Chapter 119: Turning the Tables

“An open plot! That’s an interesting way to put it!” Lin Xiaosu laughed. “And it really is an open plot. Yesterday, I rattled the mountain to shake the tiger. If you made a move, I could follow the trail today. If you didn’t, I would simply investigate Tong Yadong and your three pharmaceutical factories. They would still reveal their flaws. You didn’t dare gamble that their defenses were flawless, so you had no choice but to enter the game personally and wager against me!”

Li Changsheng said, “Although Tong Yadong is a clever man, and although the three pharmaceutical factories have their own security systems, in terms of the difficulty of breaking through, penetrating my defenses is three orders of magnitude harder than penetrating theirs.”

“Indeed! You’re very clever!” Lin Xiaosu said. “At the very least, you managed to mislead me.”

“Oh? About what?”

“Your identity as a genetic human!” Lin Xiaosu said. “In the elevator, I pressed your hand against the controls. The intensity of your resistance was no greater than that of an ordinary person, so I assumed that was what you were.”

“With the three of you watching me like tigers waiting to pounce, exposing my abilities at the time would have been suicide! A true trump card is most effective only when revealed at the right moment.” Li Changsheng smiled. “Lin Xiaosu, do you know that this isn’t the only evidence of my intelligence?”

“Oh? What else?” Lin Xiaosu asked.

Shen Yinchuan’s thick brows drew tightly together.

His thoughts were in complete disarray.

Was this really the time for conversation?

In his experience, they should have broken through immediately, not stood there chatting like two compulsive talkers. Villains died because they talked too much, and heroes could die the same way. In nearly every mission he had ever carried out, talking had been a baffling option that served no purpose except to waste precious time.

Yet Number 88 had given him no signal.

Number 88 was Hidden Dragon. If Hidden Dragon gave no signal, he had no right to act on his own judgment.

Li Changsheng said, “It’s also evident in the fact that I deliberately kept talking to you. Do you really think I had any need to chat with you?”

Shen Yinchuan’s heart gave a violent thump.

Lin Xiaosu also frowned slightly.

Li Changsheng threw back his head and laughed. “The conversation was merely a way to buy time!”

Shen Yinchuan’s entire body shook. A foreboding feeling came over him.

The basement was unnaturally quiet. Then, all at once, a bone-chilling sensation rose from within him. It seemed to be the sixth sense he had developed through countless battles.

Li Changsheng shifted his gaze toward him. “Captain Shen, you have a bad feeling, don’t you? That’s right! The mutant creatures need time to make their way here from the laboratory!”

Shen Yinchuan spun around and stared behind him. Strange noises suddenly came from the office behind them. He turned completely and saw that, at some unknown moment, a passage had opened inside the office. More than a dozen spiders were racing through it.

They were the same kind of spiders that had committed the two horrifying mutant murder cases in Jiangcheng.

The four spiders that had appeared earlier had already been dealt with, but now more than a dozen came pouring out at once. No—not nearly all of them. The spiders were merely the vanguard crawling at the front. Behind them came snakes, wolves, four-legged monstrosities, and more.

The hairs on Shen Yinchuan’s body stood on end.

Lin Xiaosu suddenly laughed. “Li Changsheng, you think you’re clever for using conversation to buy time. But why haven’t you considered this—why would I play along and patiently keep chatting with you?”

Li Changsheng’s smile abruptly froze.

That was right. He was using the conversation to buy time.

But what reason did Lin Xiaosu have to keep talking with him?

The situation was obvious. He had used the impenetrable U31 to trap the three of them. They should have been looking for a way to break through at the very first opportunity and arrest him. This was precisely the moment when they should have had the least inclination to talk.

When something abnormal occurred, there was always a hidden cause.

Number 88 smiled. “Because you wanted to buy time, so did we! It takes time for the Hidden Dragon forces to surround this place as well!”

With that single sentence, the truth behind the plan was completely revealed.

Li Changsheng had been buying time so that the mutant creatures in the laboratory could pass through the underground passage and slaughter them.

Deep down, he still wanted to witness their deaths with his own eyes.

But in this world, every scheme could be turned against its schemer.

Lin Xiaosu and Number 88 had likewise used the time to let the Hidden Dragon forces outside complete their encirclement.

It was the outer encirclement that truly required time.

“Page One of Three”

Hidden Dragon had always operated in secrecy. Even a single Hidden Dragon skimmer usually appeared only at night, let alone an entire Hidden Dragon force.

Li Changsheng’s expression changed.

The Hidden Dragon forces?

An encirclement?

Lin Xiaosu smiled. “Besides that, I had another little motive of my own. I wanted to use your plan to unleash the mutant creatures and wipe out the hidden danger beneath Jiangcheng once and for all.”

The moment Lin Xiaosu said this, sweat broke out across Shen Yinchuan’s back.

Only then did he truly understand how carefully Lin Xiaosu had planned everything.

The mutant creatures were extraordinarily dangerous.

They could burrow underground and hide in sewers and ditches. Even one that escaped would pose an enormous threat to a metropolis of ten million people like Jiangcheng.

If they were not eliminated immediately, the consequences would be unimaginable.

Normally, exterminating them would have been extremely difficult, and the outcome impossible to predict, because no one knew where they were hiding.

But now Lin Xiaosu had seized the opportunity created by Li Changsheng’s attempt to kill them.

He had calculated that, once they were sealed inside the basement, the experimental subjects would be activated—because that was originally the most effective and convenient method.

