Chapter 651
Liberation
Chapter 651 Liberation
Display rack number 127.
A soft mechanical sliding sound rang out as the display rack installed in a hidden compartment in the roof slowly descended. The items on the rack gleamed white in the light, reflected in the eyes of everyone present.
It was a section of vertebrae that had been carefully treated and "processed"—something that Lo had lost in this fortress many years ago.
She stood quietly beside the "artwork," her expression complex and inscrutable. For a moment, Yu Sheng even thought she was about to cry, but that fragile emotion had perhaps dissipated from her life many years ago—she simply stood there quietly, and only after a long time did she softly break the silence: "Ah...it really is here."
Eileen sat on Yu Sheng's shoulders, turned her head to look at the spine, then turned to look at the blonde elf next to her. After a while, probably unable to bear the somewhat oppressive atmosphere, she finally couldn't help but ask, "You don't actually want to put this thing back, do you?"
"How is that possible!" Luo's emotions suddenly became disjointed again, and he stared at the little doll with a tense expression. "Who can twist their head off and put it back on?"
“Me?” Eileen said matter-of-factly, “I can even break it off and put it back together, let alone unscrew it—or should I break one off for you right now? It’ll just need a different body, this one won’t do, it’ll break and Yu Sheng will have to glue it back together. Oh, and let me tell you, Marlene’s nanomachines don’t stick…”
Luo: "..."
"Why did you take this so seriously?" Yu Sheng sighed from the side and waved to Luo. "Alright, hurry up and take it off. It'll put your mind at ease. But on another note, I'm also quite curious about what you plan to do with this."
“I…” Luo opened his mouth, but his expression quickly became conflicted. “I haven’t really thought it through. For many years, I’ve been planning how to completely get rid of Old Joe, planning to take back what’s rightfully mine. I’ve imagined everything, but I haven’t thought about what to do after that. And then again…”
She paused, her gaze sweeping over Yu Sheng and the others, her expression subtle: "This situation is quite different from my plans over the years—I never imagined I would return in this way one day."
“Plans often change,” Yu Sheng said with a relaxed attitude. “If you don’t have any ideas for now, then we’ll talk about it in the future. I’ll find a box to pack it up for you first, and you can put it in your ‘dormitory’ in the valley later.”
As he spoke, he casually opened a door, retrieved a cardboard box from the basement of No. 66 Wutong Road, and handed it to Luo while explaining, "This box was originally intended to be used to make a bed for Eileen, but she didn't want it, and I thought this size would be just right..."
Luo looked at Yu Sheng, then at Eileen, then at the cardboard box, before accepting the "gift" with an almost astonished expression.
She felt that her emotions were indeed disjointed today.
Yu Sheng watched as Luo put away the vertebrae, then seemed to be sensing something. After a moment, he spoke again: "Also, I found a group of guys in this fortress who don't look like combat personnel—I sealed off the area where they were as soon as Old Joe's troops started their attack. I guess... you might want to see them."
Luo was taken aback for a moment, but the next instant she realized what Yu Sheng meant by "non-combat personnel".
"Should I send a few mass-produced dolls to bring them here?" Yu Sheng looked into Luo's eyes. "Those people are all safe; it's just that the sudden lockdown of the base has made them a little nervous."
Luo took a light breath.
"No, I want to see it for myself."
"Okay, let's go together."
The group then headed towards the exit of the hall.
As Luo passed the empty biomass storage tank in the middle of the hall, he suddenly stopped.
She looked at the empty storage tank and the screen next to it that had been turned off, a strange sense of emotion creeping into her expression.
"In fact, in the end, Old Joe still got what he wanted."
Yu Sheng turned around: "Why are you suddenly saying this?"
"...After his brain was shut down for a period of time, his perception of time was greatly stretched, and the panic and pain I imposed on his neural circuits increased exponentially. At that time, he only wanted to die quickly—death was his wish fulfilled."
"What, are you regretting acting too quickly?"
“Of course not,” Luo immediately shook his head. “I’ve waited for this day for far too long, and I don’t want any more changes. Delaying it even for a second would be irresponsible towards all these years of waiting, and to be honest…”
She slowly curled the corners of her mouth, and a happy smile finally appeared on her face: "The moment I burned that thing was really satisfying."
……
The lower level of the core area of Deeprock Fortress is the "laboratory" area of the entire base. The corridors and rooms here are tightly sealed off by layers of security systems, and the entire residential area is within the range of sentry gun fire. The "Living Metal Control Center" and the "Modification Center" are the central hubs of the entire area. Rather than an experimental facility, it is more like a large prison with an attached laboratory.
