“A special elite encounter?” Calvin could not help being intrigued.
This was the first time the system had ever triggered a mission like this.
Apparently, joining a faction and entering its side-story content really did come with extra opportunities to make a profit.
Between the elite encounter and his existing side mission, he was looking at a total of 10,000 EXP.
That was equivalent to ten days or even half a month of ordinary daily missions when he was grinding at full speed.
‘If I’d known joining S.H.I.E.L.D.
would unlock missions like this, I could’ve been snowballing ages ago.’ Even more interesting were the rewards listed on the system panel: a Rare Item and a Special Item.
The system had never explicitly assigned rarity categories to his mission rewards before.
Most previous missions had simply awarded random items, and the difference between the best and worst possible results was enormous.
He might receive a genuinely powerful weapon one time and end up with pots, pans, or other household junk the next.
This time, however, the system had specifically promised a Rare Item and a Special Item.
Calvin’s expectations immediately shot through the roof.
Items the system itself considered rare were never weak.
More importantly, every strong item he obtained made it easier to earn even better rewards later.
Calvin understood perfectly well how quickly an advantage could snowball once it started building momentum.
“Something wrong?” Natasha had just reached the bottom of the stairs when she noticed Calvin standing motionless at the landing.
Assuming he had detected another threat, she immediately lowered her center of gravity and rolled lightly toward the wall beside the stairwell, taking cover while watching him closely.
Calvin rubbed his stomach and smiled.
“I was just wondering what we should get for a late-night meal after we finish the mission.” “You…” Natasha sighed helplessly.
She wanted to point out that this was a strange time to be thinking about food, but after everything she had just watched him do, Calvin had probably earned the right to be confident.
A small smile appeared on her face.
“How about chicken?
Win the fight, get the chicken dinner.” Calvin immediately gave her a thumbs-up.
“Now that’s why you’re an elite agent.
You know how to enjoy life.” He grinned.
“Then let’s wrap this up quickly.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.” With that, Calvin burst out of the apartment building and began advancing carefully toward the warehouse district.
The high-explosive grenades had devastated the compound, but there were always a few impossibly lucky survivors who managed to cling to life at the edge of a blast.
They had survived.
Most of them were simply missing a few pieces.
The moment several wounded gangsters recognized Calvin as the man responsible for the bombardment, they immediately began screaming abuse at him.
“You bastard!” “You attacked us!
The people backing us will never let you get away with this!” “I’ll kill everyone you care about!” “You—” BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Calvin fired rapidly.
Two rounds to the chest, one to the head.
The gangsters who had been hovering on the edge of death went still.
What could he say?
Calvin was a compassionate man.
Seeing people suffer like that was simply too painful, so naturally he had helped put an end to it.
‘”The people backing us,” huh?
What is this, some cartoon where your secret boss is going to descend from the heavens and save you?’ Natasha watched the shooting and gave a small nod of professional approval.
Calvin handled the Mozambique Drill with impressive speed and consistency.
Whatever else could be said about him, the man had all the raw ingredients of an exceptional assassin.
Using S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intelligence, the two quickly located the warehouse concealing the underground laboratory.
They did not enter immediately.
First, they swept through the surrounding warehouses and dealt with the gang members who had survived Calvin’s bombardment by sheltering inside.
At this point, the infiltration mission had already turned into a full-scale clearance operation.
There was little reason to leave armed enemies behind them.
Once the area was secure, Calvin and Natasha entered one particular warehouse that normally housed various entertainment facilities and attracted the largest crowds.
Hidden at the very back was a concealed partition.
Behind it lay the entrance to the underground laboratory.
The Hand had chosen its hiding place well.
With so much illegal activity happening openly throughout the warehouse district, the most sensitive operation of all had been concealed right in the middle of everything.
Calvin stopped beside the heavy steel entrance.
“Agent Romanoff, stand back.
I’ll open it.” This was not chivalry.
Calvin could use Wind Wall, which meant that if anyone opened fire the instant the door came down, he had very little to worry about.
