Flushing.
One of the largest Asian enclaves in New York City.
An underground meat processing plant.
That matched up.
In the original story, Kimiko was imprisoned in a place reeking of blood and rotting meat, filled with iron cages and all sorts of inhumane torture.
Lucas stood up.
He walked out of the bar and glanced at the gray sky.
Two hours later.
On the outskirts of Flushing, in front of a dilapidated industrial building emitting a foul stench.
On the surface, it looked like a meat wholesale market that had long since closed down.
The rusted rolling shutters were tightly shut, and the surrounding area was piled with trash and discarded wooden pallets.
But Lucas’s keen hearing caught the faint vibration of a subwoofer and several deliberately lowered shouts coming from behind the shutters.
There were sentries.
Lucas didn’t choose to force his way through the front door.
He circled to the back of the building and found a vent about five meters above the ground.
Absolute Stealth activated.
He took a deep breath and suddenly exerted force with his legs.
The explosive power from his 55 points of speed allowed him to leap onto the vent silently, like a nimble night cat.
The vent’s louvers were rusted shut, but for Lucas, who possessed Carbyne Heavy Armor, they might as well have not existed.
“Creeeak.”
With an extremely faint sound of twisting metal, he ripped the louvers right off.
He slipped into the narrow ventilation duct like an eel.
The duct was filled with the nauseating smell of rotting meat and a musty odor from years of no sunlight.
Lucas held his breath and crawled forward in the darkness.
He can feel a massive space beneath the duct.
Dim light filtered up through the gaps in the ventilation duct.
Lucas slowed his movements and quietly pressed his eye to a gap, looking down.
It was an enormous and grim underground warehouse.
Rows of rusted meat hooks hung from the ceiling, still stained with dark red blood.
And in the central area of the warehouse sat over a dozen large iron cages.
Most of the cages were empty.
Only the cage in the very center was surrounded by four burly Asian men holding assault rifles, their expressions tense.
That cage was tightly wrapped in thick iron chains and even connected to a high-voltage electric fence.
Inside the cage, a small figure was curled up.
Long hair hid her face.
She wore a dirty, tattered prison uniform, and her hands were locked behind her back with heavy, specialized shackles.
She was curled in the corner, motionless, like a startled beast.
But Lucas could feel it.
Within that thin frame lay a terrifying vitality and destructive power akin to a volcanic eruption.
“Found you.”
Lucas smiled silently in the ventilation duct.
His eyes were cold, yet filled with a fanaticism that said she was already his.
He was in no hurry to go down.
While the four armed men weren’t a concern, the high-voltage fence on the cage was a problem.
Although he wasn’t afraid of dying, he didn’t want to experience being charred.
More importantly, he needed the perfect moment to appear.
A moment that would make this wounded beast feel the deepest sense of “safety” or “awe” toward him.
In the warehouse, the four men were talking in low voices in a dialect Lucas didn’t understand, their tones filled with fear of the “monster” in the cage.
“I heard the higher-ups are moving her?” one of the men said, looking at the cage, feeling a bit creeped out.
“No shit.
Vought International is hunting everywhere like crazy right now.
This monster is too dangerous; keeping her is like holding a time bomb.
The boss said we’re putting her on a boat tonight and shipping her to South America,” another man, who looked like the leader, replied impatiently while smoking.
“Leaving tonight?”
Lucas raised an eyebrow in the ventilation duct.
“It seems I’ve arrived just in time.”
“If I had let Butcher and the others come tomorrow, they probably wouldn’t have found a single hair.”
Just then.
Kimiko, inside the cage, suddenly moved.
She slowly lifted her head.