At this very moment, in the connecting hall at the edge of the laboratory area, a dozen figures dressed in white laboratory coats were gathered uneasily, looking at the high wall at the end of the hall.
Humans, elves, orcs, demon subspecies... all sorts of different faces, from different homelands—the only thing they had in common was the fear and tension on their faces at this moment.
Not long ago, a series of huge explosions shook the entire facility, and it seemed that something big had happened outside the isolation wall. However, no one knew what was happening outside. After a brief power outage, several clone soldiers appeared in the living area and asked everyone to keep quiet, but soon the soldiers seemed to have received orders from their superiors and hurriedly left the corridor.
That was the last time anyone saw them.
After that, the entire laboratory area was sealed off, not by a security system as before, but by a physical "seal".
A few brave souls ran to the end of the residential corridor and found that the main gate had vanished. All the passageways had distorted as if they were alive, then "grown" together, completely blocking the way to the outside. The elevators also seemed to be malfunctioning. The display screen on the main gate kept displaying the eerie message, "The fighting isn't over yet, don't move." The surveillance system on the ceiling seemed to be spinning erratically, and the sentry guns had been retracted into their hidden slots—something that had never happened before.
The sound of hurried footsteps came from the side.
A tall, male Algrid elf wearing a lab coat came running from the corridor on one side of the hall. He jogged up to the dozen or so people and stopped in front of a short, gibbon girl with distinctly feline features. He was slightly out of breath. "Momo," he said, "I just checked the communications station. All the equipment there is locked, it seems like they're all disconnected from the main system. Also, there's still airflow from the ventilation ducts, but something seems to be blocking the middle of the pipes. It's too dark to see clearly, but it looks like something like vines."
"Momo, what do we do now?" another young man from Algered asked anxiously. "It looks like something's happened at the base... none of the soldiers have come back, maybe..."
“No,” the girl with short, light brown hair, Gibraltar, immediately shook her head, her ears trembling slightly in the air. “All the passages are blocked. Forcibly breaking the ventilation ducts will trigger the alarm, and we don’t know the exact situation outside… We don’t have the shuttle’s activation key yet.”
Suddenly, a slight tremor came from behind the high wall at the end of the hall, interrupting everyone's conversation.
The vibration continued several times, as if something was restarting. Then came a slight friction sound like living metal wriggling. Suddenly, the elevator gate at the bottom of the high wall lit up with a green light, and then the scrolling message on the gate changed.
Momo, with the best eyesight, boldly took two steps forward and saw the text on the screen: "Finish now."
Her ears twitched.
Before she could figure out what was going on, the elevator doors suddenly opened.
An Algerian, a human, a "robot" dressed as a star maiden, and a fox-person with many tails.
They were all unfamiliar faces.
— Nervous, bewildered, at a loss.
Luo was the first to step out of the elevator and saw a dozen or so men and women gathered in the lobby. Everyone had a similar expression on their face. The laboratory uniforms that had been etched into her nightmares for years looked glaringly white under the lights. The shortest and thinnest-looking figure stood in front of everyone, looking like the "leader" here.
She was a jeeplow girl with short, light brown hair and equally light brown cat ears, but she only had one ear on the left; her right ear had been replaced with a mechanical structure. She stood in front of the elevator, seemingly having mustered all her courage, but the fur on her tail was all standing on end, and she clenched her fists in front of her—her right hand gleaming with a metallic silver light.
Luo walked straight toward the other person.
"What's your name?" she asked.
“I, my name is Momo,” the girl Gibraltar answered instinctively. Her racial talent seemed to allow her to keenly sense a certain… frightening aura from Luo. It was the scent of a predator who had survived the internal struggles of the Black Dot Group. But this aura wasn’t so terrifying. Instead, it was powerful yet friendly, which puzzled her. “I’m here… a laboratory assistant.”
Luo looked the jeeplo man up and down, then nodded slightly and patted him on the shoulder.
"Don't be afraid," she whispered.
Eileen ran up from behind—she first rummaged through the raccoon's tail, then ran to Luo's side holding a round thing, threw it on the ground, and shouted triumphantly, "Old Joe is dead!"
The round, mechanical head rolled off the ground with a loud thud.
Momo was startled.
The first jump was because she had just noticed Eileen—the little doll had been hidden from view by a fox's tail while standing on the ground, and no one had noticed her.
The second jump was when she finally saw what that round head was.
"Old Joe is dead." Luo looked at everyone and said it again, word by word.
(End of this chapter)