He summoned the wind barrier around himself, wrapped both hands around the steel door’s handle, and pulled.
The muscles in his arms tightened until his sleeves strained against them.
Then metal screamed.
The thick security door warped under the pressure, bending farther and farther until Calvin tore it open through brute force alone.
A door that normally required passwords and multiple layers of authentication had just been forcibly peeled out of the way.
Natasha barely reacted anymore.
Superhuman strength was superhuman strength.
At this point, watching Calvin manhandle reinforced steel almost seemed ordinary.
The instant the doorway opened, automatic gunfire erupted from below.
Just as Calvin expected, someone inside the underground laboratory had been waiting to ambush whoever breached the entrance.
Unfortunately for them, all that preparation accomplished nothing.
The bullets stopped several centimeters from Calvin’s body, stripped of their momentum by the swirling barrier, then dropped harmlessly onto the floor with a rapid series of metallic clinks.
“No…
impossible!” “You’re a demon!
You have to be some kind of demon!” A middle-aged man stood at the bottom of the stairs clutching an M4 carbine.
He stared at Calvin as though he had just witnessed the most terrifying thing imaginable.
Calvin ignored his panic and glanced toward Natasha.
“Do we need him alive for questioning?” Before Natasha could answer, the man suddenly collapsed.
Calvin approached and quickly discovered the reason.
Poison.
The researcher had killed himself.
“These people really don’t hesitate,” Calvin murmured.
“Whatever they’re doing down here must be serious.” Natasha nodded grimly.
“We’ve already made enough noise that the Hand will send reinforcements sooner or later.
Collect the tissue sample, then we get out.” Calvin agreed.
He was more interested in seeing the anomalous test subject anyway.
Whatever was waiting inside had somehow been significant enough to trigger an entirely separate system mission.
Fortunately, the remaining researchers were barely capable of putting up a fight.
Calvin and Natasha encountered little meaningful resistance as they moved deeper underground, and before long, they reached the laboratory’s central section.
The moment Calvin opened the final door, his expression changed.
Voices flooded directly into his mind.
Men.
Women.
Children.
The elderly.
Every voice carried grief, agony, and a rage so intense it seemed to burn through his thoughts.
‘Avenge us…’ ‘Kill them!
Kill them all!’ ‘Help me…
please help me…’ ‘I want to go home.
I’m so tired…’ ‘Please…
let us rest…’ As the doors opened fully, the laboratory beyond revealed itself.
Even Calvin stopped moving for a moment.
Dozens of cultivation tanks stood throughout the chamber, each nearly three meters tall and filled with a murky, black-tinted fluid.
Inside them floated incomplete human bodies.
Men and women.
Children and elderly victims.
There were even infants.
Every body was missing something different.
Eyes.
Noses.
Limbs.
Organs.
Skin.
At the center of the entire chamber lay an enormous pool filled with thick, blackened blood.
The stench rolling from it was overwhelming, like corpses that had been left rotting for far too long.
Twisted black symbols had been drawn around the pool.
Merely looking at them made Calvin’s eyes ache and his thoughts feel muddled.
And within the blood lay an enormous humanoid corpse nearly three meters tall.
Its body was covered in obvious seams.
It had been assembled.
The missing pieces from the victims in the cultivation tanks had been harvested and stitched together to create the thing lying in the pool.
“What the hell were these people doing?” Natasha’s face had gone pale.
She had spent years as a spy and assassin.
She had seen torture chambers, mass graves, human experimentation, and more atrocities than most people could imagine.
Even she had never encountered anything quite like this.
Someone had taken body parts from countless victims and assembled them into a single monstrous corpse.
There was a pool of corrupted blood, incomprehensible symbols, and advanced scientific equipment all occupying the same room.
It looked simultaneously like a laboratory and the site of some occult ritual, science and black magic fused together into something deeply wrong.
Calvin’s expression turned cold.
The sight made his blood boil.
