"Commander! Commander?!"
"Lao Zhuang, stop playing dead, you motherfucker! Get over here and look!"
The frantic voices of her sisters pulled Lorna from her distant reverie, dragging her back to this foul wasteland.
"I haven't cracked yet..." she rasped. They helped her slump back against the truck bed. Her left hand still held a cigarette, while her right remained an unraveling mess of bloody neural threads. Blue veins throbbed violently across her pale face, making her look half-mad.
Her neural overdrive a moment ago had drained every drop of her mental energy; for the moment, she lacked even the strength to reel her right hand back in.
Lorna took a slow drag of her cigarette. "Didn't make it to heaven. Still stuck in the Sludge Pond District. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
Seeing that their commander could still joke—that she had actually pulled through—the female mercenaries finally let out a collective breath. A ripple of soft laughter passed through them.
All around the convoy lay total devastation. The Sludge Gang had lost no fewer than twenty men, and anyone left alive had gone completely insane.
The Game Gang crew, thick-skinned and tough, had fared better. A few were injured where the Mutant had overturned their pickup, but none had died. Brother Zhuang stumbled out from the sea of trash, joining his men to heave the truck back onto its wheels.
"Commander, looked like your right arm digested that thing pretty well just now?"
"Did that host's method actually work?"
"Think I faked it?" Lorna exhaled a plume of smoke, her voice exhausted. "Gu He really pulled me out of the fire this time..."
And it wasn't just about digesting the right arm. It was also, perhaps, because of the nonsense he'd spouted over the phone earlier.
In that turbulent flood of information, it had given her a stabilizing anchor for her persona to grip: the Bloodline Banner...
That was why she hadn't completely broken down this time.
She'd head over to the Fishpond later and book him for a night. Call it a thank-you.
Lorna caught her breath a little. Slowly, she drew the bloody threads back in, reforming them into her oversized mutant hand. Clasped within its grip were Rag's Classical Pilot Goggles.
"Only a dead man's eyes can see Roden Ludd."
Muttering to herself, she plucked out the two ruptured eyeballs stuck inside the goggles and tossed them aside, then wiped the blood and mold from the lenses.
Scavengers might belong to an unorthodox branch of professions, but those transcendents genuinely had a knack for turning trash into treasure.
Rag had treated these goggles like a prized possession; the damn things were probably worth a bit of money.
Examining them, she called out to her sisters, "Go check that Mutant's corpse. An Embryonic Species is the best malleable material for Cyberware. See if there's anything left to salvage and sell."
She didn't hold out much hope, though. That Mutant had already been molded by the junkmen; it was no longer a pure Embryonic Species.
Besides, the flood of rogue data she'd unleashed had completely fried its cranial nerves and ruined nearly all its nervous system—the parts that would have been worth the most.
Still, the hundreds of dicks sprouting across its body could fetch a decent sum if harvested.
Plenty of rich bastards at the New World Bank loved dosing themselves with that crap as a tonic, supposedly chasing it with depraved orgies afterward.
Suddenly, before the battlefield could be cleared or the convoy could advance or retreat, more tattered, shadowy figures began emerging from the sea of garbage surrounding the highway.
That was just how the Sludge Pond District worked. Wipe out one wave of junkmen, and another wave was always right behind them to pick over the scraps.
Destitute, filthy, and riddled with disease, they were desperate enough for anything.
Across the way, Brother Zhuang's laughter cut off abruptly. Everyone clearing the battlefield froze.
"Well," Lorna muttered softly. "Looks like we're checking out here today after all. Hit the jackpot in the dead man's lottery."
"Commander, we'll cover you. Go."
"You're the only transcendent here. You can make it."
The female mercenaries immediately grew solemn again, but Lorna shook her head, cutting them off. "So what if I'm a transcendent? I can't walk right now. This Mutant hand is too heavy, and if I detach it, I'll completely break down. It's over for me. Just get the hell out of here—as many of you as can make it."
"We can die, but you can't. As long as the Daughter of the Bloodline lives, it isn't over—"
"Enough!" Lorna's eyes instantly reddened. "What isn't over? What kind of stupid fairy tale are you still dreaming about?!"
The muscleheads from the Game Gang were descending into a panic as well, while the truckload of wild dogs, blind to what was happening in the dark, grew even more terrified.
"Go, hurry up, move!" Brother Zhuang scrambled into a pickup truck, fully intending to abandon Lorna and her crew. "No point in all of us dying together! Turn around! Ram through them if you have to! Leave the wild dogs, just drive!"
Lorna had thrown in the towel. Brother Zhuang, for all his posturing as a Muscle Fanatic transcendent, was all show and no substance. And this hollow held a truly endless supply of sludge.
If he didn't run, what else was he supposed to do?
Suddenly, without any warning, the blare of police sirens pierced the air from behind.
The black rain was falling harder now. Up in the oppressive sky, several armed helicopters from the Metropolitan Police Department swooped in, circling overhead.
A stern voice boomed down from above: "Ground personnel, attention! We are the Liuguang Police. You are suspected of engaging in illegal activities, and we are moving in to arrest you. Any resistance will be treated as hostile action, and lethal force will be used!"
"The cops!?" Brother Zhuang's bizarre face twisted in shock, not quite realizing he had just been saved. "What the hell kind of day is this? Since when do the police care about what goes on here? And with this kind of firepower? They brought out the choppers?!"
"What's so surprising about seeing garbage at a dump?"
Hearing him, Lorna gave a disdainful scoff. "I knew I didn't have the luck to hit the jackpot."
The female mercenaries snapped out of their shock, pleasantly surprised. With the police deciding to meddle, the junkmen would have to seriously weigh their chances.
