Once he confirmed that bullets posed no threat to him, Russell loosened up his hands and controlled his power before dashing toward the Hydra soldiers before him.
Having experienced being strung up on the ceiling earlier, Russell roughly understood the sheer strength he now possessed, so he didn’t dare unleash his full power inside this small operating room.
Even though he wasn’t running at maximum effort, his forward speed still far exceeded anything the Hydra soldiers could have imagined.
The soldiers, who had just reloaded their magazines, couldn’t see Russell clearly at all.
To them, he appeared before them as if teleporting, followed instantly by a lightning-fast punch.
These Hydra soldiers were well-trained elite troops, but in front of Russell, they were no different from motionless wooden puppets.
One punch, one Hydra soldier—the feeling was insanely exhilarating!
Faced with absolute strength and speed, these soldiers had zero ability to resist.
Instead, their wild, panicked firing ended up injuring quite a few of their own comrades.
From the moment Russell launched his attack to the point where all the Hydra soldiers lay unconscious on the floor, less than twenty seconds had passed.
In the adjacent observation room, Security Chief Jack, dressed in a Hydra combat uniform, looked thoroughly grim.
Beside him, however, the researchers in white lab coats were practically glowing with wild excitement.
Two squads, twelve well-trained soldiers, hadn’t even lasted twenty seconds.
For Jack, who was in charge of the entire base’s security, this was undeniably a massive slap in the face—delivered with full force.
“Switch to armor-piercing rounds!
Get heavy-caliber sniper rifles!
I want that monster inside dead in that room!”
At Jack’s command, the Hydra soldiers rushing to reinforce began heading back toward the armory to swap their weapons.
“Chief Jack, you can’t do that!”
“He’s the only test subject who survived!
We need to extract crucial experimental data from him—he absolutely cannot die!”
Hearing Jack’s order, the bald doctor who had previously injected the Abomination serum hurried over, ripped off his surgical mask, and practically screamed in Jack’s face.
“I don’t give a damn if he’s the only surviving test subject!
Look at the soldiers lying in there!”
His rage boiling over, Jack grabbed the doctor’s bald head, shoved his face flat against the one-way glass, and growled out word by word, “If we don’t kill him, everyone in this base is going to die!”
Only then did the bald doctor finally snap out of his excitement and break free from Jack’s grip.
“You still don’t need to kill him!
Just use the taser cannons!
As long as he’s a biological organism, he can’t withstand electricity!
If the higher-ups find out you killed the only surviving test subject, you know what the consequences will be!”
Having regained his composure, the bald doctor’s intellect reclaimed the high ground, making him look completely confident in his argument.
“Prepare the taser cannons and the shock-explosion collar.
Execute the capture plan via electrocution!”
Though unwilling, Jack had no choice but to abandon his plan to kill Russell on the spot and issued a new set of orders.
While the Hydra soldiers were no match for Russell, their speed of execution certainly lived up to their reputation as elite troops.
Before long, heavily re-armed Hydra soldiers completely surrounded the corridor outside the operating room.
Just as Russell stepped out of the operating room, before he even had time to get his bearings, a fist-sized ball of light-blue electrical energy came flying toward him like lightning.
Russell didn’t know what the ball of light was, but he dodged it with utmost seriousness.
Although he wasn’t afraid of standard bullets now, this was still a secret Hydra base.
Who knew if they were researching some high-lethal mystery weapon here?
Relying on his superhuman strength and speed, Russell easily dodged the first orb of electricity.
What he hadn’t expected, however, was that Hydra’s attack didn’t consist of just a single shot.
To be completely safe, the Hydra soldiers had brought out every taser cannon in the armory.
Russell wasn’t facing just one electrical sphere, but ten of them.
The corridor outside the operating room wasn’t particularly wide, allowing ten taser cannons to achieve full saturation coverage.
Russell managed to dodge the first few electrical spheres, but the remaining seven struck him with precision.
The moment the first orb hit him, Russell knew he was in big trouble.
A intense electric current swept across his whole body instantly, causing his speed to drop dramatically as an irresistible surge of agony flooded his nerve endings.
The energy balls hit him one after another.
By the time the fifth ball connected, Russell lost the strength to stand.
The final two electrical spheres knocked him out cold.
In the second before he lost consciousness, Russell blearily caught sight of a soldier holding a collar-like device running toward him, snapping the device onto his neck.
…
When Russell woke up again, he was no longer in the operating room.
Instead, he was in a vast, empty chamber with nothing in it except a metal dummy standing nearby.
As Russell regained consciousness, Chief Jack’s voice echoed through the room via a loudspeaker.
“Designation 9527.
That is your combat number from now on!”
“Around your neck is our newly developed shock-explosion collar.
If you don’t want your head blown into a blossom, you’d better not try to remove it!”
“Now, let me demonstrate the power of this shock-explosion collar for you!”
The metal dummy in front of Russell was wearing an identical collar.
At Jack’s command, the collar’s blue indicator light switched to red, and a visible, intense current flooded through the dummy instantly.
That taste of electrocution was far from pleasant.
Once the electrical discharge stopped, the red indicator light on the collar began to flash rapidly while emitting a series of piercing beeps.
A few seconds later, the seemingly small collar erupted with an absurd, shocking explosion.
*Boom!*
The massive blast blew Russell off his feet, slamming him hard against the room’s wall.
Only then did Russell realize that the walls of this chamber were entirely constructed from metal.
When the smoke from the explosion cleared, the metal dummy was completely obliterated.
What had been a life-sized metal figure was now reduced to a pile of fist-sized metal shrapnel.
Russell casually picked up a piece of the shrapnel and squeezed it slightly to gauge the metal’s hardness.
“I was too careless!”
Throwing aside the metal fragment he had just deformed with his bare hands, Russell cursed himself in silent frustration.