Although Ren Yi had successfully escaped the meticulously crafted sealed chamber by exploiting the Withered Claw's logic, he was not yet out of the woods.
He was still inside the land ship, a steel behemoth where layers of metal walls radiated a cold, oppressive weight.
Fortunately, an extreme-spec sealed chamber like that was clearly not a mass-produced item found everywhere.
His disappearance would likely be noticed soon, but thanks to the silencing operation led by B-406, everyone in the vicinity had been moved out, and the surveillance had been cut.
For the time being, no one would find him.
However, the situation in this room had yet to be resolved.
The moment Ren Yi escaped, B-129, the Withered Claw, seemed to be struck by an invisible current, twitching abruptly in the air after losing its target.
Its five finger joints splayed out like twisted blades before suddenly snapping shut.
Squelch—
It was a wet, squelching sound, reminiscent of a rotting fruit being crushed to pulp.
Guard B-050's eyes bulged instantly, his eyeballs becoming a map of spiderweb-like blood vessels.
He opened his mouth, but only warm blood mixed with dark red chunks of flesh surged from his throat.
The Withered Claw was death-gripping a lung that was still slightly quivering.
Sharp nails dug deep into the flesh, squeezing the living tissue with the force of a malicious child kneading clay.
Ren Yi floated back to put some distance between them.
It seemed B-050's luck had run out. While a snatched lung might not be an instant kill in a world with high medical standards, such trauma in the absence of precision medical intervention was a death sentence for the veteran.
However, the threat from the living still remained.
The delivery boy, B-406, reacted amidst a nightmare of shattered senses.
What Ren Yi had just inflicted upon him wasn't total sensory deprivation like he had used on B-050.
To halt B-406's actions immediately, he had chosen a more direct method.
For those few seconds, B-406's consciousness had been cast into an illusory world of fragmented reflections, as colorful and chaotic as shattered glass.
Thousands of loud, distinct yet meaningless noises, combined with a piercing ringing in his ears, triggered a full physiological collapse through sensory misalignment.
But Ren Yi had miscalculated one thing: a mindless madman is often harder to deal with than a calm killer.
While this crude interference had indeed interrupted all of B-406's deliberate actions, it triggered an unexpected side effect.
In his state of extreme tension, even as his consciousness wallowed in a chaotic mire, B-406's survival reflexes caused him to lock his finger onto the trigger of his pistol.
The powerful recoil jerked his arm, and he began to fire blindly in every direction.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
The pistol's power was formidable.
In an instant, debris flew everywhere in the medical room. Precision medical instruments were reduced to scrap metal in the explosions, and the wall plaster fell like peeling autumn leaves.
The unfortunate B-050 didn't even have time to take his last breath before the wild spray of bullets punched several more transparent holes through his waist and abdomen.
Ren Yi darted left and right like a phantom amidst the hail of bullets.
He found that he was momentarily unable to approach the madman at the center of the frantic gunfire.
Tsk, what a nuisance.
Ren Yi frowned in his mind.
Watching B-406 pour out firepower, he realized that unless he completely quelled this conflict, it would be difficult to slip out of this area unnoticed.
Thus, Ren Yi began to manipulate the Seed he had long since planted.
In a daze, B-406 felt the distorted patches of color recede as his vision refocused.
He gasped for air, the ringing in his ears still lingering, the immense neural stimulation leaving him dizzy and lightheaded.
Through his vision, the room was a ruin.
Struggling to see through his doubled vision, he spotted B-050 slumped behind a fallen metal cabinet, a limp lower body visible.
"Is he dead? Is it... finally over?"
However, at that moment, the half-shattered legs twitched violently.
B-406 jolted, his already tense hands instinctively pulling the trigger again.
With a deafening roar, the heavy metal cabinet was sent flying by the massive shockwave.
B-406 felt the tinnitus in his ears worsen.
Behind the cabinet, B-050's "corpse" was revealed.
Due to the close-range shot, a hideous hole the size of a basketball had been blown through his waist, leaving intestines and blood clots scattered in a mess.
Judging by that wound, he was as dead as one could be... theoretically.
But then, B-406 witnessed a terrifying sight.
The body, as broken as a trampled ragdoll, twitched violently once more.
Then, a blood-stained hand suddenly gripped a nearby iron rack.
With a screech of grinding metal, he actually used his ruined body to haul himself up, swaying as he stood.
The massive gap in his waist was still dripping blood clots and fragments of internal organs.
Because of the missing chunk of his midsection, his entire upper body leaned at a bizarre forty-five-degree angle, tilted eerily to one side.
This shocking sight caused B-406's brain to stall momentarily, failing to process the scene.
In that split second of blankness, the "corpse" charged at him like a wild beast, its expression devoid of emotion.
B-406 finally snapped out of it and fired again.
The shot hit the "corpse" squarely in the shoulder, and the entire right arm was torn away by the blast, flying off in a mist of blood.
But the current B-050 seemed to have transcended the realms of pain and physical momentum.
His movements weren't like a man running; instead, he moved like a puppet missing vital joints and limbs, being yanked frantically by countless invisible strings.
Despite losing an arm, half his waist, and part of a lung, this mass of broken flesh used its final burst of momentum to tackle B-406 to the ground.
The two of them instantly rolled into a heap amidst the glass shards and medicinal fluids on the floor.
It was no longer a fight between two humans.
B-050 tore at B-406's flesh with his teeth and clawed wildly at his face with his remaining left hand.
B-406 felt his neck being ripped open. Adrenaline masked most of the pain, leaving only the sensation of gushing fluid and a gradually cooling body temperature.
In his extreme terror and the haze of blood loss, B-406's eyes began to glaze over.
They had known each other for quite some time.
He knew that both he and B-050 were merely the Doctor's disposable pawns, destined to become dust crushed under the whims of important figures.
Still, he hadn't expected that in the end, they would have to destroy each other in such a slaughter.
Was all of this... actually real?
As if in response to his thought...
B-050's bloody left hand suddenly plunged into B-406's face. His fingers closed, and he gouged out the expensive mechanical prosthetic eye, tossing it aside like a piece of junk.
Regrettably, in his remaining organic eye, nothing changed.
B-406 suddenly smiled.
He gave up all resistance and, with his last bit of strength, pressed a red switch on the inner side of the pistol's grip.
Boom!
The high-energy pistol was not just a weapon; it was a high-energy trap in itself.
A violent burst of fire erupted from between their abdomens, and the powerful shockwave instantly leveled every precarious object in the room.
It also tore those two locked bodies into fragments beyond any hope of recovery.
Rate on N.U.