Sure enough, the ragged silhouettes lurking on the periphery quietly vanished back into the sea of trash.
Regardless of why the cops had shown up, they were saved. Getting hauled in just meant sitting in a detention cell for a few days before being cut loose.
In Liuguang City, eating prison food was actually considered a pretty solid career path for the youth.
Yet the city's jails were perpetually over capacity; they simply couldn't afford to feed everyone.
If they were wild dogs, they might conveniently disappear. But they were the Blood Blades, and City Hall generally preferred not to provoke the nerves of the bloodliners.
Soon, a massive fleet of police cruisers arrived, sirens wailing.
Lorna watched the officers pour out of their vehicles in all-too-familiar uniforms—personnel from the Criminal Investigation Department and the Traffic Department, with ranks ranging from patrol officers and senior officers all the way to inspectors. They immediately began processing the arrests.
At the same time, a squad of plainclothes officers stepped out of an armored transport vehicle and began inspecting the scene.
There were six people in the squad. The uniformed officers deferred to them instantly, actively avoiding eye contact.
The men were tall, and the women stood with straight, imposing postures. None carried heavy firearms. Draped in various styles of weatherproof trench coats, some kept their hands buried in their pockets while others strode forward, their heavy boots clacking sharply against the highway.
Lorna couldn't help but feel a twinge of suspicion. She recognized them at a glance: they were members of a Mobile Task Force from the Mystery Bureau.
The Mystery Bureau was the transcendent division within the Metropolitan Police Department, and its Mobile Task Forces were the absolute elite, tasked only with high-priority special operations.
In other words, every single one of these plainclothes officers was a Primary Profession transcendent—the special-ops lapdogs of the New World Bank.
The six of them surveyed the chaotic battlefield. When their eyes fell on the mangled corpse of the Embryonic Species, they seemed genuinely surprised.
"This whole business with the Sludge Gang's organ truck... it really isn't simple."
"If they'd been allowed to keep developing this Embryonic Species until it fully matured, we'd have had real trouble..."
"Good thing a certain someone decided to intervene this time..."
Lorna faintly caught snippets of their hushed conversation, though she had no idea what they were talking about.
She could also hear Brother Zhuang's grating shouting: "I run business for the Yakuza! Make a phone call and check, why don't you?!"
Normally, dropping the Yakuza's name carried some weight, but this time the uniformed officers just manhandled him away.
Lorna and the others in the back of the truck were also hauled down roughly. She didn't know which precinct these uniformed mutts had been pulled from, but they were acting like they were hopped up on stims, utterly emboldened by whoever was backing them.
"Stop shoving them. Just get them out of here. I'll personally handle the transcendent."
A tall man in a black trench coat from the Mobile Task Force stepped forward and sharply reprimanded the uniformed cops.
The uniformed officers backed off instantly, handing Lorna over to him. They carefully corralled the laughing, swearing female mercenaries and led them away.
"What?" Lorna smirked, looking the man in the trench coat up and down. "Looking for a quick lay?"
The man had short, dark gray hair and a sharply chiseled face. He showed no obvious signs of Cyberware modification, nor did he sport any street tattoos, but his face was marked by a web of crisscrossing scars.
He briefly flashed his badge. Lin Chen. Rank: Inspector—one grade above a standard police officer.
And as an inspector for the Mystery Bureau, it was highly likely he was already a third-tier sequencer or even a fourth-tier sequencer. He was definitely the leader of this task force.
"Miss Ludd," the man in the trench coat said, his face completely expressionless but his tone respectful. He kept his voice low. "The bloodliners aren't the only ones who respect Roden Ludd. There are big shots keeping an eye on things this time, so just cooperate. Play along, go through the motions, and let's not blow this out of proportion."
Lorna narrowed her green eyes, giving him a disdainful side-eye. "Drop the act, you Mystery dog..."
"I can't tell you much," the man continued. "But think about it: how often does our Mobile Task Force actually get involved in a case like this? Your identity is incredibly sensitive. If you get dragged too deeply into this mess, it'll end very badly for all of you."
Lorna fell silent. That was exactly what she hadn't been able to figure out.
Let alone the fact that they shouldn't have known about this beforehand—even if the Mystery Bureau had known an Embryonic Species was out here, they wouldn't have dispatched a Mobile Task Force directly.
Even though she felt disgusted just thinking about it, unwilling to admit the truth... she knew.
Inside the city government and the Mystery Bureau... not everyone was just a corporate lapdog.
"Do I need to sing you a verse of the Song of the Future to make you believe me?" The man in the black trench coat's voice was barely more than a whisper.
"The future is now," Lorna replied. She stepped forward to join her sisters, but as she walked past him, she dropped a final piece of advice:
"Don't run a retrospective here. There's an Information Bomb in the area. It'll drive you mad."
The man in the trench coat remained silent. He watched as the suspects were loaded up one by one. The entire gang convoy was seized, along with the truckloads of smuggled refugees. The mangled corpse of the Mutant and the bodies of the Sludge Gang members scattered across the highway were steadily loaded into the police transports.
The black rain continued to fall, heavier now, washing over the asphalt highway and the vast expanse of the surrounding landfill.
A thick miasma hung in the air, swirling around mountains of discarded electronics and household waste. The gruesome remains of the dead sank into the churning sludge—a rotting, decaying, putrid mess.
The man surveyed the devastation. Within his empty, silent heart, a famous quote from Roden Ludd surfaced:
"If our light cannot pierce the dark clouds, then we shall become the rain and wash over the earth—because that's how big our bladders are!"