Brother Zhuang recognized the figure at a glance. It was Rag, the junkman leader he had originally intended to trade with.
Rag was a short young man dressed in tattered clothes. His untrimmed beard was a messy, bushy tangle, and he wore a pair of Classical Pilot Goggles with an air of absolute pretension.
He knew the man was a "scavenger"—a One-Programmer of an unknown tier.
"Rag, you absolute moron!" Brother Zhuang shouted. "Are your garbage eyes blind? Look at who's standing right here!"
Brother Zhuang pointed at Lorna, who was smoking quietly beside him, and shouted, "This is Lorna Ludd! The Daughter of the Bloodline! A Two-Programmer! You so much as touch her, and you'll have the whole Bloodline District hunting you down for revenge!"
Lorna's green eyes instantly turned furious. She glared at Brother Zhuang and hissed, "Who the fuck gave you permission to call me Lorna Ludd..."
Surging, torrent-like blood light pulsed from her Mutant right hand. "Did you hire me just to throw that fucking name around?"
Around them, the female mercenaries perched on the truck beds and pickups mirrored her rage, glaring at him as if they had suffered a grave insult.
"No, no..." Brother Zhuang muttered meekly. "Captain, I just thought we could avoid a fight if possible."
If they could avoid a firefight, Brother Zhuang wanted to avoid it. Losing any of his brothers in a shootout was not only tragic, but expensive.
"Haha!" Rag burst into laughter by the garbage piles. The other junkmen immediately joined in, howling with laughter whether they understood the joke or not.
"I don't care if she's Lorna Ludd or Lorna Dud! Daughter of the Bloodline?" Rag jeered. "How old are you? You think this is fifteen years ago? Operation Bloodline? 'The children of Liuguang City are my bloodline'? Her parents got their heads chopped off!"
Rag couldn't stop laughing. He turned to mock a few of the younger junkmen who clearly didn't understand the reference:
"Never heard of it, right? Open your garbage eyes and look closely at those Blood Blades! They're all 'descendants of a noble house.' Who knows, maybe they marched on the front lines against the Santou Corporation when they were kids!"
The female mercenaries froze, their eyes turning red with suppressed rage.
Lorna took a deep drag of her Eastern tobacco, her face expressionless, but Brother Zhuang could feel an icy chill rolling off her.
"Still don't get it?" Rag grinned. "Then let me spell it out for you.
"Years ago, down south in the Bloodline District, there was a guy named Roden Ludd. Somehow, he convinced a whole bunch of bloodliners to follow his little rebellion. Claimed they were going to drive out the Santou Corporation and the New World Bank, that they were going to build a brand new Liuguang City.
"That bullshit Operation Bloodline of theirs actually made quite a splash back then. Plenty of people joined the riot. They even propped up a 'Daughter of the Bloodline'—Roden Ludd's kid, just a toddler really, walking at the very front of every march waving their bloodline flag.
"Well, take a look, because she's standing right over there: Lorna Dud. I was there, you know. I saw how proud she looked, acting like her parents were actually going to pull it off and make her some bullshit bloodline princess."
Rag and the older junkmen erupted into fresh bouts of mocking laughter, but the younger ones looked at Lorna with a slight shift in their gazes.
So this woman actually had such a glorious past...
"What happened?" one of the younger men asked.
"What happened? Are you living in a dream world? Santou and Seth are still right where they've always been! And the Bloodline District? It got utterly flattened in retaliation. It's a savage wasteland now. At least we have scraps to eat here; over there, it's just ruins. Not even the bloodliners themselves can survive in it."
Rag chuckled, sticking out his tongue in a lewd, licking gesture, completely amused with himself.
"And what about these 'descendants of a noble house'? They call themselves the fucking Blood Blades now, strictly working illegal jobs. Why? Because no legitimate employer dares to hire them. Who knows when they might go crazy again?
"Her deadbeat dad Roden Ludd's greatest contribution to the world is that ever since he died, no one believes in that fairy-tale bullshit anymore. Especially not here in the Sludge Pond District! Bloodliners have no say here."
The sky grew heavier, scattering occasional drops of rain. This gloomy overcast looked no different from the sky above the Bloodline District.
"Are you done?"
Lorna tossed her cigarette onto the ground and crushed it under her heel. "That was quite a touching story. You know it so well, you must have been one of those idiots marching at the front back then, right? Crying your eyes out, so moved by the innocent little shouts of the Daughter of the Bloodline?