Li Changsheng’s face twisted savagely. “The Hidden Dragon forces are surrounding us? Who do you think you can fool? The moment you revealed your trump card, you lost the chance to transmit any signal!”

That was precisely what made the basement special.

All signals were blocked inside it. Only signals transmitted through a special frequency band could get through.

And that special frequency band was connected to the specialized communication devices used by the Hydra operatives. Did they really think they could make those Hydra members come and rescue them?

Lin Xiaosu smiled. “That’s true. We can’t summon Hidden Dragon from inside the basement. But what about in the elevator? Sorry, Li Changsheng, you think entering the basement was when I exposed my trump card. In my view, the moment the secret of your private elevator was revealed, your trump card had already been laid bare.”

The signal had not been sent from the basement. It had already been transmitted from the elevator.

Li Changsheng said coldly, “Then let’s see which side breaks through first!”

He turned and ran up the steps behind him.

On the other side of the glass partition, a gigantic spider had already leaped forward.

Slash!

Number 88 drew a Dragon Scale blade and drove it deep into the spider’s head.

Shen Yinchuan fired repeatedly, putting two bullets into the head of another spider.

Yet the creature still lunged at him.

Shen Yinchuan lowered his gun and drew a dagger instead. With a backward flip, he rose and followed the same path as Number 88, relying on his blade rather than his firearm.

Guns had too little stopping power against mutant creatures of this kind.

“Stay there, Xiaosu!” Shen Yinchuan blocked the doorway, protecting Lin Xiaosu.

Number 88 laughed. “You still don’t know what he can do, do you? He could take on ten of you without trouble! Does he need your protection?”

Shen Yinchuan was startled. Surely not?

Lin Xiaosu smiled. “Though I don’t need protecting, I appreciate the thought, Captain Shen.”

Slash!

He swept over Shen Yinchuan’s head. A huge spider descended from the ceiling ahead of him. Lin Xiaosu tapped the floor with his toes and brought one foot down. The spider’s four legs flailed wildly, then went still.

Boom!

He threw a punch that struck another spider squarely in the head. The creature staggered as if drunk, then collapsed once more.

In an instant, the entire vanguard that had entered the basement had been slaughtered.

“Page Two of Three”

“Number 88, cut through the passage and go straight to the laboratory!”

“Move!”

Three figures advanced with countless killing techniques. Amid flying flesh and blood, they carved their way through the passage, which stretched for more than ten meters. There were spiders, giant snakes, tiny snakes that moved like lightning, and ferocious martens and wolves.

Yet beneath the combined assault of the three men, the passage was still pushed through by sheer force.

Now, Li Changsheng.

The moment he reached the top of the steps and raised his eyes, his heartbeat accelerated.

Above the sky, a hundred skimmers converged from every direction, instantly surrounding the entire Changsheng Group industrial complex.

A beam of red light shot from the enormous skimmer at the center and transformed into a gigantic blood-red sword.

A solemn voice descended from above.

“Hidden Dragon combat order. Everyone within the Changsheng Group complex, kneel where you are and place your hands behind your head! All vehicles, shut down your engines. Those who disobey will be eliminated!”

Countless people throughout the Changsheng Group raised their heads at once.

“My God, what is that?”

“What is the Hidden Dragon combat order? Is this a police operation? Or the military?”

“Hidden Dragon! It’s Hidden Dragon… What happened?”

There were still some who knew of Hidden Dragon, but ninety-nine percent of the people had never witnessed a Hidden Dragon combat order, much less a scene like this.

“Don’t move! The sky is full of robots! Those machines won’t show you any mercy!” an old man shouted.

For a moment, everyone who heard him dropped to the ground and covered their heads.

In the corridors, inside the offices, across the plazas—

Whoosh!

The wind roared. Hundreds of robots descended from the sky like dumplings being dropped into a pot and landed on the ground. Some were humanoid, some were shaped like spiders, and some resembled enormous mountains of steel, their four sides bristling with black gun barrels.

A car raced toward the gate of the complex. It was almost outside when—

Boom!

A giant spider dropped from the sky and landed in front of it. The car flipped over on the spot.

A Hidden Dragon warrior in armor stretched out one hand and tore the door from the wrecked vehicle with his bare hands. He then reached inside and dragged out a pale young man.

With a wave of his hand, he hurled the young man toward a nearby robot.

The robot closed its hands. A set of steel restraints locked the young man securely in place before tossing him into the skimmer beside it.

That was the fate of anyone who moved.

For a time, the entire Changsheng complex was cowed into silence.

Suddenly, in a corner to the northwest, dozens of figures moved at once. Some charged toward the walls, some toward the gates, and some leaped onto the buildings.

Every one of them was a genetic human.

That area was the Changsheng Group’s gathering place for genetic humans, known as the Physical Training Center.

The moment they moved, Hidden Dragon moved as well.

Dozens of Hidden Dragon operatives leaped into the air at the same time. They were faster than the genetic humans.

Even so, three figures ultimately swept over the wall. Two plunged toward East Lake, while the third raced toward the bustling streets outside.

Just as they were about to escape, a figure suddenly flashed atop one of the skimmers in the sky.

That single movement seemed to break completely through the bounds of space and time.

A cold glint flashed in his hand. The genetic human charging toward the city streets suddenly lost his head.

Before the head had even struck the ground, the figure was already behind the two men diving toward East Lake.

Slash!

A faint, almost invisible streak of cold light passed through the air.

Two headless corpses plunged into East Lake, sending up waves of blood.

“Page Three of Three”