A continuous barrage of bullets tore through the sea of garbage, sending scrap flying.
The Mutant was instantly enraged. The gunfire couldn't bring it down; it merely splattered some of the monstrosity's flesh and shattered the trash clinging to it. An instant later, both the broken debris and the embedded bullets were absorbed as new parts of its body.
It let out a strange, muffled roar, sounding like every wire and appliance inside its body was short-circuiting all at once.
The colossal beast lunged, leaping up onto the highway and charging straight for the convoy.
Garbage flew in its wake beneath a downpour of black rain and billowing distant smoke.
Seeing the fight break out, the muscle men of the Game Gang pulled their triggers, their guns spitting bursts of sparks.
But with a casual swat of the Mutant's hand, an entire pickup truck was flipped into the air. Several muscle men collapsed screaming, unable to get back up.
"Fuck..." Brother Zhuang panicked slightly, electricity arcing across his half-metal head. "Take it down!"
He vaulted fiercely from the truck bed. Muscle Fanatic Profession System J-Grade Program: Tenfold Muscle.
Brother Zhuang's already knotted muscles instantly bulged out several times their size. Even his head swelled, making his mangled mix of flesh and metal look even more gruesome.
He cleared a distance of over ten meters, slamming both massive fists into the Mutant. With a loud thud, he struck a junked television screen on its chest, shattering the already battered display and sinking his fists deep inside.
That punch could have blown right through a brawny man.
Yet the Mutant didn't fall. It wasn't even close—it didn't so much as sway.
Meanwhile, Rag let out a burst of laughter from the shadows. "Trash!"
It was a mockery, but also a summons. Lines of 0s and 1s flashed across his Classical Pilot Goggles. Program activated.
Scavenger Profession System J-Grade Program: Everything Is Usable.
Some of the electronic scrap on the Mutant's body lit up, emitting electrical pulses as if answering Rag's call.
"Motherfucker..." Brother Zhuang cried out. The increasingly frenzied Mutant flung him away, sending him crashing heavily into the sea of garbage by the roadside.
"Zhuang, I told you," Lorna said from the truck bed, taking a drag of her cigarette in utter exasperation. "Against these transcendent things, even guns and cannons are useless. If all you have is muscle, all your training is just a waste of time."
She watched the Mutant walk toward the truck, her mind slightly hazy. Over the past few days, her personality integrity still hadn't recovered much...
"Commander?" a few female mercenaries asked urgently, waiting for her to dictate their next move.
Lorna took another deep drag of her cigarette. A voice faintly surfaced in her mind. It was that gigolo, Gu He, saying:
"If you want to find your true self, you have to completely accept yourself..."
She closed her eyes. So many memories flashed by in an instant, making her heart ache so badly it nearly stopped.
How long had it been since she recalled those days? She thought she had abandoned them, but it turned out she had never forgotten.
It was true. Lorna Ludd, this Daughter of the Bloodline, had once been surrounded by the street crowds, riding on their shoulders.
Her lost right hand had once waved the bloodline flag with such vigor.
Rag's unbridled singing drifted over, sounding just like the passionate chorus everyone used to sing back then:
"My child, my bloodline, her name is Lorna Ludd, her name is Liuguang City!"
But the stench of the surrounding garbage seeped into her nose, and the cold, foul-smelling rain beat against her face, reminding her that this wasn't fifteen years ago. She was no longer that five-year-old child.
She was a Blood Blade in the Muddy Pond District, a female mercenary, a transcendent hunter.
Rag was mocking her so vigorously, as if mocking his own past would somehow make him feel better.
People like him had betrayed the bloodline and insulted it.
"I'll handle this."
Lorna's eyes suddenly snapped open, her left hand gripping the half-smoked cigarette. Just as the Embryonic Species charged close, her massive, blood-red mutant right hand exploded!
Anchored to her shoulder, countless bloody threads shot out, dancing wildly in the black rain.
This was a right hand, and it was also a nerve bundle.
A right hand compressed from countless neural transmission conduits.
Hunter Profession System J-Grade Program: Neural Invasion.
In an instant, the sky full of fine, bloody threads shot across the gap. A portion latched onto the Mutant's head, while another snaked past the garbage barricades on either end of the highway, homing in on the sound to attach to the heads of the Sludge Gang members.
Behind a pile of garbage, Rag froze. A few bloody threads stuck to his forehead, pierced his flesh, drove straight through the fissures of his skull, and instantly fused with his cranial nerves.
A bizarre sensation surged through him—some ghostly presence was forcefully invading his mind.
Impacting, detonating, like a virus smashing through a firewall.
