87: Chapter 87: Directly Slay the Enemy Leader!

The Cyborg Leader stared at the scattered steel rings on the ground, his red prosthetic eye swiveling twice.

"Interesting."

The electronically synthesized voice dragged out a harsh, grating tone, sounding like nails scraping against sheet metal.

He tilted his head, which was encased in a transparent glass dome, and a distorted smile squeezed onto the human half of his face.

"No matter how the muscles of a carbon-based lifeform evolve, they are nothing more than trash made of piled-up protein. The hardness of my damping alloy body is forty times that of refined steel. You can break free from chains, but you cannot break free from my fingers."

He raised his mechanical right arm, his fingers opening and closing as small puffs of steam hissed from the joints.

"Kill."

The command was brief.

Two rows of mechanical guards simultaneously raised their energy rifles. Twenty crimson aiming dots landed on Chen Chen's chest and head, dense and overlapping into a single patch of light.

Blood Rose lunged to the side, pressing her back against the wall, her heart nearly leaping out of her throat.

The hum of the barrels charging with energy filled the entire underground space.

Chen Chen stood his ground, unmoving.

The energy rays fired in a volley.

Incandescent pillars of light converged from twenty different directions. The air was torn apart by the high temperature, and the pungent smell of ozone instantly filled the air.

They hit nothing.

All the light pillars passed through the spot where Chen Chen had just been standing, slamming into the damping alloy wall opposite and exploding into a blinding shower of sparks.

The man was gone.

Not even a shadow remained.

The mechanical guards' red eyeballs scanned left and right as their targeting systems fell into a brief logical loop—target lost.

Blood Rose's eyes widened.

She had been staring at Chen Chen just now, and in the blink of an eye, that man weighing over a hundred and eighty pounds had evaporated into thin air.

It wasn't speed; he had completely vanished.

The Cyborg Leader's prosthetic eye switched to thermal imaging mode.

He scanned the entire underground space three times.

Heat sources, infrared signatures, vital sign fluctuations.

He couldn't even detect the changes in carbon dioxide concentration from breathing.

"optical stealth?" The leader's human half-brain calculated rapidly. "No. optical stealth cannot deceive a vital signs Radar."

He did not panic.

Mechanical modification had erased most of his emotional fluctuations, and any remaining fear circuits were suppressed tightly by the coolant in his tubes.

The back armor plates popped open, and a disc-shaped electromagnetic pulse generator rose, charging with blue light.

"Vrrr—"

A visible ripple of deep-blue electromagnetic waves radiated outward from the leader, sweeping everything indiscriminately.

The screens of the precision instruments on the operating table shattered.

The lighting tubes on the walls burst into a string of sparks.

The mechanical guards' eyeballs flickered, rebooting after a brief failure.

The space crackled as blue electric arcs crawled over every inch of metal surface.

The leader's prosthetic eye performed another full-frequency scan.

Still nothing.

Chen Chen was four meters to his right rear, pressed against a thick pipeline, his breathing suppressed to the minimum.

The electromagnetic pulse had indeed swept over his entire body.

A weak current surged across his skin, but with a constitution of 107, not even a single hair on his body stood up.

Absolute Stealth did not rely on any electronic equipment.

It was a rule-level ability granted by the Keyword System, acting directly on 'presence' itself.

An electromagnetic pulse could fry chips, but it couldn't fry rules.

Chen Chen moved his feet silently in the darkness, circling toward the leader's flank.

The Armor-Piercing Military Dagger was already in his hand, its blade reflecting no light.

The leader began to grow agitated.

He turned his head, his red prosthetic eye locking onto the trembling Blood Rose in the corner.

His massive frame crossed the distance in two steps. A giant mechanical hand reached out, five alloy fingers clamping around Blood Rose's neck, lifting her off the ground with one arm.

"What kind of thing did you bring in?"

Blood Rose's feet dangled in the air, kicking out but finding no support.

Her windpipe was crushed, and her face quickly turned from flushed red to a purplish-blue.

"Speak!" The leader increased the pressure. "Which faction's assassin is it? What technology did he use?"

Blood Rose's mouth hung open, but only broken gasps could escape her throat.

The lack of oxygen caused her vision to blur.

As her consciousness teetered on the edge of being swallowed by darkness, a hundred thoughts raced through her mind.

In the end, only one remained.

Compared to the strength that man used when he was on top of her last night, this mechanical hand was laughably fragile.

She had chosen a side.

Killing intent surged in the depths of Blood Rose's eyes.

She suddenly opened her mouth wide, and a thick, dark red liquid sprayed from between her teeth, coating the human left side of the leader's face.

Succubus Venom.

The concentration of this venom was three times that of a normal secretion.

Blood Rose had squeezed out every last bit of her body's reserves.

The moment the venom touched his skin, its highly corrosive components immediately gnawed into the subcutaneous tissue. Simultaneously, the released neurotoxins followed the capillaries, rushing straight toward the leader's only remaining half of a human brain.

"Aaaagh—"

The leader let out an out-of-tune electronic roar.