Whatever amusement he had taken in tearing apart the Hand’s operation vanished completely.
These people had kidnapped civilians, butchered them for parts, and reduced human beings—including children—to raw materials for an experiment.
Every voice inside Calvin’s head begging for release only made his anger worse.
The system had called this a Special Elite Encounter, yet there had been no enemy waiting to fight him.
Now he understood why.
The stitched corpse in the blood pool—or perhaps all the souls trapped within it—was not asking him for battle.
They only wanted the suffering to end.
Calvin glanced toward Natasha.
Her reaction made it obvious that she could not hear the voices.
‘Maybe my mental attributes are high enough that I can hear the dead?’ The thought passed through his mind, but he set it aside.
For now, he still had a mission to complete.
Calvin approached the blood pool and took out two sample tubes.
Using a knife, he attempted to cut a piece of tissue from the stitched corpse.
The blade barely penetrated.
Its flesh was unnaturally resilient, more like cutting through reinforced leather than human tissue.
Calvin had to make several cuts before finally removing a small sample.
No blood emerged from the wound.
Instead, a thick, pitch-black liquid slowly seeped from within.
Calvin sealed the tissue sample inside one tube, then collected some of the corrupted blood from the pool in the second.
He tossed both containers toward Natasha.
“Agent Romanoff, do we need anything else?” Natasha inspected the samples and shook her head.
“This should be enough.” Then she looked back toward the horrific chamber.
“What are you planning to do now?” “Destroy all of it.” Calvin’s smile held no warmth whatsoever.
He pretended to reach inside his coat, then retrieved a golden grenade from his system inventory.
A cross was mounted prominently on its casing.
[Item: Holy Hand Grenade] [Effect: An extraordinarily powerful grenade imbued with holy energy.
Upon detonation, it produces a chorus of “Hallelujah” and possesses multiple effects, including enhanced damage against dark-aligned entities, holy purification, and the release of trapped souls.
Detonation is controlled directly by the user’s will.] [Evaluation: A holy purification and a merciful destruction.] Calvin and Natasha quickly left the underground facility and continued moving until they were several hundred meters from the warehouse district.
Natasha glanced back toward the distant building, clearly confused.
It was only a modified remote-detonation grenade.
Even assuming it had an unusually powerful explosive charge, did they really need to get this far away?
A moment later, she discovered just how badly she had underestimated it.
Calvin triggered the Holy Hand Grenade with a thought.
A vast, solemn chorus suddenly rang through the night.
“Hallelujah!” No thunderous explosion followed.
Instead, the sacred chorus continued echoing beneath the night sky.
Then a brilliant golden light flashed.
The underground laboratory and the warehouse directly above it simply disappeared.
There was no burning wreckage.
No collapsing structure.
No cloud of debris.
One moment the building existed.
The next, it had been erased as cleanly as pencil marks wiped from a page, leaving behind nothing but an enormous empty crater.
“What the hell?!” Natasha stared at the hole, completely dumbfounded.
“That was a grenade?” That had not looked remotely like an explosive device.
And what was with the choir?
At this point, she was beginning to question whether the normal laws of physics still applied anywhere around Calvin.
Calvin barely noticed her reaction.
All of his attention had shifted to the system notifications appearing before him.
[Special Elite Encounter Complete.] [Rewards Obtained: EXP +5,000.] [Rare Item Obtained: Creature Egg ×1.] [Special Item Obtained: Gift of the Departed.] [Creature Egg: Feed the egg one drop of your blood each day for fifteen consecutive days.
After fifteen days, it will hatch into a random creature.
The resulting creature will possess absolute loyalty toward you.] [Gift of the Departed: Single-use special item.] [Active Effect: Removes all pain and suffering from a chosen target.] [Passive Effect: When the user faces a lethal threat, the item will automatically negate one fatal attack.
The item disappears after this effect is triggered.] [Evaluation: The dead were bound to this place, their souls unable to find peace.
You purified what remained and released them from their suffering.
This is their final gift to you.]