"Brain-to-brain contact..." Rag was suddenly gripped by terror.
He hastily drew a small knife to hack at the bloody threads, but for every one he cut, another took its place, nearly scraping off his own scalp in the process. Around him, the group of junkmen fell into total disarray.
On the other side, the Embryonic Species Mutant, its head also entangled in bloody threads, let out a muffled roar, rooted to the spot and unable to move.
"Commander!" The female mercenaries watched nervously. With the Commander's personality integrity on the verge of collapsing at any moment, this was tantamount to suicide...
Lorna's face remained calm. The tangled wires and silicon strips amidst her black hair suddenly radiated brilliant light.
In just a few short seconds, her nerves accelerated, accelerated, accelerated... overdrive.
Hunter Profession System Q-Grade Program: Information Turbulence.
The bloody nerve bundles dancing in the sky had already physically linked her head, the Mutant's head, and the heads of Rag and his men, forming a macabre, bright-red spiderweb.
This was a neural network, one dominated entirely by her.
"Don't you guys love picking up trash? With such a massive load of garbage data, how could you miss out?"
The sudden thought crossed her mind, transmitting into the heads of Rag and the others as soon as she formed it.
She fiercely swung the nerve bundles with her hand. Thanks to Granny Jin and the Mirror Box Therapy over the past few days, this arm worked perfectly. Otherwise, she truly wouldn't have been able to exert this level of programmatic power.
The thousands of interwoven bloody threads erupted with light. The spiderweb was dripping blood—
In this world, every living flesh-and-blood body possessed consciousness, and consciousness was data. At this very moment, the consciousness data of the Embryonic Species was forcefully detonated, surging through the neural network formed by these bloody threads and flooding into every mind.
"Ah!" Rag shrieked as all sorts of indescribable mutant information endlessly slammed into his brain.
What was he seeing? What was that... blood, colossal shadows, an overturned world, chaos, flies, utter darkness...
At the same time, many junkmen screamed, collapsed, bled from every orifice, and rolled on the ground.
Information overload, information overload...
Whether it was a One-Programmer like Rag or an ordinary person, none of them could endure it.
It was like being relentlessly subjected to a blinding light without sleep for over ten days, right up until a person went completely insane.
Nearby, severely wounded and unable to rise, Brother Zhuang watched with wide eyes. The nerves on Rag's face were bulging violently, already in extreme overdrive. His entire body seemed to twist erratically, yet the bloody neural network continued to madly pump the Embryonic Species' consciousness data into him.
Bang! Rag's head finally couldn't take it anymore. Overwhelmed by the Information Turbulence, the flesh on his head exploded, leaving nothing but an empty skull still wearing those Classical Pilot Goggles.
Scattered bits of flesh fell alongside the rain. Rag's body swayed before crashing into the rancid garbage.
His eyeballs, with nowhere to fall, remained trapped inside the goggles.
Within that terrified gaze, there seemed to be a trace of peculiar sorrow—images of years gone by...
Bang, bang, bang—one by one, the heads of the junkmen exploded.
Losing its host, the Mutant's consciousness data leaked, corrupted, and collapsed, causing the massive Embryonic Species to stagger wildly.
The bloody threads pulled tighter and tighter, applying massive pressure to the Mutant's head, which had shut down and lost its strength.
Suddenly, that head—a foul mixture of countless pieces of trash and rot—blew apart into countless fragments.
The Embryonic Species collapsed violently onto the highway, becoming just another oversized piece of garbage in the Muddy Pond District.
The Information Turbulence ended, and the battle also ended.
"Haha!" Brother Zhuang yelled in ecstatic joy. "I told you, I told you! She's a Primary Profession Two-Programmer! And you dared to mess with her!"
The female mercenaries, however, felt no joy in victory. They anxiously supported their Commander, Lorna, who was unsteady on her feet.
Just now, their Commander had also been a part of that Information Turbulence.
She was the one controlling the storm, but she was also at its very center...
The fingers holding her cigarette trembled weakly. The ash was knocked away by the black rain, but the ember still burned.
The wires and silicon strips in her hair dimmed. Lorna took a deep breath, letting the garbage stench and heavy exhaust fumes pierce her lungs, mixed with a faint tang of blood. Her vision blurred. She couldn't tell if her eyes were veiled by the color of blood, or if her personality was deliriously disintegrating.
She felt as though her original right hand was still there, raising its arm and waving something. She seemed to hear singing.
It was a childish voice, brimming with hope and passion, singing loud and clear:
"Her name is Lorna Ludd, her name is Liuguang City, our future, our future..."