"Did you promise Roden Ludd you'd build a happy future for kids like her? Did you fantasize about marrying her when she grew up, just so you could call Roden Ludd 'Daddy'?"
Rag choked on his words, suddenly silent. A flurry of emotions flickered across his filthy, soot-stained face.
"Looks like I hit the nail on the head." Lorna shook her head with a sneer. "Do you know the biggest difference between a bloodliner and a junkman?"
She looked around at her female mercenaries, answering her own question: "Bloodliners have fathers. Junkmen beg for them."
The women burst into laughter, their voices carrying a deep, hidden pride.
Brother Zhuang didn't dare interrupt the entire time. He was terrified of saying the wrong thing—even if he made it back to the Kabukicho area, he didn't want to get randomly assassinated by some Blood Blade.
"You've got a real fucking smart mouth," Rag muttered darkly. "I guess you're not going to hand over the goods quietly..."
"Did you really think that after spouting all that nonsense," Lorna paused, "you wouldn't be part of today's dead man's lottery?"
Rag, however, looked completely unfazed. "Yeah, I'm not. Because you lot are taking all the tickets. Go join your deadbeat dad."
The moment he spoke, all the junkmen positioned at both ends of the highway ducked behind the towering piles of garbage.
The wind picked up, carrying the pungent stench of heavy industrial exhaust mixed with the foul reek of piss and shit. The rain falling from the sky looked like black oil sludge.
"Something's not right..." Brother Zhuang scanned their surroundings. This was the Sludge Pond District, after all. "They've got something else prepared..."
Suddenly, Lorna's eyes widened. Several of the musclemen and female mercenaries cursed out loud as they noticed the shift.
A massive section of the garbage sea on the left side of the highway abruptly collapsed with a deafening crash. Bang!
Electronic waste, plastic bags, iron cans, plastic bottles, rotting matter, and foul sludge exploded into the air.
Right in the center of the collapsed trash heap, a bizarre, gargantuan figure stood up. The thing had to be ten meters tall. It was a massive, humanoid amalgamation—something akin to a body of charred flesh, but sprouting with all sorts of garbage and foreign objects.
Countless living human eyes, organs, hands, and feet were plastered all over the giant's body, making it look utterly grotesque and terrifying.
"It's a Mutant..." Lorna said grimly. "Looks like an Embryonic Species, molded by these junkmen."
"Fuck me." Brother Zhuang's ugly face froze in shock. "Rag fed all those wild dogs to this thing?"
The situation in front of them made it completely clear what the truth behind the Sludge Pond District's organ trucks was.
Rag and his crew hadn't been buying wild dogs to harvest and sell their organs. They were feeding and cultivating this Mutant.
Brother Zhuang couldn't tell what the hell the thing was, but if Lorna said it was an Embryonic Species, then that was what it was.
"Well, it certainly didn't grow hundreds of human cocks on its own," Lorna retorted in irritation.
An Embryonic Species was a category of Mutant. It referred to a new biological species currently in the process of forming.
Because it hadn't fully taken shape yet, it possessed extremely high plasticity. It was essentially a gigantic, grotesque ball of meat that could be molded into whatever form its handlers desired.
Rag's crew must have stumbled upon this Embryonic Species by chance, bringing it under their control, feeding it, and shaping it into this monstrous form.
"What do we do?" Brother Zhuang had little experience hunting Mutants, and his mental state was already beginning to fray. "How do we fight this?"
At the same time, many of the musclemen and female mercenaries couldn't help but clutch their throbbing foreheads, unable to look directly at the Mutant.
They weren't transcendents, nor were they equipped with Cyberware processed by an alchemist.
The sensory information emitted by Mutants was inherently contaminating, capable of inducing dissociative effects on their psyches. That was the hallmark of a Mutant.
Lorna used her left hand to pull out another Eastern cigarette. She lit it and took a drag. "Wait. Don't look at it."
The junkmen were hiding safely behind the garbage piles, all of them wearing Shielding Glasses cobbled together from electronic waste. Rag still had on his Classical Pilot Goggles, shouting triumphantly:
"It's real hungry right now, and it doesn't give a shit about any Daughter of the Bloodline!"
Catching everyone off guard, a muscleman on one of the truck beds snapped under the mental strain. He let out a crazed scream and pulled the trigger on his machine gun.
The deafening rat-tat-tat of gunfire erupted as he sprayed bullets at the Mutant.
"Fuck, your men are useless!"
Lorna swore at Brother Zhuang and his crew, a mix of frustration and tension rising in her voice. "That's not going to work!"