame, it levitated on its own and flew into Chen Chen's hand.
"Field is significantly stronger…"
Chen Chen muttered to himself. He remembered that the protagonists in the movie were able to control a baseball masterfully the very next day after acquiring superpowers, even capable of stopping a thrown baseball mid-air.
A baseball weighed somewhere around 150 grams. Combined with the force of a throw, it's impact force at close range could surpass 25 to 30N. The protagonists could effortlessly stop a thrown baseball mid-air and this was only their initial demonstration upon acquiring their superpowers.
When Chen Chen first acquired his superpowers, he could only handle spontaneous explosive force up to 0.3N, which was only one percent of what others were capable of. Even after more than half a year of training, he only managed to raise that number to 1N.
Now that he had absorbed five hundred pieces of crystalline in one go, its effects were immediately apparent. He even felt his spirits greatly revitalized.
The only thing he was curious about was, to what heights could his "Field" reach now?
Chen Chen smiled faintly, doing what he could to contain his excitement. He turned to inspect the girl in the picture frame.
Judging by the picture, the girl was probably in her late twenties. In the picture, she pursed her lips together and had her eyebrows slightly raised in a cutesy manner. Overall, the vibe she gave off was seven-parts cute and three-parts somewhat gloomy.
In this instant, Chen Chen felt his vision shifting as an odd feeling came to him uninitiated. He had an impression that he should be very familiar with the girl in the picture.
However, his mind was telling him that this was the first time he had ever seen this girl and this picture…
"Is this déjà vu…"
Chen Chen frowned. Déjà vu was a phenomenon in which a person got the sensation that they had experienced an event beforehand while the very event itself was just unfolding. According to physiology and psychology interpretations, this was a very common physiological phenomenon, mostly occurring in a person's youth.
Th
is should imply that this déjà vu was merely a coincidence.
With this in mind, Chen Chen silently placed the frame back in its original spot and approached the window to look outside.
There was a moderately sized lawn, separated from another lawn with a wall of fences. Further out was a path leading to the front gate with two rows of trees lining across both sides of the path. As it was in the midst of winter, the trees were barren of any leaves.
This was a common civilian house in North America. They were nowhere near extravagant as a villa but closer to the self-built houses in the rural area of the Mainland, except the housing planning and environment were better here.
Most common civilians in North America lived in houses such as these.
This particular house was a hiding spot for the Black Knights to evade the pursuit of the North American government. A B.S.S. member had purchased this lot several days ago. Chen Chen was not too informed of the general details. All he knew was that the original owner had just moved out not too long ago because he could still smell the lingering scent of female hormones in the bedroom.
Not planning to linger for too long, Chen Chen took a deep breath and exited the bedroom, where he went to the basement again.
In the basement, the bile he had vomited and the fragments of the crystalline were already cleaned up. There was only the computer with the USB drive plugged into it in the basement.
Chen Chen swiftly unplugged the USB drive and put it away before putting on a pair of Bluetooth earphones and spoke, "X, send me the address of the Munster Financial Group. Since we're here, I might as well go meet him in person."
"Will it be dangerous?" Little X asked with mild concern.
Chen Chen grazed the button that was emitting faint blue light on his collar and smiled. "If I still find myself in peril even with the GS Combat Suit along with the memory eraser and cloaking device as a backup, then I suppose there's no helping it."
"Understood."
Little X understood straight away and responded, "I've already sent the address to you."
"Excellent."