The pain nerves of the human half-brain were violently stimulated. The muscles on the left side of his face spasmed and twitched, and the flow rate in the coolant tubes suddenly became chaotic.

The mechanical hand loosened for a split second.

Blood Rose fell to the ground, coughing violently twice. Without hesitation, her right hand shot like lightning toward the hidden sheath on her inner thigh—

A palm-length high-frequency vibration dagger was drawn.

She rolled and lunged behind the leader.

The dagger stabbed into an energy delivery hose connected to the life-support device at the back of the leader's head.

The high-frequency vibrating edge sliced a seven or eight-centimeter gash in the tube wall.

Ghostly blue coolant gushed out, drenching Blood Rose's face and body.

The leader's movements developed a visible stutter.

The red light of his prosthetic eye flickered unsteadily. The human muscles on the left side of his body began to twitch uncontrollably, and the mechanical joints on the right side also became sluggish due to the loss of coolant.

"Bitch!"

The leader swung a metal fist weighing several tons, whistling through the air toward the top of Blood Rose's head.

The fist stopped.

A dark red airwave exploded three meters to the leader's left.

Chen Chen deactivated his stealth and appeared.

The killing aura of the Purple-Gold Keyword [Abyssal Plunderer] was released at full power. Driven by 81 points of spirit, his killing intent materialized into visible dark-red ripples, spreading out with Chen Chen as the center.

A 2-second stun.

The leader's half-swung fist froze in mid-air.

The mechanical joints emitted a sharp grinding sound like gears jamming. His entire arm trembled violently, yet it could not advance even a fraction of an inch.

Chen Chen pressed his left hand down.

[Absolute Control: Gravity Field]—Twenty times.

An invisible force field crashed down.

"Crack!"

The leader's high-grade damping alloy kneecaps suffered comminuted fractures under twenty times his own weight.

Both mechanical legs were driven straight into the metal floor. His torso above the waist was crushed forward ninety degrees, and the alloy connecting rods at his spine made a piercing sound as they bent.

"Im... possible..." The leader's electronic voice was severely distorted and intermittent.

"Carbon-based lifeform... how could..."

He desperately tried to drive his prosthetic eye, attempting to condense a high-energy ray for a final counterattack.

It was too late.

Chen Chen's spirit condensed into an invisible spike—

[Soul Pierce].

The purple spiritual blade penetrated the glass dome, stabbing into that mass of throbbing human brain matter.

The leader's scream sounded neither human nor mechanical; it was a noise made of both being ground together.

The high-energy ray gathered in his prosthetic eye exploded inside the socket, and red fragments splattered from the gaps in the glass dome.

The moment his mental defenses shattered, every mechanical part of his body fell into chaos—fingers opened and closed randomly, back armor plates popped up and shut frantically, and the tread wheels on his feet spun aimlessly in no particular direction.

Chen Chen's right hand gripped the Armor-Piercing Military Dagger.

107 points of constitution erupted with full force.

The metal floor beneath his feet was stomped into a web of cracks.

A brief sonic boom echoed in the air.

"Ding! Purple Epic-grade Keyword [Fatal Lock/Weak Point Break] triggered!"

On the leader's glass brain dome, a crimson crosshair mark suddenly lit up.

The position was exactly above the brainstem.

The military dagger pierced through the crosshair.

100% True Damage.

Ignoring damping alloy.

Ignoring energy shields.

Ignoring all physical and energy defenses.

The tip of the knife entered from the top of the glass dome, pierced through the brain, and exited from the jawbone.

Ghostly blue coolant and dark red brain matter mixed together, trickling down the blade.

The leader's prosthetic eye went completely dark.

The final expression on the human half of his face was frozen in disbelief.

The massive two-and-a-half-meter body toppled backward, slamming onto the ground and shaking the entire underground space.

[Level increased to 10. Obtained 10 Free Attribute Points!]

Chen Chen pulled out the dagger and flicked off the filth on the blade.

Stepping on the mechanical wreckage, he looked down at this once-arrogant semi-biological corpse.

"Your bite was no good, and your brain was even worse."

Blood Rose slumped in the corner, thoroughly drenched in coolant, her wine-red hair plastered to her face as she gasped for breath.

She stared at the back of Chen Chen as he stood on the wreckage, her gaze complex to the extreme.

She had bet correctly.

"Beep beep beep beep—"

A piercing alarm suddenly resounded through the underground space. All remaining indicator lights on the walls switched to red, flashing frantically.

A dull roar came from beneath the floor. The metal plates under Chen Chen's feet began to grow hot.

Blood Rose's face instantly turned paper-white.

"Self-destruct sequence..." Her voice trembled. "The leader is dead, and the reactor's self-destruct sequence has automatically activated!"

Chen Chen looked up.

On a screen fragment on the wall that hadn't been destroyed by the electromagnetic pulse, a row of crimson countdown numbers flickered.

180... 179... 178...

Three minutes.

The blast yield of an grade a nuclear reactor's sympathetic explosion was enough to wipe everything within a two-kilometer radius flat.